Posts Tagged ‘Berst’
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012
By Allan Maurer
 So, you’re at the big game and the Quarterback makes a startling play but your cell phone camera misses the crucial moment by an instant. Throughout the stadium, though, hundreds, perhaps thousands of other sports fans took photos. Don’t you wish you could see their pix?
If you had the Berst app on your phone you could.
Berst, founded last fall at the Triangle Startup Factory on the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, NC, is the brainchild of foudners Matt Ramsden and Caleb Foster.
“We had been working on things together and the idea came up after we were playing tennis one day,” Ramsden explains. “We thought it was a really big thing but also something we could use ourselves.”
Berst makes a mobile app for the iPhone and Android phones that makes it easy to connect with people around you. Unlike many such apps, everything it presents to the user is based on location.
Seeing their photos of the game
“If you’re at an NBA basketball game,” says Ramsden, you can call someone across the country, but not across the stadium.” He notes that you may not necessarily want to be friends with them, but you might want to see their photos from the game.
The same is true of concerts, weddings, and “a lot of experiences like that,” says Ramsden. “This is something we know will exist in the next few years. We want to be the ones who do it right.”
When you open the Berst app, he says, “The connection we use is location rather than friendship or interest.”
Users can, however, invite their Facebook and Twitter friends and those on other services to get the app.
“But with Berst,” Ramsden says, “Everyplace you move what you see is different and super relevant to you.”
So, if you’re at a baseball game, your friends in Rhode Island probably won’t care about the photos you’re taking, but the people at the game care a lot about that homerun that just happened. Berst removes the friction from people being able to do that (share photos, etc.).
Working on monetization
Ramsden says his partner, Foster, “Isn’t formally trained but he’s been coding since he was 10 or 12. He created a video game for his friends at 14. He was that kid.”
The app is currently free, but Ramsden says the firm is working on ways to monetize it. “The biggest thing for us now is to reach scale. The difference between 10,000 users and a million opens up a lot of ways to make money.”
While they’re currently focused on getting the app right and scaling up, Ramsden said they’re weighing their options regarding potential funding from outside sources.
“We think it’s a huge opportunity and market,” Ramsden says.
Tags: American Tobacco Campus, Android, app, Berst, Caleb Foster, Durham, iPhone, location, Matt Ramsden, NC, photo sharing, Triangle StartUp Factory
Posted in Apple, entrepreneurship, Internet/New Media, IT, Mobile, Startups, Telecommunications | 1 Comment »
Thursday, June 7th, 2012
By Joe Procopio
 Joe Procopio Back in March, when I wrote about the five companies that had been selected for the first class of Triangle Startup Factory, my theme was that in the startup world, nothing happens overnight. It took a long three years and some pivoting to get TSF to the place it is now, and each of the companies, for the most part, had been in the trenches for a while.
Today, those five — Archive Social, RxAnalytics, Arcametrics, Ruzuku, Berst, plus late arrival Entasso will hop on stage in Bay 7 of American Tobacco and show you, and a number of potential investors, what they’ve created. Five of the six will ask for money (not from you, you’re cool).
Half of the Factory
I sat down with half of the TSF management team this week — serial CEO, board member, advisor, and mentor Dave Neal — to talk about the class, the semester, and what everyone learned.
Dave sees the pros and cons of the Triangle as a startup hub. The pros are many, and they start with the ideas, which are big, and extend to the talent pool, which is vast. The cons are few and, played right, can be strengths.
The Who and Where
We talked about the class. It’s a class with lots of potential. Having known Anil from Archive Social and Rick and Abe from Ruzuku for a while, and having met Alison from Entasso and Deepak from RxAnalytics shortly before they were selected, I can honestly and definitely say that they started with a great group of entrepreneurs.
We talked about the geography. TSF got a very diverse group of applicants for their first run, and even so, the strength of the RTP led to five of the six being local, with Berst coming down from Chicago.
The Other Side
Dave had a blast, and from what I’ve heard, everyone involved got a lot out of the time they spent at the Factory, from the speakers to the advisors and so on. Dave has been involved in angel-backed, VC-backed, and bootstrapped startups, as well as advising some 18-24 companies over the last two years, so for him, being on the other side of the table was eye-opening
Lessons Learned
I asked him if he’d do anything differently the next time around. He mentioned the application process and changing a few things there. Some of that is already in place – for example, there was no early application process last cycle, so when this cycle’s early application period ended on May 31, TSF found they had a healthy amount of startups already. The final deadline is June 30th, so there will be several more, if not many.
He also talked about amping up the feedback. Like the process any god startup goes through, there’s usually a great deal of feedback and learning and testing and adapting up front, then a heads down period for execution. TSF startups went through much the same process Dave sees feedback being applied to the teams more strongly and through the entire session for the next run.
What’s Next
Obviously, today’s festivities are big, and there will be a lot of follow up for the teams, but they aren’t getting tossed out of the nest tomorrow. All six plan to stay in the TSF space in the Underground until the next cycle begins on August 27th, as the TSF directors provide more connections, more mentoring, and more advisement to the teams in their next crucial fund-raising stage.
TSF has established itself now with two programs per year and a financial offering that ranks in the top four nationwide, but Dave and Chris know they’re not done, not by a long shot. What happens with these startups over the next three months, even the next three years, will reflect on TSF and the validity of its program.
Dave knows this, and he’s tweaking while he extends that runway, even as they ramp up for the next class.
Tags: American Tobacco Campus, Arcametrics, Archive Social, Berst, Dave Neal, Entasso, entrepreneurs, Joe Procopio, NC, RTP, Ruzuku, RxAnalytics, Startups, Triangle StartUp Factory, TSF
Posted in Columns, entrepreneurship, Internet/New Media, IT, Startups, Tech life/Culture, Viewpoint | No Comments »
Monday, March 19th, 2012
By Joe Procopio
Joe Procopio There really is no such thing as overnight success in the startup universe.
Just as it’s been a long road for Triangle Startup Factory, going back to the conversations I first had with Chris Heivly some three years ago, when the idea of an accelerator in the Triangle seemed so crazy that it just might work, it’s been a haul for the five companies that make up its inaugural class.
ExactByte makes Archive Social, a software-as-a-service solution for automatically keeping business-compliant records of an organization’s social communication (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). I first started following CEO Anil Chawla’s entrepreneurial exploits while he was still with IBM a couple years ago, and finally wound up covering him, ExactByte, and Archive Social when he presented at Launch Days back in January.
As I mention in that column, Anil has been on the startup scene for years, he’s been a fixture at ExitEvent since the first one (he even let me beat him at ping pong back in December), and he was at Startup Happy Hour Wednesday night looking all smiley and what not.
Ruzuku has been at it just as long if not longer. They allow creation of online courses and learning communities for instructors – anyone from bloggers to coaches to speakers who want to put structured instructional material online. I first met Rick Cecil over a decade ago when he was building UX for clients at hesketh.com (almost before anyone knew what web UX was). Abe Crystal first told me about Ruzuku early in 2010, and they also presented at Launch Days in May of that year.
Making athletic training more productive
RxAnalytics uses machine learning algorithms and data analysis to make athletic training more productive, resulting in maximized performance. When I last saw Deepak Gopalakrishna, it was via Skype in February when he pitched to the Carolina Challenge from a coffee shop somewhere in DC. He was in DC because he had been pitching in person earlier that day. RxAnalytics was also a Startup Stampede company in mid-2011.
Arcametrics has created a data engine that allows financial and healthcare marketing professionals to pool relevant customer data across from multiple sources without compromising privacy. Admittedly, this is the company I know the least about and there is little information online, but I found some stuff on them dating back to 2008, which is exactly two forevers ago in startup time.
Berst is an app that lets you communicate with groups of people at specific locations where you share a common context. Matthew Ramsden and Caleb Foster developed the app as a side project and then took it to Chicago’s bi-monthly Technori Pitch event in October where they demoed the app to 500 people.
Yes, they are the youngest company of the bunch, but remember, this is an accelerator, not an exit.
I caught up with Heivly on Wednesday (surprisingly, not at any of the three startup events that took place that night) and he was genuinely excited about the class. It also means good things for the region, with TSF having pulled a much greater pool of applicants from the area, 55% local as opposed to 25% local during the late 2010 LaunchBox Digital application process.
The class is mostly local too, and it’s that way on merit, with absolutely no preconceived desire to pull local startups into the accelerator.
It bodes well.
Tags: Abe Crystal, Anil Chawla, Archive Social, Berst, Caleb Foster, Deepak Gopalakrishna, ExactByte, Hesketh, Joe Procopio, LaunchBox Digital, Matthew Ramsden, NC, Rick Cecil, RTP, Ruzuku, RxAnalytics, Startup Happy Hour, Startup Stampede, Technori Pitch, Triangle StartUp Factory
Posted in Carolinas, Columns, entrepreneurship, Facebook, Internet/New Media, LinkedIn, Mobile, North Carolina, Telecommunications, Twitter, Viewpoint | No Comments »
|
