Startups

Armed with a degree in Marketing and Business from University of Ulster in Northern Ireland and an Operations experience from Ireland, UAE and Egypt , Ciaran Connolly, 36 teamed up with Ernist Turdubaev 33, with a Master of Arts – Retail and Government Sector to launch ProfileTree.

After a $13.9 million in Series A funding and a launch in Chicago, Getaround, is coming to a city near you to help residents make money from sharing their cars even on a full time basis, thanks to its beta service Getaway.

Facebook just hit 1 billion active users globally and that was great but a new social payment application is set to make Facebook users across the world get more from their connections and even allowing companies to sell or receive payments from their pages.

TechZulu caught up Robert Sussman, Co-CEO of Zunguz, the Facebook payment app.

The team at Recycled Bride knows weddings are expensive, time-consuming to plan, and that’s the reason they want to make it easy to source great deals on pricey wedding items, and help you recover some of the money spent.

Even though Lyft nor Sidecar presented at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012 they need to be mentioned as they were a huge time saver both getting from after party to after party and also to get to the airport.

Lately there has been a non cab, “hire your neighbor”, kind of transportation craze. Here in LA we have a towncar service called Uber that with a tap of an app we can get a door to door town car service ride.

ResearchGate, the professional network for scientists and researchers, was founded by virologists Dr. Ijad Madisch and Sören Hofmayer, and IT specialist Horst Fickenscher. According to the founders, ResearchGate was built for scientists, by scientists in a move to improve research through collaboration regardless of the distance between the research team.

MoviePass has launched a new payment card technology in what it says is a move to bolster the dwindling theater attendance across the US by over 100 percent.

Geo-location Based Technology
The new geo-location based technology via their membership card, or simply a debit card for movie theaters is activated with the MoviePass iPhone App, which has been released simultaneously…

Copenhagen is world renowned for its biking culture and has officially become the first Bike City in the World. It’s not a surprise then that the founders of a company that provides a smart solution to university students to rent a bike for free, happen to be Danish. Johan Bender and Kim Sanderhoff are the founders of Free Bike Project. Both are students at the University of Southern California and wanted to provide free bike access to students on campus.

Music Prodigy, a Los Angeles based music education technology firm serious on improving the way people learn, play and interact with music beat over 70 startups with their app Rock Prodigy to win the Silicon Beach Awards.

Hours after the panelists debated the future of content distribution at the Silicon Beach @ USC conference, across campus at the Annenberg Innovation Lab a remarkable product demo was taking place by Coincident.TV . A technology that will surely revolutionize how viewers interact with content and television in the very near future. Coincident has created a platform that will allow storytellers and producers to create robust second screen stories on the fly that incorporate video, images and other web content. The implications of what types of new interactive experiences can be made utilizing this technology are phenomenal.