Comments Off on Startup Event: Dallas Prepares For Startup Weekend0LikeLike 2,158
Entrepreneurs, startup founders, and members of the Dallas tech community are preparing for Startup Weekend next weekend. The official startup weekend organization advises those participating to not let their ideas, and plans get sidetracked this week with father’s day. Next weekend means business.
In anticipation of the event the Startup Weekend committee for Dallas has announced some of their mentors that will be helping the teams build their startups over the 54 hours next weekend.
Startup Weekend Dallas will have two lawyer mentors in Danica Mathes and Craig Cox of Bell Nunnally LLP. They will be able to tackle some of the tough legal questions as teams vet out their startup plan.
They’ve got BioTech and NanoTech specialist Phong Le of Marketing in the Life Sciences Group at HPC.
Paul Griffith, Senior Director of Business Development at AOL Inc will be on hand as well Brad Kendall of Great White North.
Rounding out their list of great mentors is Amrit Kirpalani who is the founder of predictive social commerce company called Nectar Online Media.
The mentors won’t be there throughout the entire event, however Startup Weekend Dallas plans to post the hours of their ability at the event so you’ll know exactly when you can get the kind of help you need.
Comments Off on Cincinnati’s The Brandery Announces 2012 Startup Class, And It Starts Young0LikeLike 2,404
Earlier we reported on Louisville Kentucky startup Impulcity and the fact that they would be headed up to Cincinnati for this years class at the Brandery. The Brandery is a marketing focused Cincinnati incubator. All of the companies selected to participate in the 2012 session receive $20,000 in seed capital and will participate in a 14 week program that includes free office space, mentoring, working with some of the top marketing and advertising people in the country and access to venture capitalists.
To date the Brandery has graduated 14 startups since 2010. This year’s class is 11 startups deep and the ages of these entrepreneurs range from 17 years old to 45. It’s a mix of Cincinnati based startups, to startups from across the US. However the Brandery received applications from over 40 different countries and received twice as many applications as the previous two years combined.
Enterchange reports that Rujul Zaparde is the youngest in the class at 17. His co-founders in their New Jersey based startup FlazCar are Shri Ganeshram and Kevin Petrovic, both of whom are just 18 themselves. Details were stealthily as to what they would be working on however Laura Baverman of Enterchange reports that these three high school buddies started a non profit that’s built 50 wells in India serving 80,000 residents. One word: Impressive.
At 45, Vinay Murthy is the oldest member of the class. Murthy left a position at Google where he helped develop Adsense, Adwords and also worked on YouTube among other things. His startup, with co-founder Vikram Venkataraghavan is called 360pager, and again there’s word on exactly what they are doing.
Brooklyn, NY: Off Track Planet, Freddie Pikovsky, 29, and Anna Starostinetskaya, 29.
Chicago: Ontract, Julian Miller, 31, and Matt Duch, 26.
Cincinnati: Modulus, Charlie Key, 28, Brandon Cannaday, 28, and Richard Key, 24, (moving back home from Tucson).
Cincinnati: VouchedFor, Michael Bergman, 33, David Volker, 31, Bree Bergman, 31, Stephen Hartz, 34.
Cleveland: Flock’d, Greg Svitak, 37, and Kurt Pettit, 34. According to its website, Flock’d is a mobile application that lets groups check-in at bars and request rewards from the bars’ owners or managers.
Louisville:Impulcity, Hunter Hammonds, 21, and Austin Cameron, 22. They’ve already received some press in Louisville for a plan to use data from a person’s social media presence to recommend events and venues that fit his or her interests.
New York:Socstock, Jay Finch, 26, and Angelo Stracquatanio, 25. Its website describes an online platform that helps small businesses raise capital from their community of supporters, in return for future goods and services at the business.
New Jersey: FlazCar, Rujul Zaparde, 17, Shri Ganeshram, 18, and Kevin Petrovic, 18.
Salt Lake City: CrowdHall, Austin Hackett, 27, Jordan Menzel, 27, and Nick Wientge, 34, of San Diego (and Cincinnati native). A website for the company calls it a free online platform that lets high-profile people respond to public discourse and lets crowds more effectively communicate with those high-profile people.
San Francisco: 360Pager, Vinay Murthy, 45, and Vikram Venkataraghavan, 36.
Seattle:FlyDutch, Andy Zhang, 26, George Lin, 26, and Sean Wen, 27. According to a profile on AngelList, a site that matches startups and investors, FlyDutch helps online daters meet in person faster, safer and more casually.
The Brandery has a team of over 55 mentors with top notch business and startup experience. The list includes Mike Bott, the General Manager of The Brandery; Lucas Watson, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at YouTube; and Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of Living Social.
Powerhouse VC firms including Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and Polaris also have mentors participating. This is actually one of the strongest teams of mentors we’ve seen at an incubator “everywhere else”.
The program officially starts July 2 and will end with a Demo Day set for October 3rd when all 11 teams will show off their startups.
Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”
The next leg of our road trip actually includes Cincinnati (In addition to Chicago, St.Louis & more) please check this link out and watch the video below:
Here’s a story that’s just screaming “everywhere else”. Two students who actually hail from Arkansas, Brandon Lee and Chris Thibault are two ambitious young entrepreneurs who have built a startup app studio with a twist. Their startup is working out of an incubator at USC where Thibault was a student.
Their development company, called 52apps, is set out to produce 52 high quality apps over the next year. They hope to produce each app in just five days, presumably cheating the startup culture and taking weekends off, which is ok considering they are also students.
While the 52apps concept isn’t entirely new, the way they’ve set out to find app ideas has an interesting twist. The startup held almost a “pitch” event Friday evening. At the event they took app suggestions from all walks of life at an event with a stage, pitches and brainstorming.
Lee and Tthibault heard a ton of great app ideas at their “Idea Day” that was held immediately following a launch and kick off event for their University of South Carolina, Columbia, based company,
These two aren’t guys who just decided to become app developers in College. Both Lee and Thibault are BFFs from high school, who developed their first app while they were till in high school, with the ambitious idea to make math homework easier and more automated. They were able to achieve that as part of a goal to stop taking backpacks to school.
52apps is just one of 32 resident startup companies at a fairly new incubator at UNC.
“These are two- to three-month projects,” said Steve Leicht, who serves as 52apps’ chief executive and part of the management team put together by the incubator and Columbia venture capitalist Don Tomlin, said Tomthe statee.com. “These folks pull it off in a week.”
The duo has already put out their first iOS app under the 52apps umbrella. The app, called Tap Notes, sells for $2.99 in the iTunes app store and helps students, and business professionals take notes, and record conversations for the notes that can be accessed at specific points rather than having to listen to an entire conversation and then pulling what you need.
Lee and Thibault report that they’ve received over 30 great ideas so far and will start developing straight away.
Comments Off on Austin Startup: Top5Foods Is A Scoreboard For Restaurants0LikeLike 1,843
Alex Zwernemann, the founder of Austin based startup Top5Foods, created an easy to understand ratings/scoreboard style platform for restaurants. Top5Foods was the Statesman’s featured startup over the weekend. It takes a totally different approach to the food app and food site.
While apps like Urban Spoon serve up restaurants one at a time in a ratings based model, Top5Foods does exactly what the name suggests and serves them up according to the top 5. The data is crowdsourced across the network of Top5Foods users.
Top5Foods shows the restaurants and their local rankings but if you would prefer to see how they do across the entire network you can do that as well. If you’re a die hard foodie Top5Foods could serve as a great starting point for a trip to discover the best restaurants in the US. If your favorite restaurant in Austin is outranked by another restaurant in San Francisco, it may be worth the trip to San Francisco to try it out.
Zwernemann told the Statesman in an interview that the concept was born after a 2009 trip to San Francisco. He set out to find a couple great restaurants to go to and it took over 2 hours of research. Naturally he thought there was an easier way.
Top5Foods is unique because the user base is constantly moving restaurants up and down the scoreboard similar to a way a story moves on reedit or hacker news.
Top5Foods is already operational in Austin, Houston and Dallas. Zwernemann hopes to bring Philadelphia and Washington DC on soon as well.
He hopes to continue improving Top5Foods by adding more and more categories like top 5 lunch spots, top 5 happy hour spots etc.
Comments Off on Chicago Get Ready For TechCocktail June 24th0LikeLike 1,764
The other TC (TechCocktail) will be holding one of their great mixer events in Chicago on June 24th as part of the TechWeek celebration.
This event takes the shape of their normal TechCocktail mixers which means plenty of networking, casual pitches and cocktails of course. You’ll be able to meet Frank Gruber and the entire TechCocktail team at the event being brought to you in part by the fine folks at Motorola Mobility.
They also have a little known soft drink company called Coca Cola sponsoring as well. Yes, us non drinkers can perpetrate a great TechCocktail fraud at the event.
TechWeek badge holders will get in free but need to RSVP here
Ethics statement: We love Frank and the staff at TechCocktail for their commitment to tech and startups all over the country. We don’t do events ourselves but love to hang out at all the TechCocktail events we can, we’ll see you there.
Mike Krupit and the crew at Novotorium are holding a really cool event June 27th and 28th in Philadelphia. The event, that they’re calling the “Not a hackathon” Entrepreneur Sleepover. The event is not a “build a startup in 48 hours” type event. Rather it’s more like a weekend worth of valuable office hours to refine your startup, develop your product, work on your marketing and pick the brains of Krupit, and other great mentors.
Novotorium promises 36 straight hours of “eye popping, brain swelling, undulterated business progress”
There is a $20 participation charge which of course will cover things like fuel (food and red bull) along with other considerations. But not only that, there will be a $2,000 prize. Krupit told Nibletz.com the companies won’t do “pitches” but their progress throughout the weekend will be judged by the Novotorium and SeedPhilly team. Both Novotorium and SeedPhilly will meet with each startup individually.
The best part of the entire process is that everyone will be on hand all 36 hours, so if you’re knee deep into problem solving at 3am you’ll be able to get a mentor to help you solve your problem.
Krupit responded to criticism on the Phily Startup Leaders List Serv saying:
“We know that there are entrepreneurs are reluctant to attend hackathons or startup weekends because they don’t own what the community helps them produce. That’s why we called this a “Not-a” hackathon – to demonstrate its approach from another perspective. We added the cash prize as an incentive to those who maybe weren’t purely in it for the community, learning, and fun.
The $20 registration is a token to basically ensure that people show up. It’s even lower than other similar events.
This model isn’t for everyone – and we never intended for it to be. There are already a number of registrants, so I’m assuming some find it interesting. For those that do, we’ll build some good business models and product, build more community, and have a good time.”
We totally get it here at nibletz, as we said the best way to describe it is 36 straight hours of office hours type access to some of the best mentors in the Philadelphia area to help any startup who registers, work on their business.
As we get closer and closer to the SEC’s July 4th deadline to come up with rules for crowdfunding startups, we’re likely to see more and more crowdfunding startups emerge. Earlier this month we reported on Ohio crowdfunding startup Fundable who has already opened for business, with a more traditional Kickstarter, Indiegogo model until the crowdfunding rules are announced and brokers are approved.
A New York startup called Return on Change LLC, has also thrown their hit in the crowdfunding arena. They’re now in a private beta and promise to provide a way for investors to connect with game-changing startups.
“The timing could not be better,” said Sang Lee, founder of Return on Change. “We saw the huge potential in crowdfunding, and now, with the signing of the JOBS bill, look forward to connecting investors with ventures that can make a real difference.”
RoC also announced a contest that provides incentives for startups to register. The first 100 startups that meet RoC’s criteria will have the opportunity to win one of three $1,000 funding prizes. The company is seeking startups in the areas of clean energy, biomedical, social ventures and technology.
With all this excitement about crowdfunding we got a chance to speak with Sang Lee, one of the founders of Return On Change. Take a look at the interview below the break.
Do you remember when you used to be able to go to the school nurse and get three for free? Never mind.
Here are three things that every new startup should do when they first start out. It actually shocks me when I get into serious discussions with startup founders who have a pitch deck, a website, a social media presence, but neglect these three free things.
CrunchBase
Regardless of how you feel about Silicon Valley the biggest source for startups on the planet is CrunchBase. This data base of startups, entrepreneurs, founders, venture capitalists, angel investors, incubators, accelerators, and other startup related people in resources is amazing.
Creating a profile is free. The profiles have to be approved but that process usually takes less than 24 hours. Once approved though your profile as an individual and as your company has a place on CrunchBase.
This is where all the significant news and milestones is compiled “for the record”. When you have news of new top level executives, a funding round, a pivot etc you can add those entries to your CrunchBase profile.
CrunchBase is free. It’s a service of AOL (since the TechCrunch sale to AOL in 2010). Really every semi-serious startup needs a CrunchBase profile.
We give the Angel List (angel.co) a hard time because 90% of their trending news is based in the Valley, 5% in New York and the rest everywhere else. We do report on companies on the list form everywhere else. But again, like CrunchBase it’s free.
Angel.co does a great job of showing what’s hot and what’s not, and it’s actually not the founders of angel.co’s fault that startups “everywhere else” don’t trend. It’s not a matter of what they think, it’a all about traction and how many people endorse you, give you references, invest in you and follow you.
Naturally with the startup ecosystem in the valley they have more startups on the list, and hence trend better.
Regardless of the trending though you really need to register, again it’s free.
FounderSync is a startup themselves and based in Cleveland. It’s another great free resource for startup founders.
Once you sign up for FounderSync you can network with other founders across the country. It’s also not exclusive like FounderDating, and being that they’re from “everywhere else” they encourage startups from “everywhere else” to join the site.
Collaborate with founders, find your technical founder, get recommendations for developers, designers, make new friends and network network network.
So on our road trip if we meet you, do office hours with you, or judge a contest that you’re part of, please make sure you’ve done these three things.
Comments Off on Baltimore Startup: NJorku Is A Job Board In Africa INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,842
There’s a startup in Baltimore called Njorku and what they are doing is actually very exciting. Co-founder Chika Uwazie and her team are connecting people in Africa with jobs in Africa.
We’ve heard time and time again that more and more people in Africa are taking to mobile phones and smartphones because they can’t afford computers and internet access in the home. When we ran this story we actually found out that hundreds of millions of people live off the grid and walk miles to charge their phones. So in continents like Africa mobile is a lifeline.
That’s why Uwazie and her team have developed a job site and aggregator that delivers the information to African people via their mobile device. Employers get access to NJorku’s database where they can upload jobs and then correspond with candidates via SMS/Text messages on their phones.
The service is available in Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Egypt and Ghana.
Job seekers can also do everything most typical full job websites allow you to do, via mobile whether they are on a smart phone or feature phone. NJorku has made it easy for job seekers to upload their resumes and show interest in available jobs with text messaging.
With such an awesome idea we had to take a few moments and talk with Uwazie. The interview is after the break
Comments Off on Hollywood Hack A Day, Final Recap0LikeLike 2,208
“It’s like a party, you are afraid that no one will show up”
Rahim Sonawalla mentioned to me about his fears about putting together Hollywood Hack A Day. But boy did they show up. While Kyle was in Memphis for a Launch event this past weekend, I was on the West Coast. More specifically Hollywood California to witness Hollywood Hack Day taking place at io/LA which was nice enough to provide their location to use for the weekend. Put together by Ryan Chisholm, Rahim Sonawalla and Abe Burns, this weekends event expected around around 70 developers, graphic artist, and visionaries to show up. Battling 80 degree crystal clear skies, developers spent all weekend from 0900 on Saturday to 6pm on Sunday putting together not only presentations but working projects as well.
Comments Off on Memphis Startup: HappyPotty Final Pitch At 48 Hour Launch0LikeLike 1,793
Lot’s of people came out Sunday night to the final pitch event for LaunchMemphis, SeedHathery and LaunchYourCity’s 48 hour launch event. Graduates of SeedHatchery’s two previous classes were in attendance all weekend long to mentor and support their fellow startups. Also, previous participants in the last 5 48 Hour Launch events were in attendance as well.
Hometown startup hero Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily was absent from the event, despite the fact that she vowed to cover startups everywhere in her inaugural post at the relatively new startup focused Silicon Valley website. Oh Well we’ve got a lot of coverage here from the great event.
HappyPotty was another one of the unique “finalists” selected to develop over the weekend long event.
Problem: Finding a clean bathroom on a road trip
Solution: HappyPotty hopes to be the mobile app of choice to find clean “Happy” bathrooms while traveling by car.
There are a couple of similar sites out there. The biggest one was developed in conjunction with toilet paper giant Charmin, however it has it’s flaws.
HappyPotty ran through some statistics including the fact that there are over half a million potty breaks during road travel per year. That number actually seems a little low.
The app is simple, go to a bathroom and rate it “Happy” or “Crappy” the interface shows two toilet flushers, one colored green, and the other red.
They hope to add more functionality like details on the bathroom from cleanliness, to changing tables, seat covers and more.
For monetization they are looking at traditional mobile app in app ads and geo-located advertising with couponing.
The biggest challenge with an app like this is they have to build enormous, nationwide scale fast. The other challenge is sourcing bathrooms. Surely there are a lot of location based api’s however none that will tell you whether they have a multi-person bathroom or a one person bathroom or if you’ll have to purchase something to even use the bathroom.
They Happy Potty team was able to track down some gas station and rest stop data to start the build out of the app, alongside FourSquare API’s. Check out the pitch video below:
Comments Off on Memphis Startup: ScrewPulp Final Pitch 48 Hour Launch0LikeLike 2,197
ScrewPulp is an idea that hasn’t been tackled in quite this way before. It’s a self publishing website that allows authors to publish their books to the site. So what’s so unique about that?
Problem: More and more authors are turning to self publishing. Just look at 50 Shades of Gray for instance. According to the startups data there were over 200,000 self published books out of over 1.5 million books published with ISBN numbers.
Self published authors have a hard time garnering social network interest, ratings and reviews which can be the lifeline for a self published book.
Solution: ScrewPulp offers an innovative new platform for self publishers that builds the social network interest piece and the ratings and reviews piece as well. After a book is downloaded 100 times they will switch to $.99 for the next 1,000 copies. After that they’ll increase to $1.99 and so on.
The monetization plan is to take 25% of the sales from books that are selling on the site.
Screw Pulp will giveaway the authors first 100 copies in exchange for a social media share and a rating/review. Readers who love reading new books will be able to download one free book at a time. Once they share it across social media and provide a star rating and or review, they’ll be allowed to download their next free book.
As far as rights are concerned, Billings would like to require authors to hold their work on ScrewPulp for a year regardless of whether or not that author gets their book picked up from another publisher.
Founder Richard Billings said in the Q&A that ScrewPulp will start with novel sized books first and then expand to series and even short stories. Billings also said he would like to use the format for indie artists as well and said we could expect a ScrewTapes out at some point as well.
Comments Off on New Hampshire Startup: Regaalo Takes To Indiegogo For Expansion0LikeLike 2,113
The student founders of Regaalo (photo regaalo.com)
Stories like this one are a strong indicator that as soon as the SEC figures out the regulations for crowdfunding for startups, it’s going to take off.
Regaalo, a social gifting startup founded by University of New Hampshire (UNH) graduates has taken to crowdfunding site, Indiegogo, to expand their gifting startup to Boston.
Regaalo allows parents and loved ones of college students to send them real gifts using an app on their mobile phones. The service is currently available for UNH students from surrounding merchants. Basically a parent or loved one back home can pay for and send their college student a real gift that will show up on the students mobile phone.
For example parents can order their student a pizza from a local pizza merchant. All the student has to do is pick the pizza up and show them the app on the phone to verify payment.
“The text-messaging gift gives us our edge, it’s what makes us unique,” said Jessica Streitmater, a Litchfield native and one of the student co-founders of the site told the New Hampshire Business Review. “There are quite a bit of people that do care packages, but we do have an edge on that too because we make it customizable.”
The startup is looking for $5,000 on Indiegogo to fund interns in the Boston area so that they can expand their service to Boston University. The company will remain headquartered in New Hampshire. There are incentives on the Indiegogo campaign for donations up to $800. At the time this story was written they’ve raised $975 of their $5,000 dollars with 21 days to go.
“we have a lot of people who are really interested in the company and who would love to help us,” said Streitmater. “They ask, ‘How can I help?’ And we really needed the help… to get to Boston.”
Comments Off on Boston Startup: SCVNGR Announces $12M Round For LevelUp Expansion0LikeLike 1,742
Boston location based scavenger startup SCVNGR has secured another $12 million in funding. This time it’s to roll out their payment platform LevelUp on a national level. LevelUp is currently in 8 US cities and plans to rollout nation wide.
“This is a new round of preferred stock that will be left open for 1-2 more large strategic partners to join,” SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch said in an email to the Boston Business Journal. “We’re already in late-stage conversations with them — just haven’t officially closed on their funds yet.”
LevelUp is a gamified, deals based mobile payment system that connects to a users current credit or debit card. The user gets a discount by using the LevelUp app the first time at a merchant and can earn more discounts by continuing to pay with LevelUp.
LevelUp is currently supported at 3,000 locations in their 8 states including national hamburger chain Johnny Rockets. They have nearly $200,000 users and are paint $2 million dollars per month through the service. Towering the adaption of services like Google Wallet.
LevelUp is currently available in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego and Chicago. SCVNGR will use the investment to add 40 people to their sales team and add more exciting merchants across more cities.
Kyle
Entrepreneurs, startup founders, and members of the Dallas tech community are preparing for Startup Weekend next weekend. The official startup weekend organization advises those participating to not let their ideas, and plans get sidetracked this week with father’s day. Next weekend means business.
Nick Tippmann
