CentUp Comes to Nibletz, See What It Does

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Have you ever read a great blog post and wished there was some way to show your support? Sure, you could leave a comment or tweet a link. That stuff’s great. But you know what content creators really need?

Cash. Just like the rest of us.

There’s been a slowly growing trend of micropayment companies in the last few years. The deal is that you, the reader, give a very small amount–even a few pennies–to your favorite bloggers or content companies when they create something you like. It’s another way of showing your gratitude and helping them stay in business. Win-win.

Now, though, Chicago company CentUp is upping the ante even more. Instead of transactions straight from consumer to content company, there’s a third party benefiting from your pennies: charities.

CentUp will take 10% of all donations, and the other 90% will be split evenly between 1 of 6 charities and the content provider. The charities include national nonprofits such as Love146 and The Fender Music Foundation. As the company grows, they plan to add more charities.

Nibletz is proud to be a CentUp publisher. Our button is right there at the top of each post. All you have to do is sign up with CentUp, then start clicking. Besides designating how much you want to give, you can also use the button to Tweet about your donation. It’s similar to a Facebook “like” button, but benefits a couple of great organizations.

For our part, we will use our portion to continue our Sneaker-Strapped Road Trip. This enables us to travel the country, get in the trenches with great startups, and talk to amazing investors. It’s also when we cover awesome events like SXSW and Southland, which starts tomorrow. In fact, the majority of our content (which we know you love!) comes from our Sneaker-Strapped Road Trip. Love Nibletz? Every little bit helps us continue to be the voice of startups everywhere else.

Video Interview With Indiana Startup Squad, Collaborative Code Editing

Imagine if Google Docs (or Drive whatever you want to call it) was all about developers and coding. Imagine if you could work on code projects easily and together from around the world. Then imagine if you could upload those projects to DropBox. Well with Indiana startup SquadEdit.com you can.

SquadEdit is like Google Docs for developers, except instead of working on papers, spreadsheets or presentations, you work on coding projects together.

With Squad  you can have your coding project on several different “work spaces” and they have a plan for individuals and small groups, all the way up to 50 users.  Everyone involved on the same Squad project can see everything updated and in real time. You can also create sub projects of projects. If one part of the team is working on one function and the other part of the team is working on a different function, each team member can see the task they’re working on and the entire community project.

This is one of those startups that is a great resource for other startups. Now you don’t have to have your developers in one room and you don’t have to take different conference calls, skype sessions and Google+ hangouts to make sure everyone is on the same page. As Squad CEO Hillary Cage explains in the video interview, it’s an all in one collaborative experience.

Oh and as for DropBox, you can save your Squad projects in DropBox and share them with others.  Our West Coast editor Junaid Kalmadi got a chance to interview Cage at the The Innovation ShowCase in Indianapolis last month. Here’s that interview:


 

Linkage:

Check out Squad here at their website

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Indiana Startup: Volunteer Your Voice, So Easy A Congressman Could Do it VIDEO

An Indiana startup called Volunteer Your Voice has streamlined the phonebank process.

If you’ve ever had to execute a phone bank campaign you’ve probably experienced a long and tedious process. Most phone banks rely on volunteers which makes even finding out who’s helping a task in itself. After you’ve got your volunteers set up you have to set up the phone bank, print surveys and register the volunteers to the phone.

Then the next long step starts, which is training the volunteers on that particular banks mission, survey and goals. And then you wait…

Once the volunteers are done you tear down the phone bank, wait for results,and prepare reports.

Volunteeryourvoice.com has revolutionized this whole process from the top down. The biggest way they’ve changed the phone-bank industry is that you’ll use your own computer and headset and their built in telephony to actual make the calls. This saves the campaign huge amounts of money in overhead and means you can do the surveying from the comfort of your own home. If you have a PC headset and a high speed internet connection you’re ready to go and the quality is great.

If you don’t have a PC headset or a high speed internet connection you have the option of routing calls through your own personal phone, a landline or a cell phone/smartphone will work. The calls will be routed similar to the way Google Voice routes calls. This still insures that you can keep great data on the success of the campaign and that the people administering the campaign can still monitor your calls.

Volunteeryourvoice.com’s web based dashboard provides campaign administers easy access to real time reporting.

We got a chance to interview Jayson Manship the founder of volunteeryourvoice.com in the video interview below. He talks about their new SaaS platform and the industries that they serve. Naturally they are in the political space along with nonprofit surveys and alumni phonebanking for schools on pledge drives.

Check out this cool startup video:

Linkage:

Check out VolunteerYourVoice here

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Interview With Chris West Founder of Memphis Startup: NeedRegistry

NeedRegistry is an original new idea for a startup based in Memphis TN. As you may have guessed it involves a registry, but not like any registry you may have seen before.

When someone goes through a major life changing event,  like a bad illness, death in the family member, cancer, or even birth of a newborn, friends and family members inherently want to help. It’s part of human nature. Often times, the person going through the life changing event is too proud to say that they need help or to accept help. Friends and family don’t know what that person’s needs are so they resort to what Chris West, the founder of NeedRegistry, calls “death by casserole”. Friends and family members bring food, and lots of it.

Typically after the initial life changing event occurs, the person that had that event in their lives starts realizing that they do need help with even the basic and simplest of necessities. Perhaps they need someone to cut the grass, clean the house, or even clean the pool. Maybe that life changing event was a long term sickness like cancer, or an injury that has the person off their feet. These easy tasks can mount up quick.

Enter NeedRegistry.

NeedRegistry connects friends of that person with vendors of the services they need. The person that has had the life changing event happen to them can select things like lawn care, then the size of their lawn, the frequency of the lawn maintenance, and then a local service provider.

Friends can then fund the lawn maintenance and when the maintenance is performed the vendor gets paid.

It’s this direct vendor to friend connection that sets NeedRegistry apart from other crowdfunding startups that allow you to collect money for health reasons. With those types of sites you would still have to source out the work itself, get estimates and pay.

As West explains in the video interview, for the vendor its an easy sale and a no-brainer,once the service is ordered they go do the job and get paid.

West is excited about a beta launch in the coming weeks and plans on expanding the platform piece by piece over the next six months.

After the initial NeedRegistry rollout this year, he’ll expand the startup to cover two more markets and then by the end of 2013 he hopes to have a decent sized footprint across the country with a robust network of service providers.

Check out the video interview with West below:

Linakge:

Check out NeedRegistry here

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Madison Startup: SeatSwapr Facilitates That Airline Seat Swap For You

Last week, when we stopped in Madison Wisconsin as part of the Nibletz sneaker strapped, nationwide startup road trip we took office hours with 10 hungry entrepreneurs and startup founders. One of those founders was Thomas Mueller who is hoping to take something that happens on lots of airlines, streamline it and execute it through an app.

Seat swapping is nothing new. A lot of people get on an airplane and realize for some reason or another the seat that they picked or have been assigned isn’t going to work out. At that point, if the plane is full, the passenger is stuck.  Sometimes when this happens you’ll hear people trading seats or even selling their seats. In fact I’ve done this a number of times. I often select an exit row seat and then someone really tall comes along and wants the seat with the extra leg room. More often than not I’m offered between $20 and $60 to swap seats. (as long as they’re coming from an aisle seat I typically do it. I don’t do window seats, you get out of the plane quicker on the aisle).


Well Mueller is also very familiar with this practice. Every now and then you’ll see seat swap requests on major flights happen on Twitter. Typically the bi-coastal NY/SF or NY/LA flights have the most traffic on Twitter. Tweets will read “I’m on NY/LA Flight XXX and need an aisle seat $50”.

Interestingly enough the flight attendants don’t seem to care as long as you don’t delay them starting their safety instructions, and of course don’t interrupt the flow of other passengers getting to their seats.

Well Mueller realizes that websites like seatguru and seatexpert already know which seats are the best. Other sites like tripit know what flight your on and of course all the airlines offer viewable maps online of the inside of the plane so you can see where your seat is.

When you put all this information together and then tie it in with a mobile app you have the opportunity to create a seat swapping app.

Now it’s not as easy as it sounds and Mueller is ready to face the challenge. Of course with any mobile app the first thing a founder wants to do is build scale. Mueller has to build tremendous scale because for the app to work, two people need to be on the same flight.  In addition as Mueller told us “If a plane is half full there’s no market for us”.

That doesn’t seem to be a problem though because since 9/11 airlines have reduced their number of flights and have tried to fill every plane to capacity. The load factor right now is 83% full while some of the more popular flights like New York to San Francisco are 98% full. Those are the flights where people would really benefit from an app like SeatSwapr.

Mueller is hoping to partner with some of the other travel sites to implement his technology.

Linkage:

Check out SeatSwapr here at SeatSwapr.com

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Chicago Startup: Red Meat Market Connecting People With Meat, Socially! Video Interview

Did you know that meat could be social? Of course you did, how many times have you socialized over burgers, hot dogs (is that meat) or great steaks? Well a new startup in the Chicago area is connecting people socially over meat. This time though, it’s about buying meat.

Red Meat Market, like Kansas’ AgLocal, connects people in Chicago, Madison and Milwaukee (for now) to the freshest, farm raised sustainable meat.  Red Meat Market has a website and a mobile app which makes it a cinch to order meat in boxes, by dollar amount, choosing the cuts that you want.

With Red Meat Market you tell their platform what you want to spend and it tells you what you can get in your “box of meat” you can get a variety or one choice cut but this way you always stay in the budget that you want, each and every month.

There are actually a couple of social components to Red Meat Market. The first is the ability to split your “box of meat” up with friends, within the site and the app. Red Meat Market handles the payment distribution and everyone gets the meat they want.  The meat box can be delivered to your door, or you can opt to attend one of Red Meat Market’s Meat Ups (clever huh). At their Meat Ups, Red Meat Market supplies the beer and the sides and everyone gets the box of meat that they ordered.

By holding a meat up you can meat or meet other Red Meat Market users and socialize or swap cuts of meats between boxes.

Red Meat Market is in a great part of the country to start a business like this. Co-Founder Mark Wilhelms blends his 18 years of digital and marketing experience with his love of meat for a new way to not just sell great, quality, grass fed meat but to connect people who love meat together.

Check out our video interview below:

Linkage:

Check out RedMeatMarket here at their website

Here’s more of our Chicago TechWeek coverage

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Video Interview With Chicago Startup ReGroup Therapy

ReGroup Therapy is a new Chicago startup that brings group therapy into the digital age. The service puts together people with common conditions in a video chat style group support session. The sessions are moderated by licensed professionals.

ReGroup Therapy can be applied to any number of conditions. Say you’re looking for a support group to quit smoking or an eating disorders support group. Now you can confidentially attend a group therapy session from the comfort of your own home.

One of the best parts though, is because it’s done over the internet and via video, you don’t have to miss your session if you travel out of town. You can access ReGroup Therapy from a laptop or a tablet and have the same experience.

Co-Founder David Cohn tells us that right now they are working with women with maternal depression and anxiety and plan to expand to a number of other group support offerings.

Cohn and his co-founder Sari Nass Ziv are two friends who met during their MBA studies in 2010.  Cohn had developed an interest in the way technology can change people’s lives while volunteering in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. That passion stuck with him through more traditional positions in technology.

Nass Ziv started patients with mental illness as part of her psychology studies but then pivoted to the business world. That passion for helping people also stuck with Nass Ziv.

In 2011 as Nass Ziv was pregnant with her first child and Cohn’s wife Ana was pregnant at the same time, they started the idea for ReGroup Therapy which launched earlier this year.

Check out our video interview with Cohn below.

Linkage:

For more info visit ReGroupTherapy.com

Here’s more of our coverage from TechWeek 2012

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Indianapolis Startup: Blab Bubble Is A DIY Platform For Pay Per Click Social Media Advertising INTERVIEW

If you haven’t noticed advertising is moving away from traditional online pay per click models of years past. Advertisers are reaching out to both mobile and social media channels for advertising.

Companies like Ad.ly,MyLikes and Sponsored Tweets allow individuals with good social media followings to capitalize on their tweets, likes and recommendations by offering cash based incentives. Blab Bubble is a new startup that’s coming into the same space with a new spin that may work out even better in the long run.

Blab Bubble spent a lot of time and money researching the market to find out where social media advertising is breaking down. They found two key areas that had the biggest pain points.

The first was that many advertisers felt that traditional social media advertising sites were too cumbersome when trying to create campaigns.  The other area that needed improvement was in the startup and small business arena. Most social media advertising companies targeted big brands and enterprise. Of course, with that, they were pricing small businesses and startups out of the market.

Blab Bubble has created a simple, easy to use interface for businesses of any size to set up social media campaigns. The process takes just a few minutes and the campaign is off and running. Blab Bubble also offers very easy to understand pricing, how about $.40 per click no matter who you are.

We got a chance to interview BlabBubble to find out more about this Indianapolis startup and their spin on social media advertising.

Read More…

Video Interview With Memphis Startup Paytopia Making Payments Safer & Easier

There are a lot of payment startups out there today. There are consolidated payment solutions and mobile payment solutions coming out of the woodwork. None of them though are focused on convenience and safety, the way that Memphis startup Paytopia is.

We originally met Mike Hoffmeyer CEO and founder of Paytopia a few weeks back at 48 Hour Launch in Memphis. Hoffmeyer, like many others in Memphis isn’t just a local founder and CEO but he regularly gives back to the local startup community by mentoring, helping with pitches and pitching in at events like 48 Hour Launch. In fact when we met with him at our office hours in Memphis we were talking about the the startups he is helping at ZeroTo510 a medical device and biotech incubator in Memphis.

Hoffmeyer, a graduate of the most recent class at Seed Hatchery, loves helping other startups and of course working on Paytopia.

Hoffmeyer spent most of his career in the payment business. He worked with credit card processing and ACH processing (direct debit and checking account payments).  Over the years he figured there had to be a better way then filling out these long, sometimes un-secure forms with all of your important information.  Hoffmeyer set out to develop a system that was both easier and faster. That system is Paytopia.


In a nutshell Paytopia works like this.

If you buy something at an online merchant that uses the Paytopia system you will only need your email address and Paytopia pin. From there the merchant will ping your bank via the Paytopia system.  Paytopia will send you a message with an authentication code for that transaction either in-app or SMS. You’ll then enter the authentication code into the transaction and voila, paid via your bank account.

Paytopia effectively takes a big bite out of payment fraud in the online environment by having a two step authentication system. The only way that a Paytopia customer could be defrauded was if the person committing the fraud had both the customers Paytopia pin and the authentication code delivered by app or SMS message. If someone tries to make a fraudulent Paytopia purchase the worst that can happen is the customer will get a bunch of text messages with authentication codes. Without that code, the fraudster can’t finish the transaction.

Check out more about this great new way to pay in the video below:

Linkage:

Find out more about Paytopia here at Paytopia.com

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Wisconsin Startup: WhiteWilly Launches, Barter At The Speed Of Light

A new bartering startup has launched in the great state of Wisconsin. WhiteWilly.com is the newest startup from serial entrepreneur John Bialk who, according to his angel.co profile, has been an entrepreneur since the age of nine.

Bartering is hot these days, in fact it’s so hot that A&E has started a new series called “Barter Kings”. We’ve even featured another bartering startup in Arizona called Kwiddy with the idea behind it to help facilitate actual in person bartering.

Whitewilly is a little different. Whitewilly addresses the biggest problem with bartering. That problem in it’s simplest form is:

John wants the item Tom wants, Tom wants the item that Scott wants, and Scott wants the item that John has.

Before WhiteWilly that typically meant that the barter deal was over. Scott couldn’t get to John’s item because he didn’t have the item John actually wants. However WhiteWilly facilitates all three trades in one click and then tells each member of the trade where to send their item.

So for a little more clarity lets put items with the example:

John has a new iPad but really wants a macbook. Tom has a macbook but doesn’t want the iPad he already has one. What Tom really wants is a DSLR camera.  Scott is looking for an iPad but has a DSLR camera that John doesn’t want.

Does that sound confusing enough for you? It is, but here’s what WhiteWhilly does. WhiteWilly allows each member of the transaction to see what items each person is bartering. With one click of a button.  So with one click, Scott is told to send his DSLR camera to Tom.  Tom is told to send his Macbook to John and John is told to send his iPad to Scott.


You see John didn’t want the DSLR camera that Scott had he wanted the macbook that Tom had. With WhiteWilly everyone ends up happy and the transaction is done.

There are other barter sites out there and of course there is the barter heading on Craigslist.com however with those traditional sites, and with Craigslist, you need to wait for that one in a million opportunity that your exact trade comes up, or settle for something else.

Bartering is free (except for shipping) and can put good used items to use and make many people happy.

Linkage:

Check out WhiteWilly here

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Interview With Indiana Startup BizProps VIDEO

During my nearly 20 year radio career I had one of the ultimate secret weapons, it was called American Hole In One, this company is the company that sponsors the gigantic birthday game heard on many radio stations across the country as well as those hole in one for a million dollar contests that are held often at golf tournaments of any size.

The great thing about that company was that it allowed radio stations of any size to perform gigantic promotions which of course are the catalyst to generating new business and new leads.

An Indiana company by the name of BizProps is doing something very similar with companies and their online marketing. Now we’re not talking about badly written flashy banner ads that say “You’re our millionth customer click here”. We’re talking about a real promotional company with a solid marketing background that works.

Bizprops will help you generate leads, validate your message and amplify your reach through social media channels. To demonstrate the effectiveness of BizProps Tony Monteleone from BizProps ran a campaign surrounded by this past Thursday’s Verge Startups meeting, where they were presenters.

With very little social effort he was able to garner 1000 signups, lot’s of genuine Facebook likes and social media amplification. While Verge Indy startup meet ups sell out and have over 1000 members, they’re relatively small compared to BizProps newer clients like national consumer electronics chain HH Greg and Ford. So as you can see BizProps is making headway with their company.

Don’t let the big names scare you away though BizProps can scale their product to any sized company and they work with small companies all the way up through giant enterprises.

For more information check out the video interview below:

Linkage:

For more on BizProps click here

Check out our video interview with Verge Startups founder Matt Hunckler here

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St. Louis’ Rick Holton Jr Charged Up By VentureSTL

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Rick Holton Jr. And his brother Rob Holton are no strangers to the St. Louis startup scene, tech scene or business scene. The Holton brothers come from a long and historical pedigree in the St. Louis area. Their mother Lotsie Hermann Holton is actually the granddaughter of August “Gussie” Busch from the Anheuser-Busch family.

We met the Holton Brothers on Friday when the Nibletz sneaker strapped startup road trip pulled into St. Louis for a quick overnight stop. We were there to meet with our friends at LockerDome. We had asked Gabe Lozano to introduce us to someone very influential in the St. Louis startup scene, preferably someone part of the Arch Angels, angel investor network.

Rick Holton and Rob Holton, through their investment company, Holton Capital, are members of the Arch Angels. Rick Holton is also one of the principals in the fund that came out of the Arch Angel group, Cultivation Capital. Notable St. Louis alum Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square is also a principal in Cultivation Capital, as are Brian Matthews, Peter Esparrago, and Cliff Holekamp. Together the fund is backed by $20 million for funding startups.

But the story here doesn’t lay in the background of St.Louis’ growing tech startup community. The story is about what Rick Holton Jr has been very excited about lately, and that is synergy.

When we arrived at Holton’s office Cameron and I were under the impression that Holton had expected to hear a pitch from us. Yes we absolutely need money but we’re not sure VC money is the way to go. We were at Holton Capital’s offices to get the story. The story about how and why, all of the sudden St. Louis keeps popping back up in the tech and startup news.

We are hearing about Arch Angels, Cultivation Capital, BonFyre, LockerDome, and countless other companies, funds and investors on a regular basis. Heck St. Louis is so hot that Edward Domain moved tech.li to St. Louis from Chicago after a $50,000 grant from Arch Grants.

It’s not like the Holton’s or any of the other partners in Cultivation Capital or angel investors in Arch Angels, are strangers to investing. Holton Capital has been investing in companies for over a decade.

Rick Holton explained that with their company they had invested heavily into a variety of companies. They have a classic car company, a framing company, investments in several life sciences companies and of course technology. Rick quickly confirmed with his brother and then told us that Arch Angels has $30 million invested so far.

St. Louis is an extremely loyal town. Earlier in the morning Jim Enright and Mark Sanders at LockerDome told us that if you went down the street in downtown St.Louis 9 out of 10 locals could tell you everything that happened in the most recent Cardinals game. After a quick test they were right.

But even as loyal as St. Louis can be Holton was concerned that some people may have the perception that St.Louis is a dying industrial town, rather than the thriving tech town that it is.

Holton’s other major concern was that all the startup and tech resources weren’t talking to each other. Through Holton Capital and his work with FinServe Angels and Arch Angels Holton is extremely plugged into the tech and startup ecosystem in St. Louis but he kept finding that not many others were.

Holton explained that he would hear about one deal from someone and suggest another possible investor that would be perfect for the opportunity but they didn’t know each other. “People weren’t talking to each other and because of that they were competing with each other when they didn’t have to be”.

At this point in our discussion Holton has moved from reserved to completely animated. If you don’t know Holton personally, he stands at a towering 10 feet, ok not really but he is very tall. He’s talking extremely fast and moving his hands around explaining to us, with the excitement that you’d expect when Mark McGwire was still belting them out of the park.

You can tell that this non-communication between tech influencers in St. Louis was something Holton was becoming passionate about. So he called a meeting.

Holton invited 15 of the top tech and startup influencers in St.Louis to the meeting in his boardroom on January 26th. Among the invitees were other venture capitalists, influential local tech blogs, partner resources and entrepreneurs.

Of those 15 people invited only 47 of them showed up. Holton Capital has your average modest sized conference room. Holton was fitting all of these interested tech folks wherever they could. At one point, as Holton actually showed us, they moved every chair in the office into the conference room.

“What I expected to be a 45 minute to an hour meeting of introductions and handing out business cards turned into a strategy session that lasted over two hours” Holton said.

Out of that meeting new partnerships were formed, new friends were made, and VentureSTL was born.

VentureSTL is a new web portal connecting everyone in the St.Louis startup and tech community to each other with news, discussions, links and profiles. Holton believed so much in VentureSTL that his own holtoncapital.com forwards to the site.

Holton is very optimistic about the companies that are growing right in St. Louis. Two of the more notable startups are LockerDome and BonFyre. Holton and the others involved in VentureSTL, the meeting that VentureSTL was born out of and everyone affiliated with Arch Angels are doing what they can to keep St. Louis startups in St. Louis and attracting new companies, like tech.li to St. Louis.

St. Louis has some big stars in this web 2.0 wave. Most notably would be Jack Dorsey from Twitter and Square and Jim McKelvey, also co-founder of Square. McKelvey loves St. Louis and is committed to helping Holton and company with the St. Louis mission, Dorsey, not so much.

Linkage:

Connect to VentureSTL here

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Video Interview With Chicago Startup: Care Content

One of the more interesting startups at last week’s Startup City event, part of Tech Week Chicago, was CareContent.

Kadesha Thomas is the founder of CareContent at care content.com. The new startup is a library of content for hospitals and other medical services that publish websites, newsletters and other resources for both patients and consumers.

Thomas has a background in publishing content for hospital websites and newsletters. While working as an editor for a hospital’s patient facing online resources Thomas was constantly sourcing content to fill the gaps that she hadn’t already written for the facility.

After she left that job as an editor she became a freelancer where she would get commissioned for jobs at hospitals to write stories about procedures, after care, medical trends, new hospital developments and more.

Now with CareContent Thomas is making her personal library as well as the works of others within the CareContent editorial network, available to hospitals and medical facilities either as packages or ala carte.

If a hospital needs new content for a landing page, blog entries or newsletter content they can sign up for a subscription plan to CareContent where Thomas and her company will make sure that the facilities have the content they need when it’s time to publish.

CareContent had a lot of people visit their booth at Startup City. There are article depositories, newswires and other resources for most kinds of publications but not one quite like this for the medical field.

Patient facing content is a lot different than the types of stories published in medical journals. Thomas has to take that kind of content and make it easier to understand, and not so overwhelming or sometimes scary, for patients that have either just had a medical procedure done or are thinking about having a medical procedure done.

Even with the long hard hours involved in launching a startup, Thomas is very enthusiastic about CareContent and it’s prospects in the Chicago startup scene. Thomas is just beginning as well. They just launched the company last month after months of research and they are also participating in Chicago’s Lean Startup Challenge and Chicago’s Medical Tech Pitch Event later on this summer.

Check out the video interview below:


Linkage:

Check out CareContent here

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We Talk With Matt Hunckler About Verge Indy And Verge Startup Events

Matt Hunckler made a name for himself while he was a student at IU in Bloomington Indiana. It was there that he made his first successful exit as an entrepreneur and founder, but he wanted more. He wanted more for himself and for the startup community in Indiana and with that he created Verge.

Verge is a community of tech entrepreneurs, startups, software developers, and investors that’s grown to over 1300 active members. They meet every last Thursday of the month, which Hunckler has affectionately renamed VergeDay.

With 1300 members though, Hunckler is hard pressed to find a place to hold an event with that many people where effective pitches, networking and discussions can go on, so he limits the size of the events to a couple hundreds. He pre-warns the membership the day before the tickets go on sale and they sell out quicker than One Direction tickets would sell out for a free show at an all girls middle school.  The Verge events are that popular.

Hunckler is also selective about who attends the events. He keeps them open to the community which doesn’t let shiest SEO folks in or the guy who opened up the topless car wash down the road. There are plenty of other events in town for those guys.

Verge is all about growing the community and making sure that everyone knows each other. Verge is about creating synergy among Indiana’s startup scene.

Hunckler has also been instrumental in other events like startup weekends and innovation showcase.  The innovation showcase is now in it’s fourth year and is a conference for fundable companies to present their business idea in the fields of IT,alternative energy,life sciences,medical devices and industrial products.  This year’s showcase features 50 area companies and will be held on July 12,2012 at Developer Town/Speak Easy.

Just like Super Nick Hunckler has his hands in everything. Heck, he’s even the editor for the Indianapolis edition of the startup digest.

Check out our video interview with Hunckler below:

Links we’ve got em:

Verge Is Here

Here’s the page for the Innovation Showcase July 12

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