Yesterday, at Capital Connection ’12, 28 startups demoed at TechBUZZ, a half day conference showcasing emerging technologies.  Three of them were voted as the “Best of the BUZZ.”  Moments ago, Augaroo was announced as the event’s overall winner.

The Best of the BUZZ startups pitched in front of an audience of more than 800 investors, advisors and entrepreneurs, and by popular vote, Augaroo took the top position.

Augaroo, a DC-based startup, is building a real-time data visualization system called Zoomdata – a platform capable of processing real-time data streams and generates interactive, tangible visualizations on both web and mobile devices.  According to the Zoomdata beta signup page, their service will “allow you to do things with data that were never possible before. Touch, pan, zoom, pause, rewind, fast-forward. See your real-time and historical data in an entirely new way, on web and mobile devices.”  President and CEO, Justin Langseth, graduated from MIT and served as the CTO of a trio of companies, Strategy.com, Claraview, and Clarabridge, before taking the reigns at Augaroo.

The other pair of startups to break the top three were Cont3nt.com and Speek.  Cont3nt.com, a marketplace for user-generated media and video journalism, earned their participation into this event by winning the Startup America TechBUZZ Challenge Contest.  Speek is a browser-based, simplified conference calling service utilizing both VOIP and telephony gateways.

Highlight speeches and keynote speakers for this year’s Capital Connection conference included Chairman and CEO of Revolution, co-founder of AOL, and chairman of Startup America Partnership, Steve Case, CEO and co-founder at Gilt Groupe, Kevin Ryan, and CEO and founder of Opower, Dan Yates.  The TechBUZZ winners were announced by Tech Cocktail’s very own Frank Gruber.

Unnecessary question alert: did you notice the pink turban in the above photo?  Of course you did.  Standing in the background during a presidential speech is a big deal.  A simple sneeze in that situation could capture the attention of millions of eyeballs at any given point.  Wearing a bright pink turban amongst a sea of navy suits, well, that’s just asking for attention – isn’t it?

“Grabbing media attention was definitely not my intention,” says Navroop Mitter, founder and CEO at Gryphn.  ”I needed something to match my tie. ‘Ok I’ll throw my pink turban on,’ I decided.”

As it turns out, Mitter had no idea he was going to be on camera – the whole event was rather serendipitous.  After responding to a White House tweet about how a payroll tax cut would effect people’s finances, Mitter received an invite to the White House to watch the president’s speech on the recent payroll tax cut extension.  ”I’m going to be sitting in the audience watching the president speak. I knew my mom was watching, so I told her that when the camera pans away from the president, you might see a pink dot.  When you do, that’s your son.”

That pink dot ended up garnering a good deal of attention, including ABC News.

And although Gryphn’s first product, Armor Text, was not yet ready for launch, Mitter decided to pull the trigger and release an early beta version to capitalize on the moment.

“We had to adjust our strategy,” says Mitter.  ”We weren’t planning on pushing out code but when we saw what was occurring, we expedited the work to get a early version out there. We had a lot of attention and the spotlight today, and we knew we would lose that tomorrow. As a result we actually made it work. It ended up being great for us.”

Although Mitter willingly acknowledges that Gryphn benefitted from the increase in traffic, his marketing philosophy doesn’t typically involve media stunts.  ”Do really really good work and the attention will find you. I was in Time magazine when I was 17 years old – for my work.  At times, this feels like a distraction. I make it a point to not always wear a pink, I certainly wear it a lot less than I did before.”

To go lean or not to go lean?

Although conventional wisdom says to stay as lean as possible, Mitter knew the surge in media attention was beyond what he and his team were capable of handling, or at least, not worth leaving to chance.

“We decided to pull in the best PR specialists.  I wanted to know how to appropriately leverage this situation.  How do we handle the right requests?  The reality is you don’t have to run lean all the time – sometimes you have to pull in the experts to get the job done.”

To learn more about this DC-based mobile security startup, check out the Gryphn website and their first product, ArmorText.

Timothy Chi, whom I recently had a conversation with, came up with the idea for WeddingWire while encountering pain points during the planning of his wedding. He took action on the simple idea of creating a resource for wedding planning and turned it into what is now a growing company.

Tim joined us in Washington, D.C. for the kickoff of our monthly Sessions speaker series. Chi shared some of the insights from his two very different startup experiences at Blackboard and WeddingWire, which included the four important success factors:

1.) Team
2.) Listen Carefully To Your Customer
3.) Do Not Be Afraid To Fail
4.) Timing

We also uncovered though the sessions Q&A that Timothy connected with one of his first WeddingWire investors, Martha Stewart, via LinkedIn. Reid Hoffman would be proud. Watch the full keynote by Timothy Chi, CEO and Founder of WeddingWire.

Join us at Tech Cocktail Sessions as we break down the different ingredients that go into starting and running your own business (check our schedule). Our next DC event on May 24th features Scott Case, Founding CTO of Priceline.com and current CEO of Startup America,  Rohit Bhargava, Author of the new book LIKEONOMICS and Zvi Band, Co-founder of Contactually.

You have a great idea, but what do you do next? How do you take that inspiration and turn it into something? Moving from ideas to action is what separates entrepreneurs from those with just a dream.

Shane Green, whom we spoke with previously at South by Southwest, joined us in Washington, D.C. for the kickoff of our monthly Sessions speaker series. He took the audience through his story of how a trip to Berlin sparked his life mission and took him on a couple of startup adventures.  He sold his last startup to NAVTEQ and he is currentlyy the CEO and Co-Founder of Personal based in Washington, D.C. and shared how he took his idea and turned it into action. Watch the full keynote by Shane Green, CEO and Co-Founder of Personal.

Join us at Tech Cocktail Sessions as we break down the different ingredients that go into starting and running your own business (check our schedule). Our next event on May 24th features  Scott Case, Founding CTO of Priceline.com and current CEO of Startup America and Rohit Bhargava, Author of the new book LIKEONOMICS.

We get it, you’re busy.  You weren’t able to get to every Tech Cocktail post this week; it happens.  Fear not, because we’ve curated the week’s top 10 posts as determined by the Tech Cocktail editorial team.

To get the Tech Cocktail weekly wrap-up direct to your inbox; sign up for the Tech Cocktail newsletter today. 

1. Femanomics: 105 Women in Venture Capital & Angel Investment You Should Know
2. Who’s Seattle’s Hottest Startup? [Poll]
3. Brian Spaly, CEO Of Trunk Club, Is On A Mission To Get Men To Dress Better
4. Tech Tips: Avoiding Intellectual Property Issues on Twitter
5. What Mom Taught Me: Advice From 8 Entrepreneurs
6. Seven Tips for Busy Mompreneurs
7. Startup Outlook 2012: Entrepreneurs Are Optimistic and Hiring
8. Fantasy Politics Games Proliferate: Fanitics Launches This Month
9. Four Neat Tricks for a Good Entrepreneurial Night’s Sleep
10. Launching Today: Find Customers & Do Networking on “Skype in the Workspace”

Attention Seattle and Washington DC: team Tech Cocktail is coming your way next week.  On Wednesday, join us for our Tech Cocktail Seattle Mixer at PNK Ultra Lounge.  And on Thursday, we’ll be hosting our 2nd Tech Cocktail DC Sessions, a new speaker series where entrepreneurs teach other entrepreneurs the secrets of their success.  Next week’s Sessions will feature Scott Case, the founding CTO at Priceline and current CEO and board member at Startup America Partnership, and Rohit Bhargava the author of Personality Not Included and the recently released Likeonomics.

Can you believe we made it this far without mentioning a certain social network’s IPO?  Me neither.

Getting married and planning a wedding can be a time consuming and frustrating process (that’s what they tell me anyway).  Some bride-and-groom-zillas live for planning each detail of the big day, while others look for great resources to help ease the stress of the occasion.

Timothy Chi found his wedding planning experience to be a frustrating one and decided to try to do something to improve the process. When he looked around the wedding planning industry, he did not see an online resource that stood out as a clear go-to resource. So the Washington, DC-based co-founder of education platform Blackboard decided to take advantage of this opportunity and turn his idea into action by creating WeddingWire to improve the wedding planning experience.

I recently interviewed Timothy Chi as he shared some insights, advice and perspective from his startup experiences at both Blackboard and WeddingWire. Watch the video interview with Timothy Chi.

This video was recorded at the Water Street Project in Georgetown in front of the fine art work of DC-based Maggie O’Neill which made for a one of a kind DC themed backdrop for this video interview. It is also part of the Tech Cocktail Conversations podcast - subscribe on iTunes.

Just last week we covered Fantasy Politics, a game that takes fantasy football to a whole new level.  Now we have Fanitics, a Facebook application that tracks presidential candidates, governors and Congressional members on metrics like media mentions, facts, fundraising, polling, bill tracking, Twitter followers, etc. It’s free to play and the rules are the same as for fantasy sports games. You can join a public league or create your own, where you can draft, trade and bench your players.

The premise for the Fanitics was born during a fantasy baseball game among JD Chang, the founder, and his friends, when somebody brought up an idea to play fantasy world leaders. JD got interested in taking a subject like politics and then gamifying it, so he decided to prove the concept with American politicians first. The market potential for this game is staggering.

“There are 60 million of professed political junkies in the US, with 2 million active on Facebook each day.  There are 90 million people that post political activity on Facebook. So, there are about 44 million probable Fanitics users,” said Chang.

Fanitics can be used not only as a game but also as a research platform. For example, if we use social media mentions metrics, we can see how many times a politician was mentioned in the news, and, more importantly, every mention is accompanied by a link to the original article. Isn’t this a super useful research tool for various academic projects?  As for the game, Chang explained, “If any politician appears in an article, they get one point. They appear in ten articles, they get 10 points.”

To confirm factual metrics, Fanitics pulls information from PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. “PolitiFact rated the statement by Governor Bob McDonnell saying that ‘US is recovering slower than Europe’ as false. For false statements, he gets negative five points.  President Obama on the other hand, recently said two things – one was mostly true and one was true – so, he scored 8 points.”

Fanitics is also a content aggregator, so you don’t even need to conduct searches on Google anymore.

Fanitics is launching this month and showcasing next week at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC. They also plan on having parties and happy hours in Washington, DC, so keep your eye on them.

To learn more about this startup, check out their video below:

Clearspring, the company behind social sharing and analytics platform AddThis, will henceforth be known as AddThis.

What’s more, the DC-based company released some powerful statistics: AddThis is now on 14 million sites, reaching 1.3 billion users every month. It powers those little sharing buttons and offers analytics on how readers and fans are interacting with brands via social media.

This approach gives AddThis a distinct look into how we surf the web and how we feel about brands:

“Facebook is currently on track to map the social and interest connections between 1 billion people. Leveraging our reach, along with our Xgraph technology, AddThis uniquely maps not only the social and interest connections between 1.3 billion users, but also their intent,” said cofounder and executive chairman Hooman Radfar.

In addition to existing services like targeted advertising, AddThis is improving its toolkit with a new social plugin and analytics suite, so websites can add sections like “trending content.”

For now, check out some of the wide-ranging insights AddThis has collected in the past:

• Trends at SXSW: The Hottest Startup, Social Network, and More
• AddThis 2011 Social Sharing Trends [Infographic]
• 3 Lessons from Social Media Buzz Around the Oscars 

Whether you’re single, in a relationship, or married, it can be hard to find someone to do activities with.  If you’re a big opera fan but none of your friends are, or you want to try archery but your spouse balks at the idea, you can get stuck in a rut, not doing favorite activities or trying new ones.

Until now, there was really no easy way to find a fellow opera goer outside your network.  Just launched in beta, FunPlusOne.com is the first-of-its-kind social platform centered around activity-based connections.  You can post an activity (“Anyone care to join me for an upcoming performance of La Nozze di Figaro?”) and find a plus one to join you (“Why yes I would – that’s my favorite opera!”).

I caught up with co-founder Jay Chahil, whose other startup LunchMix I covered previously, to learn why he’d take on 2 startups at once, why FunPlusOne is better than Facebook, and the challenges in getting people to use his platform.

Tech Cocktail: So, you are not busy enough with LunchMix?

Jay Chahil: [Laughing] We are having some success with LunchMix – we are integrating new features – but I want to keep my options open.  I was appraoched with [FunPlusOne] last year at a friend’s birthday party in NYC and joined it.  We are kicking it out in beta to see what people think…and focusing on getting enough user feedback to make it what people want.  We are giving away $5 Starbucks gift cards to people who are testing it out and giving us feedback.

Tech Cocktail: Who’s your co-founder?

Chahil: Sharad Daswani.  He founded PleaseRSVP.com a long time ago and successfully exited out of it – it was like a precursor to Evite.  Teaming up with someone who has that kind of experience behind them was a no-brainer.

Tech Cocktail: How is FunPlusOne better than, say, posting a message on Facebook to all of your friends?

Chahil: Great question. On Facebook, it is hard to keep track of who replied to your activity invitation and who is interested.  So this system allows you to post it publicly or keep it exclusive to just your friends and see who has shown interest and who is participating.  When someone confirms, they are a plus one.

Tech Cocktail: Do you feel like it’s an uphill battle getting people off Facebook and onto FunPlusOne?

Chahil: Kind of, but we are also using Facebook and integrating it with our platform.  You can invite your friends from Facebook, and eventually we are going to create a Facebook app.

The reason we wanted to create our own platform is, in the beginning, we were thinking about partnering with vendors to see if we could sell a pair of tickets to go to someone’s establishment – say, movie tickets.  We would post that as an activity and you could buy it and ask someone to join you.  We really wanted to be able to create exclusive offers – we are still working on that.  The first step, though, is the user-created activities and building up a healthy user base and perfecting the platform.

If you’d like to help out the FunPlusOne.com team, they invite you to try it out and test its functionality. They’re particularly interested in your thoughts, so feel free to email the team directly at feedback@FunPlusOne.com. 

This past Wednesday night, we hosted a new type of event: Tech Cocktail Sessions. Over 220 people joined us at an art gallery near the Potomac River to hear a couple of experienced entrepreneurs share their personal stories – how they took ideas they had at various points in their lives and turned them into companies. And in some of those cases, very successful companies.

Shane Green, co-founder and CEO of local startup Personal, shared the story of how he went from being a student interested in government and international human rights to founding The Map Network and then Personal and the lessons he learned along the way.

Tim Chi, the co-founder of Blackboard and founder of WeddingWire, talked about the differences between his first venture, which came straight out of his college dorm, to his latest, which brought together a new team focused on disrupting the wedding space.

The audience showered Green and Chi with questions – which was the goal – allowing for lots of interaction. They were surrounded by colorful art installations within The Water Street Project, a two-week popup art gallery produced by No Kings Collective.

Scenes from Sessions DC

The new monthly speaker series debuted in DC but will also take place in Boston (May 14) and Chicago (during TechWeek) – more cities will be announced soon. The next Sessions DC event will be May 24th.

Sessions was born out of the positive response to our Startup Mixology Conference, which breaks down the various ingredients that go into starting and growing a business in today’s technology and business landscape. But rather than offer you just one opportunity a year in one location, we’re now bringing this opportunity to you each month. Enjoy more speakers and chat with your peers afterward about the evening’s topic in a relaxed environment. As in all our endeavors, Tech Cocktail is serious about startups and entrepreneurship, but we believe in enjoying the journey and sharing what we learn.

Previous speakers at Tech Cocktail events have included Steve Case, Alexis Ohanian, Travis Kalanick, Dick Costolo, Genevieve Thiers, Gary Vaynerchuk, Micah Baldwin, Alexis Juneja, and dozens of others. Sessions brings the experiences of successful entrepreneurs to you so you can learn to succeed yourself and learn lessons for your startup. Hear their stories in their own words and ask them your questions in an intimate setting.

And while we did announce Tech Cocktail’s first podcast today, Tech Cocktail Conversations, we’ll soon be announcing the release of another podcast, Tech Cocktail Sessions, where you’ll be able to watch our Sessions speakers no matter where you’re located.  Many thanks to our kickoff speakers Shane Green and Tim Chi and our partners: Uber for providing discounted transportation, White Ribbon Studios for video services, and, of course, No Kings Collective for their visionary space.

Following the lead of metro-targeted startups like Uber, ParkMe and SeatMe, UrbanSitter is now offering an online payment feature.  With this new feature, the site that connects parents with babysitters through people they know should continue on its path of stellar growth, especially with the infusion of $1.75M in seed funding they closed on this year.

Similarly, Womply now lets you link all major credit cards (not just Visa) to its rewards platform.  Linking a card is fast, free, and secure, and any cash rewards you earn will be pushed right back to your credit or debit card.

BiteHunter, the self-described wingman mobile app for dining and drinking deals, is also getting in on the mobile payment scene.  BiteBuy ™ allows for one-click deal purchases without leaving the app, plus a host of other features, like making restaurant reservations through the app and turbocharged algorithms that organize deal searches so that top-rated deals, highly reviewed restaurants and closest locations show up first.

PowerInbox also launched a new API recently to supplement their PowerApp API, which lets anyone send interactive emails through Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and Outlook.  Their Connect API allows for direct integration with 3 email clients (UnifiedInbox, SMAK, and Fuser) and thus removes the need for those users to install PowerInbox.

Finally, DC drivers, rejoice!  Our Parking Panda friends have expanded to DC as of this past Monday.  The community marketplace for parking now lets parking space owners to rent out their spots to drivers who can book spaces in advance on the web or through their mobile phone.  You’ll also be able to reserve spots with parking garages operated by PMI and Central Parking – at a reduced rate.

If we have covered your startup in the past, and you have some amazing new features or fabulous news to share, please email me at monika@techcocktail.com to be included in a future update post. 

The days of writing down recipes and grocery lists with paper and pen are quickly fading. With today’s technology and the ZipList app, grocery shopping and meal-planning have never been easier.

ZipList can locate and organize over 300,000 online recipes and transfer ingredients that need to be purchased to a shopping list with one touch of a button. But more than just a list, the app organizes the items by where they would be found in a grocery store, saving you even more time.

During its first year in 2010, the DC-based company gained popularity quickly and was overwhelmed by partner interests. As a result, they have been providing consumer interactive capabilities for major bloggers and partner sites, including The Food Network, Simply Recipes, Skinny Taste, Southern Plate and Martha Stewart.

Another great feature of Ziplist: To help avoid human shopping errors (forgetting items, buying the wrong one of something), the ZipList app lets you consolidate and share information through your mobile devices.

“It’s a great feature to be able to share recipes and grocery lists with family and friends,” said CEO Geoff Allen. “A common statement we hear from satisfied users is ‘If it’s not on ZipList, it doesn’t get purchased.’”

With over one million users, it is no wonder that ZipList recently announced they are being acquired by mega publisher Condé Nast.  If you’re ready to simplify your life in the kitchen, download the free Ziplist iPhone or Android app today.

Guest author Renee Ritchey has worked in marketing, business development, and management for two technology startup firms, a Fortune 500 insurance company, and a collegiate product distributor. When she’s not writing, you can find her developing independent films, designing board games, playing golf, and organizing wine tastings.  You can follow Renee on Twitter @reneeritchey.

Editor’s Note: This blog post has been excerpted from an article that was originally published by Zvi Band on the Contactually blog. 

When running my previous company, staying in touch was crucial to my business. We were one of dozens, maybe hundreds, of web development firms in the DC region, but we kept really busy (sometimes overwhelmingly so) thanks to a continual flow of referrals from past clients and our network.  Come to think of it, I never accepted a client that came via anonymous websites (read: my own website). So relationship management was a core aspect of my role as founder.

I’ve now transitioned to co-founder and CEO of Contactually, an early-stage, venture-backed startup. Relationship management is now a core part of my responsibilities, and it’s absolutely live-or-die around our users and partners – and especially fundraising.

Who do you need to keep in touch with, and how often?

Top Users: keep in touch every 15 days – We ping them about new feature releases, ask for their support, and in general, just touch base to see how Contactually is working for them. They love it.

Partners: keep in touch every 30 – We talk about deals we have in the pipeline, API providers, business development relationships, resellers, etc.

Sales Leads: keep in touch every 10 - While we’re a self-serve SaaS product, I’m in touch with many people who are actively considering Contactually, and I use our own product to follow up with them until the sale is closed.

Advisors: keep in touch every 30 – I touch base with them around quick status updates and to ask them for a particular connection.  Of the advisors we are close to, we simply ask “How are we doing?” and they’ll give us an all-around review.

Current Investors: every 15 – Given our early stage, we stay especially close to our angel investors, given them incremental status updates, asking for guidance and introductions, and in general, giving them some pride in their investment.

Potential Investors: every 7 – Continually follow up with investors who are evaluating your company. I provide constant updates on metrics, answer any questions, etc.

Future Investors: every 30 – If you haven’t read Mark Suster’s excellent blog post about investing in lines, not dots, read it now.

Potential Hires: every 7 – Keeping in touch works both ways, as we’re able to show interest and at the same time ask them any questions we may have.

Other Entrepreneurs: every 30 – We’re always exchanging introductions, support, etc., but it’s generally nice to get in touch with each other just to see how things are progressing.

Zvi Band is CEO of DC-based Contactually, a CRM product that integrates directly into your email; they are backed by 500 Startups.  He is heavily involved in the DC tech scene, including Proudly Made in DC and the DC Tech Meetup. You can follow him on Twitter @skeevis. 

Sean Glass, Allen Gannett, and Collin Gutman’s idea started simply: foster a community.  They could sense that there was an opportunity around enterprise software, but the idea for Acceleprise didn’t come into being until local DC businesses caught wind of their plans.  ”I was surprised with how many high quality companies we had heard from within the first week.  I wanted to build a community around the entrepreneurs that I invest in.  But quickly we could tell we were onto something bigger,” says Glass, one of Acceleprise’s founders as well as CEO and co-founder at EmployInsight.

This new DC-based accelerator will be taking full advantage of being in the backyard of the world’s biggest purchaser of enterprise software – the federal government.  Don’t forget all of the associations, including lobbyists, that the region plays host to as well.

And although DC doesn’t have The Valley ‘s reputation for late stage funding, the reality is that the venture capital scene in the nation’s capital doesn’t get the respect it deserves – with Novak Biddle, NEA, Columbia Capital, and Grotech Ventures leading the charge.  ”This perception often results from people not being familiar with the capital sources in the region,” adds Glass.

And although enterprise software doesn’t garner the same kind of excitement as consumer facing products, you wouldn’t know it by talking to the Acceleprise team.  ”The future of this space is open,” says Collin Gutman, Chief Strategy Officer at EmployInsight.  Glass went onto note three emerging trends that make this so.  First, the ease and speed of delivery via the cloud, as well as the ability to personalize based on the needs of various positions or departments.  Second, is consumerization.  It is now commonplace for employers to put the decision in the employees hands as to which business solutions work best for them.  Last, is the rapid growth of mobile.  Glass adds, “Enterprises are trying to figure out how to use their own mobile devices.  Right now there’s a lot of head scratching and managers asking ‘how do I use mobile technology to work with my business?’”  This evolution will translate to opportunity, and those who can adapt the fastest stand the most to gain.

Acceleprise Managing Partner, Sean Glass

Acceleprise offers an impressive list of organizations, including AOL, Microsoft, and The Washington Post, the opportunity to work directly with the accelerator and offer insights on the inefficiencies that their companies currently struggle with.  Market research doesn’t get much easier then your buyers telling you exactly what they need.  And once the DC accelerator selects their first class of startups, they’ll reach out to additional organizations – specific to the space the startups are building products around.  Add the mentorship of CEO, Scott Case, iStrategyLabs CEO and Founder, Peter Corbett, and Maria Thomas, the former Etsy CEO, and you’ve accurately envisioned the Acceleprise ecosystem.

Acceleprise is currently accepting applications for their first class of startups, which begins in mid July.  Gutman jokes, “Getting into Acceleprise will be twice as hard as getting into Yale.”  Needless to say, only startups seriously passionate about enterprise solutions need apply.

Since launching nearly a year ago, DC-based TroopSwap has been growing by leaps and bounds, raising nearly $1M from angel investors and then raising $2.5M in equity financing and partnering with Lego.  The ecommerce platform exclusively for active service members and veterans now offers access to military and veteran discounts, most of which are sourced and curated by active military spouses and veterans.

Another startup that has been growing quickly is location-based mobile marketplace Grabio, whose listings now total nearly $4.6 million.  They just launched version 3, which integrates a lot of super useful new features (all based on user feedback). Local businesses can offer their inventory for sale on Grabio (sign up here), and users can now rate and review other users on Grabio; pay for goods and services through the app; follow people on Grabio (and others can follow you); and create a wish list.

Meanwhile, over in Boston, Vsnap, a company that makes it dead-simple to create and send short
 video messages, has released mobile apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android.  Since Vsnap recipients 
are up to 41% more likely to take action than email recipients, this is definitely a company/app to check out – and start using.

Speaking of marketing, let’s talk about near field communication (NFC).  Despite the fact that we are all tethered to our mobile devices, many companies are still trying to figure out how to successfully use NFC for marketing and content delivery. Blue Bite is the top mobile-marketing solutions provider – and they want to teach you how to take advantage of it.

The company just announced that they will be a 2012 Silver Level Sponsor and presenter of the NFC Bootcamp education and training series, which will be held monthly in different cities around the world – the first one is in Atlanta on April 25 and 26.  If integrating mobile marketing into your marketing strategy has been on your “to-do” list, this is a great opportunity to learn how.

FINALLY – Zombie apocalypse training is gaining the recognition that it deserves.  At least that was the consensus amongst the most recent Cupid’s Cup business competition, held by the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Reed Street Productions, the organizers of the zombie-themed Run For Your Lives 5K race, took home the top prize for the 7th annual UMD Entrepreneurship Invitational.  With 13 races scheduled across the country in 2012, Reed Street Productions expects over $3 million in revenues while doubling the number of events in 2013.  Amongst a panel that included Under Armour’s founder and CEO, Kevin Plank, as well as Rob McGovern, chairman and CEO of Jobfox and founder of CareerBuilder.com, Reed Street Productions walked away with $17,500 for winning both the first place prize as well as the competition’s people’s choice award.

Taking home the 2nd place award was the Food Safety Administration for their online courses offering food service professionals food and alcohol safety training and certifications.

The Cupid’s Cup award capped a daylong series of talks, presentations, and events including the launch of Startup Maryland, part of the White House’s Startup America initiative.  Also included was the BB&T Business Invitational highlighting various University of Maryland and DC and Baltimore-based startups.  My Fridge Rental (2011′s Cupid’s Cup Winner), a dorm room fridge rental service, won the $2,000 award for best student/alumni company, and Veenome, the previously covered video indexing platform, took home the invitational’s best regional company award of the same value.

For those interested in running for their lives, the below video highlights this award winning Zombie 5K.

After starting AxHill, a government consulting agency, back in 2009, Jonathan Lunardi was exposed to an issue that would forever change his life. Along with fellow co-founder Paul McDonald, Ph.D., the team tasked themselves with leading the U.S. Army and National Guard Bureau in creating a program for veterans focusing on health promotion, risk reduction, and suicide prevention. Lunardi prowled through government agency websites asking the same tough questions that many veterans have upon returning home. “Real answers were hard to find,” says Lundardi.

And thus began his and McDonald’s creation of the DC-based Veteran Central, a recently launched social network created specifically for veterans and their family members. With a three tiered approach of social reintegration, resource centralization and awareness, and employment support, Lunardi hopes that his new network can serve as part of the solution to a very serious problem. I caught up with Lunardi to learn more about his inspiration, the brand’s core focus, marketing strategy, and why they opted to become a for-profit venture.

Tech Cocktail: What was the inspiration behind Veteran Central?

Jonathan Lunardi: The inspiration for Veteran Central came when Paul and I started working on how the re-integration challenges facing our active duty men and women could be improved using modern web and mobile tools. As we began research into the National Guard and Reserve populations, we only saw those issues compounded. Here were our nation’s heroes coming home to communities that didn’t fully understand what they had experienced while deployed, where the traditional support systems enjoyed by the Active Duty in garrison were lacking, and where unemployment was (and still is) high. We looked online for some government or private solutions (figuring there had to be some central site to help veterans) and found an overwhelming number of sites that were often just laundry lists of links to other sites. We knew we had the expertise and technical ability to make a difference by connecting Veteran resources within a trusted, secure online environment that could be accessed by any device, anywhere.

Veteran Central President and Co-Founder, Jonathan Lunardi

Tech Cocktail: What is Veteran Central’s core focus? Is there any one void in particular that you’re hoping to fill?

Lunardi:

1. Social integration and reintegration into communities
2. Resource centralization and awareness
3. Employment support

While there are a lot of “top down” driven solutions (i.e., government websites and job boards), we really feel that a bottom up community-based approach is the only thing that will help address the three issues above. By creating an online tool that focuses on those three areas, users are encouraged to post jobs, start conversations, and support each other, which is very unique compared to all the other veteran websites that are out there.

Tech Cocktail: How do you plan on getting the word out to veterans about this service?

Lunardi: Media is obviously important. We are also hoping our user community spreads the word to their networks. Ultimately, the site will succeed based on our user engagement. We want to leverage the experience of Veterans, Veteran Spouses, Veteran Small Business owners, Veteran employers, etc. who can help the community thrive. No individual can substitute for the collective knowledge of a group of people who have lived through these experiences.

Tech Cocktail: Any reasons in particular to not make Veteran Central a non-profit?

Lunardi: The real question here revolves around intent. When a company states that they are a “non-profit” people think that means they are looking out for the public good. Unfortunately, being a non-profit means there are a lot of regulations and constraints put around how, where, and when you can apply your profit to certain projects. We decided to be a for profit company so that we would have the freedom and flexibility to use our funds at our discretion for the betterment of the site and the Veteran communities that we represent. The site will always be free to our users. We consider ourselves a good example of a “private enterprise delivering public good.”

Personal finance tool HelloWallet launched version 2 of its iPhone app today, with new features that help you manage your money on the go.

If your employer offers a HelloWallet membership, you can do your setup on the iPhone – including linking bank and credit card accounts to monitor transactions. If you see a pink, frilly Easter basket you have to have, you can also add “Holiday decorations” as a new budget category within the app. And instead of waiting for the purchase to show up in HelloWallet from your bank account, just manually enter it right away (and it’ll synch up with the bank records later).

“Our goal is to help you take control of your finances through actionable financial guidance. With the iPhone app, you can pull up that guidance right as you’re making a purchase,” explains marketing manager Justin Thorp.

HelloWallet released its original iPhone app last November, with tools for tracking spending, building budgets, setting goals, and more. They also use AI to offer personalized financial advice. As always, the DC startup provides one free account to a needy family for every 5 paying subscribers (see CEO Matt Fellowes on democratizing financial advice).

The company raised $12 million in series B funding in January, after a $3.6 million series A. An Android app will also be released this quarter.

To become a member, try a free 30-day trial first.

Looking for a new way to communicate with your friends, family, and customers?  The just-launched DC-based startup RantRally is a social site that lets you record messages and quickly and easily share those messages with others. Your listeners will immediately know it’s you, providing an emotional connection and human element that text lacks.

It’s super easy to use: call a toll free number, leave a message, and your “Rant” attaches to your profile and is available for anyone to hear.  You can share your audio posts on Twitter and Facebook and via email, and you can also embed the audio on your blog or website.

The idea initially came to co-founder Michael Harris, who is a developer, while waiting for a meeting to begin.  “I was online and came across a site that was political-based and let people call and leave messages that would then be posted in real-time on the site.  I thought, ‘This is a great idea!’ I got it instantly – how really easy it is to get your voice on the Internet.  But I could see a lot of room for improvement, since this service was not social at all.  There was no way to share your messages from that site.”

Harris actually launched RantRally a year ago with a focus on B2B, and though he was getting feedback, the concept wasn’t going anywhere.  So, he did what all good startup founders do and decided to look for a co-founder.  He met Juancarlo Morales through CoFoundersLab, who immediately saw that this was better as a B2C application.

RantRally is based on the Twitter model with audio instead of text, but it also improves on the model a bit.  As Harris pointed out, “There is an issue of authenticity on Twitter.  A lot of celebrities have ghostwriters for their Twitter accounts, so they don’t even really know what they’re tweeting.  With audio, you instantly know who the person is on the other side of that message.”

While the focus right now is on a great user experience, future B2B applications are in the works.  “RantRally is a great way to set up a feedback loop with customers, and other ideas we have for its use include audio polling and public service announcements.  We are working on a feature that will parse audio to text right now, because there really are a lot of applications out there.”

Stay tuned! In the meantime, give it a try and let us know what you think – leave a comment below!

Every startup pivots at least once during alpha or private beta to improve their concept and/or open up new markets or applications.  This has certainly been the case for DC-based Restin Chairs, which was called Restin Digital when I first met co-founders Barry Womack and Frank Taylor last month.  Their story is almost a perfect case study (almost, because of course the story is still being written) of how pivoting can really pay off.

Womack and Taylor were roommates at The College of William & Mary (W&M)  when they started noticing massage chairs in malls and other public spaces.  “We decided to take the concept and develop it around the college market as a way to help relieve stress during exam time,” Womack said.  “Our original concept was pay-per-use, so students would swipe their student ID cards to use the chair, but it turns out the time-to-market was just too long, so we immediately changed that idea, and we leased a few chairs to the college during exam periods.”

The service was offered as a free service to students, and during the initial trial period, they had 10,000 uses in 12 days – and this was just with 4 chairs at one library at W&M.  “During that trial, we saw that tons of kids were using iPods, iPads, iPhones, and their laptops while in the chairs to access digital content – music, entertainment, the Internet, and so on,” Womack continued.  “Frank and I quickly realized that if we could capture an individual’s attention for 3-5 minutes while they are sitting in the chairs, we could integrate a digital marketing aspect and offer this in corporate settings, public spaces, and tradeshows.”

And thus the idea of Restin Digital came about.  The massage chairs originally had a built in screen that would stream location-specific content and advertising at malls, in public spaces, and at airports.

Fast-forward from our initial meeting in February to last week, when Taylor told me that had pivoted again and were now called Restin Chairs.

“As we’ve learned things along the way, we might go off in one direction for a little bit and refine the idea, but we are still going in the same direction.  People love these chairs, and we need to figure out how to best leverage that attraction.”

At a tradeshow at the beginning of March, they got a lot of feedback and learned that there is a huge need for regular massage chairs for rent or lease, especially in the business/corporate market. Chairs retail for $3,000 to $6,000, so they’re pretty expensive.  But a $150-250/month rental is much more attractive – it’s no longer a capital expense, but instead a line-item expense without maintenance costs.

While Restin Chairs now focuses on renting or leasing chairs for their original target market of malls, public spaces, corporate clients, and airports, the digital media component has not been thrown by the wayside.  As Taylor explained, “We are putting together a network of digital marketers who can create branded messaging, so we will continue to offer digital marketing, but we will not be doing it ourselves. We will be able to integrate your content or recommend companies that can do it for you.”

Did you keep track of the number of pivots?  Four by my count.  Time will tell how quickly they pay off, but thanks to so much user feedback, Womack and Taylor do appear to be headed in the right direction.

Fresh off their official launch at SXSW, where they were a showcased startup at our #StartupLife Celebration and competed in the SXSW Accelerator as 1 of 48 startups, Votifi is poised to have a very busy year.  Launching during a roller coaster of a campaign season that is preceding a presidential election in the fall, the mobile polling and analytics company wants to disrupt politics thru peer-to-peer political exploration and interaction.

I had a chance to talk to founder and CEO Lou Aronson about why he jumped into the chaotic mess known as U.S. politics, just how the company will change political discourse now and in the future, and a surprising way Votifi is being used.

Tech Cocktail: Why did you decide to jump into the messy world of politics and try to create a solution to the problem of connecting constituents and politicians?

Lou Aronson: After coming up with the idea back in Sept 2008, I just honestly couldn’t shake the prospect of starting a mobile-focused polling company that answered the challenges of an increasingly mobile society.  With a more diverse and mobile electorate we found a potential solution in the “disconnect” by using “peer to peer” issue-based connections as a tremendously powerful avenue to bring people together and enable them to form their own political connections.  It is exciting to see people engage across socio-economic, gender and party lines on the issues that matter most to them. Once the people connect, the politicians will follow.

Tech Cocktail: How do you think Votifi will most disrupt political discourse in this country?

Aronson: In the short term by providing our user community with a broader voice that is supported by quantifiable data. By using news from both sides of the issue together with actual user poll responses, we provide a very accurate and “real time” picture of the sentiment of the electorate. In the long run, I humbly hope we can improve voter turnout, as the poor voter turnout figures continue to be a problem for us as a nation.

Tech Cocktail: Have you gotten traction with polling companies?

Aronson:  Some. I would like to boast and say we have caught on like wildfire, but it’s a process. Any time you bring a new technology to an old industry it takes time to catch on. The good news for us, though, is that polling is primarily dependent upon landline phones, and the problem of landline abandonment is not going away.

Tech Cocktail: Is Votifi being used in any ways that surprise you?

Aronson: Funny you should ask. And, yes!  We have discovered that our “sentiment hub” has a unique application in the association and non-profit world. For the past 20 years or so, all of these organizations have spent tremendous resources building out massive email lists without any core understanding of the demographics, psycho graphics and issues that matter to these members. We now run a “Community Insights” product for these groups that allows us to analyze and segment their population in a way they have never been able to before. And, more good news…it’s been working with tangible progress in the short term.

Tech Cocktail: What do you consider your biggest success with Votifi to be so far?  What is your ultimate goal with Votifi?

Aronson: Getting “launched” at SXSW.  In the startup world, it’s easy to talk and very difficult to do. We, as a team, have been benefited from a tremendous group of friends and family investors, as well as co-founders, consultants, interns and collaborators – all of whom have enabled us to get up and running (which is never to be dismissed as a milestone), enable SMS polling, launch our app in the iTunes marketplace and actually use the “sentiment hub” for polling.  Having a random pedicab driver at SXSW tell me she had just downloaded the app but not had a chance to enter a discussion, well, to be honest, that one of the coolest experiences of my life.

The ultimate goal? We are building the central connection point for the mobile political relationship for people to each other and politicians to their constituents.  We will be the destination for civil political exploration and interaction.  That is the goal – to provide the platform.  What happens with that platform that depends upon how the folks from all across America elect to implement the tool.

Venga spent 8 months “gold plating” their first product: an app for browsing nearby restaurant specials and events. It had the catchy feature names (like A List and Rutbuster), the exclusive deals, even a prize involving a Top Chef – and was available on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry all at once.

But as Venga worked with restaurants, they heard another complaint over and over: systems like OpenTable and the seating/ordering program (aka point-of-sale terminal) weren’t talking to each other, so restaurants didn’t know who their star customers were or whether they liked scallops or pasta.

So in February, with support from Fortify, Venga launched a new product: software for restaurants to create a loyalty program and keep track of customers. Diners get coupons on their receipts that can be redeemed online or by SMS, where they can also give feedback on the overcooked steak or too-attentive waiters. Combining that with ordering information, restaurants can send out tailored emails rather than generic blasts.

But a new product also means new obstacles. Cofounder Sam von Pollaro says that figuring out the details of loyalty programs takes some “leg work”: a few weeks per restaurant to choose rewards like free oysters, drinks on your birthday, cooking classes, or even a trip to London. That’s after designing the software to integrate with point-of-sale terminals (they currently work with Micros and Aloha). For the time being, Venga will also continue to support their first product.

In addition to pivoting product-wise, Venga has also become leaner. This new version took 2 months to produce and will be tweaked based on feedback. Von Pollaro says they took a lesson from other entrepreneurs and, unsurprisingly, the lean startup movement.

These days, you can find Venga exchanging wisdom with their fellow tenants at The Fort accelerator in DC.

Society is becoming ever more transparent.  What we’re doing, who we’re doing it with, and where we’re doing it is now being broadcast for any and all who wants to see.  Not all information is meant to be shared openly and freely however.  Your breakfast burrito, sure (if you must).  Your wi-fi password, probably not.  What if there was a way to safely store these more private pieces of information and seamlessly share with the select few who should know?

With Personal, there is.

“Personal is a private, personal network and data vault for individuals to manage and control access to their digital information,” explains Personal co-founder, President/CEO Shane Green.

Think of Personal as a safe of your personal data, but you want to share certain pieces of data with certain people.  Instead of writing out instructions for your kids dietary needs for each subsequent babysitter or having to retrace your steps looking for directions to the hard-to-find private oceanside hike, Personal keeps all of this information in one central location, accessible across all platforms, and removes the redundancies of duplicate sharing.

Although Facebook allows you to share your favorite wines with your friends, the ad of Wine Library TV’s competitor sitting adjacent to your profile is the cost.  Green believes there are less intrusive ways to share this information:

“Today, companies capture, exploit and benefit from people’s data in privacy-invasive ways….We think it’s time people enjoy the power of their data in their lives.”

And although Personal wants you to regain control of your data, Green realizes that it’s not an either/or versus the traditional social networks.  Personal isn’t competition to Facebook, but a complement.  ”It will become easier and easier to decide whether social networks or private networks are appropriate to a given context. I don’t think it will be one or the other,” Green adds. “People will learn to effortlessly switch between them.”

Note: The Washington D.C. based startup was one of the featured startups at the recent Tech Cocktail #Startuplife celebration.  

Last week a movement was launched to provide students with inspiring opportunities at leading tech companies. SummerQAmp is a nationwide initiative to train a new workforce in high-tech skills and help create tech jobs for young Americans.

SummerQAmp was developed as a commitment to the White House’s Summer Jobs+ initiative and as a call to action for businesses, nonprofits and government to create pathways to employment for low-income and disconnected youth this summer.

The initiative is being led by former White House CTO Aneesh Chopra, musician Jon Bon Jovi, GroupMe co-founder Steve Martocci, Gilt Groupe’s VP of Quality Engineering Kevin Haggard and Onswipe’s CEO Jason Baptiste.

SummerQAmp is setting out to help keep the U.S. at the forefront of innovation by creating tech jobs right here at home. Its mission is to promote awareness for Quality Assurance (QA) as a career opportunity, and it will accomplish this by inviting leading U.S. software companies to offer QA internships this summer to students who haven’t received formal technical training.

“For many people, QA isn’t necessarily a job you go to school for. It’s something you learn on the job,” said Steve Martocci.

I started working closely with the QA team at Gilt and went on to found GroupMe, where our QA team is a critical part of our success. Now I want to inspire others to explore QA as a career, so I’m inviting entrepreneurs and other technology companies to sign our pledge and commit to offering QA internships this summer.

SummerQAmp hopes to create at least 1,000 QA internships this summer alone. You can read more about the initiative at http://www.summerqamp.org/.

There’s no doubt that professional networking could work better.  At least that’s the premise behind the new wave of web and mobile apps aiming to make the experience more efficient.  Earlier this week it was Shortlist.

Today it’s TappedIn.

In a nutshell, Zainab Zaki, TappedIn co-founder, promises that her service will “make every conversation matter.”

Because, as it is, not every conversation does matter.  There’s an excessive amount of small talk, time spent trying to wrap up dead-end conversations, and thought energy spent on who you should be talking to.  ”This is something we’ve been working on for the last three and a half years,” says Zaki.  ”The key finding of our research was that building trust is the most important part of the networking process. Our service expedites that process.  We cut out the bullshit.”

To use the TappedIn service, first register your event with Eventbrite and answer a few of their registration questions.  The day leading up to the event, the user will receive a list of other attendees the service predicts would be worth connecting to based on the answers to your questions and LinkedIn profile.  The user can easily e-mail or send a message through the TappedIn mobile app.  At last, the bullshit has been removed.

The DC-based startup is co-founded by the aforementioned Zaki, who has more than three years experience at Capgemini Consulting, and Dahyu Patel, whose resume includes a stint as the chief technology architect for DC Homeland Security.  Although the team hasn’t received any outside funding to date, they are currently seeking a seed/angel round of funding for $300K.   Come check out the TappedIn team tomorrow, as they’re one of our featured startups at the Tech Cocktail SXSW #StartupLife Celebration.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to Vitrue, a sponsor of our #Startuplife Celebration and Tech Cocktail’s special SXSW video series. Check out Vitrue’s live daily updates from SXSW!

Founder Guy Wolcott of DC-based startup Sawbuck wants to change real estate.

“We saw how anti-consumer the real estate business was. Real estate brokers hoarded access to the secret MLS data to protect their old models. So we wanted to give consumers more control – starting with giving them easy access to more information and better tools than any agent had.”

Thus, Sawbuck was born.  But first, about that name: Back in frontier times, a sawbuck was another name for a sawhorse, which then became slang for a $10 bill.  Homes + money = Sawbuck.  Pretty clever.

Sawbuck’s brand new app, HomeSnap, goes way beyond moving “home search” to a smaller screen to answer “What’s the deal with THIS HOME right in front of me?” You might not even know the name of the street, but if you snap a picture, the app will tell you all about that house.

Operating in just 13 cities, Sawbuck already gets over a million unique visitors a month – and they are about to open that up to the whole country.  As they grow, Wolcott said they will use their existing reach and user base to market HomeSnap. “Beyond that, we’ve tried to build the first real estate app that has a network effect – HomeSnap executes a very simple idea with a bit of magic. We think iPhone users will show it off to their friends and family and help us get the word out.”

Because Sawbuck is a licensed real estate brokerage, they connect consumers to top local agents and only make money if and when a user buys or sells a home. They don’t have ads on the app, and they don’t sell leads.  As they grow, their goal is to build a trusted national real estate brand.  “Sawbuck gives consumers what they want – simple, powerful tools; complete, real-time information; access to top local agents; and the freedom to do what they want without being invaded by ads, turned into a lead or pestered by an agent,” said Wolcott.

You can learn more about HomeSnap in the video below – or stop by to meet the team at our #StartupLife Celebration at SXSW on Saturday night, where they are a showcased startup.

The Fort, a DC-based startup accelerator that launched earlier this year, is quickly becoming a center point in the DC area. With its office space granted by DC Mayor Vincent Gray, the Fort currently houses thirteen early-stage startups as it looks to offer a hybrid accelerator model for the DC region. Today, the Fort, lead by Jonathon Perrelli and Adam Fazackerley, announced its first class of startups.

They include:

CoFoundersLab –  Founders Shahab Kaviani and Culin Tate are dedicated to helping entrepreneurs launch new businesses by helping them overcome the first challenge in launching a startup – finding the perfect co-founder. It’s eHarmony for entrepreneurs. The service is similar to FounderDating, but serves different geographic markets.

Feastie - Founder Valerie Coffman wants to make it easier and more affordable for people to cook healthy, tasty meals. The site provides nutritional information, shopping lists, and coupon matching – and, most notably, a recipe engine that uses natural language processing to extract ingredient information from recipe webpages.

Forensic Innovations - Founder Rob Zirnstein developed networking and data processing software for 15 years. Now with Forensic Innovations, which already sells a File Investigator Engine for document recovery, backup, management, security and more, he aims to build new technologies to satisfy the need to efficiently dig through data and produce the nuggets of information hidden in today’s computers.

Hinge - Justin McLeod wants to help you expand your social graph on Facebook. Just answer questions about your current Facebook friends: What are they like? Which ones are your type? Hinge then learns your tastes and suggests up to five compatible friends of friends per day.

Klaggle - Klaggle is Klout for reviews and opinion based content. Founder Stephen Candelmo, the former co-founder of Fedbid, has focused the team on building the ReviewRite product, which allows consumers to write, share and discover trustworthy reviews on anything with their friends. It also lets businesses leverage the power of reviews more effectively through its patent pending analytical and search technology that scores and indexes the quality, credibility and resonance of any type of written content.

Lemur IMS - Founders Will Fuentes and Cary Scott, whom we recently covered, understand that retailers have a problem with inventory.  Their new Inventory Management System for big box retailers connects local customers to local slow moving inventory via personalized offers. The system also collects market, retail, customer and community data to optimize the results per location. Using various methods of real-time communication, Lemur creates a sense of urgency and a call to action that leads to more sales.

MonthsOf.Me - MonthsOf.Me is home to visual stories about life’s moments; it lets members easily organize their digital life, share their stories and collaborate on content. Founders RJ Johnston and Joshua Abraham have built a platform for you to create visual stories using media like pictures, text, and videos in order to share moments around specific topics such as births, ballgames, weddings, concerts, and events.

NextGame - Founders Andrew Chang and Tareq Tahboub are really passionate about sports and want to enhance people’s active lives by connecting individuals and groups to make it easier for them to play and participate in the sports and activities they love. Users can search for new places to play, find and organize games and activities, and easily share those activities with friends. NextGame brings people, locations, retailers, and event organizers together, and will be the only platform people need to manage their active lives. It’s like Foursquare for pickup games.

Saylo - Founder Sean Sun wants you to communicate easily, one-to-many, with the people around you. So he built a mobile app that lets you create and join location-relevant conversations, anonymously. Like a hyper-local Twitter, Saylo allows for spontaneous interaction and engagement, especially with new people around you who you don’t even know.

Social Tables - Founder Dan Berger is trying to make the event planning experience less stressful and more efficient.  Social Tables is a web-based event planning platform for large, seated events. The service offers a suite of planning tools, built for anyone from the DIY bride to the sophisticated corporate planner.

Uppidy - Founder Josh Konowe built Uppidy to let you save, search and share your text/sms messages using any major smart phone platform. The company has thousands of users worldwide and millions of messages in dozens of languages. Uppidy lets everyone keep the conversations they created regardless of carrier, provider, cell phone or cloud service.

Venga - Venga, (“Let’s go” in Italian”) the winner of our Hottest Early Stage Startup in DC Poll, is a guest management platform for restaurants. The platform, developed by founders Winston Lord, Sam von Pollaro and Reg Stettinius, seamlessly integrates with a restaurant’s Point of Sale system, captures all of the information on the bill (server, dishes, check amount, etc.) and turns it into actionable insights for restaurants. Products include restaurant-branded loyalty program, guest satisfaction and targeted marketing. Advisory Board includes Top Chefs Spike Mendelsohn and Mike Isabella and Jose Andres’ Think Food Group’s CEO Rob Wilder.

I visited with Jonathon Perrelli earlier this week to get a tour of the Fort – watch the video tour below as Jonathon shows us his new space in downtown DC.

Imagine this: you attend SXSW with basically just an idea for a startup.  You haven’t started coding yet, you are weeks or months away from alpha, but you go anyway and talk to anyone who will listen to you, like Robert Scoble, who then tweets about you, which is picked up by someone at a big company in your industry who wants to form a major partnership with you.

This is exactly happened last year to Dan Berger, founder of DC-based Social Tables.  As Dan (pronounced like Don) said,

“Shit does get done at SXSW.”  

“Last year I was walking around with my laptop and a Photoshopped image of what Social Tables was going to be,” said Berger.  “I ran into Robert Scoble, who tweeted about me – and I didn’t even have a product yet.  Someone who worked at a major wedding destination site saw the tweet, contacted me, and now I am meeting with C-level execs at the company to discuss a partnership deal.”

While this was certainly a serendipitous event, Berger pointed out that SXSW is all about networking and warm leads – and that is what he worked on last year.  This year, he has a serious lead generation plan, which he showed to me on his iPad last night at The Fort here in DC.

Social Tables will have 5 people on the ground, deal sourcing.  “What they are doing is monitoring Twitter to see if there are any attendees I should talk to,” said Berger,” and they will keep me informed of who to meet where and when.  There is a ridiculous amount of noise at SXSW, and you generally don’t know who is attending til the last minute, so setting up meetings beforehand is impossible.  Twitter will let us set up meetings on the spot.”

The networking opportunities are awesome, of course.  “I met the VP of News Services for CNN last year – and got an invite this year to go their CNN Daily Grill, which they will be broadcasting from during the festival.”

Since last March, Social Tables obviously became a real company – and a lot has happened:  They launched in May and have seated 53,000 people at a variety of events – 75% weddings, the rest is a mix between galas, charity events, and conferences. Berger just hired his first employee on February 6, a brilliant Javascript engineer, and they are rebuilding Social Tables to take it to the next level.

They are also in the middle of raising an angel round right now – and are excited to announce that wedding planner-to-the-stars Marcy Blum is joining their board of advisors.

Berger’s one last piece of advice to SXSW newbies: “RSVP to everything.  You don’t know what is going to happen where, so be prepared!”

Getting a new social application to go mainstream is getting harder to achieve (not that easy was ever an option).  Although the market for these applications is still growing, there already exists the pre-established favorites.  For every Pinterest and Instagram, there are ten social startups that’ll fail without your even hearing their name.  So instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, why not find a way to improve upon the tools we already use.

Meet Grandstand, a web platform that turns social media mobile apps actions into games and data visualizations.

Example:  You’re at the movie theater.  Before your flick, instead of the tedious carousel of ads and three trivia questions, a foursquare bingo card appears on screen.  As users check-in to the theater, their faces replace the blank squares, ultimately revealing one lucky winner (perhaps a free large popcorn and bathtub size Cherry Pepsi).  Suddenly what once was monotonous is now fun and engaging.

We first covered Grandstand back in October of last year as they displayed what their platform could do for the Tech Cocktail co-produced DCWEEK.  The iStrategyLabs founded startup has since been announced as one of the featured startups in this year’s Tech Cocktail SXSW #StartupLife Celebration.

The below video better demonstrates Grandstand’s capabilities.  If impressed, be sure to give them your vote in the #StartupLife people’s choice contest.

Grandstand Demo from iStrategyLabs on Vimeo.

When we first covered Feastie last September, we had decided that 2011 was the year of the recipe site.  Despite the very crowded market they are operating in, Feastie, a DC-based recipe search site that generates shopping lists based on what you want to cook, has continued to grow, evolve, and stay competitive.

Part of their success is based on the algorithm that co-founder and CEO Valerie Coffman developed to pull into the site as many recipes as possible.  “We are trying to create one place for people to discovery recipes from everywhere,” Coffman told me.  “Since Tech Cocktail last wrote about us, Feastie has quintupled the number of recipes on the site from 10,000 to 50,000, and we are adding new recipes every day. We also just went through a design refresh to amp up the food porn aspect .”

So don’t visit the site if you’re starving and food is not within reach.

Their other big news is a contest they are running for food bloggers.  As Coffman explained: “We’re gonna send a food blogger to a conference in May in DC called EatWrite Retreat.  We’re calling the contest a photo potluck – we’ll choose ten finalists – and the winner will be chosen by vote on Feastie.”

The contest sounds like fun – creativity, food, recipes, food porn – what’s not to like?  But one of the reasons they decided to run this contest came as a bit of surprise:

“We had a little bit of a controversy with food bloggers.  Because recipes are on somewhat questionable copyright grounds, it is easy to rip off someone else’s recipes.  Someone took a food blog that did not belong to them and turned it into an Kindle eBook.  Bloggers thought this is what we were going to do at Feastie for some reason, but we actually drive traffic to food bloggers’ sites – we don’t copy the recipe like some recipe sites, we link back to the original post on their site.

“We do show the recipe in a frame so we can add our interactive tools [like the shopping list generator] to the original recipe and show those 2 things side by side, but one of our goals is to build community within the food blogging community. We want to prove that we love food bloggers with this contest – and bring them together and promote what they are doing.”

Coffman also just built a widget for food bloggers that puts Feastie tools directly on their blog – so a user can click a button and build a shopping list directly from a recipe on that food blog.  “We are just starting to promote that.  It’s still in the testing phase, but we’re looking for feedback from food bloggers on what would make this a must-have. “

Feastie has a few thousand users and traffic is growing slowly but surely. Because they have their own blog on the site, they get a lot of traffic that way.  They have some funding, have won 2 business plan competitions, and just inked a deal with Fortify.vc.

Quitting one’s day job to fully focus on a startup is scary, but here’s some advice from Coffman if you are about ready to take the leap:

“I quit my job because I got over the fear of not having a steady paycheck – I do have savings – but I also realized that if you can program, you can get freelance work.  My advice to anyone who is thinking about leaving their job to start a startup or work for one, if you can program, do it and quit, and you can work enough freelance jobs to pay your bills and make it work.  I am a lot happier!”

If you are a super busy startup founder, always out on the road doing business development, talking to funders and potential partners, and pretty much tethered to your smartphone, imagine how much easier your life would be if you could instantly get a lot of information about the person calling you.  Is that person the assistant to an angel investor?  Is it your contact at a company you are pursuing a partnership with?

“Most people hate telephony.”

Michael Zirngibl, co-founder and CEO of Ringio, flat-out admitted during a chat last week. But because we still rely on our smartphones for actual phone calls, he and his co-founders Sam Aparicio and Ashish Soni decided to simplify the best of enterprise deployments to make it easier and affordable for small businesses to integrate their CRM and online address books with their phone.

DC-based Ringio lets companies with 5-50 employees get a virtual phone solution in less than 10 minutes. As you accumulate data about the people in your address book and your customers, you can have more informed conversations – and decide whether or not to actually answer the phone when it rings.  It is really affordable, too – their flat subscription fee is only $25/month.

Though this is his first startup, Zirngibl’s entrepreneurial streak actually started at MicroStrategy.  After finishing business school in Germany, he landed a job here in the U.S. with the big DC-based tech company.  He was almost immediately put on an innovation team and sent back to Germany to develop new products in a kind of lab.  “We created MicroStrategy Narrow Casting,” Zirngibl said.  “It was software that would take snippets of data that reside in data warehouses, conduct business intelligence on it, and send the relevant pieces of information to customers based on what they cared about.  It was actually featured in a Super Bowl ad.”

After acting as product manager for Narrow Casting, Zirngibl launched an internally incubated company called Angel.com that allows businesses to set up interactive voice response (IVR) and call center apps in cloud-based model.  It is still doing very well as part of MicroStrategy with 200 employees.

Like all entrepreneurs, the itch to start a company was impossible to fully scratch while working for someone else.  “I needed to satisfy my entrepreneurial desires, so I left 3 years ago when the idea for Ringio came about,” Zirngibl said.  “Our big growth area is selling the technology to companies that already have an established customer base, like web carriers and large telecom operators.  We make it easy for them to create a banded app on top of their services.  Our first big client is Miami-based RingByName.”

Their next new thing launches during Q2 – it is a version of Ringio that can work with any phone.  The app will be demoed in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress.

So far, they have had lots of interest from international carriers that want to layer apps across the top of their services.  “With this technology, telephony is no longer faceless.  For salespeople, this is awesome.”  After seeing it in action (I called Zirngibl while sitting next to him and got to see all my social media information pop up on his iPad and iPhone), I definitely agree with that statement.

Ringio was initially self-funded.  They did a friends and family round, got money from Baltimore angels, and funding from the Center for Innovative Technology in November.  Right now, thing are looking up for them – new products launching and lots of potential partner interest – all great news if you’re looking for a new gig, as they are aggressively hiring developers right now.

Many of us spent last night with our eyes glued to the TV and our fingers glued to our keyboards during the Oscars. Meanwhile, social analytics platform AddThis was humming away monitoring our social media activity. Below are some insights (as interpreted by me) from their data.

Everyone loves Pinterest. AddThis saw Oscar-related sharing on over 200 services, with the most popular being Twitter, then Pinterest, then Facebook.

“Pinterest sharing took off during the red carpet show and continued through the show with people sharing pictures of the fashion from the red carpet…Pinterest is a very visual medium which makes it a natural for a fashion theme,” says AddThis director of product Greg Cypes.

It’s an amazing accomplishment for Pinterest to even be on their radar, not to mention scoring #2. Congrats to Pinterest.

The power of the grassroots. Hugo and The Artist, the two films with the highest social media buzz before the Oscars (see chart below), took home a bunch of golden statues – but not so much for the less-discussed movies:

“Warhorse, which was an critically acclaimed movie, had poor marketing and missed out on any awards,” says Cypes.

This is the case even though Oscars are awarded by elite Academy members, demonstrating – like several recent PR fiascos in the tech industry – the power of the grassroots.

Fickleness, thy name is Internet. AddThis also notes that most sharing and searching was related to new actors: “Demian Bichir was not even on the radar until the nominations were announced.” The Internet is hungry for new trends, but digital memes and popularity come and go; no one seems to have cracked the code to virality yet.

“And what I’m interested in, is investing in people.” – Arthur Rock

A company can have the best concept for a product/service, perfect timing, and an endless access to capital, but without the right people, a startup’s days are numbered.  It’s the difference between the Titanic sinking and safely landing an engineless plane in the Hudson.

Sendhub, a simple messaging solution that enables businesses to send texts to groups of any size, has a promising crew around it.  Some of their accomplishments includes:

Garrett Johnson (co-founder):  Graduated from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in DC.

Ash Rust (co-founder):  Served as an officer in the British Army, graduated from Oxford, former Director of Ranking at Klout.

John Fallone (co-founder):  Competed in Track and Field for the Florida State Seminoles, currently completing his Juris Doctorate at the George Mason University School of Law.

How could you not be intruiged by this trio?  I caught up with the SendHub founders to talk about the importance of team, finding the perfect designer, and, of course, cocktails.

Tech Cocktail:  How did the team meet? 

Garrett Johnson:  John and I were on the track team together at FSU and lived together during undergrad.  When I moved to DC post-Rhodes, John and I lived together for another 2 years.  Ash and I went to grad school together at Oxford – we met on his first day.

Tech Cocktail:  What advice can you offer in regards to finding a good designer? What qualities are most important?

Ash Rust:  Firstly, I’d say don’t underestimate the importance of getting a good designer, nor how it long it will take. We’re lucky to have a great one but we went through at least 5 before finding him and the process was time consuming. Here’s what I did:

1. Pick some large/searchable resource of designers, e.g. dribble
2. Pick some relevant keywords, e.g. mobile, food, and search.
3. Now you should have a long list of potential designers.
4. Go through this list quickly by only keeping those with work that you love, no maybes.
5. Create a generic email template, including who you are, what you do, when you’d need them to start, and what their rate is.
6. Send it out and go through your responses, discount all those who aren’t available or within your price range. Should be ~10 left now.
7. Reply to the remaining asking to do a call to ensure there’s no personality conflicts.
8. On the call, ask them to do a 2 hour paid project to solve a design problem you have right now.
9. Keep only the ones you like from here and give them feedback on what you’d like to be changed. This is key, as you need to know how they respond to feedback.
10. Pick a winner.

Tech Cocktail:  What do you think constitutes the ideal startup team? How do you embody this? Are there areas for improvement? 

Ash: I’d say a group that can do everything: engineering, design, sales and product. Unfortunately, that’s not realistic, so to move a level higher, you need people who will get things done. Rockstars, ninjas and the like tend to be big talk wannabes, what you need is people who can isolate a problem, it’s market and get the product that addresses it out the door.

We’re still very early, so it remains to be seen if we embody any of this. We’d all like to ship things faster, be better at processing feedback and close more deals. I think anyone who feels they already have all the necessary skills to deal with what happens at a startup will be proven wrong but that could easily just be our experience.

John Fallone: Team-wise, I think multiple perspectives are invaluable, but there should be a heavy emphasis on the tech-side of things because they are the architects of the product. If your tech team isn’t strong, then the company will fail. Sales and business development is important to help the tech-side of the team determine the direction of the product. The sales and BD side can help steer the product development for the most useful and desired product.

In regards to the actual development of a company, the ideal startup team is one that has two qualities – recognition-ability and adaptability. Regardless of who is on the team and their respective backgrounds, a team that can recognize opportunities and problems will be able to develop a useful product, while avoiding pitfalls. The ability to adapt is the follow-through which delivers the end product – results.

Tech Cocktail:  There is certainly no lack of resume material on this team. Is a collision of egos ever an issue in the office? 

Ash: Every day we initially disagree on almost everything, except we want to build something that people want. We have a philosophy of strong opinions, weakly held; it certainly raises the office’s decibel reading but also makes sure all issues are out in the open.

John: Much like Ash says, I think we disagree a lot; but this is what makes a great team. In fact, I am pretty sure when we are editing our responses, we will disagree on what to keep and discard. But the beauty of a team is that we all bring different perspectives. Garrett’s background is in politics, Ash’s background is in tech and startups, and my background is in law and business. When we arrive at a contentious issue, we each bring a unique view that helps us form an action plan. When there is a yes or no question, we make a decision and the disagreeing party moves on. We all know that one decision is not make-or-break and we shouldn’t be offended by the outcome. Our banter sometimes reminds me of the discussions between representatives at the Constitutional Convention Debates.

Tech Cocktail:  ”How well do you know your fellow co-founder” test: What is your fellow co-founders’ favorite cocktail/adult beverage? 

Ash:  Garrett never used to drink but now it seems to be rum and Coke. John loves fruity drinks (Margaritas and Pina Coladas).

John:  Garrett doesn’t drink much, but rum and Cokes. Ash probably likes beer the best.

Garrett:  Ash drinks Sweet Tea Vodka and John’s favorite is Newcastle.

(Answer key: Ash – sweet tea vodka and lemonade; John - “fruity drinks”; Garrett – rum and Coke)

Raise your hand if you’ve worked at hourly retail or hospitality job.  Yeah, a lot of us have.  Remember filling out paper applications and scheduling interviews with the manager – which of course meant you had to travel to their location at least twice?

A new DC-based startup called JobOn wants to change that decades-old process.  Thanks to webcams and cloud technology, job seekers can record and upload a free video profile in which they answer standard interview questions and email it directly to hiring managers. The managers then have a better screening tool and can invite in only the best for a second interview.

JobOn launched last fall and has gained traction among both seekers and employers because it offers both the video application component and job listings.  Customers include restaurant chain Greene Turtle, franchisees for Quiznos and Dunkin’ Donuts, Pohanka Automotive Group, Zips Dry Cleaners, Verizon Wireless retailers, Amtrak and even Computer Sciences Corporation.

I interviewed CMO Chris Ourand via email about the tremendous need for and potential of JobOn.  Turns out they are in a great space: the online recruitment market is valued at $6 billion, which includes professional applicants.  In their segment for retail, restaurant, customer service and similar industries, there are 80 million workers and nine million workplaces.

What made you decide to launch this startup? 

CEO Jody Presti was walking through a shopping mall and saw a retail job applicant sitting on the floor filling out several paper applications; this was the same job-finding method he used as a teenager 20 years before.  Presti had just left a position at an online recruitment firm where he helped technical professionals use technology to get jobs, and he realized how broken the process still was for many seekers.

Why do you think you can solve the problem inherent with interviewing/hiring hourlies?

The need is tremendous.  Service-based industries that typically hire hourly workers have high turnover for various reasons.  Sometimes the employees return to school, have limited availability because of other activities, or they simply are not the right fit for the position.  As a result, the companies spend a significant amount of time finding and interviewing applicants, and when the screening tool is a paper or even online application, the basic information they contain is not enough to make an assessment.  Companies need to see and hear the applicants, so they consequently spend a lot of time in obligatory interviews with the wrong candidates.

JobOn is upending this model because it places the interview as the first step in the hiring process.  With recorded videos of applicants answering questions, companies have a powerful screening tool they use to make better hiring decisions.

What kind of success have your clients met with? 

According to feedback, JobOn simulates the job fair experience where customers can gauge applicants’ enthusiasm and other traits that are relevant for customer-facing and other positions.  There is a substantial reduction in the number of candidates they have to meet face to face, and for job candidates the experience allows them to create a personalized video profile that stands out among competing seekers with their paper applications.

How are you marketing your service to both job seekers and companies?

We have a direct sales force that has signed up customers, and we are also are reaching job seekers through partnerships with state agencies with career centers.  They help citizens get jobs and are using JobOn to do that and as a training tool.

Whether you’re selling tickets to a small yoga class or a large concert venue, this process can be synonymous with headache.  On one hand, you have the customizable software option, but that’s a massive upfront cost.  On the other, you can use a third-party client, but they’re going to ask for a large slice of the pie.  Both options have their obvious drawbacks.

Enter SimpleTix.

This DC-based startup “brings a professional-grade ticketing application to venues that do not have the time or budget to pay for custom e-Ticketing software.”   SimpleTix differentiates itself by being strong in three areas: features, price, and international customization.

Features

SimpleTix isn’t just a platform to sell tickets, it’s a full website.  Whereas other ticket applications only manage the sale of tickets, SimpleTix allows you to seamlessly include a full store to sell other complimentary products along side your tickets.  Additionally, SimpleTix fully communicates with your box office to keep one central inventory.

Price

Whereas other third party sites take more than $1 per ticket sold (plus a small percentage), SimpleTix takes only $0.50 for each ticket sold.

International customization

SimpleTix’s interface can easily switch between a variety of languages and currencies, making it a big player internationally.  ”We already work with over 23 international payment gateways,” says Aron Kansal, SimpleTix co-founder and CEO.  ”All of our advertising dollars are spent overseas and in Canada.  We don’t even bother with America, it’s too saturated.”

Although still relatively young, for Kansal, SimpleTix has been in the making for the better part of a decade:

“I did a lot of web design work to pay for my tuition.  I was hired by a small theatre in Canada to build a ticket sales platform from scratch.  It all evolved from there.”

Thus far, Kansal’s ticket platform has been entirely self-funded, but does not rule out financing moving forward.  Right now, however, he and his team are pre-occupied with improving the old and building new features.

SimpleTix was one of the featured startups at last week’s Tech Cocktail DC Mixer.  

If you were one of 999 who RSVP’d to attend DC Tech Meetup: Social Media Edition this past Wednesday, then you got a chance to enjoy Peter Corbett’s interview with Haroon Mokhtarzada, Co-Founder and CEO of Webs.com - “the world’s largest do-it-yourself website-creation solution,” which was acquired by Vistaprint in December 2011 for $117.5 mil.

If you missed this interview or want a short summary, here are a few takeaways:

•  On entrepreneurship: Do not sit on your ideas, execute them.

“It’s really important to actually start. Do the thing [startup] and it really doesn’t have to be perfect or thought through from the start.”

•  On raising capital: Know your investor. Venture capital may not be the right fit for your company.

“You have to realize what the venture capital firm means and what it wants. And what they are really looking for are very large opportunities. So, if you think you’ve got this great idea that if you do really well, you can get $5-10 mil in revenue, I actually wouldn’t recommend raising venture capital at all. Go to angel investors, because you create a lot of tension between yourself and venture partner, who keeps pushing you to get much bigger, while you are going after something different.”

•  On exiting vs raising more capital: Know what your competition is doing and analyze the potential of your revenue growth.  Selling your company at higher price in the future may not be achievable.

“On the one hand, you are waiting on the upside of continuing to grow, but there is a risk in doing that. Yes, you can continue to grow but you could flatten, and if you flatten out you basically become worthless. A lot of our competitors raised a lot of money. So, I felt that we either have to sell or raise more money. If you decide to raise more money, you add a lot more risk to the equation. Now you will have to sell the company for a much higher price and that’s a larger target to get.”

•  On early stage marketing: Use as many resources as possible, i.e. forums, directories.

“I did two things. One, I went to all the directories out there that had some place where we could list ourselves and just manually listed our site. I also went to Yahoo type websites and left replies to questions.”

If you are a startup founder or small business owner, it goes without saying that you are severely crunched for time.  How does a platform that brings together a powerful web presence, social networking, e-commerce, and business management tools in one place sound?  Pretty good, right?

Last night at our DC Winter Mixer, I got to see Dasdak’s social commerce platform in action, as they were one of our showcased startups.  They had a big team at the event doing demos – Greg Anderson walked me through it on an iPad.  I have to say that I was very impressed.

Founders Swaptak Das, Stephen Acott, and Panutat Khunachak really thought this idea through.  Because they all own small businesses, they know that most small business owners fail to take advantage of modern technologies such as mobile ordering, ecommerce, viral marketing, cloud storage, electronic bank transfers, or online job applications. As Marty Hauck, COO, explained:

“We realized that small business owners need free or affordable software solutions all in one platform to manage their operations. Business owners also need to leverage new technologies like mobile commerce to attract customers. As we built the system, we realized that we can have a major impact on customers, employees, and vendors – Dasdak can make everyone’s life a little easier.”

The founding team used themselves as guinea pigs, building the software and implementing it in their own small business in 2008 to test and perfect the system.  They processed over $9 million through the system, managed over 60 employees per year, and automated many business functions to save over $300,000 per year.

Hauck told me that the savings came from the combination of multiple solutions, rather than just one or two, and it really helped them through the terrible economy.  “We also concluded that having multiple solutions in one platform creates valuable synergies that save time and money,” Hauck said.  “So we designed and built Dasdak so other businesses, organizations, or individuals can leverage one or more solutions in our platform to streamline whatever they are doing.”

Their initial target market is hospitality and retail based businesses, but they built Dasdak so that it is flexible for almost any type of business out there – customers include professional sports teams, wholesale distribution companies, teachers, lawyers, sports camps, valet services, college residents halls, and apartment complexes.

Dasdak is currently looking to raise another angel seed round between $200,000 and $500,000.  More information is available on their website.

This past Wednesday, 20+ young entrepreneurs gathered across a 4-location telepresence, with one startup in each location pitching their concept and receiving feedback from the collected brainpower. The Startup Telepresence Roundtable at DC’s AT&T Innovation Center was a part of DC’s Social Media Week.

Last summer I wrote about ParkingPanda, a mobile, real-time parking discovery tool that lets users rent out their underutilized spaces to a community of drivers. Since then, ParkingPanda has grown in Baltimore and will be launching in Washington, DC in about one month.

I checked in with co-founder Nick Miller to hear about what’s new with the company as well as some lessons learned since launching last year. ParkingPanda has big plans for its DC launch, with peer-to-peer parking spaces as well as some major parking garage partners throughout the city. They’re hoping to leverage this coverage to help people find and reserve parking for everything from a dinner in Dupont to a Caps game at the Verizon Center.

Miller and his team are using their experiences in Baltimore to inform their expansion to the DC market. According to Miller, balancing peer-to-peer rentals with the parking garages ParkingPanda works with within a city is critical because both provide different value to customers. He’s hoping that understanding this balance will enable the company to expand more efficiently in DC;the team has its sights set on Philadelphia and Boston next. However, the team understands that timing is everything when deciding when to expand.

“First and foremost we want to make sure we have a strong grasp on DC and Baltimore to ensure we are servicing our customers in the best way possible,” he said.  “It will also be determined by the organic interest from those cities.  If we see a lot of people signing up in a new market we will adjust our launch date accordingly.”

If he had the chance to start up all over again, Miller wouldn’t do anything differently.

“Are there things I wish were different? Sure, but running a startup is a learning experience and all of the little failures along the way are critical to future success. If you never failed along the way you wouldn’t know what you were doing right or wrong. I think in the long run, the business will be stronger because of the things we’ve done wrong; it has given us the opportunity to learn and optimize.”

ParkingPanda was a featured startup at our Tech Cocktail DC Winter Mixer last night; if you didn’t make it to the event, be sure to check out their site.

Proving that DC is a hotbed of entrepreneurial spirit and creativity, we will be showcasing 12 startups at our DC Winter Mixer that offer everything from a fun way to find and share quotes to an affordable e-Ticketing software solution.  Meet the founding teams of the startups and other tech enthusiasts as we mix, mingle, and enjoy a few cocktails.  See you tonight!

ElectionGauge: provides real-time, hyper-localized data on social media response to electoral campaigns and politics.

Veenome: a video enabling platform that translates video content into machine-readable data for superior organization, publishing, searching and monetization.

RUNIN Out: your dining out concierge – tell them your favorite dishes, ingredients, or even your mood, and they will provide an interactive display of the top restaurant and dishes that will cater specifically to your needs.

Weekly Eats: simplifies the process of cooking and grocery shopping so you no longer have to hunt through a database to find recipes you want to make.

Quotogram: an app where you can discover and share quotes.

SimpleTix: provides a professional, customizable event registration and ticketing application for venues and organizations looking for affordable, custom e-Ticketing software.

Parking Panda: a community marketplace for parking. Parking space owners earn money by renting their spaces and drivers get cheap and easy parking.

YoBucko: a personal finance site for people in their twenties that equips them with the knowledge and tools needed for financial success.

Dasdak: a social commerce platform that is revolutionizing the way customers connect to businesses on the web.

LemurIMS: an inventory management system that creates amazing personal shopping experiences to save the customer money and move retailers’ inventory at the highest revenue and profit

LunchMix: helps DC-area professionals find lunch dates.

Sponto: a location-based social networking mobile app that allows users to see what events are currently trending in their proximity.