Betaspring Celebrates Latest Start-Ups at Fall Launch 2012
Monday, November 12, 2012
Betaspring's Allan Tear addresses a packed house at the startup accelerator's Fall Launch event, featuring 13 creative new companies. Photo: Cat Laine/Painted Foot
Betaspring mentors, investors, community partners, interns, alumni and Governor Lincoln Chafee converged to meet, greet, and share in the ongoing success of Rhode Island's unique incubator.
The Fall class
The companies leaving the Betaspring nest this season are a fascinating combination of technology, business, service, and lifestyle-oriented ventures. They are:
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AutoBike
AutoBike's automatic shifting bicycle creates the smoothest, most comfortable riding experience ever. No shifting, just fun.
Crunchbutton
Crunchbutton curates the top food items from the top restaurants within a community, so you can order favorites online and on your phone with just one button. Brought to you by the creators of One Button Wenzel, the cult phenomenon that sold over $60K of a single sandwich at Yale.
Greentape
Greentape uses sensors and a mobile app to calculate shopper intent, tracking their interests, movement, and in-store location to instantly provise offers and loyalty points via smartphone.
HealthID Profile
HealthID Profile is a mobile solution that works with unique medical ID bands to offer simple, chronic disease management tools coupled with emergency communication.
Kuratur
Kuratur lets social media users filter out the noise and keep track of only the people, conversations and topics they care about.
Pennant
Pennant is a powerful ad creation tool that enables ad agencies to create interactive advertisements, delivered via advertising networks to desktops, phones, and tablets.
Plandree
Plandree is a collaborative vacation planner that helps you discover incredible experiences and makes planning easy. Simply create an itinerary and start group planning with your friends and family.
Rootless
Rootless is a ridesharing community that safely connects passengers and drivers to get them where they want to go.
Scholrly
Scholrly makes it easy for companies to find and collaborate with researchers. Fostering collaboration between academia and industry unlocks the value of billions of dollars of research that goes unseen and unused.u.
TennisHub
TennisHub connects tennis players with high quality playing opportunities while providing tennis clubs with powerful tools like online booking to help them grow their business.
TouchVu
TouchVu allows small businesses to instantly turn their Facebook business pages into websites that are fully optimized for mobile phones, tablets, and PCs.
Umbie DentalCare
Umbie DentalCare is a web-based management solution for dental practices that provides all the functionality that a modern dental practice needs while meeting the HITECH law requirements.
WorldBrain
WorldBrain enables more students to travel the world than ever before. GoWorldBrain.com serves as a teacher’s salesperson, marketer and accountant to double the chances of a trip taking place.
Allan Tear: The importance of start-ups to our economy
"I think it's really satisfying to see what you can accomplish when you bring a community together", said Betaspring co-founder Allan Tear. "That's really what you see here, we got a few hundred people that have come together not just from Providence but across New England to support startups." Tear reminisced about an early demo day at Betaspring: "[We] had only between 50 to 75 people. Now, we're having 300 people in the room. What we realize is increasingly we understand the importance of startups to our economy and to our future success. Seeing that happen is just really, really gratifying."
Tear noted that this celebration launches the next round of recruitment. "As soon as we finish Fall we start recruiting for Spring," he said. "We do a very intensive recruiting process--it takes us about 3 months because we have to go through hundreds of applicants down to 12 to 18 companies that are actually going to participate," said Tear, adding that Betaspring accepts about 5% of the companies that apply.
"If you look across the country, what recent data has shown is that startups, companies that are less than 5 years old, have accounted for all net new job growth in the country. That means that with big companies some of them hire, some of them lay off and in the end you end up flat. Startups are what drive job creation, our job is to create as many startups in Rhode Island as possible," he said.
Reenergizing Rhode Island's entrepreneurial spirit
"What we're looking to do is reenergize that entrepreneurial spirit that Rhode Island has always had, help us rediscover that and create the next big companies in Rhode Island."
Betaspring is now accepting applications for their Spring 2013 session, and the deadline is December 3, 2012. If you have a small business that you're trying to get off the ground of even a great idea that needs a little direction, log on to Betaspring.com to begin the process.
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