Michigan Startup: FetchNotes Brings StickyNotes To Your Mobile Phone

Ann Arbor Michigan based FetchNotes is a new note taking mobile app. However they aren’t looking to challenge the likes of Evernote or Catchnotes. Co-Founder Alex Schiff says that they are looking to bring sticky notes to the mobile phone. Think more along the lines of three to four word notes not three to four page notes.

“We see ourselves as competing more with a phone’s native notepad than Evernote,” Schiff explained to Xconomy. “The problem with most of the note-taking software is that it focuses on long-form note taking. Ours is geared toward three-to-four-word notes, not three-to-four-page notes.”

Schiff and co-founder Chase Lee met at a entrepreneurship practicum at the University of Michigan. Their first idea was for an ideas marketplace startup. Schiff says he quickly learned that his idea “really sucked” and then he and Lee started looking at how people capture notes and to do items.

Fetchnotes has a variety of ways to jot down your note. Users can text, call and email notes on the fly from their mobile phone and then quickly recall them from the mobile app. Schiff admits to texting his own ideas to himself and then later putting them in a word doc.

“One day, my Blackberry’s notepad erased a year’s worth of ideas. I was very distraught.” Schiff said

Like Evernote and Catch Notes you can tag your notes and keep them organized using a hashtag system. With Fetchnotes emphasis on short notes the hashtag would be much more effective than it is on Evernote.  The different ways to input a note definitely set Fetchnotes apart from the rest of the pack.

Fetchnotes is currently bootstrapped and working on a seed round at the moment. They do have a staff of 9 right now and Schiff and Lee are still enrolled as Juniors at the University of Michigan. They’re hoping that Fetchnotes will be the goto  app for short notes.

source: Xconomy

Des Moines Startup: Freebee Cards About To Launch, Making Customer Loyalty And Engagement Fun

A new Des Moines based startup called FreebeeCards is preparing for launch. They are launching May 15th in Des Moines and they are currently signing up merchants and users, for what promises to be a fun and exciting new way to build customer loyalty and engagement.

Freebee Cards was founded by CEO Ken Lazzaro who is a consultant in the reward/loyalty card and credit card processing space so he has experience with this kind of thing. How did he come up with Freebee Cards? Their marketing guy Todd Razor told us in an interview:

“Ken’s consulting company, which educates and helps business owners implement gift card, loyalty and credit card processing programs, was working with the owner of a women’s clothing boutique in Austin, Texas.  Ken had just sold the business owner a point-of-sale system, and she was also very interested in increasing customer loyalty. Ken’s company approached her about offering preloaded gift cards with varying values of $5, $10, $25 and $50 to customers in her area.

She loved the idea of consumers having to visit her store to find out the value of the cards. Yet a concern over not being able to measure the customer acquisition cost stopped her short of running that program. 

Ken soon realized that developing an electronic version of this gift card marketing concept would allow merchants to track customer shopping habits, as well as open a direct line of communication to make special offers, reward customer loyalty and collect candid feedback outside of the public’s view.

It snowballed into an idea for a website and FreebeeCards was born.”

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Kansas City Entrepreneur Inspires Startups To Get Fit With New Fitness Startup Blog

The managing partner and co-founder of Think Big Partners, Herb Sih, has launched a new startup of his own called “Startup Your Fitness”. The new media startup (blog) aims at giving startup founders and entrepreneurs who live the workaholic startup lifestyle fitness and living tips that fit into their busy lives.

The site, which launched on the first of April, was no April Fool’s joke. “Startup Your Fitness” offers exercise tips, diet tricks and health advice that can fit into a busy lifestyle. Sih created the startup because as a serial entrepreneur he found himself drifting further and further away from being in shape.

“I know many other entrepreneurs who are in the same boat as me,” says Sih. “They’re passionate and committed to their dreams, but struggle finding time for exercise and living a healthy lifestyle. So, I’m challenging them to join me in my next venture in building an exercise regimen that works for entrepreneurs just like me.”

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Chicago Startups Yield $160M In Q1 From Funding To Acquisition: What’s This Midwest Mentality?

Whoever said Chicago didn’t have a thriving tech scene may need to crawl out from under their own angels and actually look at the facts. Builtinchicago.com has just released the Q1 numbers and they are mighty impressive for a town with no startup culture and entrepreneurs who are at home by 5:00pm.

According to the latest data from builtinchicago, 32 new startups were launched in Q1 2012. 17 startups saw funding to the beat of $33 million dollars and there were 12 acquisitions for a total of $127 million dollars. If you put your basic arithmetic hats on you’ll see that Chicago startups (and just the ones builtinchicago.com reports on) yielded $160 million dollars in funding and acquisitions.

Ageology, gtrot, Band Digital, Hireology, BodyShopBids, Kauzu, Buzz Referrals, Lab 42, CareShare, MediaFly, Channel IQ, Retrofit, Eved, Tap.me, Fippex, Univa and Vmock all saw some kind of funding in the first quarter of 2012.

Cellit, ClearTrial, Pointbridge, PrepMe, FeeFighters, RegistryPro, Intelli, RoundArch, ki edit + design, Savid Tech, MobManager, and Quiet FDN all saw exits through acquisition.

data from builtinchicago.com

Technically Philly Expanding To Cover Baltimore

One thing that Cameron and I have noticed on the road covering startups “Everywhere Else” is that there are some really great locally focused websites out there (and some really horrible ones). Sites like inthecapital.com (covering Washington DC’s thriving tech scene), Builtinchicago (covering Chicago’s Tech Scene), Silicon Prairie, TechCocktail and Technically Philly do a great job of keeping the tech community in their target areas in focus.

Technically Philly is expanding this summer. They let their readers know in this blog post that they plan on soft launching Technically Baltimore.com later this summer with the help of Baltimore entrepreneur and startup evangelist Mike Brenner. Brenner maintains the startupbaltimore.org site and will be instrumental in Technically Baltimore’d launch. They plan on having a more formal launch in the fall.

Technically Philly has a revenue model that consists of an annual event called “Philly Tech Week” which is just about a week away, along with other shoulder events, and some underwriting. They plan on continuing a similar model with the Baltimore site, so while reporting on the Baltimore tech scene will be priority number one, companies in Charm City will also get the chance to showcase themselves in an event similar to Philly Tech Week (we hope).

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Startup Spotlight: Minnesota’s Altsie A New Way To Watch Indie Films

altsie, startups, startup, minneapolis, twin cities

Nibletz takes pride in being the startup voie for “Everywhere Else” as such we love bringing you stories about startups from everywhere under the sun, especially startups that are doing something uniquely different and uniquely fun. Altsie is one of those startups.

Altsie hails from the Twin Cities. It’s about socially mixing indie films, but not online, offline. How’s that for a change. Of course you use a website to find out where to go but after that it’s a fully immersive experience with you, the movie, the venue and the attendees.

Lucas Rayala and co-founder Joe Dolson launched Altsie in the twin cities with plans to refine the experience and then roll it out at other areas across the country, but what is it exactly?

Here’s how it works. You go to the Altsie website which will tell you what the current movie is for that month. Rayala curates the movies himself through relationships with indie film producers. They then partner with a venue which agrees to host the film. It could be a sports bar that’s trying something different for a night or a coffee shop or anywhere in between.

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Wayne State Launches A Pre-Seed Microfund For Student Run Startups

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Wayne State has launched a first of its kind, in Detroit, micro-seed fund for student run startups. The fund called “The Warrior Fund” is being administered by Andrew Olsen who is the commercialization principal with the college’s tech transfer office.

The fund is only $25,000 this go round and Olsen will dole out awards between $2500 and $5,000 in hopes to attract student run entrepreneurs into staying in Detroit’s flourishing tech startup community.

“It’s great to have resources, but the ability to write checks is what really knocks down barriers,” Olson told website xconomy. “Students have the ability to practically live on air. They can do more with less.”

In addition to some preseed funding student run startups will receive mentoring including how to create a pitch deck.

The student run startups need to be legitimate companies registered with the state of Michigan and have tax ID numbers. They also can’t use the money to pay down student debt.

“We want startups to use the money on prototyping or to hire a developer to build a mobile app. We want this money to be need-to-have funding, not nice-to-have.” Olsen said.

Source: xconomy

DC Area Company: Cadre Looking To Change The Face Of The Network Mixer

I’ve been attending networking mixers for all of my adult life. In a previous life as a radio personality and then programmer I attended many conventions that had their own networking mixers as shoulder events. When I started founding my own businesses as “SMBs” before “Startups” were chic, I attended every chamber of commerce business after hours, every small business mixer, power breakfast and the like.

All of these events, and even the ones I regularly attend today for both of our sites, it amounts to a room full of people that get all clicked up into their circle of friends and the theme of the mixer is lost almost instantly as you walk through the door. Sometimes when you go to these things and try to be outgoing and meet new people, people look at you like you’re nuts.

I’ve recently started using discovery apps like Sonar, Glancee and Highlight to see if they would help in the networking mixer problem. In some ways they have but not by much. I’d find people I wanted to meet and they were already in deep conversations with the other people I wanted to meet about baseball, football or their latest deal.

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New York Start Up: Stamped Let’s You Put Your Stamp Of Approval On Things

Review sites like Yelp are great. The problem is  when you’re looking for something in a hurry the last thing you want to do is read a 2500 word review on something. You want the meat and potatoes now and that’s what Stamped specializes in.

Stamped launched in November and was born in New York. Founders Robby Stein and Bart Stein previously worked for Google. The third co-founder, Kevin Palms worked with risk analytics at a New York hedge fund. They’ve already secured $1.5 million in seed funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Google Ventures.

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Rawporter Roadshow: We Talk With Venga At The Fort In DC

We’re still going strong on our Rawporter Roadshow stopping in and talking with tech companies and startups from “everywhere else”. We spend some good quality time at Fortified’s “The Fort” accelerator in DC. We already brought you our interview with NexGame and now we’re spending some time with Sam from Venga to talk about Venga and what it’s like to startup outside of Silicon Valley.

We actually felt like it was more important to spend more than just 3 hours in the nation’s capital to really get a feel for the scene. We also got to spend a lot of time with Kendrick and Carl from inthecapital who lent us some of the co-working space they were borrowing from canvas.co the largest co-working space provider in DC and a great friend of startups.

Check out the interview video above. We covered Venga earlier on here as well. If you like what we are doing we could sure use some gas money for the trip hit the donate button on the right side.

If you’re a startup from literally “everywhere else” send us an email at startup@nibletz.com and we’ll get you covered.

Minnesota Tech Startups Gopher Angels Is Looking For You (Real Soon)

A new group of Angels is putting the finishing touches on their website, business and an event to kick off their new fund. Gopher Angels is holding an invite only event for seed stage tech startups on May 3, 2012 at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

Gopher Angels is currently pre-screening startups to see if they have what it takes to get funding from the group. Interested startups should visit this link to check out Gopher Angels and submit their best idea.

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Kansas City’s Hallmark Acquires L.A. Startup Spirit Clips

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U.S.greeting card giant Hallmark has acquired Los Angeles based video startup SpiritClips.

SpiritClips was founded in 2007 by Academy Award winning producer and studio executive Rob Fried who’s credits include the hit movies “Hoosiers” and “Rudy”.  The company makes heartwarming short films and movies that will compliment Hallmark’s similar offerings and give Hallmark customers access to a variety of video content.

Fried said in a statement:
“It’s a dream come true for SpiritClips to be part of the digital future of so esteemed an organization as Hallmark.”

Hallmark CEO Donald Hall Jr said “It is a superb brand fit for Hallmark, with each story delivering compelling emotional content, positive family values and meaningful life lessons,”

No terms of the deal were announced.

Source: siliconprairie

Omaha Startup MindMixer Gets $1.9 Million In Funding

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Omaha Nebraska’s MindMixer, which bills itself as a “virtual town hall” announced last week that they had raised $1.9 million in series A funding front Dundee Venture Capital who originally seeded the company with $300,000 back in February.

MindMixer’s virtual town hall platform is geared towards municipalities and universities.  MindMixer already has 125 on board.

The idea came about when CEO/co-founder Nick Bowden  and co-founder Nathan Preheim, who both have backgrounds in urban planning, noticed that no one attends community meetings.

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Film & Broadway Producer Max Gottlieb Unveils “Lovvvit”A New Beverly Hills Start Up

If you’re expecting a story about an app that helps you find posh deals on Rodeo Drive, that’s not what Lovvvit is all about. Lovvvit was just recently released into the iOS app store by founder, movie producer and Broadway producer Max Gottlieb.

Lovvvit is a recommendation app that’s based on videos and improves interaction between local businesses and their best customers. Long are the days when everyone is waiting for the latest daily deals app. Recommendation and rewards apps seem to be the app du jour.

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