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Business Insider
Alyson Shontell
DreamIt Ventures, a multi-city startup accelerator program like TechStars and Y Combinator, has selected 16 startups for its summer session in New York.
The three-month program gives each startup a stipend of up to $25,000 and mentorship. There’s a Demo Day at the end attended by press and investors. Some of the better known startups to come out of DreamIt are SCVNGR, Adaptly, Winston and SeatGeek.
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On Friday, May 10, 2013 from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm, DreamIt Ventures – in conjunction with Comcast Ventures and Startl – will be hosting a kickoff party at Google to meet the DreamIt New York 2013 companies and other members of the New York and Philadelphia entrepreneurial communities.
We will be providing light snacks and a short program as well as your first opportunity to meet the companies that have been selected to participate in the Summer 2013 accelerator program. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!
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Easy app creation, outside of the land of Ruby and Python, has become a huge phenomenon in the last year. And the latest company to join the fold, AppArchitect, is launching straight from our Disrupt NY stage.
AppArchitect lets you build custom iPhone and iPad apps using a simple drag-and-drop interface. That’s right — you need zero coding experience to build your own iPhone app. It’s a brand new world.
Once you log in to the AppArchitect system, you’ll be asked whether you want to make an iPad or iPhone app. From there, you head straight into a dashboard complete with a Screens tab, Library tab with default background and picture options, and a Properties tab where you can handle styling. You can drag and drop backgrounds, images, add text, maps, or links.
From there, you can test and review your app before submitting it to the App Store for approval.
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LevelUp has partnered with Merchant Warehouse today to launch a $1 million co-sponsored development fund designed to encourage more developers to build apps leveraging its mobile payments platform.
LevelUp has its own iOS and Android app, which users can link to their credit or debit card and then pay for goods using an on-screen QR code.
The technology was supported by hardware running Genius, a unified platform created by Merchant Warehouse, in October last year. The various readers integrate a number of different transaction methods, payment types and customer loyalty schemes to give merchants a ‘one size fits all’ solution for accepting mobile payments.
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Ross Kenneth Urken
Main Street
NEW YORK (MainStreet) —Bridesmaids dresses are notoriously divisive among wedding parties. But for What’s wURKEN?, Brideside CEO Nicole Staple unveiled how her company tries to use an online algorithm to ease tensions and boost style.
Journeying from a tech incubator in Philadelphia and launching a pop-up shop in Chicago, the Boston-based company is looking to disrupt the way we purchase the most contentious item in fashion.
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Marcia Wade Talbert
Black Enterprise
Jonathan Gosier, a TED senior fellow alum, founded MetaLayer with business partner Matthew Griffithsin 2011 to help non-technical users perform data-driven research such as trend spotting in big data sets, predictive analytics, and visualization using drag and drop data science technology. As an open-source product, the Philadelphia-based company works seamlessly with other data management platforms.
“To get the data you usually have to go to the IT department, accounting department, and other departments,” says Gosier, an alum of the accelerator DreamIt Ventures. “They need SalesForce for their sales data, Quickbooks for their business data. All of these are different technologies and different environments that you have to learn and it can be overwhelming. With our product you can essentially do it all with Metalayer.”
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Elise Vider
Key Stone Edge
Go figure. FastFig, a startup developed in Easton, launched in Bethlehem and, for the moment, quartered in Philadelphia, has gotten its biggest visibility so far at Austin’s recent South by Southwest fest. And it appears poised for exponential growth.
Billed as a “word processor for math,” FastFig is a cloud-based tool that allows students to do math online – everything from basic arithmetic through algebra to calculus – typing and solving problems in the program without the need to go back-and-forth with calculators, paper and pencil.
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Juliana Reyes
Technically Philly
WHO’S GETTING FUNDED?
First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund invested an undisclosed amount in Dagne Dover, a Brooklyn-based handbag and accessories retailer, the New York Times reported in a recent feature on the student-run investment fund. Dagne Dover cofounder Deepa Gandhi is a Wharton MBA student.
First Round Capital announced participation in two investments this week, including a $5 million round for Palo Alto, Calif.-based food delivery service EAT and a $9.1 million round for Boston-area coupon service SavingStar.
Comcast Ventures co-led a $30 million round for Silicon Valley-based Youtube network Fullscreen, AllThingsD reported.
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Stereotypes is a music messaging app for iOS focused on building groups and sharing music as messages. I spoke last week with CEO Jason Keck about the experience of developing the app, incubating at Dreamit Ventures and plans to include features that will support marketing by musicians, music festivals and music bloggers.
Before Stereotypes became an iOS music app, it went through a phase as a web app that helped people find others with similar taste in music. That wasn’t exciting users so when Co-founders Jason Keck and Eric Bogs spent three months in a tech incubator, Dreamit Ventures in Austin, they redeveloped the app for mobile with a focus on groups of friends sharing music.
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Dana Henry
Flying Kite Media
DreamIt Ventures – the Philly-based accelerator that helped launch SnipSnap and CloudMine – is tackling a particularly challenging industry: Healthcare.DreamIt Health, which launched April 8, focuses solely on companies in healthcare IT.
The accelerator’s first class features ten companies including AirCare, a company developed by VenturePact that helps minimize re-admissions through mobile nursing; Osmosis, a tool that helps clinicians retain vast amounts of knowledge during medical training; and Medilo, a mobile healthcare card that details benefits and eliminates the need for forms.
