Curated monthly subscription services took off in 2011, with sites like Lost Crates, Umba Box, and BabbaBox sending out packages of stationery, women’s products, and kids’ arts and crafts. So it’s no surprise that a startup is finally aggregating those services – and giving them the tools to take off. Memberly is an online marketplace…
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Here is a little known fact about electricity in the United States: In 15 states, you have a choice in your power provider. It’s not necessarily the large power company that sends postcards when you move or the name provided on the list of services your condo association gave you. Power2Switch is challenging the belief…
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Facebook owns social. LinkedIn owns professional. How about recreational? “The bet we’ve made is that people have 3 big persona’s in their life: social, professional, and recreational,” says Gabe Lozano, LockerDome Co-Founder and CEO. ”We want to cover recreational – an area that we believe people are more passionate about than any of the…
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Feeling creative in the new year? Looking for a better way to make models or prototypes of your products currently in development? Want to start manufacturing your designs to sell? Paris-based Sculpteo is bringing together cloud manufacturing and ecommerce with their ingenious 3D printing service that uses your 3D design to manufacture something, be it…
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I’m chatting with Peach Rojwongsuriya at a Starbucks in a posh mall in Bangkok. Wearing a white Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, he’s chattering in great English about keeping his startup lean, Ruby, and the state of ecommerce in Thailand. But 23-year-old Rojwongsuriya wasn’t always an entrepreneur. He studied at an international primary school – which is…
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Earlier this year Tech Cocktail covered the DC-based immediate response service provider/contact platform Urgnt.ly. Today, they have officially launched. Under the old model, in order to get an appointment with a service provider (the cable guy, electrician, tow truck service, etc), you’d have to first locate the provider’s phone number, make the call, fight through some…
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If you are really into music, check out this clever new startup: Vancouver-based Shirtify will send you t-shirts from your favorite bands based on what you listen to on music streaming platforms like Pandora, Spotify, Last.fm, or Rdio. It’s win-win for everyone – artists, who get paid in full – and you – who get…
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Yesterday afternoon, I spent an obscene amount of time and money buying tickets to a Coldplay concert in July here in DC. Being forced to use TicketMaster is bad enough, but they made it worst with their horrible CAPTCHA system that depends on text so distorted I wasn’t even sure if they were letters in…
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Which presidential candidate best represents your political ideology? Seems like a fairly straightforward question, right? Before getting too confident in your response, I suggest taking a quick stop over at Keya Dannenbaum’s latest venture, ElectNext. What has been dubbed the “OkCupid of Politics,” the concept behind ElectNext is pretty simple. First, select the topics that matter…
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Last night’s Iowa Caucus marks the beginning of the insanity that is an election year. In 2008, we saw then presidential hopeful Barack Obama benefit greatly from a thorough and strategic social media campaign. Look for technology to have an even more pronounced effect in 2012. Although not directly related to the race for president, the Washington,…
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Early this morning a new social network that focuses on quality, rather than quantity, of relationships launched publicly to beta testers. Much like Path, Ourspot focuses on creating a platform for only the closest relationships, but on a web instead of mobile platform. And much like Pintrest, this new service encourages users to tag inspiring…
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Who ever said snail mail is dead? They might feel differently about that after checking out Quarterly Co. This once-per-quarter mail service curates some of the most interesting and influential taste makers and industry leaders, and has them send you a package based on a specific theme. For example, Josh Rubin and Evan Orensten, the creators of…
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We first met VenueWize when they demo’d their new software at our Tech Cocktail Mixer event in Vancouver this past July. The team was very much focused on their international pilot test in an attempt to best understand event organizers needs when it comes to metrics. Now they have officially launched with their new web…
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When I first checked out Remixt.us’s beta, I was a bit skeptical: it looked like a bunch of nice image collages, but I wasn’t sure why users would create them. But talking to cofounder Angela Min, I began to see how it could be beautiful and meaningful. Remixt.us’s bookmarklet lets you grab content from all…
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We have covered, sliced, diced and analyzed the startup accelerators for awhile now and even produced the first startup accelerator rankings this past year. Yesterday, TechStars, a Boulder-based startup accelerator program, took a step to help simplify the process by offering a unified application form for startup accelerators at accelerato.rs. The website gives startup founders…
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Do you ever have days where you feel tremendously busy but when 6pm roles around you look back at your day’s productivity, and there’s not much to show for it. I have. You get stuck on what’s urgent rather than what’s important. Your day is spent in meetings, answering e-mails and responding to texts, you…
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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
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
We are excited to announce the participating startups for Tech Cocktail's South by Southwest (SXSW) event: #Startuplife Celebration presented by .CO. It was one of... 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