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11 Promising Startups Selected For Morgenthaler Ventures Health Startup Competition

Thomas Oppong — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:47:37 +0000

Morgenthaler Ventures, a venture capital firm, has announced the 11 finalists of their nationwide contest to find the most promising health IT startups looking for seed and Series-A funding. The 11 company founders will present in front of leading venture capitalists, angel investors and entrepreneurs at a gathering dedicated to health IT innovation on September 22.

The 11 finalists of the DC to VC: HIT Startup Showcase are grouped into two categories: companies seeking either seed or Series-A funding. They include:

Seed-Stage Finalists:

Careticker is the world’s first platform that helps patients plan in advance for a hospital or outpatient procedure. (Miami, FL)

EyeNetra is one of the most affordable mobile eye diagnostic ever developed, allowing anyone to take their own eye test, get a prescription for glasses, and connect to eye-care providers all on a mobile phone. (Cambridge, MA)

Skimble powers the mobile wellness movement with a cross-platform ecosystem of fun and dynamic coaching applications. Its latest title, Workout Trainer, ranks Top 10 in the free Healthcare & Fitness category on iPhone/iPad. (San Francisco, CA)

SurgiChart is a mobile, cloud-based, social-clinical network for surgeons to exchange relevant perioperative, case-centric information. (Nashville, TN)

Telethrive provides patients an instant connection to doctors for a medical consultation using any telephone or computer with complete audio and video conferencing. (Los Angeles, CA)

Viewics provides hospitals with cloud-based analytics and business intelligence solutions which enable them to drive enhanced operational, financial and clinical outcomes. (San Francisco, CA)

Series-A Finalists:

AbilTo develops and delivers online mental health programs to managed care members and enterprise workforces that help reduce payor costs while improving overall health outcomes. (New York, NY)

Axial Exchange moves healthcare organizations towards pay-for-performance, enabling providers to coordinate care and measure clinical quality across disparate settings. (Raleigh, NC)

Empower Interactive’s online services deliver proven psychotherapy methodologies via an e-learning platform to greatly improve the economics and accessibility of mental and behavioral health solutions. (San Francisco, CA)

Jiff is the first HIPAA-compliant iPad platform for patient education in the medical industry –used by doctors, nurses, patients and more. (San Francisco, CA)

YourNurseIsOn.com employs bi-directional text, phone and email communications to help hospitals and agencies put “the right healthcare providers, in the right places, right now.” (New Haven, CT)

CareyinSync, a real-time care collaboration platform for smart-mobile devices such as iPhones or iPads to radically transform patient care, was an honorable mention (referred by BluePrint Health IT).

Room 77, A Hotel Search Engine Raises $10.5M In A Series B Round

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:57:58 +0000

Room 77, a hotel search engine to reveal room-specific details, today announced it has secured $10.5 million in Series B financing. The round was led by General Catalyst Partners with participation from existing institutional and angel investors, including PAR Capital Management; Sutter Hill Ventures; Felicis Ventures; Rich Barton, founder of Expedia and co-founder of Zillow; and Erik Blachford, former president of IAC Travel.

Room 77, which officially launched in public beta in February, has collected and indexed data on more than 500,000 hotel rooms in 2,500 properties and also crowdsources reviews and ratings from travelers.

The site provides travelers with specific details about each hotel room at a property, including the room category, square footage, bed type, elevator proximity and if it is a connecting room. For each room, Room 77 also generates a virtual Room View, simulating the actual view from that room’s window using Google Earth-enabled technology.

200 of The Best Resources To Help You Raise Venture Capital

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:26:20 +0000

Venture Capital firms screen through hundreds–if not thousands–of investment “opportunities” each month. To differentiate yourself from your competitors, it’s important to avoid mistakes and and make the best presentation of documents, pitches and demos. The following resources will be useful as you seek funds for your startup.

Vfinance – A directory of venture capitalists, angel investors, and business plan templates.
Forbes Midas List – A list of the top 100 venture capitalists for the year 2009.
The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint – Before you make a powerpoint that showcases your company and how much money you are raising, you should read this.
How to Raise Venture Capital – An detailed overview on how you can raise money.
Venture Hacks – A blog for entrepreneurs that discusses everything about venture capital.
The Funded – An online community of entrepreneurs to research, rate, and review funding sources worldwide.-Over 200 articles and guides on everything you need to know about raising venture capital
How To Raise Venture Dollars – Ben Elowitz who has raised over 40 million dollars breaks down the tricks to raising money.
Paul Graham – Awesome essays about venture capital and entrepreneurship.
The Capital Fund -21 tips for SME’s Raising Venture Capital
Entrepreneur’s Guide To Raising Venture Capital – Over 200 articles on everything you need to know about raising venture capital.

Techstars NYC: All 11 Most Promising Startups

Thomas Oppong — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:32:52 +0000

TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment program. It is a three-month long program in Boston (MA), Boulder (CO), New York City (NY) and Seattle (WA) once each year.

Each year hundreds of companies apply and only about ten companies are selected per city. These companies get up to $18,000 in seed funding, three months of intensive top-notch mentorship, and the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program. TechStars takes a 6 percent equity stake in each startup in common stock.

TechStars NYC have wide support from the New York venture and angel community which includes AOL Ventures, DFJ Gotham Ventures, FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital, Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Jove Ventures, Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures, Social Leverage, Village Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, many top NYC area angel investors, and more.

This year Techstars NYC selected 11 most promising startups to demo from a pool of 600 applicants. They are:

Nestio wants to get rid of apartment search headaches with a clean, organized interface. Nestio wants to simplify the process by allowing users to easily mark all of the housing information they find for later viewing on its site.

ThinkNear drives customers to local merchants when business is slow by blasting people nearby with coupons.

Immersive brings Minority Report to life by using facial recognition technology to make OOH ads relevant.

Friendslist wants to remove the middle man from the equation and create a network of social listings/classified ads via friends and friends of friends.

OnSwipe wants to “make it insanely easy for a publisher of any size to make websites look app-like on every mobile device, without actually creating apps.”

CrowdTwist helps companies find their most loyal users and reward them for promoting the brand to social networks.

Migration Box helps people migrate everything, including email messages, contacts, documents and appointments, to the cloud.

ToVieFor wants to close the gap between what a product is actually worth and what it sells for by holding auctions.

Red Rover is a peer-to-peer learning platform that helps businesses eliminate wasted time.

Shelby.tv aggregates all the video links your friends share on social networks and turns them into one, customized channel.

Veri wants to take all the world’s content and turn it into a fun trivia game online, created by users.

Top 7 Investor Firms In New York You Can Contact For Funding

Thomas Oppong — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:09:50 +0000

Startups either bootstrap and later seek for funds from angel investors or venture capitalists. At each stage in building a company entrepreneurs access their funding requirements and apply for funding. If you intend to source for funding, one of the following firms might be of assistance to you. Contact them for details of how they can help.

First Round Capital is a venture capital firm is committed to providing funds for founders and assisting them build great companies.

Founder Collective is a seed-stage venture capital fund, built by a collection of successful entrepreneurs.

Polaris Venture Partners invests in seed and early stage companies and in growth equity companies with substantial operating income.

Spark Capital is a venture fund focused on the conflux of the media, technology, and entertainment industries.

RRE Ventures focuses on expansion stage information technology ventures.

Union Square Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm.

Zelkova Ventures early stage venture capital firm specializing in software-as-a-service and digital media.

Six Startups To Pitch At Open Angel Forum

Thomas Oppong — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:27:00 +0000

The Boston edition of Jason Calacanis’ Open Angel Forum is taking place on June 18th. Calacanis established the Open Angel Forum (OAF) to provide entrepreneurs and startups with free and open access to angel investors. OAF has held sessions in LA, New York, Silicon Valley and Boulder.

The following startups are scheduled to present their ideas or products to investors.

Textaurant’s web-based waiting list management technology allows restaurant patrons to get stuff done nearby while they wait for a table. Textaurant will alert people on a restaurant’s wait list via a text message when a table is ready.

Keenkong, helps manage the social media overload for marketers. Keenkong semantically segments the conversations taking place on Facebook and Twitter by topic (what), by intentions (why), by network size and more.

Zazuba is an appointment booking service that allows consumers to view appointment availability at local businesses in realtime.

Venalytica develops an SaaS product, Consumer Preference Analytics, that gives retailers greater insight into the way consumers find and purchase products online and in stores. The product allows consumers to indicate the strength of their preferences for product or service features resulting in a ranked list of choices on a retail or consumer research website.

Tasted Menu provides a centralized, structured destination addressing two of the most pressing questions regularly faced by diners: “What’s good to eat here?” and

Techstars Boston: Top 9 Startups from Boston

Thomas Oppong — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:36:02 +0000

TechStars debuted nine new startups from the inaugural Boston class this month. The teams presented to about 200 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are few months old and have two or three founder employees. TechStars debuted nine new startups from the inaugural Boston class.

TempMine is looking to change the temporary staffing market. Temp workers create a profile on TempMine that is automatically updated as placements occur, providing more transparency and traceability to the process. Employers can search directly for temps across the inventory of multiple agencies, finding the right fit. Agencies retain control over placements of their best temps. The temp agency only gets involved after the employer finds the exact temp they want.

LangoLab is the most entertaining way to learn a new language—by watching popular TV shows and videos with subtitles. LangoLab leverages the American media machine that is constantly churning out entertaining content and then provides an engaging “watch and learn” experience complete with translations, definitions, user generated language notes, and self testing. Many people have learned English just by watching TV with subtitles, and this is the online equivalent. English as a second language is the largest market

Localytics provides mobile usage data and analytics for the mobile market, similar to companies such as Flurry and Medialets. Localytics says that it has both real time and “deeper” analytics than the competitors, allowing you to slice and dice the data in a variety of ways to gain better and more immediate insight into the usage of mobile applications. They also explained that they’ve open sourced critical components so that developers can know exactly what they’re putting into their applications, and that their mobile components are highly optimized for performance. Localytics is cross platform and already supports Blackberry, Android, and iPhone applications, with Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Palm planned for the near future.

AmpIdea is working on web-enabled baby monitoring as a platform for delivery of various services such as video monitoring, sleep tracking and analysis, statistical comparison, music streaming, and even an integrated baby encyclopedia (Baby 411) which suggests techniques to soothe sleeping babies based on age. While they’re at it, they’re using wifi as the delivery mechanism for audio and video monitoring, which eliminates the static and range issues that plagues traditional baby monitors. The sleep scheduling monitor keeps a record of when the baby is sleeping and waking up over time. This helps the parents schedule when to put the baby down for naps and night time sleep. AmpIdea sells the monitor hardware and charges for additional services.

HaveMyShift has built a tool that allows hourly shift workers to trade shifts online. The company is using a grassroots approach and encourages employees to sign up and trade shifts with or without the blessing of the company itself. They’re seeing strong viral adoption in the Chicago area market where, for example, 80% of Starbucks stores there already use the application. Many of the listings offer “bonus money” to tempt others who work for the same employer to pick up a shift, and last-minute shift changes can be filled with paid emergency promotional placement. HaveMyShift makes money by taking a percentage of the bonuses offered to other workers to cover a shift.

oneforty is creating an app store for Twitter applications, open to any developer who wants to build and sell a Twitter app. The company organizes the apps by category, allows for ratings, media coverage, profiles (showing what applications are used by various users), and the necessary e-commerce infrastructure. Oneforty takes a percentage of every sale.

AccelGolf 30,000 golfers are already using AccelGolf, after just 3 months in beta, for stroke tracking, range-finding, and personalized improvement of their golf games. The company showed off their BlackBerry and iPhone applications and explained that the heart of their system is really the community of avid golfers who are now connecting and building their own social network. AccelGolf offers personalized improvement tips by analyzing strokes of golfers who are just slightly better than you, and presenting areas for improvement based on your past performance. AccelGolf suggests which club to use, and where to place the shot, based on your past performance on a specific course.

Baydin uses email, and the words in the email, to create keywords to search for other relevant information. It is similar to Xobni, but goes beyond email data and searches all the files on your hard drive, and document repositories across your corporate network. It automatically launches the search in the background while you are reading the email, and presents the relevant results in a side panel in Outlook.

Sensobi bills itself as a personal relationship manager (PRM) and also reminds me a lot of Xobni , but it goes beyond email and looks at phone calls and other activity on your phone contact list. In practice, it’s a BlackBerry address book replacement that shows you the last time you communicated with your contacts, who’s falling off your radar, and who you need to get back to quickly. You can set a reminder for each contact to remind you to connect with them within a specific time interval. It does this by analyzing the email, contacts, text messages, and phone calls on your Blackberry and then presenting your contacts in a relationship-focused view. For any contact you can see the last several communications of any kind with them.