TODAY'S COCKTAIL OF TECH STARTUP STORIES:
The latest cocktail of emerging technology news, people, startups, products, and innovations for the true tech enthusiast.
| Uber Adds Fare Splitting to Popular Ride Request Platform |
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The wildly popular on demand private ride requester Uber today announced a brand new feature: fare splitting. It is a simple feature, but a much needed one to bring in new customers while fostering the happiness of the current user base. Request your ride, tap the up arrow next to the driver's information, click split fare, choose your friends, and hit send. Your friends tap the text message link, go directly to the app, and confirm the fare split. Uber handles everything else. 
"At Uber, we love math - we have a whole team dedicated to it," says the blog post. "But we understand that not everyone does. So we are going to do the long division for you."
The market surrounding Uber is extremely competitive, not just with taxi cabs, but with other ride sharing platforms like Car2Go, Lyft, and SideCar. This is the most recent, in a long line of moves, made by Uber to stay on top. So now you can avoid being 'that person' when it comes time to collect money from your friends. The fabled Uber SUV trip that has always been too expensive is now attainable if you split it six ways. Who knows, you might even be able to split the ultimate Uber ride, the Uber Chopper. The post Uber Adds Fare Splitting to Popular Ride Request Platform appeared first on Tech Cocktail  |
| Project Travel Helps Fund Student Travel With Crowdfunding |
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Peer funding, or crowdfunding, is one of the most interesting sides to the Internet, in my opinion. Some of the projects that get funded are beyond amazing, like the ARKYD space telescope that raised $1.5 million. But popular platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo draw the line at actual projects. That is, if you are not funding something that can be completed, you are out of luck. Jennifer Thomas took a page from the annals of these crowdfunding platforms when she decided to create Project Travel, but she designed it with a specific purpose in mind: meaningful, student travel. Project Travel serves the purpose of answering an age-old question that a lot of high school, college, and post-graduate students encounter: I want to study abroad, but what happens if my financial aid and scholarships will not cover the cost? Every year, students want to expand their horizons and visit a different country, whether they are studying abroad, volunteering, working, interning, or service learning. However, the bottom line remains; the cost is higher than the average student budget. Since students need to spend tens of thousands of dollars every semester for tuition, books, and housing, meaningful student travel opportunities tend to get sidelined rather quickly. "As a student, I struggled with affording travel, but was eventually able to make it to Lisbon, Portugal" says Thomas. "I kept thinking that somebody should create a better option for funding student travel."
Thomas did not just want to create a crowdfunding platform and call it a day. She wanted to develop a way for students to engage their entire community. Thus, their friends, family, and acquaintances could center on helping them achieve their goals. Project Travel operates on the idea that if you can reach out to a dedicated community, it will in turn support you on your journey. This inherently makes Project Travel personal and relevant to those who seek funding or want to donate. More importantly though, it offers students a way to share their unique travel story from start to finish. Students plan their trip, explain why they want to go and what it means for them, and then present their ideas to their community to start the funding process. "Helping our first Project Starter reach his goal was certainly a huge day for us at Project Travel," says Thomas. "Expanding my dream of helping young people through student travel, and bringing it into reality, has been amazing."
This summer, Project Travel was invited to participate in Coolhouse Labs, a Michigan-based accelerator program. The experience from Coolhouse Labs will ensure that Thomas is able to sustain the thriving community she has always dreamt of as Project Travel moves forward. Project Travel will be featured at Tech Cocktail’s Chicago Mixer & Startup Showcase on July 25th. The post Project Travel Helps Fund Student Travel With Crowdfunding appeared first on Tech Cocktail  |
| Brittany Laughlin of Incline Discusses Arming Veterans with the Right Skills |
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Brittany Laughlin is a self-described geek and Navy brat. She has used her interest in technology as a former technology and travel writer for Forbes and as an entrepreneur. Her first startup was gtrot (now Boomerang), which was a local discovery tool for events and things to do in cities. She was also accepted into the Startup Leadership Program, which is a highly selective training program for leaders and founders. Incline is her most recent project. Incline provides short-term intensive training in web development to military veterans. The goal is to provide them with marketable skills for the current job market. Brittany’s previous experience with hiring made her realize that education did not always equal a skilled, hardworking employee. This, combined with learning that thousands of veterans would soon be leaving the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and returning to the US job market, led to a desire to help. In the video below, Brittany talks about how she came up with the idea for Incline and how she plans to help veterans get jobs in technology. She discusses the skill set gap that is present in our current economy-lots of educated, motivated people who are unemployed or underemployed and lots of job openings that require skills which they do not have. Incline’s solution to this is what they call "just in time training." Most college students have no way to predict what skills will be trending in the job market by the time they graduate. Therefore, there is a necessity for programs that teach a skill set within a matter of weeks that can be applied immediately. Incline focuses specifically on training military veterans in web development, but Brittany’s talk also emphasized the emergence of non-traditional education and the responsibility of employers to think outside the box and take these candidates seriously.
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Guest author Kristin Pryor @kristinpryor is an archeologist turned budding entrepreneur who is enthusiastically navigating her way through the DC startup space. She has an unending passion for learning and is never satisfied with the status quo. Her current obsessions include wine, hiking, and Downton Abbey. The post Brittany Laughlin of Incline Discusses Arming Veterans with the Right Skills appeared first on Tech Cocktail  |
| MyBestRx Has Epic Foundation, Removes Pharmacy Guesswork |
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Four strangers set out on a bus trip that will last for over 72 hours. Their mission is to devise a startup over 1,800 miles and launch their new company when they arrive in Austin, Texas. Sounds like the plot of a movie, right? Wrong. That was the exact situation Colleen Egan, Andrew Craze, David Ip, and Michael Davidson were in when they were accepted to StartupBus. "I got a call on a Friday, around 3 o'clock saying that I was in, and the bus leaves at 0800 on Sunday," says Egan. "So I grabbed my laptop, extension cords, power strips, and a bottle of Jameson, you know, for making friends."
At the end of the trip, Egan was a founding member of MyBestRx, an app that provides a succinct wrap-up of all the pharmacies nearest to the user. But this was StartupBus, and the participants are akin to demi-gods, so Egan and the team went deeper. "The healthcare industry is broken, trust me I spent years in it," says Egan. "The real issue was how to fix it in 72 hours. We went with prescription drugs as our MVP, most valuable product." Say you have an Adderall prescription for your ADD. Plug the specifics into MyBestRx, and it will give you the pharmacies close by, their hours of operation, and competing prices for the Adderall. MyBestRx asks you questions as well, like if you know the difference between the generic and name brand versions of Adderall. The team wanted to eliminate the guesswork behind pharmacy visits while empowering consumers to handle their prescriptions versus being handled by them. "Some people have labeled us the Kayak of pharmacies, but that makes us sound like a tool for the pharmacy," explains Egan. "We are a tool for the consumer, empowering them in their prescription drug choices."
Realizing that you could pay a $20 copay for your drug at Pharmacy A, or $12 out-of-pocket at Pharmacy B, could theoretically lower insurance rates in the long-term. The logic here is that if you can avoid the copay price, your insurance premium will not go up as much. That, in turn, is less money the insurance company spends on you, which helps everybody across the board. A smarter consumer who makes the right choices is better for everybody. At the end of StartupBus, MyBestRx had the chance to present their work at SXSW in front of multiple angels and VCs. They showed the startup world what can be accomplished in 72 hours, but they also displayed a healthcare app with a purpose. That purpose has held the team together while a lot of the other 36 StartupBus companies fell to pieces. And I bet that Jameson helped a lot too. MyBestRx will be featured at Tech Cocktal’s Chicago Mixer & Startup Showcase on July 25th. The post MyBestRx Has Epic Foundation, Removes Pharmacy Guesswork appeared first on Tech Cocktail  |
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
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