The 40 Women To Watch Over 40 for 2013  list celebrates women who are upending the perception that entrepreneurial innovation is only for those before a certain age. The juried list features women from around the world, whose work spans a variety of industries from the arts and sciences, to politics and entertainment, to social entrepreneurs and corporate change-makers.

The concept for the list was co-created by Christina Vuleta, Founder 40:20 Vision, 7×7 Mentoring Salons and Whitney Johnson, investor, speaker, co-founder of  Rose Park Advisors, and author.

Over 1,000 women were nominated for this inaugural list. Nominees were judged on leadership skills, innovation around work/life balance, and their track record as mentors and positive role models for other women.

“Indeed if you are seeking innovation, which at its essence is the ability to go from stuck to unstuck, it is more likely to happen after forty, not before,” explains Johnson, author of Dare Dream Do, Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream.

Some names on the list may be familiar, such as Joanne Wilson and Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” the most read article in The Atlantic’s history. Other names may be new to some, such as Chandra Krintz, founder of AppScale, an open source implementation of Google App Engine cloud platform.

Here are Forty Women to Watch, who just happen to be over 40:

Anne-Marie Slaughter:  Leader of a Movement
Foreign Policy Expert, Law Professor, Work-Life Policy, Role Model, 54

AnnMaria de Mars:  Gaming the System, By Her Bootstraps
CEO, 7 Generation Games, Adjunct Professor, Statistical Methods, Pepperdine, 54

Bettina Sherick:  She Makes the Show Go On
SVP of Digital Strategic Marketing for 20th Century Fox, 49

Cali Yost: Putting flexibility to Work
Workplace Flexibility Strategist, CEO and Founder, Flex+Strategy Group, 48

Carine Clark:  CMO to CEO …Going From Good to Great
President and CEO at Allegiance, Inc. 49

Carol Fox: A Global Citizen Before Her Time  
Director, Strategic Planning and Partnerships at East-West Center, 69

Chandra Krinzt: From Computer science to CTO, academia applied 
CTO at AppScale Systems & Computer Science (CS) Professor at UCSB, 43

Cheryl Kellond: Creating the Lulu Lemon of Quantified Sel
CEO & Co-Founder at Bia Sport, 47

Deborah Jackson: Champion, cheerleader & CEO, fueling female entrepreneurism
Founder/CEO at Plum Alley and co-founder Women Innovate Mobile Accelerator, 55

Deb Levine:  Bringing digital innovation to sexual and reproductive health
Executive Director and Founder at YTH (formerly ISIS), 50

Diane Danielson:  On-ramping into the C-Suite
Chief Platform Officer, Sperry Van Ness International Corporation, Founder Downtown Women’s Club, 45

Dondeena Bradley: Nourishing Women
VP Global Design & Development, Nutrition, PepsiCo, 46

Dominique Crenn:  An Iron Lady Chef in America 
Chef/Owner, Atelier Crenn, 48

Ingrid Vanderveldt:  Bridging Entrepreneurship And Big Business To Big Results
Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Dell, CEO, Ingrid Vanderveldt LLC, CEO, VH2 Energy Investments and Green Girl, 43

Jacki Zehner:  A Woman Moving Millions
Philanthropist, Former Goldman Sachs partner, Board of Sundance Institute, 47

Jalak Jobanputra:  Claiming The Future Of Innovation Through Women
Founding Partner of FuturePerfect Ventures, 40

Jenifer Willig: Harnessing Corporate Collaboration to Solve World Problems
Co-founder of Motive & WHOLE WORLD Water, former CMO/CEO of RED, 43

Jen MacLean: Empowering Women To Take Control of Their Reproductive Health  (Game Guru Takes Game out of Conception)
Head of Business Development for Ovuline, 40

Joanne Wilson:  An Angel On Your Shoulder – Who Has Your Back
Angel Investor, Blogger (Gotham Gal), Founder, Women Entrepreneur’s Festival, 51

Joy Marcus:  Venturing into Digital Media Disruption
Venture Capitalist, Digital Marketing Expert, M&A Lawyer, 50+

Kara Goldin: Goliath and Goldin
Founder/CEO Hint, Young President’s Organization, 45

Kathleen Warner:  Starting Up America
Chief Operating Officer of the Startup America Partnership, 48

Kelly Hoey:  Chief Catalyst Officer for Women
Founder, Women Innovate Mobile, Angel Investor, 47

Kimberly Mahan: Turning unskilled workers into technology tradespeople
Founder, Principal Optimist at MAXX Potential, Co-founder/CEOIntelliGraph, Inc. 42

Lauren Flanagan:  Funding an Ecosystem of Women Investing in Women
Angel Investor, Tech Entrepreneur, Job Creator, 57

Lesa Mitchell:  Starting Up American Innovation
Vice President, Innovation and Networks, Kauffman Foundation, 53

Linda Avey: Giving People Access to Their Genetic Code
Co-founder, 23andMe; Founder, Curious, 53

Maria Stukoff:  Gaming the Next Generation of Talent
Head of Academic Development at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, 44

Maria Thomas: Creating Marketplaces Out Of Dots
SVP & GM, Marketing and Consumer Business, at SmartThings, Former Etsy CEO, 49

Michelle McKenna:  Touchdown for Technology
CIO of the NFL, mid-40s

Nancy Duarte:  Elevating the Power of Presentations
Entrepreneur, Communication expert, Principal at Duarte Design, Inc., 50

Nina Ignatius: Making the World Better for Preemies
CEO/Founder of Beibamboo, Board member at Netcycler, 42

Paola Gianturco:  Turning Photos into Action
Photojournalist, Activist, creator Grandmother Power, 73

Rachel Armstrong: Creating Solutions for Living that Benefit vs. Harm
2010 Senior TED Fellow, co-Director AVATAR (Advance Virtual And Technological Architectural Research) group, 44

Shelly Kapoor Collins: Gaming Politics
Vice Chair of Hilary Clinton’s 50×50 Leadership Circle, Silicon Valley, Women in Public Service, CEO of Enscient

Susan McPherson:  In the Vanguard of Corporate Social Responsibility
SVP/Global Marketing for Fenton Communications, 48.

Tracey Wellson Rossmann: Raising the Tech Profile of Girls and a City
Founder of TechGirlz.org, Philadelphia’s Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference and Women in Tech Summit, CMO Chariot Solutions an IT consulting firm. 41

Trae Vassallo: Venturing New Patterns of Success
Venture Capital, General Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Victoria Carter: A Bulldozer Creating New Pathways for New Zealand Women
Director JUCY Group, Tax Management NZ, Cityhop, Chair Auckland Arts Festival, 49

Wendi Sturgis:  Stepping Up to Sales at a Tech Start-up
EVP, Sales and Services of Yext, 45

The post Forty Women to Watch over 40 appeared first on TechCo.

Introspection is difficult, and typically not labeled as “fun.” Compass Lite aims to change that by making the process of personal discovery around career choice more dynamic.

Compass Lite is a free web app that asks users to choose between  “Me?” or “Not Me?” by way of a visual slider that presents a set of character traits and/or tasks. This winnowing down leads users to an interactive display of career opportunities that match the user’s personality, organized by education level.  Detailed information about careers, salary ranges, career outlook, and academic programs are offered as well.

This is a far cry from searching through lists of majors and careers, or making career decisions based on projected salary. It’s easy to lose track of time choosing between “Me?” or “Not Me?” and before you know it, you’re presented with an interactive dashboard tailored to your answers – with actionable recommendations.

Developed by Baltimore-based Woofound Technologies, Compass Lite integrates with Facebook, adding a social sharing element that elicits feedback on career interests from friends. In return, users see results of Facebook friends who’ve used Compass Lite, as well as who is matched with top schools and employers in different fields.

Compass Lite is a free, basic version of a larger piece of software (Compass) in use within colleges and universities to match students to specific majors, courses, on-campus activities and ultimately, career paths.

The “Me or Not Me” visual slider has become Woofound’s signature. The firm, founded in in April 2011 by lifelong friends Joshua Spears and Daniel Sines, utilizes this psychology in other applications in order to determine individual personalities and preferences in targeted areas.

Credit the concept for Woofound to the uncertainty associated with a blind date.

After hours spent on Yelp, Living Social and Google, Woofound’s Spears realized the disconnect in the way people discovered things to do, and how difficult it was to plan something not knowing the other person’s likes or dislikes.

It led to a next day phone call to Sines, where Spears suggested, “Why not build something that personalizes the way we experience the world around us?”

The two registered a domain, put a pitch together, and got a valuable piece of advice from Ken Holt, then recently retired from Morgan Stanley, now Woofound’s CFO: go after a bigger idea.

Sines and Spears broadened the initial concept and pitched Scott on the idea of personality technology; all saw the immense potential. Woofound, named after an old-fashioned term associated with dating (woo) plus discovery (found), has since then gone through two rounds of funding, developed a diverse team of 17 that spans experience level and professional background, has created a psychology advisory board, and has applied their core slider technology beyond the initial application (Explore) to Compass, and now Compass Lite.

Taking students through self-awareness and discovery early in their college career is where Compass and its companion version break from traditional personality testing. Career placement extends into workforce development as well; Woofound is working with Baltimore’s RG Steel on a program to assist 2,500 former steelworkers in the transition into new career paths.

In addition to the recent launch of Compass Lite, Woofound has an update of its Explore app planned this month. A partnership with Factual will increase the business/activity match in the Explore app from 12,000 to 50 million businesses.

The post Discover Your Career Personality with Psychology-driven Compass Lite appeared first on TechCo.

With an offer of unlimited storage at a price point lower than that of Amazon, Apple, and Google, QVIVO is making a serious challenge.

QVIVO is a startup out of Hong Kong that’s aiming to capitalize on increasing consumer use of the cloud to store personal media. The company recently secured $1 million in funding from investors including SingTel Innov8, the SingTel Group’s corporate venture capital fund with plans to use the capital to expand its infrastructure capacity.

At its core, the QVIVO cloud is of course, the same as all Software as a Service: upload on one device, it’s available on all. Where the service stands out is price and user interface.

Storing media in the QVIVO cloud is affordable for those with large media collections. For an unlimited amount of storage (the company is running a challenge to users to upload a terabyte for a free six month account) the cost for a premium plan is $4.99/month. That is less than the premium iCloud level with more storage than Apple offers, given that iCloud tops out at 55GB. Amazon offers 500 GB/$250/year. Google’s model is tiered, offering users a monthly price based on GB used per month up to a certain level.

Built in HTML5, QVIVO has a stunning, award-winning interface (it won an Awwward for Design in September 2012). Users drag and drop files to sync to the QVIVO cloud in order to build libraries. Integration with Facebook allows users to drag right from Facebook into the QVIVO application – those on the family plan can link all of their Facebook accounts to the QVIVO app to contribute.

Apps are free to download – users can play and stream media around the home, essentially setting up a home network between devices running the app for PC and Mac. QVIVO has apps for iPhone, iPad and Android, with support for Windows 8 and an app for the Windows phone on the way.

The post New Contender for Cloud-based Media Storage: QVIVO appeared first on TechCo.

DC-based DataRPM’s release of Instant Analytics expands access to business intelligence software to teams of all sizes. No wonder this company won DC’s hottest startup poll at Tech Cocktail’s DC mixer and startup showcase.

Instant Analytics is cloud-based analytics software for independent software vendors, large companies, small teams, and even solo entrepreneurs. It’s a white-label business intelligence package fashioned with flexibility, scalability, and the “fastest go-live in the industry,” according to its founders. For a monthly fee, users are free from the hassle of infrastructure management and free to focus on finding meaning in their data.

Instant Analytics enables the user to upload data from any source and then segment it, build ad hoc reports, publish dynamic dashboards, and invite multiple collaborators into the process. The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for anyone on the team to create reports on the fly and even create mashups of different data sets.

“We provide out-of-the-box ability to do slice-dice and drill-downs without having to do complex configurations,” says CEO and founder Sundeep Sanghavi. “We have tried to hide as much of the complexity as possible from the users who are making, building, and using analytics, providing the flexibility to change data dynamically without having to rebuild things.”

DataRPM defines this as Data Analysis 2.0 – the ability to go beyond the model of a dedicated team of data and business analysts (Data Analysis 1.0) and cast a wider net by inviting collaboration from every level of the process.

Inspiration for DataRPM founders Sanghavi, Gautam Shyamantak, and Ruban Phukan came from building and using several analytics solutions themselves. Sanghavi founded Razorsight in 2001 and helped it become a market leader in delivering business assurance, process automation, analytics, and business intelligence to several Tier 1 communications providers. He has also held key executive positions at Arthur Andersen, Cable & Wireless, and TEOCO Corporation and founded another Business Intelligence as a Services (BIaaS) company called  SearchRidge. Shyamantak is the former technical architect at Trigo, which was acquired by IBM; and Phukan was a data scientist at Yahoo and cofounder of Bixee, acquired by Ibibo. They know “how insanely difficult” and expensive it is for a company to build a custom solution and how complex it can be to use the ones currently in the market.

DataRPM is the team’s third startup in DC, and they say the biggest advantage to being in the District is their network. “We have a great network; this time we are building a Silicon Valley-type of product which would get lost in the Valley, as there are so many like us. Being in DC, we have the cool ‘buzz factor’ going for us.”

On the flipside, the biggest disadvantage? “Funding” they say. “It’s just not like the Valley.”

That said, the team did recently secure a round of angel funding in order to expand the product and its market reach.

Demand for Instant Analytics has been hot – so much so, DataRPM was faced with the challenge of scaling at a rapid rate. Sanghavi explains, “We are believers of long-term scalable solutions. So we put on our thinking hats and immediately started working on a structured go-live and customer on-boarding process. We identified areas that can be further automated for a smoother customer experience, to handle growth and scale seamlessly.”

“The big learning has been to plan early and not wait till the high tide arrives.”

The post DataRPM: ‘Instant Analytics’ – Cloud-based Business Intelligence Software appeared first on TechCo.

This sharing dilemma is a situation in which Sam Franklin found himself. Franklin, CEO and founder of Greenvelope, an electronic invitation service where the designs model the look of a real paper invite, saw the business opportunity in the problem. Keyword research showed that even with the number of existing services available, a quarter of a million people were still searching for the phrase “file sharing.”

So Franklin worked with the team at Greenvelope to code, design, and launch FilesToFriends.com, a free service that makes sharing files up to 1 GB as easy as 1, 2 , 3. That is 1 – upload the file, 2 – enter the email you want to send it to, 3 – push the send button.

Below, Franklin shares news related to new features at Greenvelope, as well as what makes FilesToFriends.com stand apart from existing file sharing services.

Tech Cocktail: What makes Files To Friends unique?  

Sam Franklin: Simplicity is what sets us apart. Dropbox works better as more of a file storage system, not file transfer. Most services have a small file limit, nothing like the 1 GB we offer.

On Files to Friends, a file is just being shared between two emails; it’s not like a peer-to-peer network, because it’s not public. It’s stored on our servers only for a limited amount of time.

Our service is also free.

Tech Cocktail: Are there plans to monetize Files To Friends?

Franklin: We will definitely need to monetize Files To Friends eventually, but due to our relatively low ongoing costs, we have the flexibility to keep it free for quite a while. I think having a free “full-featured” product is what will set us apart from the beginning. If we can get a lot of users enjoying and sharing the product, I am confident there will be a way to monetize that traffic in the future either through advertisements or premium features. At the moment, it makes me happy to see people excited about the service and using it to send their files (even if they are not paying).

Tech Cocktail: Greenvelope isn’t your first venture, is it?   

Franklin: The funding for Greenvelope came from a business I had in high school pressure washing driveways and delivering pizzas at night. I took a year off before starting school (Washington University in St. Louis) and started Greenvelope while I was a student.

Tech Cocktail: Files To Friends has launched…what’s new at Greenvelope?

Franklin: Up to now, Greenvelope has focused on invitations for weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, and business events. We’re moving into offering birthday invitations for more milestone events, like 40th or 50th birthday parties.

We’re also getting ready to release a ticketing system. Organizations/nonprofits hosting large fundraising events with different pricing levels will be able to create and publish the invitation and seamlessly collect payment at the different pricing levels through our site.

Look for that feature beginning October 1st.

The post File Sharing Without Registration: FilesToFriends.com appeared first on TechCo.

eVenues, a startup in Seattle, makes use of underutilized space by making it easily searchable and directly rent-able.  The service is focused on smaller-size rentals (think meetings rather than conferences) – eVenues’ locations range from commercial properties, boutique hotel boardrooms and training classrooms to coffee houses, private dining rooms in restaurants and small clubs/bars.

The service recently expanded search in San Jose and San Francisco – in addition to 25 bookable venues, users can search 450 other venues in the Bay Area. eVenues has offerings in other cities as well such as DC, New York and Chicago and continues to add venues throughout the US to its database.

An across the board increase in smaller-scale events has been a motivator for eVenues, explains David Jennings, CEO and co-founder. “We’ve seen a huge demand in small, affordable spaces, but most people don’t know where to begin. eVenues wants to put all those places under one roof and introduce other time-saving services associated with orchestrating smaller, professional events.”

Startups, volunteer groups, meetups, and other event organizers – eVenues will save you a lot of time. For those that have the space to rent, eVenues offers a new revenue stream for that space. Venue-owners can list with eVenues and receive emails from those interested in renting or can sign up for eVenues direct booking option, in which eVenues processes the entire transaction for the venue, eliminating back and forth emails regarding scheduling. eVenues charges a 10-13% processing fee for the space rental (it varies based on venue size).

Welcome to the sharing economy.

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Now, dear Tech Cocktail reader, we know that’s not you. But you probably know quite a few people who fit the bill.

Tech Cocktail San Francisco mixer alum JobScout is working to increase digital literacy to support web-based employment searches. Through an online platform designed to get people back to work, JobScout uses social game design to engage users in self-paced, online activities that focus on Internet skills applied in a real life context.

Through a merit badge system modeled on the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, JobScout rewards users who master skills on the site with badges. It’s the gamification of How to Use the Internet, breaking up lessons on topics such as browsers, privacy, and navigating LinkedIn with games that test material covered in the exercise.

Lessons have been designed according to the Basic Digital Literacy Skills Framework developed by the State of California; a framework of skills considered necessary for effective learning in the workplace of today, ensuring that the individual user is provided with a comprehensive toolkit to approach the job market.

JobScout boasts a custom resume builder and built-in job search function, and will soon feature the “One-Stop Job Shop,” a tool that will allow users to manage their job application process right through the JobScout website. The team, led by CEO Christina Gagnier, also includes Stephanie Margossian and Carter Fort.

JobScout is being piloted in nearly 180 library branches in California; this partnership with an offline institution (the libraries provide the user base a point of access and customer support) is what makes this venture stand-out.

Looking forward, JobScout will be available as an application within the iTunes App Store in the fall. The team is looking to do some hiring of their own, by the way of developers as well as customer support, as well as developing content in different languages.

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However, if content is king, then smart and thoughtful user-generated content about your company is, well, pure gold. And like gold, you have to sift through a lot of crap to find it.

451 Degrees can help in that task. With a product called Graffiti, the software takes crowdsourced content and makes sense of it by aggregating the words into a form that makes sense for marketers and advertisers to then turn around and monetize. Like graffiti itself, these comments at face value can appear to say something that, when analyzed, reveal something else all together.

The service offers results in real-time.  It’s a deeper search too – beyond that of Facebook and Twitter posts.

Example of early-stage analytics using Graffiti

451 Degrees (named after the temperature at which a substance can spontaneously ignite) is a new venture out of San Diego – and was one of our featured companies at last week’s Tech Cocktail San Diego Winter Mixer. Patrick Giblin is the founder, and describes himself as “just a dude with some ideas,” yet he is a veteran in the Internet and technology sector and is responsible for creating new revenue streams for traditional media at Fox News. He also has worked with CBS, NBC, Fox, UPN, Univision, Telemundo, Cox Media and the 57 cable networks they represent on air.

As for 451 Degrees and Graffiti, Giblin says,

We take content throughout the web – articles, videos, music and images – and we aggregate all the comments from as many sources requested about that piece as given by the audience and condense it down to reliable meaning in readable elements via artificial intelligence, machine learning and latent semantic analysis.  We then take this information and deliver more on target metadata for search engine optimization and advertising within or around the content as defined by the most important part ‘The Audience.’

With two patents approved and another pending, Giblin says there isn’t much room for “same” competition in the space – the competitors don’t mine all of the content found across the web, and 451 Degrees is the first to add the relevancy factor for SEO.

If you missed meeting the team at Tech Cocktail San Diego, check out 451 Degrees here or on Twitter. Next up for our West Coast Winter Mixer jaunt: Phoenix.

The post Finding the Underlying Gems in User-Generated Content with 451 Degrees appeared first on TechCo.

Independent financial advice – for the last 50 years, only 15% of Americans had access to it.

Even with arrival of personal financial software in the 1980’s and ’90’s, the percentage didn’t change. Most Americans were on their own in regards to managing day to day finances and saving for retirement – and failing miserably.

This realization is something that Matt Fellowes was acutely aware of through his work as a consumer finance scholar and fellow at the Brookings Institution.  It is what planted the seeds of the transformational company he launched in 2010: HelloWallet.

HelloWallet has set out to democratize access to financial guidance by offering up independent financial advice via web-based software that goes beyond tracking expenses – for years the crux of most personal financial management software.

The innovative system aims to create behavioral change in regards to spending and saving though personalized guidance.  HelloWallet is not backed by a bank or financial institution, and it almost goes without saying that this type independent advice can clearly lead to a different kind of independence that many Americans need and desire – the freedom of choice in personal financial matters.

We covered HelloWallet’s unique approach to the personal financial management earlier this year, and since then, the company has grown in both revenue and staff. Since May, the company has logged 300,000 individual and corporate memberships that reach over 7 million people. A diverse team which includes neuroscientists, behavior scientists, psychologists and engineers has expanded and will move to larger office space in Washington, DC in 2012.

We had the pleasure of hosting HelloWallet at our DCWEEK Tech Cocktail mixer event as well as the opportunity to interview HelloWallet founder and now chief executive officer Matt Fellowes to discuss his background as a researcher-turned entrepreneur, the company’s social mission, as well as his thoughts on the personal financial management software space and HelloWallet’s place in it.

TC: Where and when did you conceive of the idea for HelloWallet?

Matt Fellowes: In my work at the Brookings Institution (which is essentially a think tank), I noticed two phenomena: one, US workers were $6 million behind on retirement savings.  The median balance in most retirement accounts was roughly $40,000, which is a joke. There was something simply not working. Two, most Americans didn’t have access to independent financial advice. Roughly 15-20% of the population since the 1950’s has had this access and that number has remained unchanged, even with the introduction of software like Quicken.  It didn’t expand access; it merely poached customers from financial advisors.

So I started to think, how do you expand financial advice and management to the mass market?

TC: How did you make the leap to entrepreneurism? Is this your first venture?

MF: This is not a typical story, yet there is a natural arc. At Brookings, you are encouraged to think big – we all want to change the world there, and there is no shortage of ambition.  There’s an entrepreneurial spirit, so it was a natural leap.

All of my work there focused around how to use the market to improve social outcomes and produce economic mobility. There is a myth out there that this is the county of dreams. Few people move up the socioeconomic ladder and in reality, people born in the top quartile of income have a 25% chance of moving down into the bottom quartile now more than ever. I was curious on how to change this by incentivizing market players, and then I realized that I could do this myself.

I burned through five business plans before I landed on HelloWallet. I had a luxury of time to think about the idea as well as time to talk to others about it.

Fellowes knew he had a solid idea and decided to pursue it, in spite of a “comfortable” position at Brookings. He was the youngest fellow in history at the institution.

I was passionate about solving this problem through the market rather than through public policy.

TC: Where did you come up with the name for HelloWallet?

MF: [Laughs] This is hotly contested. My wife will tell you she came up with it. We came up with about 50 different names between friends, family and colleagues and tested it relentlessly. We wanted to be deliberate about it. We wanted to transform the market and how to do that is by being a friendly source. Traditionally financial planners are from stodgy, intimidating institutions. We wanted to break the mold in branding and in name.

TC: You launched last year, up against some well-known players in the personal financial management services area. Do you consider them competitors?

MF:  When we launched there were 120 different money management sites out there. We initially thought we had a lot of competition, and then we realized we didn’t. We are the only ones trying to change spending behavior. Zillions of sites help people manage money; no one is giving personalize financial guidance on how to help people use their money.

TC: HelloWallet gives one free membership to a family in need for every five paying members. When did the idea for this come about – or was creating a positive social impact always part of your strategy?

MF: In the spirit of trying to democratize guidance we wanted everyone to access to the service; for example, those who are unemployed or those who just can’t afford and independent advisor.  We decided early on that the social mission was an important as the economic one. We thought of many ways to give back, and wanted to build something lasting. If I’m hit by a bus, a new CEO could come in and change the policy.

The free membership for every five commits us over the long run and gives immediately in a meaningful way. We aim to be transparent and aggressive in our marketing of this – since May, we’ve sold 300,000 subscriptions, that has generated 60,000 free memberships we can pass out to community organizations.

TC: Looking forward, what can we expect from HelloWallet in 2012?

MF: We’ll be releasing an iPhone app in a few weeks and an Android app in the first quarter of 2012.

Next year is going to be an exciting year. We’re thinking of ways to be more and more ambitious about helping people to convert their wages into economic mobility. We’re aggressively expanding to become a force in helping people get ahead.

The post Matt Fellowes on Transforming Personal Finance Through HelloWallet’s Social Mission appeared first on TechCo.

Welcome to the future of music television. Thanks for tuning in.

This is the bold welcome the founders of Cull.TV, a startup out of the San Fransisco Bay area, gives to would-be video curators who use the service to create their own playlists or discover new music videos.

Cull.TV greets you with a retro, somewhat fuzzy color TV logo, yet what’s inside is anything but old and outdated.

It’s quickly apparent that Cull.TV is different from any YouTube channel you’ve ever seen. The full-sized black screen overlaid with video is striking, and the site’s  user experience is artful. The simple navigation of the site is hidden unless you click on the background, leaving the focus on the video. And the drag and drop in the playlist is nice –  it’s the same feel and elegance of the queue at Grooveshark.

A massive amount of music videos have found new life on the web. Take a look at this stat from YouTube for instance:

150 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, and every minute more than 600 tweets contain YouTube links. Somewhere between commercials from the ’80s and How to Videos, there’s music. A lot of it.

Cull.TV was founded by a group of music industry professionals from Sony Computer Entertainment, Linden Lab, Intel, and others in order to bring order and function to all of these videos.

Our goal is to bring the music television experience into the Internet age with simplicity and style. No more clicking from music video to music video or site to site to watch what’s trending now. Cull’s streamlined interface brings it all together in one place. On Cull, you’ll find new videos from music’s leading tastemakers and artists updating constantly.

There is no need to recap the wealth of music-find startups out there, mainly because everyone has their favorites, depending on what they want to do.  Just like bands need to use the web to create or cull a fan-base that will follow them offline, DJ’s need to as well.  Cull.TV is a venue for both of these audiences, and the company is open to aiding in this type of promotion by soliciting suggestions for new channels and getting the word out via its social media channels.

Cull pulls videos in from both YouTube and Vimeo without restriction.  I tried Cull.TV by listening to some of the other playlists being promoted.  I searched and “culled” my own, as well as just letting the Auto DJ find some for me. The Auto DJ is like the genius function on iTunes, letting you get a nicely populated, related-genre list of music to play in the background.

Channels to choose from include Music from Occupy Wall Street, ‘Chilean Rock’ and a Tribute to Steve Jobs. The visual display of playlists makes it easy to find new music or take a walk down memory lane, and it will get more robust as more channels get added.

According to Forbes.com, the company plans to “add affiliate links for purchasing music or merchandise or tickets. Eventually the company could add a subscription model as well as paid services for music companies or bands to use Cull as a promotional channel.”

People have been lamenting MTV’s failure to play music videos for twenty years now, and it’s clear there is an audience out there who wants to watch music videos in succession. Cull.TV has tapped into this.  forYoungModerns, a group that has already curated a number of channels on the services, has paid Cull the ultimate retro compliment by pronouncing:

I want my Cull.TV.

The post Cull.TV: The Future of Music Television? appeared first on TechCo.

We’ve covered other companies related to daily deals, such as City Pockets, Lifsta and Qdealz, which was featured at Tech Cocktail Boise, but CouponTrade is different. “We’re not just trying to sell stuff,” says Wasz. “We’re providing a service, trying to help our users save money.”

Through a number of current features on the site, as well as many planned down the road, CouponTrade’s consumer to consumer marketplace – which requires the user to have a PayPal account – has been lucrative for the enterprising users out there.  There are the college students who resold their Groupon-bought tickets to the sold-out North Coast Music Festival at profit, and those that bought a Whole Foods deal on CouponTrade and combined it with Living Social’s recent and crazy-popular Whole Foods deal. One user wrote to the company to express his happiness over selling enough unused gift cards to put a down payment on a car.

CouponTrade provides a new approach to maximize your money. One new feature that is scheduled to roll out in the next few days will allow you to find a store on the site, connect to a deal, and use that deal online when they shop, consolidating the process of shopping and deal-hunting in one place.

Wasz, a veteran in the daily deal space as founder of the site Dillyeo.com, says the company is working on other money saving tools like instant couponing in-store and an online education piece called ‘Couponics 101’ that will show users how to save money shopping online, particularly on sites like Woot and Slickdeals.

iPhone and Android apps are coming soon; Wasz says the company is working on a well-thought out web application that works in tandem with well-designed mobile apps.  CouponTrade values high quality design and has a “rigorous design squad” according to Wasz, who has worked on projects for McDonald’s and Proctor and Gamble.

Since its launch 4 months ago, the company has added 20 employees and reports $500,000 in revenue (from transaction fees), with plans for a national marketing campaign next year.  With $2.5 million in seed funding, Wasz, along with co-founder George Bousis, plan to close a Series A round at the end of the year, raising between $10 -$20 million that will allow CouponTrade to staff up and launch the new features in the pipeline.

This Chicago-based company is a game-changer, leading the way for others in the daily deal reseller arena. While Wasz doesn’t consider the company to have any direct competitors currently, he certainly expects them to pop up soon. Of which he says, “We’ll be years ahead of them.”

Check out How coupontrade works on Vimeo.

The post A Marketplace for Unused Daily Deals and Gift Cards at CouponTrade appeared first on TechCo.

The paper-heavy real estate transaction.

If you’ve ever bought or sold a house, you know the amount of coordination involved in the transaction; negotiation between the buyers, sellers, the agents on both side, alongside coordination of the signatures and amendments associated with a sale…it can be frustrating in even the best circumstances. This is the void DotLoop fills – instead of this back and forth between multiple parties, DotLoop provides a simpler alternative – execution of the real estate transaction in real-time, ultimately saving time, producing a better consumer experience and increasing agent productivity.

Austin Allison, CEO of DotLoop

In three short years, Allison has taken Cincinnati-based DotLoop from an idea to a 40-person company (and growing if you’re looking) with over 100,000 paying subscribers. At 26, he didn’t just stumble on an area begging for a technology solution; he’s a veteran of all sides of the transaction. He grew up in a family involved in the business of real estate/construction, and bought his first house when he was 17. “I became a licensed real estate agent at 18, and was selling throughout college.” After undergraduate work at the University of Cincinnati came law school, and then the realization that the process of buying and selling a home needed to be simplified.

Allison had the idea, but needed a technical co-founder. Tapping into his network, he teamed up with Matt Vorst, who made Allison’s whiteboard vision a web-based reality.

Dubbed DotLoop, the technology brings all of the involved parties “into the loop” of the real estate transaction. For example, an agent opens a ‘loop’ (as the process is called), and sees a dashboard view of all active clients along with a Facebook-like wall of associated client activity. Calendar and contact import are available in what Allison calls “a virtual workspace” that the agent can share with other agents. After finding a property in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), the agent adds forms to the loop from a form library (or uploads one if not in the library), and in the final step, adds the client to the loop.

This is where the fun begins, or “secret sauce” as Allison puts it. These parties now act through a collaborative data layer and collect all the necessary signatures to close the deal electronically.

The fact is, DotLoop has taken an onerous process and made it refreshingly simple. The task of adding a client is like adding a friend in Facebook. Adding a form is like adding to your Dropbox. Allison knows this is exactly what buyers want.

“The largest group of home buyers is between 30-35 years old, and they expect things to work this way,” he says.

Does the competition work this way? Not even close. “We consider the competition the ‘status quo’,” says Allison. The status quo consists of companies that offer automatic form completion, or the ability to create and fill out PDFs, as well as those that offer electronic signatures and document management. None are offering the integrated system that DotLoop offers.  “Think of our competitors as a standalone MP3 player. DotLoop is the iPhone.”

Allison says the main reason for DotLoop’s success is that the company “values simplicity” and delivers the right features for its target audience.

The large real estate brokerages have taken notice.  DotLoop’s eEdge technology, adopted by Keller Williams, was just awarded the Most Innovative Real Estate Service award from Inman News, and the company has a partnership with RE/MAX as well.

DotLoop has two revenue models, one for the individual agent and the other for brokers to buy multiple licenses for their agents. Allison claims the software saves an agent a minimum of 10-20 hours per transaction. “The savings in productivity, as well as the ability to track all agent activity via a broker dashboard gives the brokerage a competitive edge.”

Does DotLoop have any plans to move into other verticals? “Any interaction where more than two people are involved, and is repeatable, it is possible,” says Allison. “Our vision though, is to be to the real estate industry what Facebook is to socializing.”

Curious about how it works? See it in action for yourself.

The post How DotLoop Simplified the Real Estate Transaction Process appeared first on TechCo.

I do.

I keep shopping lists on it, jot down books I want to read later – all sorts of randomness. Clearly I find it incredibly useful, yet it’s bare bones as far as apps go.

7knowledge has developed an app called 7Notes that takes the premise of the Notes application and expands on it through improved technology and integration with more than just email. Certainly this is not the first app to add features to note taking (Sundry Notes is one that I’ve used to satisfy my GTD mentality.) Adding colored text, images, highlighting – these are fun features, for sure. 7Notes has all of this plus the ability to take notes in your own handwriting.

Typing anything of length on an Apple mobile device still proves to be a challenge to many, so the ability to save time by writing something in your own hand sounds like a great idea to me. Features of the app, which comes in a free and premium/paid version include the following:

• Note take now and modify later – enter your content first, then get creative by way of decoration features like multiple font selection, weight of stroke, font size, line colors, bold and underline.
• Convert handwriting to digital text now or later (Premium only) – a great feature for taking quick notes, or sharing your notes within your social network. (The premium version, $4.99/iPhone and $8.99/iPad, is also ad-free.)
• A “State-of-the-art” predictive engine that anticipates what you want to write.  Using natural language technology, 7Notes displays word choices while handwriting or inputting through the predictive engine. An alternative display is generated to suggest the correct word; tap the desired word, or you can extend the search for alternatives.
• Add creativity to your  note taking – Bring in images or links from other websites to enhance your notes.
• Sharing on Facebook and Twitter is built into the application – as well as adding your Notes to Evernote and Dropbox.
•  “Social Doodling” – Finally, a solution to not getting caught passing written notes back and forth – 7notes HD (the iPad app) offers a “social writing experience” by providing “Edit it” server functions. One user creates a note through the app’s “7document format” and can post it to Facebook or Twitter for collaboration or re-editing. The “Edit it” server inherits the same privacy policy of the social network.

Writing with your finger takes some getting used to – for quick items like a list, it could work, but using a stylus would be ideal. The 7Notes website has a number of videos to illustrate the features.  It took me a few tries to figure out under which menu the different options and features were located, but I felt confident shortly afterwards. I can see this being a very useful app in a meeting, at a conference, or in class. For longer note-taking efforts, I’d recommend using a stylus.

7Notes is available for free for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Definitely check out the free versions before you buy to get a feel for it. 7Notes provides support via Facebook, and it gives some insight from real users and provides a forum for feature requests (e.g. additional language support, voice recognition.,)

Download 7Notes for iPhone, iPod Touch –

Download 7Notes HD for iPad –

The post Handwrite Your iPhone and iPad Notes with 7Notes appeared first on TechCo.

SingleHop, if not familiar to you already, has become one of the most recognized names in the hosting industry. The once two-man – now 70-person – company is suitably named after the networking term for the passage of packets to the next router. The team also has a penchant for sky diving, as evident in the names of many of their product lines.

Dan Ushman, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of SingleHop, is a long-time friend of Tech Cocktail, and was a sponsor of our very first event back in 2006. We had the opportunity to ask Dan about not only the story of SingleHop, but ask him to share some actionable steps for those entrepreneurs faced with the decision to self-finance or consider outside funding.

TC:  Where did you get the idea to start the company? Basically, what were you doing at the time, when did it hit you to start your own company?

DU: “I was a student at Southern Illinois University, and Zak (Boca) was at Western Kentucky. Since high school, I had been running a directory of web hosts. I was doing everything, including making sales calls – even from the bathroom stalls at school when I had to, hoping the guy next to me wouldn’t flush. Zak and I met in high school over the Internet – he was running a similar hosting directory website, and we would send referrals to each other. I realized when I was in college I was pretty good at selling hosting for other people, and so was Zak. This is how our first company, midPhase, was born.”

Ushman says that midPhase started off to make “beer money” in college, and they never intended to grow it, let alone develop it into the $22 million in revenue-making company SingleHop is today. Roughly a year and a half into midPhase, Boca sold his directory to another company, and flew up to Chicago for a weekend to stay with Ushman and decide the future of midPhase. “We made a handshake deal,” recalls Ushman. “We said that if we got customers in the first six months, we’ll leave college.” After that six month period, Ushman and Boca had their customers – 1,500 of them. They both made the decision to leave college and set up shop. With desks bought from Best Buy, they moved into their first office which Ushman describes in jest as a ‘hell hole.’

“It was awful. It was a basement office in Palatine, IL (his hometown) that had a patio door, complete with a screen, dividing it right down the middle.  We had this hilarious phone system worked out where a call would go to me, then to Zak, to my cell, then to Zak’s cell” if it wasn’t answered along the way.

The two worked this way for a year, and put all the money they made back into the customer acquisition. During the process cash accumulated, and an opportunity to buy another hosting company presented itself – and they went for it. “It was an interesting transaction, complete with promissory notes and some creative accounting,” recalls Ushman. The transaction also brought on board a third employee (the owner of the acquired company).

The acquisition also bought new, downtown Chicago office space for the team, and their first technical employee, Andy Pace (now COO) was hired. “We couldn’t have built the reputation we have for technical excellence if it weren’t for him,” says Ushman.

Two years into midPhase, a firm out of Washington State made an attractive offer to buy the company. “We thought there was still more potential in the business,” says Ushman of the desire not to sell. Investors came calling at this point – often three times a week.

Ushman offers some advice: “Don’t sell yourself short. At a certain stage you may need outside funding to grow, but bootstrap it if you can. You will thank yourself, and the investment deals will be better later on.”

“Investors bring a lot more than money to the deal,” says Ushman. “If you are going into a business where you need the capital and guidance, it may make sense.”

TC: Did you have any mentors or advisors early on?

DU: “Not really, there have been a lot of people that have offered advice – the person that bought my hosting directory, for instance. We’ve gone on instinct. I certainly didn’t know how to run a business (at the time).”

SingleHop grew out of midPhase in 2006, from the desire of Ushman and Boca to enter the field of dedicated hosting. Ushman is now Chief Marketing Officer at SingleHop and Boca is the CEO. Ushman says these roles play to each of their strengths; Boca is a natural negotiator, Ushman is a marketing and sales type of guy, and Pace, the COO, is highly technical. “Zak will come up with 5,000 ideas,” Ushman says, I’ll reject 4,999, but there will always be one that I’ll market and run with.” The company has 70 employees, 3 facilities and 8,000 servers, and now that many of the early lessons about fostering a business have been learned, SingleHop is ready to give back to nascent ventures.

TC: What are your thoughts on the rise of business accelerators/incubators?

DU: “I think it’s exciting. There are a lot of people out there who have great ideas, but they don’t have the resources, or the connections. [Incubators] bring products and companies to market that may not have ever gotten off the ground. Tech Stars, YCombinator – a lot of great companies have come out of these.”

SingleHop is in the process of talking to a few different Chicago entities about partnering to provide infrastructure and server space for an initial period of time to support early-stage companies to relieve some of the financial demands of hosting new applications. “New technologies that are coming out are extremely taxing on computer resources.” Ushman expresses the desire to create a true incubator with Boca someday, and invest in the companies. “If only SingleHop didn’t keep us so busy,” he laughs.

The company differentiates itself in an industry where customer service claims have become “commoditized” as Ushman explains. “Five years ago, things like 24/7 support and a high degree of reliability were differentiators. Now it’s a prerequisite; consumers expect it.” SingleHop sets itself apart through its automated services (e.g., clients can order a web portal and have it in 30 minutes – without human intervention), its white label control panel, and its outlook towards its resellers – as more than just a vendor, but a partner in growing their businesses.

Those resellers may notice the pattern in products they are buying – the names are all related to sky-diving, something the team did to celebrate reaching a sales milestone and Ushman uses as inspiration in naming new products. The first was Tandem, a reseller hosting program named after the way a student takes the first dive harnessed to the instructor. Others that have followed include Altitude (a resellers program), Altimeter (a new product rolling out next month that will look at hardware metrics and identify problems before they occur), Freestyle (a line of servers) and Formation (a cluster of servers).

TC: Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

DU: “I hate that question. Sure, I’ve made mistakes, but I wouldn’t have learned from them. You always wonder ‘what if’, sure. But you learn more from failure, than success.”

Dan Ushman’s Tips for entrepreneurs:

• Bootstrap it if you can – you will thank yourself and the investment deals will be better later on.
• Don’t pay yourself a salary; invest the money you’d use to pay yourself a salary back into the company.
• Don’t discount the idea of investors, but hold off if you can – the deals will be better the longer you can wait.

The post How To Bootstrap from Zero to Millions; Interview With Dan Ushman Of SingleHop appeared first on TechCo.

Zaarly is an outgrowth of LA’s Startup Weekend held February 16th – 18^th – yes, a mere six weeks ago.  Zaarly is, as described by co-founder Bo Fishback, “a proximity-based, real time, buyer-powered network.”

Practical examples illustrate the platform better:

• Say you want a seat for an event that is sold out – you post it to Zaarly to see if someone who has a ticket will sell it to you.
• You need your driveway shoveled before work – and you don’t want to do it yourself. Put a request on Zaarly with the amount you’re willing to pay.
• Can’t get a reservation to a hot restaurant? “Zaarly it” that night and see if someone will ‘sell’ you their upcoming reservation.

Zaarly App Screen-shot

Zaarly is the place where everything has a price. How does it work? It is a mobile application that operates using Twitter, Twilio and MongoDB to connect users in the same proximity. For buyers, a request is made to the service and if it is accepted, an anonymous connection is made to that person willing to ‘sell’. When both sides agree, consider it a done deal.  For sellers, there is cash to be made from people in their locality willing to put a price on their request.

Co-founded by Fishback, Eric Koester and Ian Hunter, this seasoned team is moving quickly. (All have successful ventures under their belts.) Operating with an initial $1 million investment provided by all-star funders including LA Startup panelist Ashton Kutcher, Fishback says that “rock star” developers have been hired with the goal to launch Zaarly in multiple cities in the next 90 days.

How will Zaarly make money, you ask? The platform will operate on a revenue model where a transaction fee will be assessed when people use any of the integrated mobile payment options. If you use cash with Zaarly, it’s free.

Tech Cocktail had the privilege of interviewing Bo about the genesis of  Zaarly, the ramp up to launch, and more about the involvement of Ashton and Demi:

Tech Cocktail (TC): You left the Kauffman Foundation, which you said was amazing, for this opportunity. Where do you see this going?

Bo Fishback (BF): I really do think that the Kauffman Foundation is one of the most amazing places on the planet, and my particular role there was quite possibly one of the greatest jobs imaginable. [Until recently Fishback was the Vice President of Entrepreneurship at the Kansas City, MO-based foundation, as well as President of Kauffman Labs, the foundation’s entrepreneurship program.] It was fast paced, intellectually interesting, full of amazingly brilliant people and fundamentally important work that I loved.

That said, I’ve probably seen close to 1,000 startups and founding teams in the last 5 years but I haven’t seen anything up close that I think has the potential of Zaarly. Where do I see it going? Honestly, I think it depends entirely on our team’s execution and ability to iterate quickly and capture mindshare. If we’re successful, I think Zaarly could be a enormous company. I hesitate to say how enormous, but definitely something very special.

TC: Did you go to the LA Startup Weekend with this idea? If not, how was it conceived?

BF: I didn’t really even go to Startup Weekend planning on pitching an idea – I only even went to this particular Startup Weekend because it was Eric Koester’s (one of my co-founders) birthday and he asked if I’d come down to LA to celebrate.

I decided last minute on Friday night that instead of just helping other teams, it would be fun to pitch an idea and have the full startup weekend experience. What I pitched was actually not exactly what we ended up creating….I think they are related but the most compelling pieces of Zaarly were really invented after the initial pitch. I (along with lots of other people) had previously thought that there was an opportunity for location-based markets, but the unique things about what Zaarly is turning into were really hatched starting at 2 am on Friday night in a conversation with Eric, and we’ve been busy iterating and improving on some of the those core ideas since.

TC: Did you know the team prior to working on Zaarly?

BF: I knew one of my co-founders, Eric Koester. Both Eric and I met Ian Hunter, our other co-founder and CTO, for the first time on Friday night after I pitched the original idea. We asked the people at Co-Loft (the host of SWLA) who the most talented developer in the building was and they pointed us to Ian, and we were lucky enough to have him join our team.

We’ve recently hired a few super talented people to help us drive Zaarly going forward. Our first hire was Matt Constantine, a developer who we worked with leading up to SXSW. We’ve also added a few other hires and engaged a handful of super-talented contractors and other partners.

TC: How did the name come about?

BF: The name Zaarly was born on Friday at Startup Weekend in big group discussion. One of the great things about SW is that you can get a lot of really sharp folks working extremely quickly on super focused tasks… naming Zaarly was one of the outputs of this exercise.

It’s a derivation of the word “bazaar” — as in a Moroccan bazaar where everything has a price, everything is for sale, and anyone and everyone are engaged in real-time commerce. We wanted it to be something that could be used a verb, as in “to Zaarly it”. Lastly, the url was available.

TC: How did the idea get the support of Ashton and Demi?

BF: Ashton and Demi showed up to Startup Weekend just to check it out and see what people were working on. Ashton ended up being a judge on Sunday evening and the Zaarly message seemed to resonate with both he and Demi.

TC: What kind of feedback have you been getting?

BF: It’s been pretty incredible. The idea of creating a proximity based, real-time, buyer powered network seems to resonate extremely well with almost everyone we’ve talked to. Our experiments at SXSW showed us that this can really work, and work fast. In the first 24 hours in Austin, Texas we saw $10,000 in transactions take place on Zaarly. What’s really amazing about that is that these are transactions that were all newly created economic value… they would not have happened if not for Zaarly being there.

Outside of Austin we’ve seen a huge demand for Zaarly to get to more cities faster. We’re planning on a much larger scale rollout in the next 90 days and hope to be in as many cities as possible, as soon as possible. We’ve received thousands of requests from all around the world and are working as fast as we can to get Zaarly in the hands of the buyers who want to use it and the sellers who want to cash in on those wants.

Check out Bo and team Zaarly’s pitch from the LA Startup weekend for yourself:

The post How Zaarly Lets You Name Your Price On Everything; An Interview With Co-Founder Bo Fishback appeared first on TechCo.

Florence and Kwame Iwegbue were inspired to create a web-based solution out of their own experience of managing these complexities after their son was diagnosed with autism. Kwame saw the struggles his wife was having moving folders of paper-based records to the different types of healthcare, school and service provider appointments, as well as manually recording changes in diet and the consequences on behavior. The Iwegbue’s describe their experience as “back-breaking.” And this is from an insider: Kwame Iwegbue is not only a parent, but also a physician at Roper Hospital in Charleston, SC.

Called iBiomed, the Iwegbues’ mission is to position this software as the bridge between individuals, the information, and the health professionals they need in order to take control of their health and wellness. The couple is committed to contributing substantially to the movement toward a high-quality, personalized healthcare.

The software is a part personal organizer, part social network for the management of health, even beyond that of autism. It can be used by any person or caregiver who is managing a condition to record and report, creating a reliable medical history.

iBiomed FEATURES

1. Treatment Log Book: Keep detailed records on the go and online with a logbook for prescriptions, supplements, therapies, diets, allergies, and tests (also known as Treatment items). Meal/Diet Planner: Now a person’s nutritionist, health aid, doctor, occupational therapist, speech therapist, physical therapist or health provider can provide interactive input on a calendar style meal planner. There is also a separate calendar for adding appointments/creating schedules.
2. Multiple Time Stamped Notes: Add notes to each of the above treatment items, e.g therapist/doctor’s instructions after an appointment. Your notes are easily search-able and printable. Use to create daily editable schedules too. It can also be viewed/shared by other caregivers in order to keep everyone on the same page.
3. Manage Multiple People: Manage the treatment of as many people as you’d like, just as with a portable electronic medical record. This is helpful for facilities/providers with multiple patients. Add as many medications, tests, diets, therapies and health providers/aids as you’d like.
4. Treatment Journal: Keep a journal or daily diary for each person whose treatment you’ll be managing with iBiomed. The journal entries are time stamped and easily searchable, e.g. foods, behavior logs or side effects and reactions. The journals are printable and can also be used to record therapy notes.
5. Treatment History: Review your treatment history of tests, supplements, diets, therapy notes, behaviors and journals. You can also edit past log entries, including test results. If the test results are numerical, you can easily differentiate between normal and abnormal values.
6. Treatment Reminder: Treatment alerts to help you remember to administer supplements, medications, tests and even therapy sessions and medical appointments. Online, these reminders can be scheduled to be sent to a third party with personalized messages.
7. Share Treatment Information: Share access to your treatment plan with health professionals, facilities, therapists or nutritionists. Now a user can give limited or unlimited access permission to these caregivers so that everyone is on the same page. Any changes made to the record become instantly available to all.
8. Supply Tracker for Prescriptions, Supplements & Medical Supplies: Tracks your supplies and lets you know when you should reorder a prescription or supplement based on a preset reminder. It also has a count-down feature that automatically recalculates how much is left.
9. Interactive Health Network & Forum- “Share Everywhere” Feature: Now users and caregivers can interact with each other by posting ONE message/question and send it to all or some of your Facebook friends, groups, pages and email contacts–in one click. iBiomed’s Newsfeed: This is a research and learn section as it is filtered to show only up-to-the-minute news on the person’s health issues; this keeps the user/caregiver and their contacts engaged and informed about the issue. The hope is to unite experts around the world to help share information and research in real-time around the world.
10. Customizable Graph: To track just about anything a person wants to watch closely; from symptoms to behaviors, appetite, continence, sleep, or anything you want to track. Once created, this investigational tool is essential to giving pertinent information about any issues in question.

The iBiomed Software is available for use online at http://ibiomed.me and as an iPad/iPod and iPhone App: Both are sync-able.

iBiomed for iPhone

iBiomed for iPad

We’ve highlighted the features of the technology – if you’d like to read more about  the Iwegbue’s extraordinary contribution to consumer mobile health, the family’s story has been featured in the following media outlets: Post and Courier newspaper,  Wall Street Journal, iPhone Life Magazine and About.com

The post The Organized and Connected Caregiver: iBiomed appeared first on TechCo.

MightyNest is distinguishing itself from other online retailers by offering the best products available. How do customers know they are the best? Based on the pledge the company makes regarding original research and a strict vetting process for vendors. The company’s style of mixing content and e-commerce for parents looking to outfit a household in non-toxic and safe (e.g. BPA-free, lead-free) is helping to build a strong brand – one that CEO and co-founder Chris Conn credits to the three things that sets them apart:

“Peace of mind we give customers; the time we save customers by doing the research for them and providing a limited selection of the best of the best; and our customer service.”

The company has a richer focus than simply being green and environmentally safe. Research time is spent on finding products that are non-toxic or safe for the home, and especially safe for use with children. Conn is clear that MightyNest aims to be more than simply an online seller of household goods. He describes the two-year old company out of Evanston, Illinois in terms of an ecosystem – interpreted as the living (employees and customers, and what each brings to the equation) and non-living (the best of the best in terms of safe products) interacting together creating a community.

In their research, Conn and his team have found a lot of conflicting evidence as to what is potentially harmful, and make it clear to customers what they’ve found, saving customers hours of time.

“There is a lot of judging in regards to parenting – if you do this, or don’t do this, you are a bad parent,” explains Conn.

MightyNest doesn’t judge; in fact the company wants to put an end to this judgment by getting to the facts and allowing MightyNest’s customers to make choices based on fact.

Conn also applied a life lesson to the business that he learned from his mother; to tap into understanding, or the real meaning; that business and life can be more than just ‘selling’ or money. From this, a company that prides itself on a rigorous vetting process, to offer the best for those who want to provide the safest products for their household, was born.

Conn’s team consists of five people, with shared responsibilities yet distinction in their roles, in an office that also serves as a warehouse. As they are shipping almost 80% of their sales from their headquarters just north of Chicago.  When asked about shipping, Conn explained:

“Drop ship was the plan. However, an average order contains 3 items, most from different manufacturers. Since our vision is to provide the best products in each category, we needed to ship it ourselves to ensure that vision was being executed throughout the process.”

We talked to Chris about MightyNest’s proof of concept phase, the company’s launch, funding and more:

Chris and Kristen Conn, with their children

Tech Cocktail (TC): Your experience lies in product development and business management, and you’ve clearly tapped into a market of passionate customers – can you describe the proof-of-concept phase for the MightyNest idea?
Chris Conn (CC): Let me tell you the three things that led us to starting MightyNest. First, I always knew I wanted to start my own company – I waited though to get to a point in my career where I knew I could manage it successfully. I started the company with a friend who was also an early investor. We both knew that when we started, we needed to “keep it lean”. After seeing others over-fund and end up choking on their investments, we didn’t want to set the company up for failure, so we started small, and were basically self-funded.

Secondly, five and a half years ago, before the birth of our own child, the realization that my wife hadn’t slept in weeks trying to figure out the all the different chemicals found in household products led us to realize there was a problem that wasn’t being addressed. We knew we weren’t alone in figuring this out. We started talking to everyone we knew about it, and while 1 out of 4 of them cared, they didn’t have a solution either. Kristen and I thought, if we can solve this, we can have a great business.

TC: You describe MightyNest is a “business with a heart” can you elaborate?
CC: Our path has led us to mix content with commerce – most people say that if you have a customer in the sales funnel, you don’t let them out. We take the approach of getting our customers to understand the transaction they are about to make, in the hopes that they’ll come back. Our analytics have found that they do.

We select the best products, and only the best. Our tone is open; whether a customer is deciding to make a small change in their home, or are changing 50 things, we’re accepting. Whatever ideology or ethnicity or locale our customers may come from, they all share (along with us) one thing- the desire to keep their family safe.

The business with a heart concept extends to customer service – so much so that MightyNest staff tease Conn by calling him ‘the grandma-whisperer’ for spending so much time with bewildered grandmothers who come looking for products their children want for the grandchildren.

TC: In a way, MightyNest is a family business, since your wife is a co-founder. What is your role – are you still wearing many hats, or have you formalized roles within MightyNest?
CC: Initially, Kristen was the core for determining our product offering – she conducted all of the research and processed the feedback from parents. She said she’d help for a while, and then it just kind of happened that she was an integral part of the business. I oversee the business-side, and I don’t second guess what is happening with the content and product-offering areas.

TC: Your Facebook page is not only large, but very active. It serves as a forum to build your company’s personality as well as a source of customer support and acts as a feedback mechanism. How important would you characterize the page (and allocating resources) for it as part of your outreach strategy and overall success? Was this by design, or were you surprised?
CC: When Facebook rolled out its advertising platform, everyone tried to drive a transaction – we took a different approach, and figured we’d add fans. Through trial and error, I think we were one of the first to figure this out. In the early part of last summer, we added a lot of fans with the message that we are here to help. Since the demographic on Facebook’s aligns with ours, we invested time in it.

We also invest in content; we create a blog post every day, and everyone on our team is on the Facebook account every day. It’s a shared responsibility. Facebook drives people to our site; however we need to build a relationship, and convert them to customers.

TC: Have you been totally self-financed? Have you taken funding, or are you looking?
CC: We self-funded our first year of operations and we are just wrapping up a round of investment from a phenomenal group of angel investors.

TC: What is the larger vision for MightyNest?
CC: We have a profit-mission and a purpose-mission. Today we’re an Internet business. Someday maybe we’ll be a catalog, maybe a store. I’ll be happy in the short-term to let three times as many people know that we exist – we’ve got the ecosystem to work, our analytics show that everything is consistent, if we can bring people into the site, provide quality content, add to our email list, we can make that conversion from curious visitor to customer.

Whether you’re looking to build a “Mighty Nest” yourself or not, it’s worth a visit to the site see the mixture of original content alongside product offerings. The parenting market is a tough nut to crack, yet MightyNest’s heartfelt approach is resonating within that community.

The post How MightyNest Built A “Good” Business Focused On A Healthy Home; An Interview with CEO and Co-Founder Chris Conn appeared first on TechCo.

e-Cards

YourCards is an app for iPhone or iTouch that allows you to send an animated app-based greeting via email, text, Facebook or Twitter. It’s actually an app you can use all-year round, with categories for Birthday, Anniversary, Thank You, Just Because, as well as Love and Dating. A bit of advice from one user (me) – make sure you preview the card before you send it, not all the cards on the home page are Valentine’s cards.

Download YourCards – Lions and Bears from iTunes –

A super-easy way to send a quick and artsy e-Valentine is through the Kate Spade website. A gallery of e-Valentines are ready for the choosing, plus it’ll get you points for good taste.

Poetry

I Write: Love Poems guides you through the process with  step-by-step instructions to inspire you to take that chance and for those of you looking for a little more adventure there is also an erotic version.

Download the I Write: Love Poems from iTunes –

Download the I Write: Erotic Poems from iTunes –

Instant Poetry HD allows you to explore your inner Wordsworth. Instant Poetry uses your own photos as the backdrop for a drag and drop poetry-creator.

Download Instant Poetry HD for iPhone from iTunes –

Download Instant Poetry HD for iPad from iTunes –

Instant Poetry App Screen-Shot

Seek inspiration from the words of others with Love Quotes 500. This app contains hundreds of quotes from the likes of Shakespeare to Judy Garland in a flip-able format. If all goes well this Valentines Day and you find yourself planning a wedding someday, check back in on this for quotes for your wedding invitation or program. 

Download Love Quotes 500 for iPhone –

Music

If you’d rather set the mood with music, check out Love Songs — 100 Greatest of All Time. The Top 100 Love Songs application plays the “full tracks of the greatest 100 love songs ever made” in shuffle mode. (Note: Whether these are the greatest is debatable – and you can take your opinions on Michael Bolton to their forum.) Top 100 Love Songs requires a connection to a 3G, Edge, or Wi-fi network to stream the music to your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Download the Love Songs — 100 Greatest of All Time from iTunes –

Food

Cook a meal (or make an impressive dessert) with romantic recipes from Valentine’s Recipes #2. (The first version of this app is free, but doesn’t have as many recipes.)

Download Valentine’s Recipes #2 –

If you’d rather head out, guarantee your reservations with OpenTable.

Download OpenTable for iPhone –

Download OpenTable for iPad –

Love-testing Apps

Does [insert name] see and  appreciate the uniqueness of who you are? Use The Questions to find out. This app is  based on  a deck of conversation-starter cards designed by a psychologist. Sit down with your partner for a series of probing questions; afterwards the app summarizes the ‘session’.

Download The Questions from iTunes –

Lovetricity

This app reminds me of those promotional cards you put your thumb on to determine your stress-level. Maybe it will cause some stress if you and your partner each put your thumb on this iPhone app and you get anything less than “burning hot”.

Download Lovetricity Valentines Day App for iPhone from iTunes –

Android and iPad apps

iTunes has a special category to house all of the Valentine’s Day apps. Android Market has it’s share of holiday-related apps as well.

Photoid Valentine Edition l allows you to add Valentine effects such as stickers, text and graphics to new or existing photos on your phone. After you’re done, you can post the photos on Facebook, upload it to Flickr, or email/text them.

Other Valentine-themed Android apps include games (like the new Angry Birds Valentine’s edition: Hogs And Kisses) and wallpapers.

ScrapPad – Valentines Day Scrapbooking takes your photos and along with your text and their graphics creates a scrapbook for your Valentine.

Download ScrapPad for iPad from  iTunes –

ScrapPad Your Valentine's Day Together

Finally, have a laugh with someecards.com, they never get old, like the ones below.

Celebrate Valentine's Day Like St. Patrick's Day - Cheers!

If I Were A Pimp You'd Be Your Valentine Ho - Super!

If you’ve come across any great (that includes funny) apps for Valentine’s day, please share!

The post iPhone and Android Apps, Poetry and eCards for Valentine’s Day appeared first on TechCo.

The goal of this network organization is to associate and connect the African technology community to further promote the growth and development. Afrilabs will offer  support to emerging technology labs as well as guide entrepreneurs through the process of taking their ideas to market.

The idea for Afrilabs was conceived when founders from established African tech incubators and open collaboration spaces (Hive Colab in Uganda, ActivSpaces in Cameroon, Nailab and iHub in Kenya, and Banta Labs in Senegal) came together at iHub’s launch event and realized the labs share in a common vision to promote technology as a platform for entrepreneurship.

Afrilabs will also work to connect investors and innovators, with plans to nurture an investment fund for seed capital investments.

The official announcement of the association was made early this week by Erik Hersman, director of operations at the non-profit Ushahidi, and founder of iHub in Nairobi. Ushahidi is a non-profit tech company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.  Erik, traveling in Amsterdam on business, graciously took time out to answer some questions for Tech Cocktail.

Is Afrilabs a formalization of a function that you along with the iHub (a tech community facility with a focus on young entrepreneurs, web and mobile phone programmers and designers) have been doing for months now?

“I wouldn’t say it’s a formalization of what we do at the iHub, it’s an extension to what we do.  In other words, no single lab/hub alone can be an “association” that offers an umbrella for others to be a part of.  The iHub has offered some leadership in the space, with our particular model, but it takes others with different models, like ActivSpaces in Cameroon, to give a more nuanced look at how the labs can operate across the continent.”

How would you characterize the co-working/hub situation in Africa as compared to hubs in the US – are you that far off from US cities or regions trying to coalesce technology entrepreneurs  around coworking, or are there barriers in Africa’s urban areas that still need to be overcome?

“I’m quite familiar with the coworking setups in the US, and visited many of them and got to know their founders, before embarking on the iHub.  The main difference is this;  the US and European cities that have coworking spaces tend to also have communication between the different spaces to help in their growth.  On top of this, if they’re the type of space that acts as an incubator with access to capital and markets, they also are in areas that generally enough capital in them to support them alone.

In Africa this is a little different.  There isn’t a culture or history of coworking spaces, tech incubators and seed capital funds (like TechStars or Ycombinator).  We have to build that here, and it has to be something that is owned by and made for the African tech community.”

On the flip side, are there barriers in the US that Africa is free from?

“I don’t know if there are any major hurdles in the US or Europe that Africa is free from.  However, there are fewer regulation hurdles for many of the spaces and for the entrepreneurs trying new things, so that is a big help.”

The Obama administration recently launched a formalized technological innovation initiative – do you see Afrilabs acting as that type of NGO catalyst for Africa?

“If anything, the labs tend to serve as market catalysts, with real entrepreneur activity to build new markets and make money.  The NGO side of the equation tends to provide a net decrease in markets, so we hope to get more real businesses off the ground than NGOs.”

Source: Flickr/whiteafrican. Some rights reserved.

In an interview with Fast Company, you said that you are in the process of starting an investment fund for seed capital investments “that are accessible to startups that come through the different labs” – how is the connection between investors and innovators happening now?

“Well, there’s not much happening right now, which is one of the reasons Afrilabs was started.  Currently, there are very few urban areas that are putting out enough innovative technology startups for investors to find.  There’s not enough mass.  Afrilabs serves this space best by creating an easy-to-find and use filter for investors to find startups throughout the continent without having to travel to each country and do their own search.

The fund we’re building is a way for us to directly address one of the greatest problems we see: lack of seed capital to test an idea and prototype.

Innovation in tech is like a pyramid, with very few successes sitting at the top.  We need to get more new and risky ideas funded at the bottom in order for more successes to make it to the top.  Many organizations don’t have the capacity to look across Africa, find and manage those seed investments to get them to a real investment stage.  Afrilabs is well positioned for that, and the labs in each country serve as a wonderful filter to find the good entrepreneurs and ideas.”

On the Afrilabs website, it says: ‘We have two primary activities where on one side we are looking to support the development of healthy/sustainable labs and on the other we seek to support the most promising entrepreneurs ready to escape their walls.’ Can you elaborate on that, ‘escape their walls’? Besides the obvious collective benefit of communication and collaboration, how does Afrilabs benefit the individuals involved?

“That comment was directed at the problem of seed funding.  As mentioned earlier, there are some incredibly hungry entrepreneurs with excellent ideas.  Lack of seed capital means that they go work for another company and generally don’t have the ability to escape that reality.  Our goal is to provide another path for Africa’s technology entrepreneurs.”

The post Afrilabs: Providing a Path for Africa’s Technology Entrepreneurs appeared first on TechCo.

There are four main features of the system:

Security: If you are in an accident and your airbags deploy, Mavia can automatically send text messages with your GPS location to 911 and family members. Or, what if your car gets stolen? With Mavia, you can use a computer or smartphone to track the vehicle’s location and notify police.

Mapping, Monitoring, Directions & Connections: Get walking directions to your lost car, alerts when you teen’s car leaves a preset boundary, or a map view of friends’ locations based on their Mavia location or social media check-ins.

Permission-based marketing: The application is free due to a permission-based partnership with automotive service providers. Using the locations in which you frequent, as well as information based on your last oil change, the software will serve you a coupon to a local company that can provide that service.

Diagnostics: Since Mavia device plugs into your car’s diagnostics port, it will let you know (in plain English) what is wrong with your car. Use Mavia’s diagnostic features to be notified of needed service, keep track of maintenance schedules, and to learn how to drive safer and greener.

Mavia is in the late stages of development, and is accepting beta testers.  According to the company’s website, Mavia will be in local electronics retailers in 2011 with a price tag of less than $300. There is no monthly fee if you agree to the terms of service (i.e. advertisements.)

The planned iPhone and Android specific apps will be free for download.

Mavizon was founded by Marc Ingram in 2006, while working on a connected car device, then called Auto Attendant. As a student at the University of Louisville, Marc Ingram met Madison Hamman and the two began working on developing the device and building business relationships.  After passing on two term sheets worth over 2 million, Madison introduced Marc to the owner of Samtec Inc, a hardware technology company where Madison was working as an intern. Mavizon is now supported by parent company Samtec Inc. Corporate headquarters are in New Albany, Indiana.

If you’re at CES this week, visit Mavizon Technologies at CES booth #1334 or come see them as part of the Tech Cocktail Innovation Showcase at the CES Tweetup Friday night at the Space Quest Lounge, Las Vegas Hilton.

The post The Mavia Connected Car by Mavizon Technologies appeared first on TechCo.

This beats the revenue target range of $950 million to $1 billion.

“We posted our first billion dollar quarter and record annual revenue in 2010, driven by outstanding performance across all of our major businesses,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe.  “Adobe is transforming how the world is creating, measuring and delivering digital experiences.  We are one of the most diversified software companies in the world and are entering 2011 with strong momentum.”

For the first quarter of 2011, Adobe is targeting revenue of $1 billion to $1.05 billion.  The software company that helps clients “create, deliver, and optimize compelling content and applications” will launch Creative Suite 5 and Flash Player 10.1 next year.

Read the press release from Adobe here.

The post Adobe Posts Billion Dollar Fourth Quarter appeared first on TechCo.

Foursquare members, which the company says now top 5 million, can now post comments on their friends’ “check-ins,” as well as attach photos to the directory listings for places they visit and leave feedback.

From the Foursquare blog:

“A few of our partners have done an amazing job getting the new photos feature integrated for today. Photos from Instagram pushed to foursquare will now be check-ins with photos (rather than just check-ins). Sightings on Foodspotting will be check-ins with your food photos. And picplz is the first service to allow check-in photos on both iPhone and Android.”

Photos added to tips and venues are viewable by the public – those attached to check-ins will be shared only with Foursquare friends or networks that the user has allowed Foursquare to access.

The new application for Android will arrive later this week, and for BlackBerry in January. The API will be ready for all developers later this week.

Here’s the app in iTunes.

Announcement from Foursquare’s blog.

The post Foursquare’s Holiday Gift to You appeared first on TechCo.