Comments Off on Chicago Techweek: Mayor Emanuel Chicago To Be Known As Startup City0LikeLike 1,768
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (photo: Chicagomag.com)
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel kicked off Chicago Techweek this morning at the Merchandise Mart to a standing room only crowd. His message was positive, and inviting for the thriving tech and startup community in the windy city.
Emanuel’s keynote kicked off the four day TechWeek conference in it’s second year. The conference expects to see over 5,000 attendees through Tuesday from all aspects of Chicago’s tech community.
While one of Chicago’s mainstays, Sears, is fighting for it’s business life, startups and tech companies are flourishing with Chicago’s expanding tech resources like the newly opened 1871.
Chicago is sometimes referred to as “The Second City” because for many years it was the second largest city in population next to New York City. It was eventually replaced by Los Angeles as the second city in terms of population, however it’s remained in third. However Emanuel says “three years from now it’ll be known as the startup city if we do everything right,”
Mayor Emanuel said that he and his administration are taking the steps to attract fresh young businesses. Some of those steps include making it easier to attract and hire fresh young talent. He also that the World Business Chicago and the city are planning a venture investor summit to showcase startups.
Mayor Emmanuel along with Illinois Governor Pat Quinn were very supportive of the new 1871 startup tech center.
Keep your browser locked to nibletz.com for more continuing coverage of Chicago TechWeek.
Comments Off on Nebraska Startup: Footwork To Take Some Of The Pain Out Of Political Canvassing0LikeLike 1,772
A startup in Nebraska is looking to optimize the footwork of door to door canvassers for political campaigns. The startup, appropriately called Footwork, couldn’t come at a better time as the United States prepares for a Romney vs Obama battle for the Presidency.
If you’re thinking that footwork takes canvassing to the Internet, you would be incorrect. Political candidates and those behind political causes know that in order to really make an impact, door to door canvassers are still a huge part of the equation.
Instead, Footwork helps organizers of canvassers optimize the canvassers route. In the past the door to door canvassers would typically have to jump out of a van, take a clipboard with the par affiliation data and find the house numbers that match printouts. With Footwork the data about the resident’s party affiliation is plotted on a mobile app on a smartphone typically supplied to the canvasser.
Now, with Footwork in hand there’s no need to match addresses over 100 sheets of paper.
Tegan Snyder and Phil Montag are the co-founders of Footwork and both gentlemen have lots of experience in grass roots political canvassing.
“When a canvasser is going door to door in today’s world they get a map and a list of voters by street. It’s up to them to determine what path to take and which houses to hits first,” Montag said to Betakit.com
Although most people who get involved in political canvassing do it for the cause itself, more and more political action committees and candidate campaigns have resorted to sites like Craigslist to recruit temporary workers. This sometimes results in canvassers pencil whipping signatures for a petition, or lying about actually visiting a house, or block of houses, just to get paid.
Footwork provides real time location monitoring for the canvass team leaders so you know that the paid canvassers are actually out the knocking doors and meeting people and not just pushing a button on an app.
The final piece to Footwork is social integration. Canvassers can now share their location is their social media channels which can at times spark conversation and awareness of the campaign.
Footwork charges 1 cent for every house that the canvassers visit using the app. Snyder and Montag say that with Footwork in hand canvassers are seeing up to 30 houses per hour, thus making it cheaper than mailings, traceable and mor efficient.
There are some competitors out there but none seems to incorporate all three functions in such a robust way.
Footwork is in Beta now, and plans to be in a full public release in August when the election races begin to heat up, and also just ahead of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, which will have a huge startup presence this year
Comments Off on Boston Startup: Abroad101 Moves Out Of The Nest INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,623
Back in April we reported on an innovative EdTech startup in Boston called Abroad101. Abroad101 is like a travelocity of sorts for those students looking to study abroad.
Abroad 101 allows users to review just about every aspect of a study abroad program. With the real feedback from students who’ve been through the study abroad programs, you can find out how the teaching staff and curriculum are, how the shopping in the city is, how the nightlife is and even if it’s safe to walk from the car to the classroom by yourself at night. The idea behind Abroad101 was an untapped space and the Boston company and MassChallenge graduate are doing a great job of filling it.
So great in fact, it’s time to leave the safety and security of the MassChallenge nest and branch out on their own.
We got to talk with the guys from Abroad101 about just that, see the quick interview below the break
Comments Off on Pennsylvania Startup: Dollar Rubber Club, What Do You Think They Do? Interview0LikeLike 2,557
You may be surprised to find out that grown men still get school girl giddy about buying condoms at the local drugstore. I’m in my thirties and still see the discomfort that some of my friends my age have going into WahlGreens and buying condoms. The experience is compounded when you have to ask the pharmacist or store worker where the condoms are located.
There’s a chance that you could bump into your ex-girlfriend, your girlfriends mom, someone you went to school with or someone that knows your parents. Even in you late 20’s and 30’s this can be a source of embarrassment or at the least, a slightly uncomfortable situation.
Picture this scenario, you go into your local CVS thinking that tonight may be the night you have sex with your new girlfriend for the first time, and then when you’re coming down the condom aisle, purchase in hand, your new girlfriend shows up to pick up a prescription. These things happen all the time.
That’s why Dan Elwell and Anthony Eagleton, the co-founders of “Dollar Rubber Club” have gone head first into the condom by mail business.
Dollar Rubber Clubs condoms are priced competitively, come in discreet packaging and are even sent with a little silk bag that you could keep in your sock drawer.
In the interview below the break Elwell explains why the condom business, and how they stockpile condoms and turn orders around same time to keep the customers satisfied.
Comments Off on NIbletz Says Thanks! There’s Still A Little Time0LikeLike 1,950
Thank you first off for being readers of nibletz.com the “voice of startups everywhere else”. If our rapid increase in traffic on our website and social media channels are any indication, it seems we’re doing a good, or at least decent job.
We wanted to also say thank you to all of those people who contributed to our indiegogo campaign for phase Deux of our sneaker strapped nationwide startup road trip. We’ve committed ourselves to staying on the road 75% of every month through September 2013. During this time we’re going to be visiting startup focused events, startup weekends, hackathons, incubators, accelerators, startup offices and everywhere else we can pick up the vibe and report on the growing ecosystem of startups “everywhere else”
Before we get too long winded here is the link to our indiegogo page, the video is great our good friend Sean, voice to hundreds of radio and tv stations voiced it (as he does all of our videos) and it’s great. Please check out the video, donate $2 (or more) and share it across social media. The campaign ends at midnight tonight (Eastern time) here’s the link again
About “everywhere else”
We launched nibletz.com last Spring (2011) We were invited to cover TechCrunch Disrupt in New York for our other site and we became so mesmerized by everything there, and all of the passionate startup founders that we created a site to offload those posts off our mobile focused web brand.
We also took on the tag line “small crunchy bytes from the tech and startup scene”. We had a business plan that included becoming a compliment in capsulated form to TechCrunch (hence the crunch and the bytes), we took to Twitter and it was determined in a landslide that “Nibletz” were small crunchy bytes.
Well like every trying, startup we pivoted. We began to notice that startups “everywhere else” weren’t getting the coverage they needed and deserved. We launched the “everywhere else” concept at the new year and ran wild with it at South By Southwest. The response thus far has been phenomenal.
With our media backgrounds we’ve been involved in the tech scene and even researching and scoping startups for a number of years, but we took the blinders off to the rest of the country and WOW is the word that comes to mind.
Let it be known that we have nothing against the valley. San Francisco is an awesome place to visit, the valley is a tech geeks heaven as far as vacations go. Yes our founders have all ridden the bikes on the Google campus, dined at Facebook and even tweeted from Twitter. We’ve got great friends in the Valley and silent advisors who would probably shock some of our readers.
The startups “everywhere else” are like an elephant in the room. Everyone knows that we’re out there but no one is giving them coverage, not like this.
Cameron ran some great statistics this week and we found out that since January we’ve featured over 375 startups from “everywhere else” and the momentum, amount of content and features just increases month over month.
That’s all because of you.
Whether you’re in Boise Idaho, Memphis TN, Florida, Arizona or any of our great 50 states, or London, Israel and even a few countries we’ve never heard of, we’ve got your back. We’ve never purposely turned down any startup who pitches us for coverage at startups@nibletz.com unless of course you’re in the not “everywhere else” part.
We’ve got some really exciting things coming up in the next month or two including a really cool interactive that will help startups like yourselves, and us, crowd source the startup “everywhere else” community to help with their dilemmas, so keep an eye out for that.
We’ve started forging great friendships across the country and around the world and we thank you for that and your support.
We wanted to say thanks to everyone who donated anything on indiegogo from $2 on up. We actually received a donation Thursday that asked to remain anonymous of $1000 you know who you are and we thank you so much.
We also wanted to thank those of you who couldn’t donate but donated your time and your social media space by tweeting about us. We’re a startup ourselves, it’s hard. I could tell you the story about getting coins out of the couch, the seats in the car and off the washing machine to give my daughter $10 for a field trip, it’s real we know it.
Which is actually the reason that we’ve turned down to angel investors and plan to continue to not seek traditional angel and venture funding. We want to stay true to our core of everywhere else and we want to keep our ethics inline as journalists. That’s why crowd funding is so important for us.
We also wanted to point out that there are three other sites that we really like (and there in no particular order) that also cover startups outside of the traditional cities and they are, tech.li , TechCocktail and Beatabeat. So please add them to your readers as well if they’re not already there.
Again thank you so much for reading, contributing and helping out nibletz, the voice of startups “Everywhere Else”
If you live in a big metro area or one of those areas like Hampton Roads Virginia that’s like nine cities built into one, than a job search can be painful based on the geography alone. Take Houston for example, a quick internet search revealed hundreds of jobs in Houston, most of the ads without addresses. Hmmm, what is someone to do, especially someone that doesn’t drive.
Never fear, a Houston entrepreneur has set out to solve that problem with a very interesting startup that meshes job searching and Google Maps. The startup, called JobPlotter, does exactly what you’d imagine with the background info we’ve provided, it plots available jobs on a Google Map.
Why didn’t you think of that? That’s easy because Paul Chittenden did. After experiencing the pain of looking for a job and then locating the job prospects on a map, in Houston.
In the interview below the break, Chittenden explains how he came about the idea for JobPlotter and how they are integrating job data into a Google Map. Now, JobPlotter users can find jobs, and then find where the job actually is.
Comments Off on 5 Great Angel.Co Startups From Everywhere Else: Minnesota0LikeLike 2,687
A few weeks ago we started a series here on nibletz.com of startups from everywhere else that appear on the Angel List (angel.co). We get a weekly email from angel.co, and while they’ve been getting better, typically they are dominated by startups from Silicon Valley and New York. In our series we feature a handful of startups that appear on the list, that aren’t necessarily trending by angel list standards, but are growing as startups from “everywhere else”.
So for this installment we’re exploring five startups from Minnesota.
Mashalot
Mashalot is a social shopping website. It combines the power and influence of Facebook, daily deals, group buying, and the “negotiator” concept from price line.
Late last year Mashalot co-founder John Marino told Minnesota’s Fox 9 that the more influence you have the better your negotiation will be. Marino explained that if you saw a great deal on something like a Black Friday deal or a Cyber Monday deal, you could take it to the merchant (if they are a member of Mashalot) and see if they’ll give you the product for that price. It’s up to the merchant to honor that price or not.
This is where your social influence comes in via Facebook. Naturally if you’re one of those people with thousands of friends on Facebook, the merchant may respond favorably because of your influence, and the fact that Mashalot will post your deal (with your permission) to Facebook.
Along the way you can earn badges and more influence the more you use the service.
They launched Mashalot on 11/11/11 and have since taken down the 1.0 site while they retweak it for a 2.0 launch.
This Minneapolis startup has been hailed as the “E-harmony of home services” by local tech publication tech.mn basically it’s a mobile app and website to help you find the best person for that in home job.
Think Craigslist vs Angies List vs Zaarly vs a date or recommendation site.
The Heroic engine combines recommendations and referrals from a service providers previous clients along with friend recommendations to serve up the top list of people for a job. Things like painting, cutting the grass, gutter cleaning, basic carpentry and most in home jobs are all featured on Heroic.
Co-Founders Justin Barrett and Dan Linstroth know that people nowadays don’t have the time, to interview and weed through hundreds of possible people to do a job. They also know that if you bid a job out on Craigslist half of the respondents are in Nigeria.
With Heroic you can find service providers in your neighborhood that have good ratings and can get your job done on your time line.
Tech.mn reports that Heroic received a $600k seed round from a network of angels in the Minneapolis area. They are rolling out the service in Minneapolis, Denver and Chicago to start and hope to raise a Series A round in the not so distant future to expand into another five markets.
Nothing is more effective for a business than word of mouth. When you combine word of mouth with the power of social media and the internet you’ve got a force to be reckoned with, if you execute correctly. Enter in Hypespark.
Hyperspark is a Minneapolis based startup that incubated at Project Skyway. The idea behind HypeSpark is phenomenal. Local businesses get great advertisement by social endorsement from loyal customers. The local businesses get an endorsement every time the customer shares anything on the web. The customer gets big deals and discounts for being the businesses personal advertising vehicle.
On the surface HypeSpark is a short link service with a micro ad in front of it. Say Lori loved her local bike shop and her local bike shop was on HypeSpark. If Lori agrees to be their endorser, every time she shares a web site link, youtube video or any other url with her friends or social network a real quick micro ad for the bike shop shoes up saying that Lori endorses that company.
It’s kind of like bread with most of the work already done.
I’m always looking for things to replace the pure bull crap that is Klout. I’ve found a really great social media filter in Friendsignia, and now I’ve found Minneapolis based Proliphiq, which offers incredible social media analytics, recommendations and information on social media, influence and content. I’m not sure if it’s free because they are still in beta but right now I can say that with all the social media dashboards I’ve checked out in the last two years, this one offers the most information I’ve ever seen for free.
When you go to Proliphiq’s website at Proliphiq.com you can search for a person by their name, social media identity or a topic.
Searching a name or social media identity will show you their recent posts across networks, content, and their influence on the topics they know the most about. From there you can even add topics that you find that person is a valuable source on. Or, conversely you can give them a thumbs down. This crowd sourced rating is 10x better and more effective than the pulling numbers out of ones posterior end that Klout uses.
For topics you can find the most influential people for your topic and from there you can follow them and keep them in your feed to stay on top of information that’s relevant to you.
Finally you can tweak your own profile and tell the Proliphiq community what you’re all about.
Women owned startup RockYourBlock is the LinkedIn spot for teens. Teens in the twin cities can create a RockYourBlock profile via their Facebook account for the purpose of sourcing jobs for teens. These jobs can be odd jobs, paper routes, internships and other teen type jobs.
The site also allows the teens to create a resume based on the work experience they have along with any accolades that they’ve scored in the RockYourBlock network.
“Teen unemployment is at an all-time high right now across the nation, three times the national rate. The majority of people and companies want to help the next generation learn the value of hard work and responsibility in addition to create job opportunities for them but don’t know where to begin.”
Young’s strategy is to widen their reach to markets like Milwaukee and Chicago later this year and then expand nationwide in year three.
While there have been plenty of teen focused social networks this is the first time that teenagers have had a social network devoted to their lives in the work force. Hopefully they will create a way to export their RockYourBlock page to LinkedIn when the teen crosses over to the real world. This is a really innovative startup in a unique space.
Comments Off on Virginia Startup: SynkMonkey Keep Your Friends, & Your Plans In Sync INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,101
We are all very aware of how difficult it is to keep plans in sync when it comes to life on the go running through a smartphone. Whether you’re a group of high school students, fraternity brothers or even golfing buddies, keeping your entire group “in sync” can be a challenge.
Now there’s of course Facebook and Facebook events but one of the huge disadvantages to Facebook is how hard it is to get distracted. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I needed an events address or to ping a friend for somewhere to go and then got sidetracked from my other notifications or even my wall. On the iPhone, iPad or Android phone this can be a wreck.
Enter Charlottesvile Virginia startup SyncMonkey. They combine three very key and important elements in events, activities and staying in sync. Those elements are calendars, mapping and friends. Using this app over traditional event apps keeps you in close contact with everyone that’s supposed to be there.
We got a chance to talk with Hunter Murchison of SyncMonkey about their excited startup, application and some big news, that they’re finally ready for Android. Check out the interview after the break and check out these great interviews, after this one.
Comments Off on Detroit Accelerator: TechTown Hosting Startup Soup August 3rd0LikeLike 2,379
The creativity in pitch events gets better and better. We’ve all heard of the Startup Bus to Austin’s South by Southwest Festival. Several cities have had Startup Trains, where people work on startups on a day long train ride, we’ve even heard of a Startup Beach House (that was unfortunately cancelled).
Now, Wayne University’s TechTown Accelerator is hosting Startup Soup.
The event is open to the public and will be held on August 3rd. Startups that want to pitch must register at the link below before July 31, 2012.
The pitches will be five minutes and there doesn’t seem to be a theme for the pitch contest. There is a nice $1500 cash prize along with 5 free TechTown seminar passes for the winner. The winner will be chosen by a panel of local tech community judges.
The finalists will all receive complimentary tickets to 2 future TechTown events. The events at TechTown are all meant for startup enrichment and offer valuable business resources and continuing education.
After the pitches and the winners are selected there will be an evening of networking, and you guessed it… soup.
The event starts at 5:30pm August 3rd at TechTown 2051 Rosa Parks Boulevard in Detroit.
Comments Off on Live Broadcast From Silicon Beach Fest Of Demo Day And More0LikeLike 2,677
Tomorrow at 2pm PST we’ll be broadcasting live from SBF Demo Day presented by StartEngine. As well as broadcasting from other events live throughout the whole event that starts tomorrow. Panels ranging from Meet The Accelerators to How To Hire A Developer. Into coding and actually products, don’t worry as StartEngine has you covered with a full 48 hours Hackathon going on throughout the event. Quick hint, teams from Disney are among those who’ll be showing up to show us what they can do.
Comments Off on Portland Startup: Overhead.FM Making Headway At Home0LikeLike 2,206
2012 Brown University graduate Stephen Hebson and his co-founder and fellow Brown graduate Parker Wells have developed a new startup called Overhead.fm. The company has decided to tackle a market that hasn’t had much disruption in a number of years. That market, is over head music at venues like restaurants, coffee shops and some retail outlets.
While many may think that business owners just hook up a sirius satellite radio, mp3 player or cd player, there can be serious ramifications to that. While they don’t wear uniforms or carry badges, “inspectors” for lack of a better word, from ASCAP and BMI are constantly visiting businesses to see what type of music they are playing overhead. If a business owner isn’t paying for licensing of music being played for the “public” they can find themselves staring down the barrel of a business life threatening lawsuit.
Muzak, one of the world’s leaders in overhead music charges establishments by their capacity and traffic. Restaurants and businesses can pay anywhere between $30 a month to nearly $200 to play music overhead. While it may seem logical to just not play music, music keeps patrons in their businesses longer and spending more money.
According to Mainebiz, Hebson had received some insider knowledge on the ins and outs of overhead music by first working at a coffee shop and then holding an internship at ATO Records in New York. After learning how high the fees were for licensing music he thought there had to be a better way, thus overhead.fm was born.
Hebson and Wells are building up a great library of music that is heavily weighted by more successful local acts in Portland and Providence. The company is offering the bands a great value proposition by allowing them access to analytics for plays, locations, frequency and more in exchange for licensing their music. The band wins by getting access to the proprietary information that overhead.fm collects. Overhead.fm wins by not having to payout actual fees.
Overhead.fm is going to start curating more “paid” for music shortly. They recently won the student track in the 2012 Rhode Island Business Plan Competition. With that honor came a prize package of $40,000 including some seed capital and legal services to the tune of $10,000.
Hebson told Mainebiz that they plan on using some of those legal services to construct a contract for licensing music to the company.
Hebson feels that businesses will enjoy overhead.fm because of it’s eclectic library featuring local artists. Right now in their test phase, the service starts off as a 30 day free trial and then goes to a $25 per month subscription model. Now remember that may be a little heavy for a streaming service on a personal side but it’s quite affordable when it comes to music being used for overhead systems in businesses.
We are treating [Providence and Portland] as test markets. We know these cities have pretty big independent music and retailer cultures and are small enough that we can get a lot of saturation pretty quickly and use that data” to build out the model, says Hebson said to MaineBiz. “We’ve already had a lot of success at businesses that are already playing off the independent or local vibe already,” he says.
Pittsburgh startup DuoLingo has just announced a $3.3 million dollar round of funding led by Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures along with actor turned tech investor Ashton Kutcher.. This article in the Post Gazette said Kutcher made this investment personally and no reference is made to his VC firm A-Grade investments.
Kutcher is known to journey outside the borders of Silicon Valley with his tech investments. He heavily vets his investments for game changing technologies. Kutcher recently invested in Des Moines mobile payment startup Dwolla. Although Kutcher hails from the same area, it was more about the technology, and the entrepreneur rather than just being from the same area.
With DuoLingo it’s obviously about the technology and the work that scientist/co-founders Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker have put into the startup so far.
DuoLingo is a translation software. Although there are a few very technical articles about DuoLingo’s technology, to put it into layman’s terms DuoLingo provides a platform for real life translation. While Google translate can be great for a straight up word for word translation, DuoLingo and their algorithms translate pages on the internet, in a more “real world” conversational way.
When you’re doing the real-world stuff, such as reading a news report in German or French, you really feel like you’re accomplishing something,” von Ahn said in a press release. “It reinforces why you’re working to understand this new language.”
While DuoLingo is great for translation they also enter an element of education as well. As the Post Gazette explains:
Users can scroll over words if they need clues for their translations, and the program automatically detects blatant errors. The site also is designed to track words or concepts that give users trouble and to focus on those for future lessons.
The next phase of DuoLingo includes adding a document translator to it’s already existing web based platform for commercial uses. To get to this point DuoLingo used a pretty extensive beta testing process where von Ahn reports that the beta testers translated tens of millions of sentences.
By crowd sourcing the translations the software is able to pick up the most commonly used translations and achieve better accuracy.
Von Ahn is a 33 year old junior professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned the honor of A. Nico Habermann associate professor of computer science. That’s an honor given to a distinguished junior professor every three years.
If you think that you’ve heard von Ahn’s name before it’s because you probably have. In 2007 von Ahn created the puzzle identifying system Captcha, the system used to verify that a human is filling out most forms. He sold that company to Google for an undisclosed sum.
von Ahn’s other credits include inventing “human computation” which is a form of crowd-sourcing humans to help computers solve problems that are beyond the technology.
von Ahn said that his goal with DuoLingo is to form a universally readable internet.
A Portland Oregon startup up that specializes in producing smartphone apps for conferences and events, has been acquired by event planning software company Cvent. CrowdCompass is Cvent’s second acquisition in just one week. Last week Cvent, who’s based in Virginia, acquired Austin startup Seed Labs.
“Let’s be clear: We bought this for their people,” said Cvent chief executive Reggie Aggarwal. “We’re going to let the management team run the place they way they’ve been doing it.”
Mobile apps and technology have been changing trade shows, conferences and conventions over the past few years. It’s already been seen that the more robust your tradeshow app is the better. South By Southwest 2012 had a great app that covered every speck of the event officially produced by SXSW. As did the CES app earlier in the year.
Last fall the Oregon company raised $1.3 million led by the Oregon Angel Fund.
CrowdCompass was founded in 2009 and makes apps that connect event go-fers to specific events, other attendees and social media.
CrowdCompass corporate portfolio includes event apps for
E*Trade, Daimler, and Intuit; and meetings industry organizations, like The Meetings Technology Expo; and associations, like the American Bar Association, Association of General Contractors and American Society of Anesthesiologists.
“Cvent’s success is predicated on delivering best-of-breed technology solutions to our event industry clients and partners. This acquisition is an important step to ensuring we continue to lead the industry in the adoption of mobile technologies,” said Reggie Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Cvent. “We selected CrowdCompass because it was clear that they are a leading developer of native mobile apps for business and association events. With experience building hundreds of apps for a wide variety of mid-to large-sized public and private events, the addition of CrowdCompass gives us unparalleled expertise in creating mobile apps for events. We have offered mobile friendly event web sites for some time, but the CrowdCompass product takes the mobile experience to the next level.”
To date CrowdCompass has produced 435 event apps which have seen over 500,000 downloads for Blackberry,Android and iOS.
“Becoming part of Cvent will allow CrowdCompass to operate on a greater scale than it ever has before,” said Tom Kingsley, Founder and CEO of CrowdCompass. “Our technologies and expertise will be a great fit with Cvent’s unmatched reputation and client base; we’re looking forward to all the services we will be able to develop under the Cvent umbrella.”
“The CrowdCompass app demonstrates the excellence and innovation that attendees have come to expect from the Mental Health and Addictions Conference,” said Courtney Young, Digital and Social Media Specialist at the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare. “We had over 3,000 healthcare professionals and administrators in attendance, and the response to the app was overwhelming, with 80% of them downloading it. By offering the CrowdCompass app, we showed our attendees that we are listening to their demands and care deeply about their conference experience.”
Cvent was founded in 1999 by Reggie Aggarwal. Aggarwal took the company from a two person team to a team of over 900 in McLean Virginia, the city that was once home to America Online. Cvent has been profitable over the last ten years.
Comments Off on London Startup: StreetPin Takes The Community Bulletin Board Mobile0LikeLike 2,536
By a show of hands who’s old enough to remember the community bulletin board at the grocery store? Sure there are probably some grocery stores that still have them, but they don’t fill up like they used to. Everyone has resorted to some kind of app or some kind of social network.
Well London startup StreetPin is looking to bring the community bulletin board back in a social, mobile sort of way. It’s actually a novel concept. They are of course building it in London and hopefully they will scale up large enough to adopt here in the U.S.
Now we know that Craigslist has a community section but StreetPin is more about short little pin up notes that are looking for reaction, remedy and answers as quick as possible. It’s kind of like a simplified version of both Craigslist and Zaarly all rolled up into one with a sense of urgency and immediacy about it.
We got a chance to talk with StreetPin co-founder and CEO Tim Buick about StreetPin. He gives some great examples of how to use the new service in the interview below the break.
Kyle
Nibletz
Nick Tippmann
