Sarah Headley

Health Startup Weekend: Recapping first of its kind event in the Triangle

Posted by Sarah Headley | Aug 12, 2014

Triangle Startup Weekend. Chances are you’ve heard about it or you’ve been to one. And with more than 123,000 attendees and 1,500 past events around the world, TSW is making a global impact. This weekend alone, there were eight other Startup Weekend events around the globe. Triangle Health Startup Weekend is a three-day event that took place at American Underground @Main. So what makes this most recent TSW different from the plethora of others? It was the first-ever digital health focused TSW in the region. It also had five women-led teams and 37 percent of the participants were women,...

Health Startup Weekend: First Of Its Kind in the Triangle

Posted by Sarah Headley | Aug 11, 2014

Triangle Startup Weekend. Chances are you’ve heard about it or you’ve been to one. And with more than 123,000 attendees and 1,500 past events around the world, TSW is making a global impact. This weekend alone, there were eight other Startup Weekend events around the globe. Triangle Health Startup Weekend is a three-day event that took place at American Underground @Main. So what makes this most recent TSW different from the plethora of others? It was the first-ever digital health focused TSW in the region. It also had five women-led teams and 37 percent of the participants were women,...

How Alpine Hammock Overcame a Threatening Patent Dispute

Posted by Sarah Headley | Aug 7, 2014

wilderness ranger on the Appalachian Trail and spends his winters dog sledding in Vermont. That’s where he tests hammock prototypes. But Stolp has always wanted to be a product designer in the outdoor industry, and to run his own company. Besides Alpine, he’s co-founder of Deep South Mountaineering, which manufactures “innovative and eco-conscious [hiking] gear made in the USA,” according to its website. “I think freedom of schedule is incredibly under appreciated,” he says. “When starting a company I wanted to work on projects I care about, I don’t want to design junk – I want freedom of schedule...

Startup Jobs, the Weekly Round-up

Posted by Sarah Headley | Aug 1, 2014

Want an awesome job? Here’s the weekly roundup of the best startup jobs around town that want you on their team. 80Pct SolutionsAs digital devices become more complex, there’s more to distract us. The average U.S. citizen is on a mobile device a whopping 11 hours per day. That’s a lot of potential wasted time. So, 80Pct Solutions creates productivity software for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux devices to help consumers stay focused. To help more people get more stuff done, 80Pct Solutions needs sales and marketing help. It also needs a user interface designer to perform contract...

New freemium app greens JouleBug for national growth

Posted by Sarah Headley | Jul 30, 2014

The term “carbon footprint” is used left and right, but who actually knows the size of their carbon footprint? JouleBug founder Grant Williard didn’t. His idea to create a social, mobile sustainability gaming app was born after he used numerous online carbon footprint calculators five years ago. His results weren’t pretty. Today, his JouleBug app is inspiring fun rivalries between individuals and communities as they initiate sustainable behaviors. Users complete different tasks like “Bin to Win” for recycling, “Tech Whiz” for turning their computers off and “Bottle Rocket” for refilling a reusable water bottle in return for points and...

New Freemium App Greens JouleBug for National Growth

Posted by Sarah Headley | Jul 29, 2014

Williard is well-known in the Triangle tech community. He graduated from N.C. State University with a degree in mechanical engineering, then worked at a few design firms in Charlotte before going back for his master’s degree at State. In 1984, he started I-Cubed, which developed and sold educational design software (Today, it’s an enterprise IT consulting firm). He sold it to Adobe in 2005, and immediately dove into the sustainability movement. When the idea for JouleBug came along, he found a partner in San Francisco developer James Wicker, who also sold a company (Navisware) to Adobe in 2005. They...

In a Sea of Event Discovery Apps, Can This One Get Users Hyped?

Posted by Sarah Headley | Jul 28, 2014

Part of the Launch Chapel Hill learning process has been a testing phase this summer with about 1,000 users. The feedback from those initial users has been positive, Bregier says. “They (the testers) are pretty crazy about it,” Bregier says. “People download it and are almost unanimously excited.” He won’t share any specific plans for making money through the site, other than that early venue partners include Top of the Hill and the Carrboro Arts Center and he hopes to eventually integrate ticket purchases through the app. Zavelson is convinced there are multiple potential revenue streams. “It’s just a...

Meet the new ThinkHouse Fellows: Fashion, robots, music, social enterprise …

Posted by Sarah Headley | Jul 25, 2014

ThinkHouse NC is a major stepping stone for many young entrepreneurs, evidenced by the seven men and five startups who graduated from ThinkHouse’s inaugural class in June. It is part-startup accelerator—they’re matched with mentors and attend weekly workshops—part-living community. The entrepreneurs accepted into the program live and work together in a house in Raleigh’s Boylan Heights over an intense nine-month period of business learning and building. It’s a model founders Christopher Gergen and Jason Widen hope to take to cities around the world in coming years. One of the biggest opportunities it affords, said men from the first group,...

Fashion, Robots, Music, Social Enterprise: Meet the New ThinkHouse Fellows

Posted by Sarah Headley | Jul 25, 2014

Rodar decided to start his own line last December, and so far, his SALVO LLC bags have received rave reviews on social media and from bloggers and suppliers. Now, he is creating a line of book bags that will be manufactured out of a small village in Spain. Why Spain you ask? Because according to Rodar, “everybody who’s somebody in the leather goods industry manufactures there (Gucci and Prada to name a few).” Nine months from now, Rodar says he thinks ThinkHouse will have helped him establish his brand. Six others with equally ambitious goals will join Simpson and...

Posts by Sarah Headley