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Calgary Startups Prepare To Pitch In Pitch Rodeo By June 18th

Calgary area startups are invited to submit their 80 second pitch videos to Podium Ventures by June 18th. Startups submitting videos for this contest will be judged on ideas, execution and entertainment value.

The event is part of Calgary Stampede. Startups will have 80 seconds to “rope their way to the top” in hopes of winning the Pitch Rodeo trophy. There are three great prizes available to pick from for the top three pitches:

Two tickets to Canada House at SXSW 2013 to pitch internationally
Opportunity to pitch your startup in front of Venture Alberta to get funding
Visual business model session with Business Instincts Group to hone your business plan

“We are very excited to sponsor an event in which the Calgary startup community has the opportunity to pitch their ideas” says Adam Joyce, Executive Vice President of PODIUM Ventures.

If you think you’ve got what it takes you can submit a summary outlining the idea and a YouTube link to your 80 second practice pitch. Submissions are due by June 18th and should be emailed to pitchrodeo@podiumventures.com

Interview With Memphis Startup Work For Pie, Seed Hatchery’s First Funded Startup

Memphis has got a great startup culture, ecosystem and community. Most of that happens at Emerge Memphis in downtown Memphis Tennessee. Emerge Memphis is a co-working space, home to SeedHatchery, LaunchMemphis and LaunchYourCity. It’s also home to Work For Pie.

Work For Pie is an online community for developers, with a focus on open-source developers. It’s a lot more than a LinkedIn for developers and the only thing like it in existence right now.

The company was founded in 2011 when Cliff McKinney met Brad Montgomery at a Launch 48 event at Emerge Memphis. The two tweaked a different idea into what Work For Pie has turned into today.

Work For Pie’s unique community allows developers to start a free profile that includes a portfolio of their development work. There is also a rating system involved to show the achievements of the developers in the community. The plan as they continue, is to create a site for businesses as well and then link the two so that businesses have a talent pool of top rated developers to choose from for their project.

They’ll be able to do that now that they’ve secured a a $300,000 round in funding. Work For Pie went through the first incubator class at SeedHatchery last year and they are the first startup to get any kind of substantial outside funding round. The two co-founders are excited about working on Work For Pie full-time.

As part of that great startup culture and eco-system in Memphis, they were onhand at 48 Hour Launch this year to help mentor the four startups that are building out in the weekend event. Friendsignia, Paytopia and a host of other EmergeMemphis companies and SeedHatchery graduates also spent the weekend at 48 Hour Launch paying their experience forward.

Check out our interview with both Cliff and Brad about Work For Pie and the startup culture in Memphis:

Dallas Startups: Prepare For LaunchDFW Kegs & Code Rooftop Party

Beer, coding and a roof, that’s what you’ll get if you’re in the Dallas startup community Friday night. LaunchDFW is hosting Kegs & Code 2012.

The party kicks off at 6:00pm this Friday night (June 15th) at 3200 Main Street #5.2 in Dallas. At 7:00pm their having a “Hack Attack” and at 8pm they’re giving away a $500 prize.

The evening ends with dancing until sunrise. It looks to be a great time sponsored by LaunchDFW and Senico Labs.

Tips For Pitching At A Hackathon Style Pitch Weekend

As the voice of Startups everywhere else we spend quite a lot of time at hackathon style startup competitions. You know the type,two or three day build a startup weekends. In fact there’s an international organization called Startup Weekend that hosts a lot of the events we really enjoy covering.

Now let’s preface this and say these tips are from the last ten events Cameron, Brent and I have attended and or judged, and not the two events we are at this weekend.

Timing Is Everything
In most weekend long startup competitions the first day starts with rapid fire pitches. From there they are whittled down to a handful of ideas that will be developed over the weekend period. The rapid fire idea pitches are between 2 and 5 minutes. That’s certainly not a lot of time. Make sure your pitch is concise and you don’t sound like the micro machine man.

Cut To The Chase
You don’t have a lot of time to pitch. Jump right into the idea first and do the background stats second. It’s ok to run out of time rattling off statistics that many have probably heard before. If you start with the stats upfront,you may not have enough time to actually get the idea out there. If you run out of time on the idea, your startup has very little chance of getting produced.

Build The Startup During The Contest
Keep in mind these are “weekend pitch contest tips”.
If you have your pitch deck done, a product in beta or at least a concept built,a weekend hackathon style contest isn’t the place. You need what we call in these parts, a networking event.

To me there is nothing less classy then signing up for a startup weekend event, pitching a product just about done that may need a designer or two or a marketer, or an investor and then leaving when your idea doesn’t get picked. Network, help others that aren’t as far along as you are.

Mark’s Mango Smoothie Shop or Toms Tshirt manufacturer isn’t a “startup” most startup weekend style events are looking for businesses that can go from idea to proof of concept in 48, 54 or 72 hours.

The Team That Works Around The Clock Will Probably Win
I’ve only seen two startup weekend style events where the teams didn’t have at least the option of working all weekend long. If you had a great idea and so did Tom and you went home and Toms team stayed all night, when you get back in the morning don’t be surprised if they already have social media streams, an alpha shell and feedback from four major companies. That’s just the way it goes.

In fact at a Startup Weekend in Portland most teams stayed all weekend even with a threat explosions and guns

Do Your Research
If you’re going to make a claim in your pitch that you have the first ever this or the first ever that,do some research. When judging contests I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt if I can’t find your concept ten pages back in Google search results. However if your idea is on the first page in the Google Results within the first two results, FAIL.

Pay It Forward
Last night at the launch for 48 Hour Launch in Memphis folks from Friendsignia, Paytopia, Work For Pie and other local companies who have either been through 48 Hour Launch or Seed Hatchery were there. They joined teams and they are mentoring and helping. Especially “everywhere else” you need to stick together. Take a look at St.Louis. St.Louis native Jim McKelvy, best known for being a co-founder of Square, is constantly reinvesting in St. Louis.

More tips to come later

Memphis Startup: Bryant Williams Pitches Crowdfunding Based On Social Clout

Over 20 ideas for startups were pitched Friday evening at 48 Hour Launch in Memphis Tennessee. One of the great ideas was pitched by Memphis entrepreneur Bryant Williams.

Williams wants to take advantage of the JOBS Act and crowdfunding legislation slated to take effect next month. Williams has a rather unique approach though.

What he is hoping to do is have a startup, entrepreneur or whoever is looking for crowdfunding for their project to get it based on the merits of their social graph. Basically, someone looking to get crowdfunded via Williams’ new startup would have to have their Twitter and Facebook influence factored in.

While Indiegogo and Kickstarter both allow for comments on their pages, it’s just another social network to comment on. Why bother utilizing a new comment space when you’re already posting on Twitter and Facebook anyway.

First things first though, is we have to hear the rules on the JOBS act. The SEC has until July 4th to establish those guidelines. Check out Williams pitch below:

Linkage:

See More of our 48 hour launch coverage here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”

Memphis Startup: Unique Love First To Pitch At 48 Hour Launch

Tonight kicks off 48 hour launch in Memphis Tennessee. Nibletz is on location covering this 48 hour event where 4 startup companies are going to launch. The event is a collaborative effort of Launch Memphis, Startup Hatchery and LaunchYour City and takes place at the Emerge Memphis campus in beautiful downtown Memphis.

Over 20 ideas were pitched during the two minute pitch sessions tonight. Of those pitches four have been selected to be built out over a weekend of fun and camaraderie for Memphis’ thriving startup scene.

The first two minute pitch was for a unique dating site called “Unique Love”. The site focuses on people who are looking to connect that have common unique loves, obsessions or phobias. Get your mind out of the gutter this is not about fetishes, and more about cat lovers, dog lovers, people who love the stars, or antiques, places to find die hard unique interests.

It’s also a please where two people can connect with common phobias. It may be great to hook up with someone who has the same fear of the dark, spiders, or crowds. You may end up finding someone who understands your unique situation. That’s what Unique Love is all about.

Check out founder Stark Miller, pitching in the video below:

We’ll Be Live At io/LA Covering Hollywood Hack Day

This weekend, while Kyle will be on the East Coast at another Startup event. I’ll be at a Hackathon on the West Coast covering the Hollywood Hackathon. The event, which has moved to io/LA’s venue near the famed Hollywood and Highland intersection in the middle of Hollywood. Will be filled with those trying to make it into the entertainment field by way of Tech.

California Startup: Recmnd.Me The People Recommendation Site, Interview

Recommendation startups are hot right now. It seems that every time you turn around there is another startup or app recommending something or other. Now Jesse Gant, who has a lengthy resume in some big startups like Ancestry.com, has invented the people recommendation startup.

Now we all know that LinkedIn offers referrals and references, but those are all from your top tier contacts. I couldn’t tell you how many times a friend of mine, or even a nodding acquaintance has asked me to write a referral or reference for them on LinkedIn. A few I’ve done, others I’ve passed on. Most hiring people and recruiters know the value of a LinkedIn referral, which is about as valuable as your LinkedIn password was yesterday.

Recmnd.Me allows you to post a profile for yourself and once you’ve signed up people can decide on their own with just a click if they’re going to recommend you or not. Gant told TechCrunch that he had seven references on LinkedIn throughout his entire career, but on recmnd.me he already had 21.

The other piece for Recmnd.Me is that if you’re looking to fill a position or need, and you search, say, “software developer” Recmnd.Me is going to rank the software developers in the network for you to see and choose.

Through one of our great friends in Utah we were introduced to Gant who took the time to do an interview with us. The interview is after the break.

Minneapolis Startup: Brain Hive To Offer E-Book Rentals For K-12

A Minneapolis startup called Brain Hive is looking to solve a problem for school libraries across the country. That problem, is access to books. With such a diverse taste in content in American public schools, school libraries often fall short in fulfilling student requests for books.

With the wide adoption of tablets and e-books Brain Hive has come up with a solution. Brain Hive has developed a platform that allows students to rent books from their digital library as a supplement to their schools actual library.

The Brain Hive service will offer traditional e-books, non fiction books, graphic novels and books curated by school librarians and administrators. Through the schools portal into the Brain Hive system, librarians and administrators can determine which content is age appropriate, set limitations on numbers of rentals at a time per student, and decide to offer titles around the current curriculum.

More after the break
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Austin Startup MapMyFitness Announces $9 Million Dollar Round

Austin fitness startup MapMyFitness has received a $9 million dollar round of funding.

SiliconHillsNews is reporting that Austin Ventures and Milestone Venture Partners led the series B round for the fitness app development startup. Competitor Group Inc, and The Running Specialty Group LLC also participated in the round through other business partnerships.

The Austin based startup makes a variety of fitness apps that allow their users to track their progress on their smartphone or other mobile device. They’ve already built up a strong community of over nine million registered users. They are currently adding 25,000 new users per day.

“Austin Ventures’ continuing enthusiasm is a great validation of our success to date. We’re also thrilled to leverage Milestone Venture Partners’ unique expertise on healthcare technology services, and to deepen our business partnerships with Competitor Group and run.com, the e-commerce platform for The Running Specialty Group,” said Richard Jalichandra, chief executive officer of MapMyFITNESS. “This Series B funding allows us to continue innovating and improving our tools for people of all levels to improve their fitness, nutrition and overall health.”

One of MapMyFitness’ strong points is how their apps are resonating within the fitness community. Fitness event producers have used MapMyFitness to track participants progress in races, decathlons and more.

“MapMyFITNESS’ amazing growth of one of the largest audiences of runners, walkers, cyclists and active people has tremendous synergy with what we’re doing at Competitor with events like the Rock N Roll race series,” said Scott Dickey, president and chief executive officer at Competitor Group, Inc.

“The MapMyFITNESS team has created one of the most engaging utilities for fitness enthusiasts, one that complements what we’re trying to do with our new website, run.com,” said Ken Gart, President of The Running Specialty Group.

MapMyFitness is available across multiple platforms. Of course iOS and Android are their leading platforms but it’s also available as a native app for Blackberry, Windows Mobile and iPads.

Linkage:

Find out more about MapMyFitness here

Source: SiliconHillNews

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New Hampshire Startups: $500,000 Startup Competition Launches This Fall

New Hampshire has a budding tech startup scene. Some entrepreneurs are attracted to the peaceful and beautiful climate in New Hampshire. There are some startups in the hospitality industry that are coming out of the University of New Hampshire’s hospitality program that are choosing to stay put to develop their ideas. Now though, there are 500,000 new reasons to launch a startup in New Hampshire.

The New Hampshire High Technology Council and the abi Innovation Hub have announced a new $500,000 tech startup competition. They’ve received financial commitments from 20 accredited investors who will also assist in mentoring New Hampshire startups in the so far unnamed competition, which is going by “The Fund” at the moment.

The $500,000 will be spread out into five annual competitions with $100,00

0 in prize moneyeach year for the next five years starting in September 2012. The first prize will be $50,000 the second prize will be $30,000 and the third prize is $20,000. The top two prizes will be determined by a panel of judges organized by the Entrepreneur’s Foundation of New Hampshire. The third prize will be determined by audience vote at the pitch contest scheduled for every fall.

The first competition will be September 20, 2012.

A separate company is being formed to manage the contest, obtain a name and a URL. Five members of New Hampshire’s tech sector are going to form the company and they are; abi Innovation Hub Executive Director Jamie Coughlin; early-stage investor Matt Pierson; co-founder and chief technology officer of Dyn Tom Daly, a Manchester Internet firm; Executive Director of the New Hampshire High Technology Council Matt Cookson; and member of the Cook, Little, Rosenblatt and Manson law firm Matt Benson.

“This competition fills a void in New Hampshire’s start up scene,” stated Pierson. “Not only are we going to put money into winning start up companies, we’re going to leverage the knowledge of our investors in helping them grow their businesses and ultimately attract additional capital.”

The abi’s Jamie Coughlin stated, “By having a five-year commitment to fund this event up front, we’re sending a strong message to entrepreneurs that we’re establishing New Hampshire as leader in getting start ups off the ground. This is all about investing in people, ideas, and ultimately stimulating our next crop of tech companies.”

“This competition is one more initiative to help drive innovation in New Hampshire,” added Cookson. “This effort will help create new, high paying jobs in our dynamic tech sector. The fact that individuals have stepped up to fund this effort demonstrates the commitment to nurturing our entrepreneurs.”

While “The Fund” is awaiting a name and url information about applying for the contest and the contest itself can be found at the abi Innovation hub website as well as the New Hampshire High Technology Council Site (linked below).

Linkage:

Find out more here at the abi Innovation Hub website or

The New Hampshire High Technology Council Website

Nibletz is the voice of startups everywhere else, here are more new stories from everywhere else

Milwaukee Startup: The Good Jobs Wins Startup Wisconsin Contest On Kick-Off Day

Startup Wisconsin launched last Thursday as part of the Startup America Partnership. They didn’t waste anytime either, and kicked off their kickoff party with a quick pitch contest with a quick $1750 in prizes. The prize money was furnished by the law firm of Michael Best & Friedrich.

A new employment website startup called The Good Jobs, was victorious in the quick pitch competition. The woman owned startup from Milwaukee is creating a jobs site that will launch this summer. Their spin though is that they are matching people up to jobs based on lifestyle badges.

For example, companies that are hiring use proprietary badges to identify things like their commitment to the environment and the planet, or flexible scheduling. All of the things that an employment candidate would be looking for as far as “lifestyle” or “quality of life” are concerned in a new job.

Too often you go into a job interview because you really need a job and forget to ask the important questions. That cruise you have scheduled in two months with your 90 year old grandparents could be in jeopardy if you don’t know ahead of time how a company is about prior family appointments. The office closes at 5pm, does that mean you can still make your sons soccer practice at 6:00? Quality employers know these things are important.

More after the break
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5 New Mexico Startups From The Angel List (angel.co)

We’ve recently started highlighting startups from “everywhere else” that appear on angel.co. Angel.co is one of the top resources for startups across the web. It’s right up their next to CrunchBase.

What we discovered though, was in our weekly email from angel.co every single trending startup was from Silicon Valley. Once in a blue moon we would get a startup from New York, but the trending startups are predominantly from the valley. This shows that Silicon Valley has a lot of active users on angel.co. This is no fault of the valley or angel.co however we figured we would start an ongoing feature series on Angel.co startups. It’s free to create your profile there and if you haven’t you should (you should also make sure you’re on Crunchbase).

Today we’re going to look at five angel list companies from New Mexico.

Volopt (Las Cruces)

Volopt is based in Las Cruces New Mexico and is a web aggregator. They bill themselves as the “Huffington Post” for web content. We’re not sure if we get that reference from looking at their site. After all Huffington is a web site, and well the Huffington Post would be the Huffington Post of web content.

Volopt on the other hand has an easy to understand web interface. When you go to their site there is a “cloud” of content tags on the home page that you can click on to discover more information about the tag. There is also a search bar where you can travel outside of the content cloud.

The co-founders are Hank Muetterties, Joel Diemer and Louis O. Constantini.

They look like their on to something but when you’re building a startup that is going to encompass the entire web there needs to be an entire webs worth of content. There was a great amount of sports content, tags for the NBA,MLB and NFL served up great answers, as did tags for Mathematics and photography.

On the other hand a search for startup and startups returned no data at all.

The UI is very easy to use and understand, building scale may be a challenge.

Find Volopt on the web here and on Angel.co here

AgeNation (Santa Fe)

AgeNation is a web hub and content platform targeting baby boomers and seniors. As many baby boomers are entering into retirement in their work lives they were on the cusp of computers, new media and the digital age.

These baby boomers, no how to use a computer, and the internet but don’t have a portal or destination targeting them without making them feel old, like the AARP or any of the thousands of sites targeting seniors.

The AgeNation media group includes AgeNation.com, AgeNation Radio, AgeNation Live, NEXT Magazine, AgeNation Consulting and Coaching. They’re also about to add AgeNation television, publishing and travel.

The AgeNation group was co-founded by husband and wife team Sedena and George Cappannelli. Both workaholic, energetic babybooomers themselves they’ve set out to grow their media empire with their core audience.

Find AgeNation on their website here and on Angel.co here

MoTag (Santa Fe)

MoTag is innovating the QR space with a loyalty and rewards model gamifying discovery of products through a hide and seek platform. MoTag combines QR tag code info and UPC info with users personalized information, creating a fun social game based commerce network.

Think of it as Scavngr for products. But there is much more you can do with MoTag than just scavenger hunts.

MoTag presents themselves as a QR Code browser that has robust features.

MoTag is hoping to merge big box retailers and local retailers in reward and loyalty based games.

Co-Founder Allen Branch has a vast background in big box retail holding advisory positions at Whole Foods, REI, Home Depot and Autozone. He also founded Real Estate TV in 1995.

Co-Founder Bruno Allaire holds an MBA from Harvard and has 18 years experience in managing new business development.

See more about MoTag on their YouTube Channel and here on Angel.co

UsersUnite (Taos)

UsersUnite is a product review and social networking platform revolving around software reviews for business. The company seems to be taking an actual user approach to reviews and discussion about software rather than a techblog feel where readers often wonder about the deals behind the software reviews.

The premise for the idea seems solid. Co-Founders Bret and Linda Weir have over 29 years of software experience (Bret) and 10 years of public accounting experience (Linda).

Bret says in their YouTube pitch video that UsersUnite will be worth $200 million dollars within five years by saving businesses billions of dollars in software expenditures. That’s quite a lofty goal. If the startup lives by it’s user generated ideas and beliefs, especially behind the name UsersUnite, they could achieve that goal.

However, their angel.co profile suggests that their revenue stream is going to come from charging software vendors to participate, ultimately that will be what keeps them from the $200 million dollar goal. Once money from the publishers comes into play than the questions surrounding the authenticity and ethics behind the reviews put UsersUnite right back into the same categories as the TechBlogs that regularly run “sponsored” content.

Hopefully they will pivot back to the original premise, and make money off advertising or even affiliate sales of the software titles being discussed, then they could easily become a seven or eight figure company in revenue within five years. 9 figures though? Not likely.

More about UsersUnite from their website and from Angel.co

Enlitten.com (Santa Fe)

As online sales sites like Amazon.com continue to obliterate the local and big box bookstores into oblivion, one New Mexico startup, Enlitten, is trying to return people to local bookstores.

Enlitten uses a model that links users to local bookstores. They can pay through the website, which in turn pays the local bookshop and then the user can go into the local bookshop to pick up the book.While this isn’t as convenient as having the book shipped to your home or office, it can, sometimes mean you get the book quicker. Of course it also means you get out of the house and into the local bookshop.

A lot of local bookshops are adding entertainment, poetry readings, and cafes with increased menus to get customers to stick around longer.

Enlitten was founded by John Cole who is an award winning book designer

For more check out Enlitten at their website here and on angel.co here

Linkage:

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Get your startup featured, email us at startup@nibletz.com

Baltimore Startup: Woofound Launches Gamified Recommendation App For iOS

Woofound is a Baltimore based startup in the recommendation space. Since we hail from Baltimore and Philly, this is exciting news for our area, and of course “everywhere else”.

Woofound matches your personality to things you want to do. Woofound was actually built in conjunction with psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Dr. Noreen Honeycutt from Baltimore Maryland. This is actually the second startup in just as many days that we’ve reported on that dives much deeper than the surface to serve up recommendations or discoveries. The first was London based ColourDNA which uses the psychology of colours in it’s discovery platform.

Our friend Sarah Pereze over at TechCrunch reports that Woofound co-founders Dan Sines and Josh Spears founded the company last year after Spears was set up on a blind date. The two friends thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to match up interests based on personality traits?

Like Parking Panda, (another Baltimore startup) Woofound’s launch centers around Baltimore and DC, however today’s launch brings online the 70 top metro markets. Perez pointed out that most of the recommendations in her hometown of Tampa were things she was already familiar with. I had much better luck in Atlanta this early morning.

There’s not much mention of how deep the personality integration goes however they are going to develop a version of Woofound for the Univesity of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) that will help students with career path goals.

The interface is nice and it has this simple feel to it. The user simply rates things “Me or Not Me” reminiscent of the hot or not days.

The iOS version launched today with Android in the coming months.

Linkage:

Check out Woofound here

Source: TechCrunch

We’re the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”