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Canadian Startup: Growple Challenges You To Grow Together Interview

While things seem to be falling apart for Waterloo Canada’s biggest company RIM, a new startup wants people to grow together. Their startup Growple is all about making challenges over anything and everything and either challenging yourself, your friends or new acquaintances using Growple’s mobile platform.

The challenges can be anything from “I challenge myself to lose 30 pounds” or I challenge Mike to pick up the girls number across the bar. Challenges are more fun when their done together. Making new friends and growing socially is more fun when it’s surrounded by challenges.

The team behind Growple is frustrated about how people claim to be “social” and how they try hard to stay connected rather than actually being connected. It’s another one of those startups that takes the virtual world and brings it to the real world, bringing the online world off line.

We got a chance to interview Growple’s co-founder Kevin Kim. Check out the interview below.

Baltimore Startup: SocialToaster Grabs $1.975M In Series A Round

Baltimore startup Social Toaster seems to be on the cutting edge of monetizing social media distribution. There are a lot of companies in the same space as Social Toaster but none some to be executing with the same results.

The concept is pretty simple. If you have are a digital publisher or major brand Social Toaster helps you register ambassadors and super fans. These people are charged with helping to get your message out to the world, and because their fans, they do just that. Ambassadors and Super Fans are the type of social media folks who carry a lot of weight. How much?

Well according to Social Toaster’s CEO and Founder Brian Razzaque, “One of our clients told us that with 60,000 ambassadors, we were more effective than their Facebook page of 2 million.” he told the Baltimore Sun

In fact, one of Social Toasters clients is the Baltimore Ravens. The Ravens use Social Toaster for monthly media sharing contests which help their content go viral.

This isn’t a fly by night operation or a flash in the pan. Social Toaster has been perfecting their craft. Last year their sales were $300,000 this year they are projecting $2 to $3 million in sales. That’s why Razzaque was able to announce last week that the firm had completed a $1.975 million dollar series A round.

The round follows a seed round in 2011 from Neuberger Ventures and other individual investors.

Blu Venture Investors led Social Toaster’s latest round, Baltimore Angels, Wasabi Ventures, and Piedmont Investment Advisors also participated.

Razzaque plans to double the headcount from 22-50 and also plans moving the company to larger offices to Clipper Mill with about three times the office space they are currently operating out of.

William Militello, Founder of Piedmont Investment Advisors, LLC commented, “I am always excited to fund great entrepreneurs. I believe that true innovation occurs when skilled labor, intellectual capital, and entrepreneurs with great ideas are combined with the financial capital Piedmont can provide.”

Paul Silber of Blu Venture Investors, said, “our team was really attracted to SocialToaster’s novel “message amplification” solution, to the company’s leadership, and to the fact that they were rapidly gaining traction with recognizable name-brand customers. We liked the fact that their software solution offered a cost-effective and simple way for organizations of all kinds to effectively use social media to get their message out to a wider audience.”

Linkage:

For more info on Social Toaster visit them here at socialtoaster.com

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

Source: Baltimore Sun

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Toronto Startup: SocialBungy Is A DIY Promotional Platform For Social Media INTERVIEW

Canadian startup SocialBungy is a unique do it yourself platform to hold contests, sweepstakes and other engaging promotions across Facebook, Twitter and even micro-sites. SocialBungy promises not to be a template type tool, but offer all kinds of customizable options to help any size business launch promotions with real gaugeable ROI.

As much as we love reporting about startups “everywhere else” we also love it when we can talk with startups that offer a real benefit to other startups like SocialBungy. If you’re a startup and you’ve been evaluating some of the top level PR agencies out there, you’ve probably found that some of them have minimums per month in the tens of thousands of dollars. With SocialBungy you’ll be able to take your own idea and match it up to the services SocialBungy offers and not break the startup bank.

But SocialBungy isn’t just for the startup. They have programs for startups, small businesses, large brand and even agencies. SocialBungy is backed by the marketing and promotional experience of founder Mike Barwick who spent years in marketing and then launched his own social marketing firm.

“Our goal when launching the company was to make campaigns launched online sexy and engaging again – an area I think other like-minded companies are starting to lose focus on,” says founder Barwick said in a statement.

We got a chance to talk with Barwick more in-depth about SocialBungy, check out the interview after the break.

DC Startup: GrandStand Takes Social Engagement To A Whole New Level VIDEO INTERVIEW

We found a DC startup called Grandstand on #startup alley at TechCrunch Disrupt. What they’re doing will blow some businesses away. Watch the video for some great use cases and the technical explanation. I’m going to describe it in layman’s terms. If you’re a business looking to get real engagement out of social media pay attention.

What Grandstand does is takes aggregated social media data, pulls it and applies it to real world engagements. Think of the Twitter wall concept that burst into popularity around two years ago. Every conference you went to and even some company headquarters would show a hashtag or a Twitter ID on a big television screen for the world to see.

If you’ve ever been to a GDGT event they’re known for their Twitter walls where you’ll find people staring in awe at the Twitter wall waiting for their tweet to show up. The Twitter wall concept is all well and good but in the end you’re just looking at Tweets.

Grandstand takes the Twitter wall concept along with other social networks and for lack of better terminology at 1am while writing this story, makes the tweets, likes, check-ins, statuses and mentions do stuff.

For instance Grandstand has a display at Volkswagon’s headquarters in Germany that shows tweets, and checkins on a map of the globe, and in other unique ways on multiple floor to ceiling screens (check it out it’s in the video).

At South By Southwest in Austin Texas this year Grandstand had a lot of people talking about a refrigerator stocked full of beer. When 10 people checked into the venue the refrigerator unlocked and automagically opened. How cool is that.

Forget text to win, Twitter walls and “like us for a smoothie”, if you’re a company or brand looking to get the most out of your social media you need to check out this video and contact them… NOW!

Linkage:

Get more info on Grandstand here at get grandstand.com

Here’s more of our great TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage

We’re sneaker-strapping it on a nationwide startup road trip, help the cause here

Facebook Acquires Karma

After a topsy turvy day on Friday for Facebook, and Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg’s nuptials on Saturday, the company has decided to extend their good Karma. They’ve done this by purchasing San Francisco based startup Karma.

Karma is an application that allows users to send gifts. Karma says while their are a number of social gifting apps on the market, they differentiate themselves by combining intelligence, social discovery and easy gift giving.

Facebook recently acquihired the team from photo app Lightbox sans their Creative Director Giles Peyton Nicoll who started his own agency. Of course we also know about Facebook’s $1 billion dollar acquisition of photo app Instagram which is expected to close in the second half of the year.

Like Instagram the Karma purchase was a complete acquisition. Karma and Facebook are both saying that for now Karma will continue to operate as is, with a bigger “back bone”.

An acquisition of a startup like Karma makes sense since it is a social app that would inherently give “more” to the social experience. Until we see what’s to come, the LightBox acqui-hire didn’t make that much sense since Facebook did just acquire Instagram which is in the exact same space as Lightbox. In fact Lightbox used to directly compete with Instagram in their outbound marketing to Android users.

source: Engadget

Facebook Hit With $15 Billion Dollar Class Action Suit On IPO Day

Friday was supposed to be a great day for Facebook and by most accounts it was. There were many reports about a party and speech by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday the eve of the IPO, that was one last hoorah.

Friday morning started off great. The stock debuted at $38 as it was supposed to. By midday trading it was up to $40.00 and then closed at $38.32. The performance on the stock market was so-so by some accounts, underwhelming by others. But that’s not that wasn’t the worst news for Facebook on Friday.

Facebook was served with a $15 billion dollar privacy related class action lawsuit on Friday. The lawsuit filed in Federal court in San Jose combines 21 previously filed privacy cases across the U.S. Law firms Stewarts Law and Bartimus, Frickleton, Robertson & Gorny are representing the plaintiffs.

Stewarts Law issued the following statement:

Facebook users today filed an amended consolidated class action complaint in federal court in San Jose, California in the case In re: Facebook Internet Tracking Litigation, No. 5:12-md-02314-EJD. The class action asserts federal statutory and California State causes of action related to the revelation in September 2011 that Facebook was improperly tracking the internet use of its members even after they logged out of their accounts. The action consolidates 21 related cases filed in more than a dozen states in 2011 and early 2012.

The plaintiffs assert claims under the federal Wiretap Act, which provides statutory damages per user of US$100 per day per violation, up to a maximum per user of US$10,000. Even if Facebook’s alleged actions constitute a single violation of the Wiretap Act per class member, that implies more than US$15 billion in damages across the class. The complaint also asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, various California Statutes and California common law.

The class action is being led by court-appointed co-lead counsel Stewarts Law US LLP and Bartimus, Frickleton, Robertson & Gorny, P.C. David Straite, Partner at Stewarts Law, stated: “This is not just a damages action, but a groundbreaking digital privacy rights case that could have wide and significant legal and business implications.” In addition to co-lead counsel, the court has appointed a Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee which includes Keefe Bartels in New Jersey; Mandell, Schwartz & Boisclair in Rhode Island; Eichen Crutchlow Zaslow & McElroy in New Jersey; Bergmanis Law Firm in Missouri; Burns, Cunningham & Mackey in Alabama; and Murphy, Falcon & Murphy in Baltimore. The court has also appointed a committee of former State Attorneys General to advise the class, including former Mississippi AG Mike Moore, former Arizona AG Grant Woods, former Hawaii AG Margery Bronster, and former Louisiana AG Richard Ieyoub.

The lawsuit cites federal wire-tapping laws pertaining to Facebook tracking their users. As you can imagine, on such an exciting day, Facebook hasn’t commented to any site on this matter.

source: Stewarts Law via TFTS

Is LockerDome St. Louis’ Groupon?

LockerDome is one hot startup coming out of St.Louis. It’s the first ever dedicated sports social network for youth and amateur sports. LockerDome has been likened to the Facebook or LinkedIn for athletes.

LockerDome allows individual sports organizations to develop their own sports networks, and most of the well known sports programs in the country have already joined and have thriving networks. The Dallas Texans, one of the top ranked soccer teams in the country has a LockerDome network, as does the East Coat Pro Showcase, a well known east coast event that’s made up of more than 100 of the 2011 Major League Baseball draft picks.

LockerDome and CEO Gabe Lozano aren’t just making a big name for themselves in the sports world, they’ve already chalked up a lot of funding. In December of 2011 they raised $750,000 in an angel round. Participants in the round include serial entrepreneurs Brian and Carol Matthews, co-founders of Primary Network and CDM Fantasy Sports; Capital Innovators, a St. Louis-based technology accelerator fund; Moosylvania Marketing, a nationally-recognized marketing agency; and Hal Gentry, co-founder of Capital Innovators and GridLogix, among more than a dozen other angel investors.

LockerDome also caught the eye of Square’s co-founder Jim McKelvey who invested and also took a seat on the company’s board of directors. But McKelvey wasn’t easily sold at first. He’s not the kind of investor that looks to pump money into a “flavor of the week” just to catch a big windfall he has three businesses that he’s started and still runs today, including Square which he founded with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

More after the break

Utah High School Teacher Organizes Entrepreneurship/Startup Google+ Hangout With Shark Tank’s Daymond John

Daymond John the entrepreneur and brains behind the worldwide brand FuBu has been speaking to folks about the trials and tribulations of startups and entrepreneurship for years. Since he took his business from the trunk of the car and made it a recognized brand on every street corner in America and around the world John has been passionate about business. It also helps that he has been one of the panelists on ABC’s Shark Tank for all three seasons.

That’s why Utah High School Business teacher Jeff McCauley was resilient in trying to contact John for some kind of entrepreneurship event with his students. Originally McCauley had wanted to Skype with John and his class however that idea took a pivot in the year it took to nail a date down. What ended up happening was nothing short of phenomenal for the over 100 high school kids around the country that attended the hangout on Google’s Google+ Hangout platform.

McCauley is no stranger to Shark Tank either. He admits to showing the program to his students to show real life examples of the lessons that he teaches everyday.

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Denver Startup: Closely Gives Small Businesses A Competitive Edge With Perch Dashboard

As a small business owner how do you keep track of what your closest competitors are doing? Do you wear blinders and pretend they aren’t there? Do you shop at competitor locations to see what they’re doing? Do you plant spies? Do you set up Google alerts?

While some of these things (except wearing blinders), may seem effective, they all involve time and most small business owners don’t have that. Luckily there is a Denver based startup called Closely that is looking to simplify the monitoring of your competitors in one easy to use dashboard they’re calling Perch.

Perch is currently in a closed beta. The founders at Closely are hoping that Perch will give local merchants a snapshot of competitors marketing activities and help merchants build ideas of how to respond.

“We found that the majority of businesses don’t quite yet understand the level of activity surrounding them,” Closely CEO Perry Evans told Street Fight in an email. “As the application that they learn to rely on for daily tracking and watching, we’re in a front row position for helping them participate.”

Evans, started his career in technology as head of the Mapquest publisher group so he’s very familiar with the benefits of LBS, group deals and the other technologies that are preying and benefiting local merchants.

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Follow Up: Twitter’s Fame Game Shut Down Already

Just a few weeks ago we brought you the story of the Fame Game. Fame was a side project for Adam Ludwin a principal at RRE Ventures in New York. The premise was simple, a raffle website “game” where the winner of the daily raffle got everyone who entered that days contest to follow them in one fell swoop. It was up to the winner to engage all the new followers into sticking around.

Well according to Betabeat, the Fame game is now over. The company sent out a Tweet on Thursday saying they planned to shut down the service because it violated Twitter’s terms of service. When it first launched Twitter didn’t seem to mind at all and in fact the team behind the Fame game thought they were clear because of a loop hole in the Twitter api.

“It was always a question mark about what Twitter would do,” RRE Ventures principal and Fame cofounder Adam Ludwin told Betabeat via phone. ”I have a lot of respect for the guys at Twitter and they gave us an extension, they gave us ideas about ways to change the app to conform more with what they viewed as in line with the spirit of their terms.”

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Facebook’s Other Acquisition This Week: Tagtile

Now that we’ve all heard that Instagram’s $500 million valuation drove Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg into a frenzy because he had to have Instagram, it’s time to check out Facebook’s other acquisition this week. While Instagram looks like a pretty solid acquisition into the Facebook family, their other acquisition, Tagtile, may fit better with the Facebook business.

Tagtile is a company that allows you to walk into a store, and tap your phone against a special cube. When you do that, your phone shakes hands with the business. The business gives you discounts and special offers and your phone shares the information you allow it to, back to Tagtile, like your contact information, and a little more if you let it.

Business Insider suggests that the Tagtile deal was an acqui-hire. A posting on Tagtile’s website suggests that Tagtile won’t continue the way it has been once they join Facebook. This is similar to the Gowalla deal, not the Instagram deal. Zuckerberg quickly let people know that Instagram would function as is, for now. Gowalla on the other hand officially shut down during SXSW as the founders and team relocated to Palo Alto to work on Team Facebook.

Tagtile hasn’t said how many merchants they have using the Tagtile cube or how many users have downloaded the app however they did say that Tagtile will continue to work the way it has, again for now…

source: SAI

Print Your Instagram Pics To Posters, Stickers And More With Prinstagr.am

Social Print Studio, a San Francisco based company, that specializes in making apps that print photos from social networking sites like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter to stickers, posters and other printables. They’ve just announced their most recent endeavor surrounded by the phenomenon we all know as Instagr.am.

Now your favorite Instagram photos with their glorious filters can be captured in real life non virtual goodness. Sometimes the memories you’ve created need to be shared outside of the online world and that’s where Prinstagr.am fits in.

For $25 you can have between 50-400 of your favorite Instagram pics made into a 40 inch poster with all the photos laid out on a grid. That cute picture of your kid that got 400 likes on Instagram can now be made into 48 miniprints and shared with your entire neighborhood for just $12.

In all seriousness though with more and more people using photo apps and camera phones, and of course digital cameras less and less pictures are printed out. Taking your USB stick to Walmart or Target for that special photo novelty is time consuming and cumbersome and sometimes doesn’t even turn out right. With Prinstagr.am you’re not going to have that problem.

Check it out for yourself right here.

Source: Gizmodo

In The Courts: Federal Courts Rule That Social Networking Can Contain Trade Secrets

In a move, that is interesting to say the least, a Colorado Federal Court and a California Federal Court have ruled that social networking accounts, and lists can contain trade secrets.

In the Colorado case an employee of a nightclub was responsible for maintaining the nightclub’s MySpace page. The nightclub had several thousand friends on MySpace and was often used to promote specials, and performances at the club. That was all well and good until the employee left that club to work for a competing night club in the same town.

Once the employee started working for the competitor he started to use the same MySpace friends list to market the new club to the old club’s patrons. In that case Christou v Beatport the judge in Colorado ordered that the MySpace list of friends was protected by the Colorado Uniform Trade Secrets Act.

JDspura.com reported:
The court held that, using the same logic for protection of customer lists, a friends list could be entitled to protection if it meets the traditional tests under which customer lists can constitute trade secrets. The court noted that the list could not readily be compiled from public sources, and that the plaintiff had limited access to the employer’s login and password information.

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