Raise your hand if you’ve worked at hourly retail or hospitality job. Yeah, a lot of us have. Remember filling out paper applications and scheduling interviews with the manager – which of course meant you had to travel to their location at least twice? A new DC-based startup called JobOn wants to change that decades-old…
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It’s 3am. You’ve got diarrhea, a fever, and a blistering headache. Your spouse demands that you go to the hospital. You think it’s a mild-case of food poisoning and are convinced that Pepto-Bismol, fluid, and time are ample solutions to the problem. Who’s right? The wrong answer means either a few wasted hours and unnecessary hospital fees, or…
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Whether you’re selling tickets to a small yoga class or a large concert venue, this process can be synonymous with headache. On one hand, you have the customizable software option, but that’s a massive upfront cost. On the other, you can use a third-party client, but they’re going to ask for a large slice of the pie….
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Pinterest has opened new doors (one being to Tech Cocktail’s new Pinterest account). They’ve created an entirely new means for how people consume images and videos. They’ve raised the bar for how people share and interact with images. And because Pinterest has changed how the masses browse media, there now exists an ocean of untapped…
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Let’s be honest – trying to one-up your friends is an effective way to constantly improve upon yourself and become the best version of you. And it’s just plain fun. James Dickerson and his team know this – it’s why they’re launching Leap, an app that allows users to create challenges with their Facebook friends…
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Talk to many programmers, and they’ll tell you they’re the unsung heroes of the modern world – toiling away on work their superiors dictate at the last minute, interrupted during their flashes of genius, and generally misunderstood by the masses. More seriously, we all have a psychological desire to have our successes acknowledged, and San…
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If you are a startup founder or small business owner, it goes without saying that you are severely crunched for time. How does a platform that brings together a powerful web presence, social networking, e-commerce, and business management tools in one place sound? Pretty good, right? Last night at our DC Winter Mixer, I got…
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Last summer I wrote about ParkingPanda, a mobile, real-time parking discovery tool that lets users rent out their underutilized spaces to a community of drivers. Since then, ParkingPanda has grown in Baltimore and will be launching in Washington, DC in about one month. I checked in with co-founder Nick Miller to hear about what’s new…
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We previously covered Summify in a piece on app fatigue, but Summify won’t be around long enough to fatigue you: the Vancouver-based startup was acquired by Twitter in late January. Summify crafted a daily summary of news from your social networks, pulling out links to articles and serving up the most interesting. It prioritized links…
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Is it being overshadowed, or flying under the radar? Call it what you will. No matter how you shake it, last week’s launch of Eventup, a marketplace for renting venues, created quite a splash. However, a little less than one month earlier, Ella Lief launched Venue Cricket, a marketplace for renting venues, resulting in a much…
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Eric Bell wants his company to become the trusted source of financial information for Generation Y. With information on saving money, managing debt, and investing for the future YoBucko just might be it. Young people are going online more often to shop for financial services, but there isn’t a single place where they can learn…
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In the weeks and months leading up to elections, news outlets conduct poll after poll and jostle to predict who will win. What if they had predictions updated minute by minute, based on an even larger audience? This is the idea behind ElectionGauge (no working website yet), a DC-based startup that analyzes Twitter response to…
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Last week, Fiksu, one of our showcased startups in Boston last September, announced the results of their December indexes, which looked at app store competitiveness and the cost of mobile app marketing. I was curious as to what this data meant for startups and mobile app developers. As it turns out – a lot. If…
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Arqball’s bootstrapping founders, Abhi Shelat and Jason Lawrence, are having a blast making visualization technology for education and scientific use. Their newest product, Arqball Spin, will be debuting at SXSW in March. Arqball Spin is like YouTube for 3D. It lets you capture, author, annotate and share 3D visualizations of objects using your phone or…
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Now that Timeline is becoming mandatory, Facebook users are scrambling – some begrudgingly – to pick cute and clever cover photos. For the uninspired, a new Android app helps you choose cover photos that are sure to pick up some “likes.” Facebook Timeline Covers: D33P lets you input photos from your albums, your newsfeed, or…
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Craigslist, you best watch your back: others have you in their crosshairs. The next attempt at disrupting the local marketplace giant comes from Uniiverse, “the world’s marketplace for collaborative living.” Think Airbnb for a wider set of services and skill sharing- a mojito tasting class (put on by the Uniiverse CEO no less), a ride share from Berkeley to…
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There are a number of startup accelerator and incubator programs in the United States. We are fans of these programs (not to be confused with... Read More
Two months after the iPad 2 debuted in March, around 40% of users surveyed said their iPad was their primary computer, up from around 30%... Read More
With our Startup Mixology Conference coming up next week followed by our classic Tech Cocktail DC Summer mixer which will showcase a handful of early-stage... Read More
Coming off of one of our biggest Tech Cocktail mixer events in Chicago this past week, which showcased 14 early-stage start-ups, we thought it would... Read More