Feb
16
LevelUp Expands to 4 More Cities, Doubling Footprint
News & Updates / Portfolio / SCVNGR / posted on
February 16th, 2012 — No comments
by Steven Jacobs
Mobile payment and loyalty app LevelUp launched in four new markets today, doubling its footprint a little over three months after leaving Beta. The app, a sibling of location-based social discovery app SCVNGR, is now available in Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, and Atlanta, in addition to its launch markets of Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and San Fransisco.
LevelUp brings SCVNGR’s signature game mechanics to the loyalty space, allowing users to seamless participate in rewards programs created by local merchants. Users pay by scanning a QR generated within the consumer application through a separate merchant application, which is available on any android device.
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Feb
14
This Valentine’s Day, Find Your Perfect Political Match
ElectNext / News & Updates / Portfolio / posted on
February 14th, 2012 — No comments
by Keya Dannenbaum
…For many romantics seeking the perfect partner, the Internet is increasingly the most fruitful resource. A plethora of websites have carefully developed and honed algorithms to decipher that most elusive of riddles — the human heart. They cull from among millions and find you your perfect match. And if their proliferation is any testament, it seems to work.
If only there were such a solution for politics. Surely if a computer can help me find my mate for life, it can get me through the next four to eight years.
An OkCupid for political candidates… sounds fabulous, right? Good news: It’s not just a pipe dream.Indeed, as noted in the O’Reilly Radar (in response to the original O’Reilly tweet), FastCompany, TechCocktailand elsewhere… it’s already here. In the form of the newcomer political tech startup, ElectNext.
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Feb
13
Startup Labs opens in Taipei, here are the five teams that made the cut!
Flirq / News & Updates / Portfolio / posted on
February 13th, 2012 — No comments
by James Hill
Leading figures from the entrepreneurial communities in Silicon Valley, Europe, and Taiwan descended on Microsoft’s Taipei offices last Friday to find out which five teams had made it through to the inaugural batch of Startup Labs, the new global initiative spearheaded by Clint Nelsen, co-founder of Startup Weekend and Arkady Moreynis, a prominent Internet entrepreneur and investor from Russia.
The 22-day acceleration program awards teams 1,000,000 NTD (~US$30,000) in exchange for 8% of company equity. Here’s what you need to know about the teams who stood out during the rigorous selection process:
Flirq
Flirq puts the women in charge of the dating process, offering users a safe and fun place for people to meet. The team is a graduate of Philadelphia’s DreamIt Ventures incubator, and has honed their product on the university campuses in the same city. The draw for the guys is that once a woman is interested she will contact you, raising the chances of a successful match, avoiding awkward exchanges and painful rejection.
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Feb
09
Smarterer, Senexx, & Take the Interview: Some Talent Management News
News & Updates / Portfolio / TakeTheInterview / posted on
February 9th, 2012 — No comments
by Gregory Huang.
Today’s West Coast announcement that Oracle is buying human resources management firmTaleo for $1.9 billion—yes, billion—puts some Boston-area talent and recruiting startups in a new light. Unfortunately, one of them is no longer in Boston…
—Take the Interview, the video-based recruiting startup and former Dogpatch Labs Cambridge resident, has relocated to New York City (SoHo to be more exact). It’s not a big surprise, as the company was part of the DreamIt Ventures startup program in New York last summer. Take the Interview, led by CEO Danielle Weinblatt,raised a seed funding round last September.
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Feb
03
Take the Interview names Ty Abernethy Vice President of Operations & Announces Relocation to New York City
News & Updates / Portfolio / TakeTheInterview / posted on
February 3rd, 2012 — 1 comment
Take the Interview, a video interviewing solution that enables employers to ask candidates their most important questions via asynchronous video interviewing, announced today that Ty Abernethy, a seasoned recruiting professional, has joined the company as Vice President of Operations. Abernethy will oversee the daily operations at Take the Interview and contribute his industry knowledge and relationships for business development.
“It will be great to have Ty on board given his experience and it’s even better that he knows HR technology inside and out. We’re also excited to bring on someone who’s going to be a great leader. He’s already demonstrated that in a short time,” says Danielle Weinblatt, Founder and CEO of Take the Interview.
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Feb
01
How LevelUp aims to shake up mobile payments
News & Updates / Portfolio / SCVNGR / posted on
February 1st, 2012 — No comments
by Roger Cheng
When people think mobile payments, they think about the act of paying for goods by waving a smartphone at the cash register. But I’m more interested in the implications that come from the capability. You’re seeing it now with the introduction of Google Wallet, which wants to use payment history to better serve discounts and advertisements. It’s what comes next that is so exciting.
But as we’re seeing with Google Wallet, as well as other attempts to bring mobile payments to the market, adoption is pretty tough. Using Google’s service, for instance, requires you to be a Sprint customer using the Nexus S. (The Galaxy Nexus for Verizon Wireless still can’t support it.) It also requires the retailer to support a technology called near-field communication, or NFC, which many don’t.
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Feb
01
SW-Born CloudMine is Now a Startup Weekend Global Sponsor | Startup Weekend
Cloudmine / News & Updates / Portfolio / posted on
February 1st, 2012 — No comments
Startup Weekend is thrilled to welcome an alumni as our newest Global Sponsor! CloudMine, a startup born at Startup Weekend Philly in February 2011, has come full circle and is now offering their support and services to the entire Startup Weekend community.
Born at Startup Weekend
CloudMine co-founders Brendan McCorkle and Marc Weil met at what was each their first Startup Weekend. On that Friday night, Brendan pitched an idea related to consumer data backup for mobile phones, and although the pitch received lots of votes, there wasn’t a developer on the team to start building the team’s vision. Despite the lack of technical work, Marc, who had worked with another team, was still intrigued by the idea. Although they were strangers before SW Philly, once they started working, Brendan and Marc realized they had a shared vision, complementary skills (business and tech), and both had previous entrepreneurial experience. They decided to work together on what would become CloudMine.
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Feb
01
Video Interviewing: Smile for Me
News & Updates / Portfolio / TakeTheInterview / posted on
February 1st, 2012 — No comments
Video Interviewing. When introduced to the space, it was all people could do to not literally clutch their pearls and faint dead away.
What about EEOC?
What if someone claimed discrimination?
What if the technology was too hard to futz with?
It was not accepted with open arms right off the bat. Companies like HireVue, GreenJobInterview and TakeTheInterview tried to explain away people’s fears, citing reduced cost for interviews, environmental benefits and snazzy collaboration features. So why are people still slow to adopt?
Blogger and HR Professional Jason Buss points out that the benefits are real in a four part series where he notes:
Done right, video interviewing is an end-to-end brandable solution that download-free, scalable and configurable to your workflow. It offers distinct capabilities and advantages: panel interviewing, enhanced candidate experience and engagement, and candidate support. Best of all, video interviewing is a solution drives higher quality hires and enhances your brand while reducing costs.
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Jan
27
KeepRecipes creates an iTunes for cookbooks
KeepIdeas / News & Updates / Portfolio / posted on
January 27th, 2012 — No comments
by Kevin Fitchard
Online community cooking portal KeepRecipes launched an “iTunes for recipes” on Friday, in hopes of building an online marketplace for culinary ideas where cooks and gastronomic publishers can buy and sell individual digital recipe cards and eventually whole cookbooks.
KeepRecipes is starting out small. It’s signed deals to distribute the contents of five cookbooks from two publishers, Gooseberry Patch’s 101 Recipes and Harvard Common Press’s Not Your Mother’s cookbook series. The site is also hosting individual recipes from seven famous chefs and authors, including Masaharu Morimoto of Iron Chef fame and New York Times food columnist and cookbook writer Mark Bittman – giving the portal’s members access to 1000 different dishes, priced at 99 cents each. But CEO and founder Phil Michaelson said he’s hoping he can build off that small core of cuisine, proving to publishers that there’s money to be made distributing their cookbooks online and convincing consumers that some online recipes are worth paying for.
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Jan
26
T-Mobile Takes LevelUp Partnership Further With Merchant Terminals
News & Updates / Portfolio / SCVNGR / posted on
January 26th, 2012 — No comments
by Sarah Kessler
T-Mobile is taking its partnership with mobile payment startupLevelUp a step further by powering phone-enabled payment terminals for its merchants.
These terminals, which come in nifty shoebox-sized kits and can be ordered on the LevelUp website, are really just phone docking stations that come with custom LG smartphones. The phone runs a version of Android that can only processes LevelUp payments. LevelUp users will pay at the new terminals by scanning a LevelUp QR code on their own phones.
Users don’t store any money within a LevelUp account. Rather, they link a credit or debit card to their accounts the same way that Starbucks links a gift card to its app. Merchants can add rewards to LevelUp that are already waiting for customers the first time that they use the app, and customers earn free credit at that merchant every time they spend money there using the app.
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