Mix and Mingle | LA Startups Shows Some Bite
If you weren’t able to make it out to Wokcano to mix and mingle with the hottest startups this week, you missed out. Not to worry because we’ll recap the night with some information on the demos from these up and coming companies located in LA.
Want to connect with dog lovers around you? Where my dogs at is a new mobile app that allows you to find the best restaurants, parks, pet stores, vets, hotels, apartments and more for you and your four legged friend. They have features that allow you to search within 3, 5, 10 miles or everywhere around you for dog friendly businesses or people you follow. You can also “mark your territory” and share your adventures. The idea came to John Kolker at USC 1 year ago, then through start engine him and his partner were able to make their idea come to life. His favorite dog friendly spots to take his cocker spaniel in LA are Runyon Canyon and Basics Cafe. You can download the app now in the app store because it just launched today!
Rodedog is another new mobile app – this one may bark, but it’s not related to our furry friends. The idea came from Victoria Walker, a bright 11-year-old with an entrepreneurial spirit. She was worried that her mom would continue to text and drive when she wasn’t in the car. So, she thought of a solution; an app that would detect her mom’s activity as she was driving allowing her to send “barks” to encourage safe driving. Her idea won the AT&T Hackathon “It Can Wait” campaign last month and now the development is in the works with her team. The app is set to launch in a couple weeks.
As people grow older they like to play more golf. The problem is that our bodies continue to age. What’s the best solution to be on top of your game? Hipflex wants to change the way you start your game by setting up stretching stations, allowing you and your friends to warm up and stretch for 12 minutes before you play. There are 4 golfers to 1 trainer and it’s only $12 per person. Golfers won’t have as many injuries and for golf courses, it gets people through the course earlier resulting in more customers. They have been working on the idea for about a year and are launching the product now, currently partnered with American Golf. They focus specifically on fitness, so eventually they could branch off to other sports in the future.
If you’ve ever worked for an executive and had to track multiple statistics, financial sheets and web pages, it can be very frustrating. Besides using excel sheets and word docs to organize, there was no other easy way. This was Nick Lumpp’s problem. With hoonto, you can download their browser program and clip live information from any webpage onto one real-time dashboard. There are no confusing configuration tools, it eliminates browser bookmarks, content refreshes in real time and there are multiple levels of security, plus more. He went through Start Engine and after 6 months launched their beta. He’ll be ready to launch the full version in two weeks.
Many startups are very familiar with the word “pivot.” After almost one year, this is what Tint decided to do and relaunched with a social activity website that allows you to embed content from your social networks onto your website in one page. It is subscription based and currently they’ve updated Toni Braxton’s website to showcase the functionality of their product.
Intern Sushi is striving to make finding and hiring an intern easy and seamless. They have digital profiles and dashboards for both the interns and companies and is free to use with a premium upgrade option. They just launched nationwide yesterday and currently have over 25,000 interns and over 4,000 companies signed up in their first year.
If you love to play games on your iphone and love to compete, check out gamercomps.com. They run tournaments for mobile games where you compete using your own phone. It uses games that are already established in the app store and will be launching their beta site in the next couple days. Their lobby will list all of the tournaments and when they will run then you choose which to enter. As gamers themselves, co-founders Steve Schoenhals and Chris Brockman saw the niche in mobile gaming and are building their website through the Fast Start Studio program.
Youregards allows you to turn your Facebook photos into postcards to send to family and friends! The website simply connects to Facebook, choose a photo that you like and then places the picture onto a postcard with a personalized note. You approve and it will send a real postcard directly to whoever you’d like! The cost is only $1.29 per postcard, including postage. The site launched a few months ago. A designer, a programmer and a product guy built Youregards as fun easy way to reconnect people in a personal way.
Also in attendance were myRight, FitKit, Tapshare, gonnabe, gxstream, and penango. Make sure to check out their companies and clear your schedules for other upcoming tech events in town.
