While in California for the summer I met two yobongo friends offline, Emmanuel @jewgonewild and Ben @benbinary who were  just getting started working on a new iPhone app to make it easy to invite your friends when going out. The app was called Whim @getwhim on twitter. Yesterday Whim launched in Apple’s App store [iTunes Link] . It’s great to see the progress that Emmanuel and Ben have made since the summer.

At it’s core whim allows you to do the following:

• Quickly share plans with friends
• See what friends are up to
• Find places to go, together
• Stay connected with real-time chat

Take a look a whim via the screenshots below.

Whim joins the growing trend of new apps to invite your friends to locations vs letting your firends know where you’re at after you have checked into a location. I all it “friends availability around location discovery”.

For more about whim visit: getwhim.com .

Congrats Emmanuel and Ben!

Have you invited your friends on a Whim yet?

Software developer, entrepreneur, and general geek, Chris is a vocal and omnipresent figure in Cambodia’s burgeoning hacker community. Chris has founded or partnered in several software startups which are proud to have built their products in Cambodia and sold them globally. Chris is an active member of the Barcamp movement, attending and speaking at events across the region, and is also a founding member of the up-and-coming Phnom Penh HackerSpace. Chris’s vision is for Cambodia’s software sector to leap-frog its neighbors by skipping IT outsourcing and moving straight to product-focused startups fueled by the entrepreneurial spirit that Cambodia has in abundance.

Hat Tip: Carla Mays from Building While Brown West Facebook Group

TEDx was created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading.” The program is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.

startupquote:

The most dangerous poison is the feeling of achievement. The antidote is to every evening think what can be done better tomorrow.

via

- Ingvar Kamprad

Black In America 4 spoiler alert, spoiler alert! (not really)but Black In America 4 airs tonight 8pm on CNN. The subtitle is Silicon Valley, the new promise land narrated by Soledad O’Brien. The base of story about Black In America 4 is the NewME Accelerator which I help plan/organize with Angela Benton and also as a participated in as an entrepreneur. CNN heard about the project via a Wall Street Journal Article and the rest I guess you can is history. You’ll see tonight right?

The leading producer is Jason Samuels and while Soledad O’Brien is the host we spent most of our time with Jason Samuels and his crew. The CNN Black In America production crew was great and was nice to work with. I want to say a special thank you to not only Jason but to Garland McLaurin, Kim, Mark, Ronnie Stevenson IV, Henry and more.

Some of the questions I received during the pre-screening interviews were, what was it like living in the NewME Accelerator startup house, was it like a reality TV show, how much of the documentary was real vs staged. I couldn’t answer to many of those questions before last week because I was not in attendance to any of the pre-screening until Wednesday. Now that I’ve seen it I’ll say that the documentary is not stage at all and it’s 99% accurate BUT it’s also only about 10% of everything that happen this summer.

To be fair Jason Samuels wanted two hours or at least 90 minutes for Black In America 4 but CNN only gave him one hour for the show. That’s tough to try to fit everything in one hour especially when CNN recorded over 300 hours worth of footage this summer. Regardless I’m very grateful for the one hour.

With that being said, while watching Black In America 4, Silicon Valley, The New Promise Land tonight keep in mind the notes below of things you won’t see while the cameras were rolling this summer.

1. Coffee shops in Mountain View, CA – The NewME startup house was in Mountain View, CA & many of the founders worked out of Red Rock Cafe, StarBucks and the Mountain View Library
2. Three other startups in NewME Accelerator 2011 were One School, Central.ly and AisleFinder
3. The NewME Accelerator had over 25+ different great mentor and speakers. You can see them here http://www.newmeaccelerator.com/speakers-mentors/
4. Coworking – We did a lot of coworking from Citizen Space, Tagged and at the NewMe startup house
5. Black Founders welcome event. Our first Sunday in CA, Black Founders held a meetup/welcome event. Thanks again.
6. About the midway point we had a “practice” pitch session at Blue Run Ventures, with Jay Jamison. This was a big deal, Blue Run Ventures is known as where paypal was funded.
7. There were some amazing speaker dinners at the house. Two notable ones were with Tristan Walker right after his birthday and with Shellye Archambeau.
8. Mentor sessions at Tagged. It was great to see how both mentors and the founders interacted
9. Dinner with Soledad O’Brien at the NewME startup house. That was an interesting, fun day.
10. The cookouts! Hank Williams was the man on the grill. You’ll see some of that in the documentary.
11. The July 4 cookout was epic! Come on, 8 black people in one house, you know we were having a cookout on July 4th.
12. Driving… I mean a lot of driving. The house was in Mountain View and a lot of our meetings/mentor sessions were in San Francisco. Not to mention giving people rides.
13. There was a lot of trash in the house, I mean, it was.. ok you can use your imagination.
14. Dirty Dishes … we told everyone to clean up after themselves but somehow I did a lot of dish washing. #justsayin
15. Hajj Flemings after dark.. that was the saying after midnight but it wasn’t just Hajj we had some epic/funny conversations late at night.
16. Google sent various team members from Youtube, App Engine, Android and Oath to talk with us. Thanks Google.
17. Tagged, I can’t say enough about Tagged. The cofounders gave us an awesome talk, they hosted us for coworking and the closing party.
18. Pizza… that is all.
19. Keep in mind that we started planning NewME Accelerator around February/March 2011
20. Demo day was great! A big thanks to Mitch Kapor and team at Kapor Capital for hosting us. I wish you could see all of the demo day pitches.
21. Stephen DeBerry and Stephen Adams. I don’t care what color you are, if you ever get a chance to talk with either one of these guys. Value it, listen and learn.
22. The Fights! …wait. we didn’t have any fights. Sorry to disappoint you but there were a few heated conversations at times. All in the family.
23. Jason Samuels, as the Black In America 4 producer he’s behind the camera. He’s a great guy and I appreciate him reaching out about filming us for Black In America 4.
24. To be fair…I was wearing a baseball cap. Watch the documentary & you’ll understand.
25. We met MC Hammer and Chamillionaire. Both were interviewed about NewMe and Silicon Valley but it didn’t make the cut.
26. Here’s the roommate format:
Tiffani Bell with Angela Benton
Crisson Jno-Charles with Hajj Flemings
Anthony Fraiser with Wayne Sutton
Pius Uzamere (dinning room air mattress)
Hank Williams (outside room air mattress)

Please don’t read this as a dis or as if Black In America 4 is not going to be good, it’s still must watch tech tv!. A big thank you to Jason Samuels, CNN, Soledad O’Brien, all of the NewME Accelerator, speakers, mentors, sponsors and the Silicon Valley community.

Enjoy the documentary!

Reminder
Watch CNN Black In America 4 this Sunday 8pm EST on CNN and then go to your computer to watch the official after Black In America 4 online live video panel and discussion with Mario Armstrong called “Innovation Nation:Startup Success”. Join us in the live chat, google hangout and more as we’ll talk about Black In America 4, Silicon Valley and more. We’ll also take questions from the online audience. When tweeting about the online live broadcast use the hashtag #bialive. The Black In America 4 hashtag is #blackinamerica. For more information about the live broadcast visit: http://www.marioarmstrong.com/on-air/innovation-nation-the-official-live-webcast/

Vouch Demo Day Slide Deck:

Founded:
Wayne Sutton co-founded Vouch in July 2011.

What is Vouch?
Vouch is a unified platform that allows people to share recommendations of others in their networks.

The status of Vouch
I’m currently learning new programming languages to build, design and launch a beta version of Vouch by the end of first quarter 2012, along with preparing to work with the NewMe Accelerator 2012 class. I’m also working on my first book, which is about closing the digital divide.

Great post from Curtiss Pope, CEO/Founder of Aislefinder a NewME Accelerator startup participate about Anthony Frasier founder of Playd where he calls Anthony the new face of Black Startups. If you’re wondering why, wait until you see Anthony in Black In America 4 on Sunday. Here’s an excerpt from the post.

 

I remember going over to the NewMe startup house ,and almost each time I was leaving; talking with him about a range of things: girls, music, tech, gaming, the new things he was learning about Silicon Valley.

Over the course of the summer, I started noticing things about him:

Anthony was the only one in the house that didn’t have a MacBook Pro.

Although he did have an iPad, he never bent into the social geek pressure of having that big Apple logo emblazoned on his rig.

He is just COOL.

Ask anyone that got to know him, and this is the word that they describe him with.

Gaming is his forte.

Anthony had this ability to get people excited about gaming. Even a guy like me who doesn’t even play.

Anthony doesn’t look back.

I would say the same thing about Tiffani Ashley Bell, founder of Pencil You In except she has a MackBook Pro; in terms of coolness and getting people excited about their startup and entrepreneurship. I’m excited for the both of them. Two young black tech entrepreneurs that you’ll see a lot of in the years ahead.

While Curtis is a humble entrepreneur himself, I believe that he’s on to something big with Aislefinder and don’t forget about Chris with Central.ly too. Heck, just check out all of the NewMe Accelerator 2011 startups here: http://www.newmeaccelerator.com/startups/summer-2011-class/.

Much success to everyone!

Y-Combinator partner Paul Graham recently wrote an essay, “Why startup hubs work“:

If you’re in a startup hub, unexpected good things will probably happen to you, especially if you deserve them.

And it’s not just the increased likelihood of serendipity, but to do your best work, who you hang around with matters.

Jim Rohn said:

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

via Location matters for your startup « Scott Allison’s Blog.

You can read the full transcript via TechCrunch

I want to talk about how we build things here, a little bit about the product, the work we do and the work we need to do. So, this is something I put on our Wiki a long time ago [shows slide], as one of our principles is to delight our users. But then I realized it’s more important to delight their users, which are their customers and payers. And the more we focus on that payer experience, the more we focus on really making that magical — and designing it. We win, our users win, and we get more users.

So, going back to a lot of Brian’s points, this is a big focus for us, we’re the only payments company in the world that’s concerned with design. We are all designers in this room, and that’s how we’re leading this company, through design.

So, how many of you have walked or driven across the Golden Gate Bridge? Almost everyone in the room. This is one of my favorite parts of living in San Francisco. This is astoundingly beautiful, and it’s not just beautiful because it looks pretty, it’s beautiful because of the challenge that everyone who built this bridge overcame.

So, if you go back and you look at how this bridge was built, this is what San Francisco looked like before the bridge. This was the Golden Gate. We called it the Golden Gate because San Francisco was known for gold rushes. People would come here, explore and risk everything they had to live in an environment where they might find gold, or might find work, or might open a store of some kind.

So, this is the Golden Gate, this is the fort, right on the point in the Presidio, and there’s this big divide between this fort and Marin, and a lot of people living in Tiburon and Sausalito would have to go all the way around the Bay, all the way up here to get around across the river, up by Richmond.

So, they needed something that was a little bit faster. The war was over, they weren’t using this fort much anymore, so, they decided to build a bridge. So, very simply they said we need to build a bridge here, and they got an architect. The architect had a vision, actually there are a few architects, but one person has incredibly taken credit for most of the work, which was recently rectified — it’s a fascinating Wikipedia article if you have the chance to read it.

So the architects designed this gorgeous bridge, but the problem with the Golden Gate is that this is an extremely tumultuous area, if you’ve ever sailed through this or taken a boat through this, the waves are immense. Or surfed through it, which is more dangerous. It’s a disaster, I mean all the weather of the Bay is being forced through this one single point. So, all these elements create this perfect storm of turbulence. It’s extremely deep in the middle and it’s an epic span, so this was not an easy challenge.

They got a bunch of amazing engineers, and they took it step by step and iterated and iterated and iterated. There was a lot of back and forth between the architects to make this beautiful opening into this gorgeous city that we live in. And what is possible? What is beautiful? What is possible? And that’s really what it comes down to … we want to design the beautiful and build the impossible.

And a lot of people think of design, when they hear the word design as visual, something that looks pretty. Design is not just visual, design is efficiency. Design is making something simple. Design is epic. Design is making it easy for a user to get from point A to point B.

Engineering is design. Every engineer in this room, every operator in this room, every customer service agent in this room, is a designer. Because you’re designing constantly the interaction that you have with your tools or with your users or with your customers, and you’re trying to bring efficiency and take all the thinking out of that process.

So, everything we do here is design. We always want to make the beautiful — to this point — Keith, two minutes before I was supposed to start this Town Square, told me, stop. I’ve got a mistake in my slides, I forgot to capitalize an “S”. I swear. That level of perfection is what we wanna achieve, because if we achieve that level of perfection — it’s gonna take a long time to do that, a lot of hours — but then our users see it immediately, without thinking. And that’s the important part. That’s what design is.

And look at this, this is gorgeous. I mean, just look at this bridge, it’s amazing what was achieved with resources they had in the time these folks had. Millions and millions of people go over this bridge, and one of the features of this bridge is it doesn’t fall down. Reliability is a feature. This is what Brian said earlier, availability, reliability, and staying up, that’s a feature and that’s a product, and it has to be well-designed and thought after and considered, and that’s what we’re doing.

I’ve often spoken to the editorial nature of what I think my job is, I think I’m just an editor, and I think every CEO is an editor. I think every leader in any company is an editor. Taking all of these ideas and you’re editing them down to one cohesive story, and in my case, my job is to edit the team, so we have a great team that can produce the great work and that means bringing people on and in some cases having to let people go. That means editing the support for the company, which means having money in the bank, or making money, and that means editing what the vision and the communication of the company is, so that’s internal and external, what we’re saying internally and what we’re saying to the world — that’s my job. And that’s what every person in this company is also doing. We have all these inputs, we have all these places that we could go — all these things that we could do — but we need to present one cohesive story to the world.

Brian said something very interesting to me a few weeks ago, he said, support and feedback is what our customers are telling us, and product is what we’re telling our customers. I think that’s an amazing, amazing statement. We have feedback loops, and then we speak something back, the product, this company, is what we’re telling the world.

So, on this point, ideas can come from anyone, and they can come anytime. So, we all have various directions that we want to take the company and sometimes those ideas come during a shower, sometimes they come when we’re walking, sometimes they come when we’re talking with other employees at the coffee store, and sometimes you just wanna build it — you just wanna get it done — and we want to support that.

If I want to go and create a screen saver that shows all the signatures that are coming into Square in realtime, and I’m gonna go spend the weekend doing that, and I’m gonna finish it to my satisfaction so that when I go back to the company and say look at what I did, this is amazing, this is beautiful and I’ve had a lot of fun building this. And instead of saying, you know, that’s cool but we didn’t do it as a team so let’s not use it right now. Instead, let’s figure out how to say, that’s awesome, now let’s figure out how to put it into production.

So, allowing folks to work on what they want and the strong ideas that they have at any point, and then figuring out how to build it into production, and speaking to that point of reliability as a feature. Ideas happen to individuals, they happen to groups, we should allow for all of it. We should take them all in and consider them. If we don’t act on an idea, then let’s put in on the shelf, don’t throw it away, just put it in the shelf, because we may use it later in a different way then what was originally intended. This gets us to become good storytellers, and that’s what we want to do. This is about the editorial.

As a lot of you know, this is one of my favorite magazines. [Shows The Economist] This magazine is very interesting. It’s actually a newspaper — out of London. If you look through this magazine, you’ll notice a few things. First, it has a beautiful unfolding. You open the first few pages, you get all the news around the world in brief, little, 140-character news bytes of what’s happening. You want to commit some more time, then you page through and you’ll see the briefings in half pages or pages, a little bit more on what’s going on in the world, about what you just read. If you want to commit even more to any direction or any topic that you find interesting, you can read the full articles, which are multiple pages. And then at the very back are the indicators, the economic indicators, of what various aspects of the economy are doing.

The other thing you notice about this is that there are no bylines at all, there are no names in here, not even the editor has a name, it’s The Economist, they’re building The Economist, they’re writing articles for The Economist.

The editor says, I want to write about Obama, and how he needs to step it up, it’s time. He gets 5 or 6 articles, edits them into one thing that he thinks, or she thinks, will sell the magazine and tell the best story, and that becomes the magazine. This is done with every single article that’s in the magazine. And effectively every single product and feature and aspect that we’re building to our company.

So, my point here is, this company is not going to be known by one person or by five people or by multiple people. It’s going to be known by the product that we put out. We, in the Valley, think that Steve Jobs is Apple. We see Apple and we think Steve Jobs. But the mainstream audience doesn’t know who the hell Steve Jobs is. They don’t really care. They know that the Nano works, they love it, and they want to buy the next one. They could care less what this old guy in the black turtle neck does. Square is not going to be known by me, it’s not going to be known as Keith’s company, it’s not gonna be known as any other individual’s company in here, it’s going to be known as Square.

That’s what we want people to care about, and that’s what we’re trying to push, we’re trying to push, we’re trying to push the products and the brand and our story above everything else. And if you ever see that not happening, then let’s fix it. Tell me about it, we’ll fix it. Kay will help.

So, building beautiful things, it’s not easy. You can give up easily. It’s not 9 to 5 job. This is a 9 to 5 bridge [shows new slide]. Everything about this bridge says do not cross me. First of all, I don’t trust that it’s going to stay up. It’s forcing me into these narrow lanes. It’s got this mile-per-hour limit. This does not inspire. This is not aspirational to anyone. This is not something I want to cross. This is not something I want to use. It’s not something that I look at and say, wow, that’s amazing, I mean wow, What the hell were they thinking?

And a lot of people in our industry, this is what they’re building. It’s terrible. This is the bridge I want to cross. [Shows Golden Gate] This is how I want to arrive at a destination. This is classy. This is limitless. This is inspiring. This is gorgeous. Every single aspect of this is gorgeous.

Think about all of the engineers and all of the architects and all of the people that drove rock to this bridge and their families and how happy and proud they are when they walk over this bridge and when they see this bridge in newspapers and they see it in movies and they are part of this bridge. That’s what we all want to feel. That’s what I want to feel, and I know everyone in this room wants to feel.

So, this is why design is important and this is why this coordination is important, and this is how we’re leading and building this company. So, your homework for the weekend is to cross this bridge, think about that, and then also think about how we take those lessons into doing what we want do, which is carry every single transaction in the world.

Hat Tip to @Tiffani for posting this link in Facebook

Here’s an idea:
Let’s produce job growth in Black America now. I propose we invest in creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem with a goal of generating 150,000 jobs in the next 12 months.

Let’s learn from the existing entrepreneurial and risk capital ecosystem and develop our own. Let’s develop centers of innovation across the nation and construct bridges to the 21st century economy where a new ecosystem can thrive.

That would benefit America as a whole.

Black America… Can We Talk?

Perhaps we can start our discussions within a framework in which questions are addressed with solution-oriented ideas. I propose we use our HBCUs, urban communities and our churches as “meetup” locations to engage in community-level “Startup Black America” partnerships.

Black America has high net worth individuals, middle-class and even lower socio-economic classes of folk with investment capital. We also have talented entrepreneurs, both slow growth “lifestyle” entrepreneurs and high-growth entrepreneurs within our midst. Identifying our innovators and providing education, training and resources are things we can do.

Innovative Infrastructure

Connecting entrepreneurs to pools of investment capital within our own communities is something we can do.

The business model for job growth and wealth generation exists in plain sight, yet we have not recognized it. The activity that exists in Silicon Valley and other geographic hotbeds in the entrepreneurial ecosystem is activity we can discuss developing and innovating in Black America using existing education and community networks.

Imagine 5,000 communities investing in just 10 lifestyle entrepreneurs who each hired just one person. That’s 50,000 new jobs created by our “private sector.” And if each of those communities also invested in a couple of high-growth entrepreneurs whose enterprises ballooned to hire 10 workers each, that’s 100,000 new jobs.

Imagine 150,000 new jobs in Black America over the next 12 months.

Let’s get together and talk about this… let’s get started.

You can read the entire post here: Startup Black America… Where Do We Start?

Along with the funding news AisleFinder announced a new partnership with TaskRabbit to provide grocery delivery for their current users. The new AisleFinder and TaskRabbit partnership currently supports San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Boston.

This makes the third startup that participated in the NewMe Accelerator summer program to announce have raised startup capital joining OneSchool and BeCouply. I’m sure it’s not the last. Congrats Curtis and the AisleFinder team.

Be sure to read the cnet article that featured Curtiss Pope, AisleFinder and the NewMe Accelerator here: Minority entrepreneurs set up own Valley incubator .

To other minority led startups seeking to raise funds, good luck and continue to prove me wrong!

Let’s start with some facts:
African Americans make up 1% of Internet company founders nationally. (source)
Whites make up 87% startup founders, with Asians make up 12% (source)
Minority angel investors account for 2% of the angel population. (source)
Minority-owned firms represented 6% of the entrepreneurs that presented their business concept to angel investors. (source)
92% of venture backed startups are male (source)
California ranks as the highest state in terms of number of VC deals with 48%, with New York at 14% and Boston at 8% (source)
Half of the startup founders who Raise Money ages range from 35-44 (source)
Black unemployment: Highest in 27 years (source)

Hot Topic for 2011: Black Startup Founders/ Entrepreneurs
This year like never before have conversations, meetups and programs been launched and talked about why are there so few blacks in tech, or why black startup founder are not getting the same opportunities or access or why such programs as the NewMe Accelerator and organizations such as Black Founders are needed. It’s about time is how I feel about since I’ve been in the web/tech space since before the first dot com bubble and even though the internet is suppose to make things a level playing field, sadly when it comes to launching a web tech startup and getting funding it’s not. Some people act like racism doesn’t exits and want to say if you have a great idea or product, you have the same chances as everyone else. I tell you that is just not true in most cases.

True Stories from Silicon Valley:
This summer while we were in Silicon Valley for the NewMe Accelerator we learned a lot and kept hearing a few repetitive stories. One was about a young teenage Indian programmer who worked for another startup, left and pitched an idea, no app, no MVP, nothing but an idea and walked away with over $700,000 in funding. Another was from leading Venture Capitalist and investors such as Jay Jamison, Mitch Kapor, Michael Arrington, and Ron Conway that there are not enough Black startup founders and/or they don’t see enough Black Startup founders walk through their doors and/or there are not enough successful Black startup founders who have raised funds as examples for others. So if you don’t see the need for such programs such as the NewMe Accelerator or Black Founders or groups such as Blacks in Tech. Don’t argue with me… I dare you to argue with them.

flickr photo by Juan Haro Rodríguez

Black Founders/ Entrepreneurs Are you ready?
Since the launch of the NewMe Accelerator we have received tones of request from Black Entrepreneurs with startup ideas looking for help in terms of mentorships, funding, partners, investments, design help, programming help, you name it. But most of the time the request is looking for small seed investments to get an an app or product launched. When the phone rings I can almost predict the conversation, it goes a little something like this: Hello, I have an idea or startup that’s going to be big. Can you help with funding or mentoring or introduce me to someone with money. Every now and then someone will say, I’m building a new social network that’s going to be bigger than Facebook and I my response is usually, Ok, can you send me a deck and after that I hear nothing.

Regardless of the phone calls or who has an idea or not, one thing I learned being in the Valley during the summer is there’s a system, a format a bar set by other startup founders to raising capital and that bar is high. It doesn’t matter what color you are, if you don’t follow the protocol or format or standard unless you have a NBA friend, or rich uncle or have the right people in your network with capital and trying to raise money for your startup in this economy…good luck!

Getting in and making a difference:
With everyone launching a startups these days or have an idea to launch one, this is why the business / community accelerators are on the rise and startup accelerator/incubator such as Y combinator, Founders Lab, Tech Stars, and 500 Startups are like the NBA and NFL draft for entrepreneurs.

The numbers for how many black startup founders who have participated in such programer have yet to be made public and while a few incubators are well diverse such as 500 Startups in terms of race and gender none have had a large or a significant amount of Black founders participate over the years. If I’m wrong, show me the data and explain the 1%. This is why we launched the NewME Accelerator, it’s why I’m happy to see the growth and future of the Black Founders group in Silicon Valley and why programs such as the DreamIt and Comcast Ventures for minority-led startups are being created.

If you’re a founder that makes it into one of these programmers, consider yourself lucky and take advantage of the opportunity because you may not get another chance and there are thousands of entrepreneurs who would love to be in your shoes.

Your startup chances by idea and team to raise money:
I don’t have any hard data yet but this is my observation for Black Startup Founders/ Entrepreneurs:

Idea + Team = Chances to raise money

Start a new social network
Single founder with no startup and no coding experience = .5%
Team (developer, CTO, designer) with little experience = 2%
Single founder with experience from a huge successful social network = 4%

Launch a hip hop or Urban platform or urban blog/website or urban video site
Single founder with no startup and no coding experience = 1%
Team (developer, CTO, designer) with little experience = 3%
Single founder with experience = 5%

Launch a mobile (iPad, iPhone or Android) app
Single founder with no startup and no coding experience = 5%
Team (developer, CTO, designer) with little experience = 10%
Single founder with experience = 20%
Team (developer, CTO, designer) with little experience = 30%

*If you’re a black woman and single founder = -1%

The harsh reality for black entrepreneurs in the web/tech space. Your chances of raising startup capital are slim to none. If you’re an entrepreneur, good luck and prove me wrong. If you’re an accelerator or incubator, open your doors and prove me wrong. If you’re a venture capitalist please prove me wrong!

PS:
There’s nothing wrong with launching a startup, not raising or taking any money and being successful by making money form your customers. Good luck!

Today it was announced that BeCouply, the mobile app that helps couples have epic social lives received Pre-Seed Investment from Kapor Capital. This is the second startup that participated in the NewMe Accelerator that announced they have raised capital. OneSchool was the first as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

As reported on BlackWeb 2.0:

BeCouply just received a pre-seed investment by Kapor Capital.

“We’re making a pre-seed investment in BeCouply to enable them to complete development work on the product, said Mitchell Kapor. We think the team has identified a social network segment, couples, which is currently not well served.”

BeCouply allows couples to engage and interact with each other on a different level. The app intends to capture the moments people share as a couple and connect with other couples on the go. In addition, users will be able to get new date ideas and deals.

With the investment, BeCouply will come to life sooner than later so that couples can start sharing their memories instantly.

This is great news as many has asked how would we measure the success of the NewMe Accelerator. I’ve often said the fact that we decided to launch the accelerator, move to Silicon Valley for the summer and complete the program we’re successful. But in the startup space its all about raising capital and not just launching a program. So… now that makes two NewMe Accelerator startups out of 11. For the startups in the program that are still in the process or trying to raise capital good luck and keep working hard. To investors… #cutthecheckalready!

You can see the full list of startups that participated in the NewMe Accelerator 2011 first class here: http://newmeaccelerator.com/startups/

The Goal by Anil Dash

Sometimes it feels overwhelmingly difficult to communicate these values to a new generation of entrepreneurs who aren’t being shown good role models, but I remain optimistic that we can make this mindset the default.

Make things by Caterina Fake, co-founder of Hunch and Flickr

Anil worries that it’s hard to communicate this motivation to a new generation of entrepreneurs, and I agree. There are so many conferences these days, so many voluble, charismatic leaders, and so much noise. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs in their 20s who are knowledgeable about the valuations various Y Combinator startups have attained, know the names of all the angel investors in the Valley, have in-depth knowledge of the Facebook diaspora and their doings, have opinions on various Zynga acquisitions, and know exactly how to get Andrew Mason on the line…it boggles the mind. These are good things to have in your tool kit. But I want to hear about things out there that they love. About loving the thing they’re building. There’s less of that. Nevertheless, Anil remains “optimistic that we can make this mindset the default.”

Making things, infinite games, and Fred Brooks by Chad Dickerson

I think part of what Caterina is saying is that pure focus on networking and IPOs and fundraising and valuations and acquisitions neglects the core sense of play that got most of us into this world in the first place.

 

 

Summary:
new entrepreneurs need good role models to make things for the web that’s not just shinny objects to please investors

Why do startups fail? The Startup Genome project analyzed data from 3,200 companies and came up with some answers. At the core of any successful business are two things: a good product and a large market for that product. In other words, a startup should be able to scale. And to scale properly, it must balance the growth of five core dimensions: customers, product, team, business model, and funding. The dominant reason for failure: premature scaling of one or more of those dimensions.

by visually via

The NewMe Accelerator just completed it’s first full week of working with amazing mentors and speakers from the Silicon Valley. Closing out the week NewMe startups had a chance sit down for one on one sessions with well known Venture Capitalist Mitch Kapor @mkapor of Kapor Capital. Before the sessions begin Mitch talked to the NewMe Accelerator startups first class on how he learned about the accelerator, why the NewMe Accelerator is important to have in the Silicon Valley and what Kapor Capital looks for in startups when considering investing. Take a look at the video and notes below.

Why the NewMe Accelerator is important for the Silicon Valley?

The NewMe Accelerator is supported by generous sponsors, speakers, and mentors. Sponsors include: Interactive One, Google, Tagged, Gunderson Dettmer, Syncom Ventures, PepsiCo, Kapor Capital, Bronze Investments, Justin.tv, and e3 Innovation Fund.

Silicon Valley welcomed the first ever technology accelerator for minority-led start-ups, NewME Accelerator. NewME’s select participants commenced their first class on June 16 and will participate in this program throughout the summer.  The start-up founders are based in a shared house in Mountain View, Calif. and are utilizing co-working space at Citizen Space in San Francisco.

This program gives the founders a unique opportunity to learn from key industry leaders during private group dinners and one-on-one mentorship. The founders will leverage this once-in-a-lifetime access, and being in the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s culture, for nine weeks to take their ventures to the next level.  Speakers and mentors will include representatives from successful start-ups such as Tagged, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Zynga Games. The accelerator concludes with a demo day at Kapor Capital August 4th where founders will pitch their products to various investors and members of the start-up community.

“The amount of support and interest from the Silicon Valley community in the NewME Accelerator is overwhelming,” shared Founder & co-Producer Angela Benton. “It serves as a testament to not only the need for a program like this, but also to the excitement and stewardship of the mentors and companies who are participating.  We are thrilled about this summer and the companies and individuals who’ve agreed to be involved.”

The accelerator provides housing, transportation and other basic living needs in addition to the mentorship and access to some of the industry’s elite minds. The intent of the program is to remove some of the barriers involved with being an entrepreneur and help pave the way for even greater success.  The program is supported by various sponsors who support not only the program’s mission but entrepreneurship in general.  Many of the program’s supporters view their participation in the 9 week long program as an opportunity to connect with budding entrepreneurs and expand their own businesses.

“Whether it is with our 100 million registered users or our own employees, everyday Tagged celebrates diversity and the entrepreneurial spirit. The opportunity to partner with the Accelerator is a natural fit for us,” said Greg Tseng co-founder and CEO of Tagged. “In addition to helping racially diverse entrepreneurs get their start, as my co-founder and I once did, our involvement also helps us connect with and ultimately attract the best talent to Tagged.  The NewME Accelerator is providing both the entrepreneurs and us with a great opportunity to connect, learn and teach.”

NewME has a total of thirteen start-ups participating in its first cycle.  Five were pre-selected while the other eight were selected from a large pool of applicants. Eight of the participating companies will travel to Silicon Valley to be housed this summer while the other 5 are Bay area locals. Applications were evaluated by the producers of the accelerator and selected based on concept, quality of pitch, and the problem the product solves in addition to several other criteria.

Yesterday the group gathered at Zibbibo in Palo Alto to commence the programs curriculum with it’s first speaker out of a series of others with Interactive One CTO Navarrow Wright.  The discussion included practical information on how each participants pitch could be modified along with candid stories of Wright’s experiences leading technology teams and raising money in Silicon Valley.

The start-ups include:  goKit, kloud.co, Pencil You In, Cued, TriOut , BeCouply, Playd, FetchMob, Aislefinder, Central.ly, Mosion, Qykno, +1 stealth start-up.

The NewME Accelerator is supported by generous sponsors, speakers, and mentors.  Sponsors include:  Interactive One, Google, Tagged, Gunderson Dettmer, Syncom Ventures, PepsiCo, Kapor Capital, Bronze Investments, Justin.tv, and e3 Innovation Fund.

via TechCrunch

What Photo Sharing App Should You Use?.

Findings from a survey of 300 founders helped answer three leading questions – are co-founders more successful than single founders, does age matter, and are repeat founders more likely to be successful than first time founders. Age and gender are two hotly debated subjects in the startup world right now.

Not surprisingly perhaps, 84%-89% of successful startups tend to be spearheaded by co-founders, rather than single founders. Facebook is a notable example of a “suite” of successful co-founders while Zynga is an example of a single founder.

The data seems to suggest that younger founders do disproportionately better, especially in late stage startups. Of startups with an actual or potential exit valuation of $25+ million, 47% of the founders are younger than 30 years vs. 67% for startups with exit valuation of $500+ million.

Similarly, repeat founders do disproportionately better in startups with $500+ million in exit valuation – 90% founders in this category are repeat founders. Notable examples are of course Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook fame. Sean is currently on startup#5.

via What Makes A Startup Successful? – PSFK.

1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.
2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.
3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.
4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)
5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.
6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.
7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.
8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.
10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.
11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.
12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.
13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.
14. B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.

Check out the full report here for more details.

Originally posted on BlackWeb 2.0 by Angela Benton

Important Note:  You may see Angela and I say #BOOM consistently in the coming weeks and throughout the summer, it’s our version of the fist bump, lol

We are just a couple of weeks out at this point and we are still in awe about the amount of support that we’ve gotten not only from speakers and mentors but also from the people who are financially and resourcefully helping to make this historic program happen.  When we first conceptualized even putting something like this together we knew it was a huge idea, and to be frank I was hesitant at first mainly because I knew it was such a BIG idea and BIG ideas need a lot of support to make happen.  As soon as we started reaching out to people about the program any hesitation that I’d had in the past just plain disappeared.

It takes so much more than money to make something like this happen.  It takes time, resources, physical space, knowledge that’s willing to be shared and so much more.  Throughout the summer we are going to be streaming and tweeting as much as possible (you’ll see it all from a forth coming page designed to pull everything in one place) so that you can be included in the experience as much as possible.  From there you’ll be able to see the level of involvement from the people who are supporting this program.  It’s so much more than just a sponsorship.

That said a heartfelt thanks to our sponsors partners who are helping make this a reality:

• Google
• InteractiveOne
• Tagged
• Gunderson Dettmer
• Syncom Venture Partners
• Kapor Capital
• Bronze Investments
• Justin.tv

While browsing Quora the user generated questions and answers site that’s created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it I came across an interesting question. It was “(93/3) What is the all-time greatest failed Internet startup?

Some of the answers brought back memories of the first dot com bubble and included startup such as etoys.com, Amp’d Mobile, Boo.com, Friendster, and Pets.com. The amount of money the startups blew is just plain crazy. 200 million here, 150 million there. No wonder the Lean Startup movement has gained so much momentum.

via (93/3) What is the all-time greatest failed Internet startup? – Quora.

What do you think is the greatest internet failed startup of all-time and why?

As an early adopter one thing I love is finding out about new startups and online tools, platforms, etc. Over years you could rely on RSS feeds, tech blogs, email list, sites like hacker news and then twitter to find out about the new startups being launched but sadly now their’s just to much noise. Along with noise there’s a lot of politics involved about which startups get covered too.  I’ve seen a lot of sites come and go over the years to help keep geeks, technology journalist, entrepreneurs and venture capitalist up-to-date about new startups but I think we have a winner in StartupLi.st.
StartupLi.st @thestartuplist is founded by Eric Ingram, curated by Nick Frost and not only works to help you find the latest startups but also serves as a platfrom to help founders promote their startup, provide startup news and connect other like minded people in the startup space. Joining StartupLi.st is simple:

• Add
  Create your startup profile and cultivate early adopters.
• Follow
  One activity stream including Startup News, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & Crunchbase. Follow just the startups and people that interest you.
• Signup
  Join startup e-mail lists. They do the hard work and send you timely updates. No spam allowed.
• Discover
  New startups added constantly. One featured every day.
• Recommend
  You love startups and want to scream it from the rooftops. Here you can.
• Discuss
  Share your thoughts and insights with the community.
• Submit
  Find a startup story, blog or editorial? Have a question or comment? Submit here.
• Join
  Connect with Twitter, start discovering. Join now
  .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

via StartupLi.st • Find. Follow. Recommend startups.

I submitted gokit on StartupLi.st it was simple, take a look. I’m going to add TriOut next.

If the big tech blogs won’t cover your startup or you’re looking for more startup press/media/promotion I recommend giving StartupLi.st a try!

Disclosure this is not a sponsored post.

Other than StartupLi.st what sites do you use to promote your startup

Last week was a big week for the NewME Accelerator as it was featured in the Wall Street Journal by Lizette Chapman. The post was called, “MC Hammer To Minority Entrepreneurs: “Let’s Get It Started” which was a short version of the VentureWire News release called “New Accelerator Program Aims To Boost Minority Entrepreneurs”

Here’s an excerpt from the “MC Hammer To Minority Entrepreneurs: “Let’s Get It Started” Wall Street Journal article.

As VentureWire reports today, Hammer, whose real name is Stanley Burrell, is lending advice to minority entrepreneurs in the New Media Entrepreneurship, or NewMe, accelerator program in Silicon Valley this summer. Starting June 16, seven minority-led start-ups from across the country will live in a rented house in Mountain View, Calif., and can work there or in a shared space in San Francisco. Additional Bay Area start-ups will also be invited to participate, but will not live in the house.

Hammer’s advice to start-ups? Don’t give away too much equity too early and look for a profitable niche within existing markets.

“You don’t have to invent the wheel, but you might want to be the company that invents the rims,” said Hammer in a phone interview.

Here’s an excerpt from the New Accelerator Program Aims To Boost Minority Entrepreneurs article via VentureWire.

Speakers and mentors will run the gamut. Participants include Foundry Group Partner Brad Feld, angel investor Eghosa Omoigui, Foursquare’s Tristan Walker and Twitter’s Doug Williams.

The mentors will provide a range of advice, from negotiating the legal maze around starting a company to dealing with technology and business-model issues and pitching VCs. The driving force behind the program is the belief that minority entrepreneurs–defined by the program as people of color and females–often find themselves at a disadvantage due to the networked nature of the tech world, especially in Silicon Valley.

“Everything is based on relationships. It doesn’t mean people are racist, but it means that you don’t know who to pick up the phone and call to get advice or to write a check,” said Hajj Flemings, chief executive of Detroit-based GoKit Inc., one of five companies already selected to participate. “You think you’re doing all the right things, but it’s like you’re a gerbil on a wheel not advancing and you can’t figure out why.” Black Web 2.0 Founder and Publisher Angela Benton said she first got the idea of providing a platform for minority entrepreneurs while at a conference last year in Washington D.C. Then, a report published a few months later pushed her to take action.

Since then we have received a ton of new speaker request and startup submissions. Speaking of submssions, the deadline is this Friday, April 29 to submit your startup. You can pitch your startup here http://www.newmeconference.com/startups/pitch-your-startup/. Good luck!

Also we’re still seaking sponsors/partners for the NewME Accelerator. It’s seven startups, three months, one house in the Valley. Can you say coffee, food, transportation and vampiremode! Interested? Contact Us.

Thanks for the support everyone. Fun times are ahead along with a lot of work!

It seems like just yesterday we closed out the first NewME Conference, #goodTimes.  While small, we got a lot of good information and data on what is needed to make technology focused start-ups successful.  And by successful we mean either operating in the black or experiencing a liquidity event.  Entrepreneurs, private equity, business leaders, and key members of government all came together last May and what we came up with was no surprise but confirmed theories we each had individually.

Several things stuck out that day but the key takeaways were minority-led tech entrepreneurs needed:

1.  Mentorship from people who have led or been involved in the day-to-day of successful start-ups.

2. Access to early stage capital (especially since minorities often don’t raise formal friend and family rounds)

As the year trickled on and I got the opportunity to speak with many more Founders informally and even from talks I gave at places like Google.  The lifecycle of what I think needs to occur developed.  Without successful exits from minority-led start-ups we forgo creating new angle investors, venture capitalist, mentors, role models, and more start-ups.  And the importance of producing these start-ups goes above and beyond just being good for the economy.  It also helps students (pre-k through college) see the opportunity that can exist for them.  We’ll slowly but surely start to change the way students think and start getting them to major in Computer Science instead of an entertainment or sports related fields.  The panel I spoke on a week or so ago at Howard University hit this home even more for me.  The panel was about small business but I was excited and proud to see students stand-up to ask questions of the panelist with the goal of starting a business in the digital space.  Below is a slide that I think will help illustrate the lifecycle that I think is needed.  Like all things I’m sure this will change and refine as we all gather more information and experience new lessons.

With all that said I’m super excited to announce that we’ll be launching the NewME Accelerator this summer in Silicon Valley with Semantic Seed and Wayne Sutton.  Seven Founders will be based in Mountain View from June through August and will participate in weekly private dinners with Angle Investors, Venture Capitalist, Entrepreneurs, and other heavyweights.  They’ll also have access to an insanely impressive list of people who have graciously donated their time and agreed to participate as mentors.  The speakers and mentors have an unspeakable amount of experience and come from companies like Twitter, Path, Foursquare, TechStars, SoftTechVC, and a lot of others, you can check the full list out on the site there.

The Founders will have the option of working from Mountain View where we’ll be based or working from Citizen Space in the ever so popular SoMA area of San Fran.  Last but not least the summer will close with a Demo Day where the start-ups involved can pitch the product they’ve been working on to potential investors and others from the start-up community.  We’ll also be including local minority led-start-ups in the Bay Area in the festivities; they just won’t be staying in the house.

While we are an accelerator the start-ups that are involved aren’t receiving any kind of investment from us.  They also aren’t guaranteed an investment from their Pitch at the Demo Day.  This is pure, unadulterated, balls to the wall, entrepreneurship.  And the entrepreneurs who are involved are doing what entrepreneurs do best.  Taking a risk.

If you’re a risk taker then we have 2 slots left and you can pitch your start-up on the NewME Accelerator site.  The deadline for submissions is April 29th and we’ll announce the lucky two shortly after.

There is only one word that will describe this summer.  EPIC.

As for day one, I ran into an old friend Damien Basile @DB on twitter who just launched his new startup with Brian Papa, called Addieu.

Addieu is an all-in-one solution to help you avoid business card overdose. It does this by allowing you to exchange contact information and connect you & the person you’re meeting on all your social networks at once, quickly, easily & reliably.

Some notable features:
+ Easily connect on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare
+ Automatically adds new people to your Contacts app
+ Uses your Foursquare checkins and shouts to remember where you’ve met somebody.
+ Seamlessly add people to Twitter lists, including creating new ones on the fly.
+ No username and password.
+ Your address book entry is your login.
+ Browse your connection history.
+ Email and text a contact right from Addieu.
+ Unable to connect to the Internet? Addieu works over Bluetooth!

After hearing the Addieu pitch from DB I downloaded the app and now my SXSW plan is to use Addieu to exchange contact information. If you have an iPhone you can download Addieu here [iTunes] link.

If you’re at SXSW and would like for me to cover your startup, feel free to text or message me at 919-816-2230 so we can schedule a meeting time.

If you’re using or just downloaded Addieu let me know about your experience in the comments.

There’s a secret “SXSW facebook group” that I belong to and most of the conversation so far is about the parties and which apps to use to keep track of everything during SXSW interactive. Too much is happening this year and there’s no way to stay up-to-date with everything. You’re going to miss some parties, some panels, some meetups and some people. But with this year’s hot startup app topic group messaging / group texting apps they’re all hoping you’ll not miss anything by messaging your friends during the conference. This also means some of the best conversations may happen offline on mobile devices vs being on twitter or facebook.

With that being said here’s my unofficial iPhone SXSW group messaging /group texting app plans that I posted in the “secret SXSW facebook group” I’m going to check into the hotel room and have a hurricaneparty, invite a fastsociety to kik it in a beluga pod, then yobongo to nearby friends that will turn into a messageparty where you can groupme and yell HeyTell in Pingchat … see you in Austin!

Just kidding, but if you want to reach me during SXSW interactive just call or text (prefer text) at 919-816-2230.

That’s right, those of you who have been dying to test Yobongo and/or attending SXSW the wait is over. Yobongo is finally out of private beta and ready for you to chat with people nearby on your iPhone. Today Caleb and David the cofounders of Yobongo announced first in the Yobongo private beta room that you can now download yobongo from Apple iTunes App store. But there’s a catch, Yobongo is launching in selected cities starting with Austin, New York and San Francisco, Yobongo’s HQ. More from Louis Gray about the Yobongo launch.

The service is following Foursquare’s roots in starting slow geographically, which will no doubt draw some irritation from expectant users outside the covered geographies, but there’s a method to the madness. San Francisco and New York are well-known social media hubs, central to the success of Twitter and Foursquare, and Austin is home to the SXSW event starting next week, which could be a high-profile beginning for Yobongo.

The launch also comes only days after the announcement of Facebook’s acquisition of Beluga, a well-received group chat application also expected to make waves at the show. Caleb Elston, cofounder and CEO of Yobongo, says, “If we are not in your city, don’t fret! You can vote to bring it to your city next ”

As a yobongo beta tester I’m excited to see yobongo launch and use it at SXSW next week. As a NC resident I’m crushed, but it’s a smart move by yobongo to launch in selected cites. You can download Yobongo iphone app at here [iTunes link]

Update:

You can vote to have yobongo launch in your city at http://yobongo.com/cities. Raleigh, NC is on the list and can be requested here: http://yobongo.com/cities/North-Carolina/Raleigh You can expect to see more we want yobongo tweets and facebook status updates for users still wanting in. Other cities on the list are Los Angeles, CAm Chicago, IL, Boston, MA, San Diego, CA, Salt Lake City, UT, New Haven, CT, Seattle, WA Dallas, TX, , Miami, FL. Kansas City, KS and Atlanta, GA.

If you live in Austin, New York or San Francisco let me know about your yobongo experience in the comments

Yobongo! If you’re lucky enough to be one of the early beta testers of the much anticipated location-based mobile startup then I’m sure you don’t mind yelling Yobongo out loud and you get it. For others waiting to beta test are posting tweets with a sense of frustration, jealousy, all with a nervous sense of anticipation to see if Yobongo is going to live up to the hype. If you don’t believe me just look a some of the tweets below.

Like many web/tech mobile startups, sometimes the hardest part of launching a startup after you come up with an idea is coming up with the name. This had me thinking about how did Caleb Elston and David Kasper the cofounders of yobongo come up with the name yobongo. It seems as though I wasn’t the only one as while we were “yobonging” one day someone asked Caleb the big question. How did you come up with the name yobongo? You can see the answer via a yobongo screenshot below.

There you have it, someone just yelled yobongo, then a domain registration and six months later yobongo is getting ready to take sxsw by storm. More on yobongo coming soon and you can sign up for a beta invite at yobongo.com

Does the name yobongo work for the startup that’s going to provide a new way for people to chat with others nearby?

The domo startup pitch video reminds me of the GrocerEye winning pitch from the Founder Conference 2010. Take a look.

This brings me to the thought process about pitching a startup to investors. Earlier today Jason retweeted about how @GreenGoose raised $100K in 3 minutes while pitching at the Launch Conference. You can watch the GreenGoose video here. http://bit.ly/hGzG4z. Was the GreenGoose startup outrageous or over the top? No, but they had a really good demo and product.

What do you think? How to pitch a startup; should you be really good or really outrageous or both?

I first wrote about Yobongo back in early January when it was seeking more beta testers quietly sparking interest from location-based geeks. A lot has changes since then. Yobongo now has a new logo and is one of the most anticipated startups to open to launch for the general public to test along with being predicted as one of the breakout apps of SXSW 2011 on Quora and other news sites. I’ve been lucky enough to be one of the few East Coast beta testers of Yobongo and I must say the app is great.

Yobongo is founded by Caleb Elston and David Kasper. Caleb is former VP Of Product of Justin.tv and David is programming ninja. Yobongo’s goal is to make “it fun and easy to chat with people nearby on your iPhone“. By creating rooms based on your location, Yobongo will connect users to serendipitous conversations. For example lets say if you’re at a coffee shop, conference or university and launch Yobongo. Based on your location you would be “magically” placed in a room with other Yobongo users to start a conversation about what’s happening. From there you can leave the room and/or join other rooms or send private messages to have a private conversation with someone nearby. Yobongo is a chat app but with a slick and simple interface but has powerful functionality to live up to the hype and be used not only by early adopters but the everyday mobile users.

As Yobongo is prepping for public release they recently recorded a promotional video to show how you can “Yobongo”. Take a look.

There are still a lot of questions surrounding Yobongo as the two cofounder competes with other Location-Based Messaging Apps but between the current users and conversations I’ve seen in Yobongo so far I believe the app is a winner. For instance I’ve seen employees from Twitter, Zynga, foodspotting, groupon, along with bloggers and entrepreneurs such as Om, Robert Scoble, Louis Gray and Andrew Hyde using Yobongo. Just yesterday I had conversation with Boy Genius Report founder Jonathan Geller in Yobongo and conducted a short Yobongo interview as you can see below.

For Yobongo to succeed it will depend on the continued growth of mobile users starting off with the iPhone iOS platform, the social media/word of mouth buzz and early beta testers telling their friends. Yobongo cofounder Caleb Elston says “Yobongo’s goals is to create a stealer communication experience” and so far with Yobongo they have done just that.

Here are few more screenshots of Yobongo.

Yobongo is still in private beta but you can sign up for early beta at Yobongo.com.

After watching Yobongo commercial video, do you think you will use Yobongo?

Yobongo a new iPhone app that provides a way for mobile users to chat with people nearby has been in stealth mode since late October but that is about to change. I received a tip that in the next 48 hours if you have “liked” the Yobongo facebook page which is here or joined signed up for the beta here you may have a chance to be one of the early beta testers.

Yobongo which was first covered on TechCrunch joins the growing list of new mobile chat applications such as Beluga, FastSociety GroupMe and Kik. All which have users predicting the mobile chat applications to be one of the breakout apps of SXSW 2011. The conversation started last week about SXSW breakout apps on Quora which lead to the write on The New York Observer.

Yobongo is separating itself from other chat apps by adding the nearby location option will be an interesting twist and I’m excited to see what other features Yobonog plans to add.

A simple photo mobile social networking application The social networking aspects of Instagram are simple and familiar if you’re a Twitter user. While looking at users profile you can see an Instagram username, their first name, how many photos they have uploaded, how many followers they have and how many people they are following. As an Instagram user you have four options to interact with other users. You can follow them, like a photo, leave a comment on a photo or flag a photo for review. Instagram embraced their inner Twitter by not only how user profiles are shown with the following and followers but if you leave a comment with @username on any photo you will receive push notification as well. Other Instagram push notifications are sent to your phone when someone likes your photo or follows you. Another social feature of the app is the “Popular” photos section which you could almost compared to the suggested users list or trending topics on Twitter. No, I’m not saying Instagram is a photo version of Twitter and please do not call it that, but the similarities are there. Two other social parts that I believe is a key to Instagram’s early success is the “Find More Friends” options where you can easily find other Instagram users via your contact list, Facebook friends or Twitter friends. There is even a news stream to keep you update on your Instagram likes, and new followers.

Instagram is not complex to use even with all of the features mentioned above. The founder of Instagram, Stanford University graduate, Kevin Systrom, a former intern at Odeo that later become Twitter and a former Google employee along with Mike Krieger who is a former Microsoft intern and Meebo employee before joining the Instagram team doing design & development built the app to allow users share photos and interact with others in seconds. The simplicity and usability of Instagram is smart and you can tell they followed the K.I.S.S. (Google it) rules. Along with the thought of enhancing your photos, the Instagram team has built a fun app with a growing interactive community with “likes” and comments.

Cats and Early Adopters
Speaking of community, the type of photos Instagram users are posting ranges from food, models, babies, sporting events, music concerts, holiday scenery, nature, pretty faces and animals. When it comes to animals, you may see a few dogs but as of right now cats rule Instagram. Along with cats you may find some of your favorite web “tech” personalities such as Chris Messina, Robert Scoble, Jenn Van Grove, Chris Rauschnot, Kevin Rose, Tristan Walker, Angela Benton, Dave Delaney, Tessa and John Gruber sharing their photos. A few of my North Carolina friends such as Abbyladybug, TyDowning, Jay Dolan, Mollybuckly, John Lane and GirlonCamera have started to use Instagram too making my experience even better by sharing photos from families places. Regardless of who is using Instagram make one thing clear, as of right now it is not another look at me app or see how many followers you have but Instagram is about sharing your experience via awesome photos. Still if the app continues to grow I’m sure the how to get more followers question will become an issue and a problem for early adopters who right now just love to post photos.

One Million users?
Last week it was rumored that Instagram has already passed the one million user mark which is truly impressive for the nine month old startup. If you are new to Instagram or never heard of it and asking yourself how do they have over one million users, it looks like Instagram is popular overseas. Having one million users is a marvellous achievement for any startup but to gain one million users in nine months, with 500k in funding, little press, an iPhone only app and no social networking website is amazing. Yesterday one Instagram user posted a screenshot saying the National Geographic has joined Instagram which cold be the beginning of leading social brands starting to use the service.

What’s Next for Instagram?
As for what’s next for Instagram, maybe an updated website, longer profile history, an Android version, search options, more notifications options to know if your photo is on the popular page, follow photos, like notifications tracking,leaderboards, profile badges and no startup would be complete without stickers and widgets. Regardless as Gina Bianchini stated in The Seven Principles You Need to Know to Build a Great Social Product TechCrunch post, “Create a party, not a museum.” As of today, Instagram is a party for sure.

Do you use Instagram? If not what mobile photo sharing application do you use?

Instagram

With that being said, it’s Thanksgiving and it looks like everyone is sharing Turkey photos. I took a few screenshots, here are 9 Thanksgiving Day Turkey photos on Instagram. You can see who took the photos in the top left.

Where are you sharing your Thanksgiving day photos? Do you use or like Instagram? Which one is your favorite?

The latest update to the TriOut iPhone app hit the App Store today. Version 2.0.2 brings some great performance enhancements and increased stability. I think we’ve fixed the Photo Upload bug once and for all.

Most importantly, we’ve integrated the new Facebook check in system within TriOut. In order to take advantage of this, you’ll need to re-authenticate Facebook in the app to approve check in access. Just tap on Settings >> Facebook to approve. Then the next time you check in, select Facebook from the menu of services and we’ll check you in on Facebook. It couldn’t be easier.

We’ve also added a new Help menu to get new users familiar with the app. The help menu shows the first time you launch the app and is always available in the settings menu. We hope this clears up any confusion users have had trying to check in.

Your feedback is extremely important to us. We beta tested TriOut v2 for 4 months prior to release but are still finding bugs and tweaks to make it better. If you find a crash, a bug, or something you just can’t figure out, please let us know either by email or through our feedback. We want to make TriOut your go-to app for connecting with your friends, tell us how to make it better.

Yesterday I attended a Venture Capital Symposium hosted by Local Techwire that featured Mark Cuban @mcuban at the American Tobacco Complex, in Durham, NC. Other speakers included Mike Doernberg, CEO of ReverbNation, Rich Lee, Founder & CEO of Hosted Solutions, Aaron Houghton, Co-founder, iContact, Mitchell Mumma, Partner of Intersouth Partners. The speakers participated in a panel then Mark Cuban delivered a very entertaining, honest and thought provoking keynote to about 250 entrepreneurs, venture capitalist and local media. Mark’s keynote and the panel discussion was about the challenges of starting a company, sustaining one, how to hire smart, being successful and more. I jotted down a few notes throughout the event that you can read below.

Question: What are the challenges facing entrepreneurs today?
Panel Answer: Access to capital, access to talent, themselves, lack of focus
Entrepreneurs need to focus on what they need to do to be successful
Lack of focus
Mark Cuban: @mcuban – No obstacles; now is the best time ever to start a company. Start something you love.
It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur right now.
They can be successful because the talent.

Question: What is the most important trait you look for when you want to add someone to your team?
Mark Cuban: It depends on the job
Panel Answer: Look at the fit to see if they can work in the culture

Question:What role does luck to play in entrepreneur success?
Panel Answer:
Luck is the relevant to scale
You can fail 101 times and get it right one time and you’re an overnight success
You need to identity what you’re good at and be willing to change.
Take a finical accounting course

Poll asked to the panelist:
What kind of cell phone do you have in your pocket?
Mark Cuban: Sidekick for email & a Droid X
Other Panelist: iPhone, iPhone, blackberry
Do you Tweet? 2 yes and 2 no
Do you have an iPad? 3 yes and 1 no
Do you use Social Networking sites? Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
If you have to pick one technology that will impact consumers & entrepreneurs in the future what will it be?
Cloud computing/smartphone
Wireless bandwidth
Smart Grid Power Technology
Mobile Technology

Question:What advice would you have to a child picking a career in the future?
Don’t’ worry about what you do but who you work with. Do what’s important to you and build brand you first.

Video from Mark Cuban’s keynote via @WRAL

Mark Cuban Keynote Notes:

1st Rule for every company:
The best equity for every company is sweat equity.Most think the 1st thing to do is to raise money
Don’t think VC’s are the best thing, they are vulture capitalist
Don’t always look to raise money but look for ways not to raise money
Tech has become inexpensive
Think about how you’re going to cut your own cost & spend as little money as possible to start a business

Sales Cures All:
When you do a business, who is going to be the #1 sales person?
Develop a culture where everyone in the organize sales
It’s all about selling,
If you’re not comfortable selling your product, then who will?
You have to be the king or queen of sales
Have good customers service

Ideas:
The ideas are the easy part, everybody has one
The hard part is the preparation
Ask yourself who hard are you willing to work?
If you’re married you have a disadvantage,
Understand in your mind you have some challenges ahead

Don’t lie to yourself
It may be your idea but you may not the best person to do it

Learn how to kick your own a**
There’s not one business that another company someone has not said, I can do that better
Someone is always trying to do it better
Put yourself in your competitors shoes
Ask yourself, what would you do to kill what you have
You have to resale to your own customers every day
No customers wants to feel take advantage of
At the end of the day you don’t own your business, your customers do
If you don’t put your customers first, someone else will
Great customer service is like being a great lover.
But sometimes you have setbacks
There are going to times when things go wrong but you can’t let them freak you out! Learn and move forward.
If you’re not making mistakes you’re not trying
Come up with a list of elements that work for you.

Other:
Culture is important to your organization
The two people Mark learned the most about how to deal with the media was from Dennis Rodman & Paris Hilton.
Learn how to communicate with the media,
Media is always looking for a story.
Put yourself in the the shoes where the media needs you.
Understand what business you’re in
Think about what you really are selling!

You can see a few flickr photos from the event here and scan twitter via the #techwire hashtag.

Since we launched back in February one of our goals has been to work with local businesses to offer a check-in learderboard contest each month. Previous contest have included working with Empire Eats, Arrichion Hot Yoga , Golden Corral and today we’re excited to announce that TriOut has partner with the Durham startup Shoeboxed for a top 5 check-in leaderboard contest.

“Shoeboxed is the easiest way to get rid of your paper clutter. Send receipts, business cards, and other documents to them in postage paid envelopes or via mobile phone and Shoeboxed will scan, data enter, categorize, and upload everything into your secure online account. Download expense reports, PDFs, or enjoy unlimited organized online storage at no extra charge. www.shoeboxed.com.

For the Shoeboxed top 5 check-in learderboad contest, the top 5 TriOut users for the week of July 19 – July 25 will win a 60 day free Classic trial Shoeboxed account and a Shoeboxed T-Shirt. The winners will be announced on Monday, July 26 via the @TriOut twitter account.

The Leaderboard is based on our check-in points systems and you can earn extra points for checking in at locations with specials. You can see all of the locations with specials here: http://trioutnc.com/specials/. For more information about the TriOut points system read: TriOut Points System.
You earn more points the following ways:
5 points for each check-in per location, per day.
3 points for each photo.
3 points for each review.
10 points for checking into an event.
10 points for checking into a location with a special.

We’re excited to be working with the Shoeboxed team and would like to congratulate them on their continued success as a NC Startup. You can find more about Shoeboxed and connect with the company via their online profiles below:

Web: Shoeboxed.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/Shoeboxed
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/shoeboxed
Phone: (888) 369 4269 |

Good luck to everyone and thanks for using TriOut. We’re working with other local businesses to provide more sponsored leaderboard contests in the future. If you’re interested in sponsoring a TriOut leaderboard contest please email wayne at TriOutNC dot com or call 919-200-0933.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Photo via Clickz.

Enter Whrrl, is a Seattle based app founded by Pelago. Last week Whrrl launched Society Rewards, a social loyalty program designed to close the gap between a brand’s online social media presence and real-world physical presence. Whrrl also launched a partnership with Murphy USA for a chance to win free gas by just checking in. From the press release:

… Whrrl has teamed with Murphy USA to reward the customers who love
them. When customers check in with Whrrl at one of Murphy USA’s 1,100 locations nationwide,
they will be accepted into the “Murphy USA Society” and earn a chance to immediately win free
gas.

Now with a chance to win free gas is it enough to make geo fanboys and others to check-in? In terms of value for check-ins what type of location-based promotion or partnership would you like to be rewarded with?

Disclosure: I have no affiliation with Pelago/Whrrl outside of the fact that I’ve met with the owners/team at various tech events and have visited their Seattle based office once

A few minutes ago I received a push notification on my iPhone from @PlacePop that Barack Obama checked in at InterContinental Toronto Centre as you can see via the iPhone screenshot above. What is @PlacePop? Per the http://www.placepop.com website:

PlacePop is a place-based, social networking application developed by Ooga Labs – a San Francisco-based consumer technology greenhouse. The company was founded in 2009 by Kent Lindstrom, former CEO of the social networking website Friendster.
PlacePop fills a gap in the geo social networking market by providing a simple location-based social app for consumers, combined with a mobile, web-based affinity marketing platform for local businesses.

After seeing the message I did a little research to see if this was a fake account and it looks like about 12 days ago the Barack Obama account first checked-in to the Naval Technical Training Center, Corry Station and since then the White House – Oval Office. On another note, I don’t recall friending the Barack Obama account either, therefor I think it’s a partnership/marketing project with the social media team at the White House and PlacePop. Also the location/time of the check-in is someone what accurate being that the President is attending the G20 Summit in Toronto.

Why is this a big deal or I’m blogging about it? Well for a couple of reasons. One being their are over 20 plus location-based services with @Foursquare, @Brightkite, @Loopt @whrrl and my favorite the hyper-local startup @TriOut (*partner) leading the way. PlacePop just launched in March, 2010 and if they landed a partnership with the White House or their PR/Social Media team that’s a big deal. Two, in a time where many attack Facebook for privacy and discuss the harms of using location-based services if the President of the United States (at least his traveling social media team) can use a location-based service to check-in so people can track his location, what does that say about everyone else or national security for that matter. Third, with the tech world drooling over the @Foursquare vs @Gowalla battle that is really not a battle, if it’s true what does it mean for them and other location-based services if the government picked PlacePop over them. Remember this: INFOGRAPHIC: If Obama Used Foursquare from @RWW in February 2010? Personally, I don’t think it means to much from a state of competition but more of a validation of the value of location-based services. Also note that “If” this true, PlacePop updates are more current than the @BarackObama tweets… interesting.

Regardless if it’s true or not PlacePop is an upcoming player in the location space and is one to watch for. At launch PlacePop had a check-in reward special with both Target and the Black Eyed Peas. Where the first 100 people to earn Silver status in PlacePop would receive 10 gift cards at Target and the first 1,000 people to check-in at any participating tour venue received a free song from the Black Eyed Peas. Those promotions were on the http://www.placepop.com/about/rewards/blackeyedpeas and http://www.placepop.com/about/rewards/target pages but are no longer showing up.

You can find me on PlacePop here: http://www.placepop.com/people/waynesutton

If you use PlacePop let me know how you use it in the comments below. If the @whitehouse / @BarackObama team are using @PlacePop to check-in what are your thoughts on the government using a location-based service?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanmeyers/ / CC BY 2.0

As some of you may know we launched a location based services startup called TriOut in Febarury 2010. Looking back from my years of attending and planning startup weekend events using social media tools to launch a startup of any kind can be great for marketing, planning, customer support and more.

Although TriOut is three months old, Lawrence Ingraham @LawPower (TriOut Founder) started working on TriOut in October of 2009. Fast forward three months later, even though we still have a long way to go I wanted to look back at how we used social media tools to launch and manage TriOut at it’s current state.

External Communication:
Phonebooth (Started with Google Voice, then switch to Phonebooth)

Project Management Documentation:

• Google Wave
• Google Docs

Internal Communication:

• Twitter
• Google Wave
• Gmail
• Skype
• SMS

Billing:

• Paypal

Customer Support:

• Get Satisfaction: http://getsatisfaction.com/triout
• Twitter

Email Marketing:

• Google Spreadsheet Sign-up Form
• Blue Sky Factory

Blogging:

• WordPress: http://tri-out.com/blog/
• Disqus Comment platform

File Transfer and storage:

• DropBox
• GoogleWave

Widgets:

• Custom Built http://trioutnc.com/u/widgets.php

Brand Awareness/Marketing

• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TriOutapp
• Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/triout
• Facebook Fanpage: http://www.facebook.com/TriOutapp
• Google Buzz: http://www.google.com/profiles/trioutapp (new)
• Twitter Accounts: TriOut & TriOut4Biz (New)
• Flick: http://www.flickr.com/photos/triout

Measuring/Monitoring

• Pre-launch (beta sign-up form)
• New user registration (custom)
• Google Analytics
• Tweets: RowFeeder & Searchtastic
• Google Alerts
• Check-ins: Custom Built
• iPhone app intsalls/downloads – Apple
• Mobile Web check-ins – Custom

To Implement:
Highrise for CRM (customer relationship management)
Social Media Measuring platform: Either or both: Trackur and Argyle Social (supporting local NC startups!)

Results:
While I can’t get into how many users we have at the moment here’s some traffic and measurable items from October 2009 to now.

• @TriOut twitter account: 610 followers, listed 77 times
• Facebook Fanpage: 259 fans/likes
• Blog Subscribers:
• Users to date: N/A
• October 2009 35 Beta testers
• February 2010: 200 Beta Testers
• May 2010: Reaching a landmark

Google Analytics chart Visitors Overview from February launch to May 12:

Compete.com unique visitors chart from February to March

* Disclaimer: Phonebooth is a client and I’m a partner with TriOut.

As TriOut continues to grow we’re going to keep a close eye on what works in terms of marketing, communications and productivity.
What online tools do you use to manage your startup or business?

The “check in” doesn’t have to be a no-value, self promoting act. It can actually help you find places to go and people to meet. TriOut is based in the Triangle area of North Carolina; Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill. We’re more than just a location based service, we’re a service to our community.

We treat every user check in as a positive vote for the location you’re checking into. You wouldn’t keep going back to a place you don’t like, right? If you do, you know full well you’d give it a bad review, like the DMV or a horrible automotive shop.

Using this information, we developed a “popularity” index for locations based on the number of people who have visited, how often they visit, and what they rate the place. We can determine which restaurants in Raleigh are the most popular, which museums in Durham you should check out, etc. This is much more accurate than a simple “5 star rating” you get from other sites.

What makes this system even more valuable is when you’re looking for new places to explore. We have a “Places You’ll Probably Love” section in our search results. What this does is takes all the locations your friends have been to, calculates how popular they are with your friends, then returns places which you haven’t been in to, in order of popularity. My wife and I have used this just about every weekend to find new restaurants to try out, and the beauty is, there’s always something new to try.

We like to call it “organizing the word of mouth.” Your friends are out there going to some great places, eating at some great restaurants. Unless you catch them say it on Twitter, or have a conversation with them about it, you’ll never know. Because they check in at locations, and add photos and reviews of places they visit, we can share their impression of the location without you having to ask.

I’d say the “check in” is the most valuable technology that has popped up in the last year. Just as Twitter has become a system for communication, checking in will eventually become the way we get recommendations and find places to go. All it takes now is for more companies and developers to realize the power of it.

Guest post by Lawrence Ingraham from April 4th, 2010 on http://tri-out.com/blog

Written by: Lawrence Ingraham

Lawrence Ingraham, Founder/Lead Developer for TriOut. Follow Lawrence on Twitter. You can reach Lawrence via email at law@tri-out.com

Disclaimer: I’m a partner with TriOut a location-based startup in NC where I serve as the Business development/marketing strategist.

Yesterday Ben Parr co-editor at Mashable wrote an article called “Dear Foursquare: This Is Not the Right Time to Sell” in which he discusses the uncertainty of the location-based industry and recent rumors of Yahoo buying FourSquare for $125 million. It’s an interesting argument to make if the Foursquare team decides to sell or work towards being the “next big thing” as they have been called by so many industry leaders. In the post Ben highlights 5 factors to consider should Foursquare decide to sell or not: Those factors were:

Potential market size: Currently, Foursquare has almost 1 million users. But what is its potential market size? It’s essentially anyone with a smartphone capable of GPS. And while that number is relatively small now, it’s rapidly rising.

Competitors: Foursquare’s primary competitor is Gowalla, but it has been breaking away from the app ever since the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) in March. It also faces competition from Yelp and potentially Facebook, which will likely be revealed next week at Facebook’s F8 conference. Yet despite these external threats, Foursquare has a commanding lead and all of the media’s attention.

Potential worth: Foursquare’s worth around $100 million currently — can it reach $500 million? $1 billion? $10 billion? Where is the ceiling?

Business model: Foursquare currently burns more cash than it takes in — can it create a business model that will make it profitable and sustainable? I believe there’s a ton of potential in location-based advertising, especially now that Apple and Google are helping pioneer this market.

Exit strategies: If Foursquare were to turn down the Yahoo offer, who would be able to buy it? Or is there legitimate potential for an IPO?

Here’s my comment on the article
Ben, as a Foursquare user/friend of the team and with the current state of yahoo, I understand your post title and the points you make about selling. But as someone with a location based startup (http://TriOutNC.com) I think if Foursquare decided to sell right now, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Just look at recent Ning news. Also the LBS space is getting more crowded by the day and they have a lot more competition beside Gowalla. The last time I counted there were over 17 different LBS apps and we haven’t seen what Facebook will launch as you mentioned. But we do know it will be big for the LBS industry and it seems almost weekly that Google is making their apps location aware.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the team, that they can succeed and continue to grow their user base along with showing their value but a $125 million buyout vs raising $3 & $5 million in a competitive uncertain space sounds like a good number to me. Would you have turned down the half billion from Google like Yelp did?

But hey, what do I know, I’m just a LBS geek from North Carolina. Good luck Foursquare either way and nice post Ben.

Also see:

• Location Based Poll: What is your favorite Location based social network/app?
• Check-Ins are Coupons. Game Mechanics are Bulls***. Show Me The MONEY or Go Home (Loser).
• Your feedback and results from the location based social network/app poll

*Disclaimer: I’m a partner with TriOut a location-based startup in NC where I serve as the Business development/marketing strategist.

It’s one of those cases where you agree but disagree with someone but only time will tell for everyone in the location-based industry.

To answer my own question, “Is the future of location-based apps that great or should they sell, sell, sell?” As we continue to grow and market TriOut, I believe the answer is yes, the opportunity is that great but we’re hyper-local to NC and have our business strategy with financial goals in place. For the rest of the location-based apps, good luck. What are your thoughts?

I wanted to have something here besides the auto generated RSS feed shares post that have been publishing since SXSW. So here’s a simple list post if you’re in the market to buy some stickers.

The picture above is how my skinned MacBook Pro looked before SXSWi and below is how it looked afterwards. I wanted a few TriOut stickers to pass out during SXSWi myself and for the launch party. Here’s a list of sticker printing companies I found and were suggested via twitter.

1. http://www.stickergiant.com/
2. http://www.psprint.com/stickers-labels
3. http://www.contagiousgraphics.com/Stickers/stickers.html
4. http://stickerrobot.com/pricing/

Also check out some of the stickers I collected at SXSW, you may recognize a few of the companies.

Do you have a company that you use for stickers and what is your favorite sticker on the MacBook Pro?

If you’re live in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, NC area also known as the Triangle and/or follow me on

Fast forward 5 months later and last week we held a launch party at the RTP Headquarters with about 100 attendees and  launched the website http://TriOutNC.com for non-iphone users and the community.

Ealier this week we emailed our first newsletter to our subscribers thanking everyone and announcing our first check-in special with 3 local  Dairy Queen locations and a top 5 Empire Eats check-in contest. It has been a pleasure working with Lawrence and we’re excited about the future of TriOut. Thanks for the support NC and if you’re not subscribed to our email newsletter you can do so here and on our blog.

Take a look at our first email newsletter below from TriOut with more details about the launch party, check-in specials and our contest.

TriOutNC.com launches

Hello everyone Last Wednesday, at the RTP Headquarters (@theRTP) around 100 people were in attendance from early TriOut beta users and bloggers, venture capitalists and, programers/developers, along with friends and family – as we officially launched TriOutNC.com and removed the invitation-only mode for the TriOut iPhone app. We would like to thank our sponsors and everyone who was in attendance. You can read the official press release here and recap post here. Also check out some the photos here by John Rees.

Mad Treats, Inc, Dairy Queen Check-in Special

Another announcement we made at the launch party was our “check-in” special with Mad Treats, Inc. at 3 local Dairy Queen Locations.The current specials are available at the locations: DQ Grill & Chill (New Bern Ave) DQ Grill & Chill w/Orange Julius(Morrisville Carpenter) DQ / Orange Julius (Brier Creek) After you have checked-in you’ll see one of the following badges for either a Buy one Medium Blizzard, Get the Second Free or get $1.00 off any smoothie. From there just show the badge to the cashier to receive your TriOut “check-in” special. Be sure to join us at the Triangle FreezeUp! FreezerBurns Live! @DQ on Monday, March 01, 2010 7:00 PM – 10:00 at the DQ Grill & Chill w/Orange Julius(Morrisville Carpenter) location hosted by Gregory Ng. You’ll recieve 10 TriOut points for attending and you can RSVP here: http://freezeup.eventbrite.com

Top 5 wins free $25 Gift Certificate at Empire Eats via Check-in Contest.

As some of you may have noticed every Monday morning the @TriOut Twitter account sends out a Tweet of the top 5 TriOut users for the week. With the new TriOutNC.com website you can see the leaderboard updating in real-time. We’re please to announce the Empire Eats Top 5 TriOut Check-in Contest for the week of February 22 – 28. The top 5 users for the week will receive a $25 gift certificate at one of the following Empire Eats locations below. You can read the full contest details including how to get points here.

Thank You Launch Party Sponsors

Blog	@TriOut	TriOutapp	TriDot pics	iPhone app	Feedback

Ok here’s a post that includes Foursquare but not about Foursquare but is about Foursquare just not about locations. Now that we have that out of the way, like most startups using web apps to save time and money have become somewhat of a standard process. You can use Google Docs for all of your office application needs, you can use Phonebooth, Skype or Google Voice for phone service and instead of hiring teams for customer service, startups are using web base applications for customer support and ticketing. One of the most popular customer support platforms for startups is Get Satisfaction, which offers an instant way for companies to manage customer support, share ideas and gather feedback from customers as well. Get Satisfaction provides freemium services with paid upgrades for more options. We’re using it for customer support and feedback at TriOut. Since the launch of Get Satisfaction more platforms have lunched not to just focus on customer support but to focus on community feedback or collect ideas. Here’s a list of 15 online customer support solutions for your startup.

1. http://www.zendesk.com
2. http://tenderapp.com
3. http://uservoice.com
4. http://getsatisfaction.com
5. http://www.ideascale.com
6. http://www.crowdsound.com/tour
7. http://www.eldos.com/vp
8. http://userecho.com
9. http://www.suggestionbox.com
10. http://www.fevote.com
11. http://www.kindlingapp.com
12. http://code.google.com/p/cnprog
13. http://code.google.com/p/soclone
14. http://www.opensourcerails.com/projects/1785-OpenMind

*disclosure I have no affiliation with any off the companies listed above.

Have you used one of the customer support platforms before? Which one is your favorite?

Chatterbox:

MailChimp;

Brizzly: (really not sure what this is, but looks close to a monkey )

Paul Frank

Just a random thought, have you seen more monkey logos?

From http://blog.twingly.com
The realtime web is overwhelming us with information. Search is not social. RSS is a broken promise. Twingly Channels brings a revolution to these three areas.

A Twingly Channel acts as a social filter on top of feeds and realtime search, allowing you to set up a social memetracker for any topic or event. The underlying idea is that by aggregating feeds and realtime search results into a channel where many people sharing the same interest can discuss and vote on the content (while also providing a filter to solve the prevalent problem of information overflow) we lower the learning curve to the realtime web.

Twingly Channels provides instant user value without the user having to spend time finding the right people to follow. Following topics rather than individuals, you immediately tap into the collective intelligence of a group of people sharing your interests. Or you can create your own channel and invite others to assist you in picking feeds and keywords to monitor.

After you create your account let me know what you think about Twingly channels and how you plan to use it in the comments.

While that may stay true for some, new ways of filtering, finding and reading content have emerged helping users find relevant content to their interest. Let’s take a look.

1. YourVersion – http://www.yourversion.com

YourVersion continuously discovers new and personally relevant web content based on your interests, and lets you easily bookmark and share your discoveries with friends.
YourVersion was recently named DemoPit peoples’ choice winner at TechCrunch50

2. Google Fast Flip – http://fastflip.googlelabs.com

Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

3. LazyFeed – http://www.lazyfeed.com

Lazyfeed is a web service that allows you to subscribe to any topics and get live updates. Just save any topic you are interested in, and forget about it. Lazyfeed will remember and let you know when there’s new content on that topic, just like an instant messenger. Lazyfeed allows you to stay on top of everything you care about, effortlessly.

4. Feedly (Firefox plug-in) – http://www.feedly.com

feedly organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page.

5. Alltop – http://Alltop.com

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you.

While Feedly and Alltop have been online a lot longer than LazyFeed, Google Fast Flip and YourVersion, I thought they could be useful to the non-tech readers of SocialWayne.com.

Google Reader is still my preferred choice to read blogs but with features like auto discovery of new content LazyFeed and YourVersion are good tools for bloggers looking to find content or just to keep up with the latest news from the social web / blogosphere.

Out of the five tools which one do you use? What do you use to read blogs?

I’m not sure if you have noticed but recently a lot of people have been posting various forms of multimedia content to their Twitter stream with the short url http://post.ly. That short url redirects to Posterous.com a Y Combinator startup that launched a little over a year ago. Posterous isn’t just a short url or multimedia content platform, it’s a social network, blogging platform that integrates with other platforms that allow you to post content via email and more. You can use Posterous as your blog which some have see: Steve Rubel , as a life-stream site or just post random pictures and photos to push to Facebook, tumblr or your other blogs.

At SXSW 09 Kipp Bodnar and I had a chance to meet and interview the founders Gary Tan and Sachin Agarwal about Posterous and upcoming plans for the platform. Also some have wondered how do you pronounce “Posterous” listen very closely as you’ll here it once from Sachin.

In the video the founders talk about how easy it is to use Posterous and upcoming plans for the platform.

Since SXSW I’ve created a Posterous site and configured it to post to a various social networks. As the founders stated in the video being that you can use email to post to Posterous I send pictures from my iPhone to my site. But since I have purchased the iPhone 3Gs I have used Posterous as a podcasting platform by emailing a voice recording message or for video blogging as I can send audio and video emails to Posterous and it automatically adds the necessarily embedded player.

If you thinking that Posterous is just another one of those here today and gone tomorrow startups, I suggest you take a look at some of the users and think again. Posterous users range from everyday bloggers to leaders in the social media marketing and technology space. Here are a few Posterous sites from users who you may recognize:

• http://chrisbrogan.posterous.com
• http://andybeal.net
• http://tedmurphy.mobi
• http://rah.posterous.com
• http://bwana.posterous.com
• http://ginnyskal.posterous.com
• http://georgegsmithjr.posterous.com
• http://idonotes.posterous.com
• http://jasonfalls.posterous.com
• http://jakrose.posterous.com
• http://tweetdeck.posterous.com
• http://ijustine.posterous.com
• http://holykaw.com

Recommended reading: Ten Tips to Get the Most Out of Posterous

Do you have a Posterous site if so let me know the url in the comments and how are you using it.

1. Rock the Job - http://rockthejob.com
About: Rock the Job helps students understand the impact of social media on their careers.

2. Bwana.TV – http://www.bwana.tv
About: Reviews and discussions on gadgets, social media, blogging and technology.

3. This week in Startups - http://thisweekinstartups.com
About: Jason McCabe Calacanis is the founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine focused on the top English-language search terms, including verticals such as travel, products, news, entertainment, sports, food, and health.

4. North Carolina Wine TV – http://northcarolinawine.tv
About: North Carolina Wine TV is an online video show hosted by Jeff Cohen and Kipp Bodnar that is published twice weekly on Tuesday and Thursdays that is focused on reviewing wines produced in North Carolina.

5. From the Couch – http://www.from-the-couch.com
About: ‘From the Couch’ is an Online Video show, hosted by us brothers Marc and David Perel, which covers everything web orientated. We show you CSS tips, how to create websites from nothing and also chat about news in the web world.

Shameless Plug WayneSutton.TV is still in beta and I hope to have it launched by the end of June.

What are you favorite .TV shows?

The Pitch
BabelWith.me is a simple chat tool that allows you to hold conversations in up to 45 languages. Invite your friends through Twitter, Facebook and email to join you in a conversation without language barriers. Or you can simply share your unique chat room URL anywhere you would like.

As users from around the world join your chat room, they’re given the option to choose a nickname and their language. Choosing any language other than English will immediately translate the entire chat room into the language they choose, including the chat log and all static copy.

BabelWith.me implements Google Translate’s API and runs on Google App Engine’s Python platform. This offers BabelWith.me great reliability and flexibility as we continue to add usefulness to the application and expand the opportunity for real-time, multi-language communication.

LifeChurch.tv is the non-profit organization behind BabelWith.me.

You can find BabelWith.me on twitter as @BabelWithMe

If you would like for me to cover your product or site please email: pitches at pitches at socialwayne dot com . Disclaimer:, I have no investment or relationship with the creators of this site. Thank you.

1. idek.net @idek

idek.net is a url shortener, you have a long url, we have some short ones to spare. Sounds like a fair trade.
Created by: Adam Covati (@covati)
Location: Durham, NC

2. tweetgrid.com

Tweetgrid, creates a real time twitter search dashboard. Tweetgrid recently launched an iPhone version of their website:

Just go to http://tweetgrid.com/iphone/ on your iPhone.
Created by: Jazzy Chad @jazzychad
Location: Raleigh, NC

3. EasyTweets

EasyTweets is an online marketing tool to promote and grow your business by leveraging the power of microblogging.
Created by: Alexander Barbara @ayb
Location: Triangle, NC

Just launched is:
4. Get Encouraged</a>: @getencouraged

Send your encouraging quotes and thoughts to us and we’ll retweet them. Follow us and get a stream of encouragement all day long.

Created by: Rick Cecil & Abe Crystal of More Better Labs
Location: Research Triangle Park, NC

UPDATE: Let’s make that 5 twitter apps,

5. GeoTweeter for iPhone [iTunes link]

This cool iPhone app puts the ‘where’ into your tweets! Messages automatically include a ‘schmap.me’ link, showing followers your exact location with a configurable map icon: say more about places you visit with an optional photo and star rating.

Created by:Donald McMillan @donaldmcmillan of Schmap
Location: Carrboro, NC

As you can tell I’m proud of NC and the teams behind each site and speaking of startups this weekend in Raleigh, NC we’re having Triangle Startup Weekend. If you’re in the area come by and let’s launch another startup.

Do you know someone who created a twitter app? If so what state or city do they reside in?