App :: Page 15 :: millennialentrepreneurs.com

Archive for App – Page 15

Chalk One Up

Posted by Ben Tobias

· Wednesday, December 9th, 2015

· 3 Comments

The issue of uniformity and compatible software has always been of relevance in education and in business alike. William Zhou, the creator of Chalk, invented an Office for teachers. It’s a suite of productivity apps for K-12 educators. Used in over 20,000 schools worldwide, Chalk.com solves the problems of lesson planning, assessment, and collaboration and eases teachers’ pain by facilitating personalized education and driving student success.

William Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Chalk.com, observes, “I had always thought that teaching is an easy job. I thought teachers taught from a textbook and got 3 months off in a year. It wasn’t until I visited my own high school teachers that I realized it’s not the case. They were struggling with an overwhelming amount of work—dealing with lesson planning, assessment, and attendance, in addition to fending off angry parents and bureaucratic administration. I told them I couldn’t help them with the latter two but I could help ease their daily tasks. That’s when I started Chalk.com.” Chalk.com is used in over 20,000 schools and has over 100,000 teachers and continues to rapidly expand throughout schools and administrations throughout the world.

At the young age of 23, William is just beginning his entrepreneurial career and has already made it into the Forbes list of
30 under 30. His example of immigrant entrepreneurship is inspiring others from his homeland of China to journey to the United States in search of a better life, and a venue for their ideas and dreams. He hopes that one day his motherland will become just as friendly to new companies and ideas as the United States is.

3 Comments

Categories : Academia, App, Millennial Enrepreneuers

Brian Wong

Posted by Boyce Cubarney

· Tuesday, November 17th, 2015

· 5 Comments

Imagine a world where apps and websites offered prizes instead of pesky advertisements. Well, our sought after technical advances have become a reality once again.

Brian Wong, a young entrepreneur, tackled this idea at the age of 23. It all began when he started to pay in-depth attention to the people around him and their mobile use habits, especially with application based game play. He then saw the opportunity, stating that “I remember noticing that there were these achievements that people would be hitting, like leveling up or hitting a high score … but then what struck me was that in those moments of happiness people were actually not being appreciated but rather slapped in the face with a pretty terrible advertisement.” The over all idea in a nutshell is to replace traditional advertisements with prizes after the user has accomplished something in the game. Its brilliant, and an incentive that is way more powerful than random advertisement 95% of users will immediately ignore or even find annoying.

Below are some examples of his prize based advertising. Check out his website at www.brianwong.com

5 Comments

Categories : App, Great Ideas, Online Companies, Restaurants, Uncategorized

Robert Nay

Posted by Andrew Claffey

· Wednesday, November 11th, 2015

· 3 Comments

Robert was 14 when he created Bubble ball- an app that took competition from angry birds. This game launched his game company Nay Games. Over two million people downloaded his app in two weeks. He created the app with no previous knowledge of coding. He researched how to code at the library and took ideas from games that he liked on his phone. His only investment was a macbook given to him by his parents.

This is amazing as it shows not only that kids can be creative and do amazing things, but it also shows how powerful reading is. Reading is sometimes ignored or forgotten in the new technology age, but he was able to gain enough knowledge to code over 4000 lines of code on his own without previous schooling. I think that some of the smartest people are really just avid readers or self taught geniuses.

Lesson to take away- read a lot and you will be too smart to unsuccessful.

3 Comments

Categories : App, Smartphone

myLINGO

Posted by Megan Cotterman

· Saturday, November 7th, 2015

· 1 Comment

MyLingo was founded in 2012 out of the Harvard Innovation Lab by siblings Adam Polak and Olenka Polak. MyLingo was inspired by the siblings Polish-speaking parents. Adam and Olenka wanted a technology that could help multi-lingual families have the full experience of watching movies together. The brother and sister team began courting Hollywood studies to provide the foreign language audio tracks they already produce for international distribution.

MyLingo is an easy-to-use movie audio synchronization app for iOS and Android mobile devices. It seeks to make the movie going experience more accessible by removing barriers related to language, hearing and audio preference. Movie guests can play an alternative track in their preferred language – including enhanced, controllable English audio – through their smartphones and headphones. The audio tracks are from the movie studios so they are the highest quality and play in perfect synchronization with the movie playing in the theater. MyLingo uses the microphone in the smartphone to “listen” to the audio. Using their own algorithm, MyLingo then matches the unique audio signature to its precise place in the movie. The audio file will only play if it hears the movie.

MyLingo has already raised two million dollars in seed funding. Adam and Olenka are pursuing their passion and solving a problem that they experienced growing up in a multi-lingual family. Adam and Olenka have all the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs and I hope they continue to find success with MyLingo.

1 Comment

Categories : App

Harvard Student and Entreprenuer

Posted by Erin Sixt

· Tuesday, October 27th, 2015

· 4 Comments

Olenka Polak, a daughter of polish immigrants, would frequently find herself at the movie theatre with her family. She and her brother, who had grown up in the states and knew English, understood exactly what was going on in the movie. Her parents, on the other hand, really struggled to enjoy their experience at the cinema due to the language barrier.

During Polak’s time at Harvard, she decided to pursue the solution to this problem. myLINGO allows for non-English speakers to listen and understand a movie in their own language. All you have to do is download myLINGO on a smart phone and bring a pair of headphones to the theatre. Once you’re at the cinema you select the movie you are seeing and the language you want to listen to the film in.

At age nineteen, Polak chose to take time off from Harvard to grow and develop this business. She was featured in Forbes “30 under 30” and seems to be growing into a quite the success story.

We all have something to learn from Polak. Whether it’s her recognition of a problem, or her ambition to leave Harvard and pursue her dreams, she is an inspiration to us all.

4 Comments

Categories : App, Great Ideas, Millennial Enrepreneuers, Technology, Uncategorized

Colatris: Mobile to Global

Posted by Alan Brennen

· Thursday, October 15th, 2015

· 3 Comments

A problem faced by many has just been taken head on by three young entrepreneurs in San Francisco, California. The app started out as an experience one of the co founders experienced during his visit to Chile and saw an immense need for improvement with the poor quality apps being offered and brought to market. This app helps localize mobile apps to translate with people throughout the world. These three tech entrepreneurs recognized that their was a problem and set out to capitalize on it. Common knowledge is that it is hard enough to develop a successful strategy and layout of content in your own country and native language and be successful. The thought of tackling a foreign language and country head on with a total different culture is intimidating and very difficult. A lot of expenses can incur while you try to make a splash in a whole new area. This app they created works to solve this problem and to provide a perfect fitting and existing user interface.

teamColatrisSmall

Colatris is ranked one of best current young entrepreneurs businesses in America is setting its aim on dominating the mobile industry. They set their company apart by selling their app as a way to effectively reach an international audience with very little effort and cost. The app allows you to very easily and quickly edit an app to your liking. This easy feature can help catapult your business to a great start in a foreign market with no stupid mistakes; starting your company out with a bad rep. This app personally allowing you to customize your app to your own preferences, setting you up for success! Colatris hopes their once idea, now brought to life, will one day be the standard for localization of digital content everywhere on the globe.

For more great info and a quick video on this great new company: check out the following link!

https://youtu.be/NIRAx5ANjtQ

3 Comments

Categories : App, Blog, Millennial Enrepreneuers, Millennial Entrepreneurs

From Desire to Production of Scan App

Posted by Melissa Karidis

· Wednesday, October 14th, 2015

· 1 Comment

A few months prior to the iPad 2 coming out in stores, Garrett Gee, a university student, was inspired to find an easier QR code software and apps specifically for the iPad 2. Through his mission he ended up developing one of his own called Scan. He was so dedicated and invested in this product that he had spent two sleepless nights with an iOS developer to then finally accomplish his goal. Garrett was able to make the Top Ten listing for apps specific to the devise and ended up recruiting two fellow classmates to then launch the scan on February 2011.

Later on the team earned 10 million downloads and got paid from venture capitalists with a whopping $1.5 million dollars all with in the first year. By October 2011 Scan was downloaded by 21 million people. Garrett and his team are not stopping here, they have big plans to develop a monetization plan for Scan.

1 Comment

Categories : App, Uncategorized

Beme

Posted by Joanie Brown

· Saturday, October 3rd, 2015

· 3 Comments

Over this past summer, filmmaker and youtuber Casey Neistat and former VP of Engineering for Tumblr, Matt Hacket launched a new app called “Beme”. After working on the project for over a year, the duo was finally ready to release their new format for video sharing.

“Beme” is an app that, according to Neistat and Hackett, captures the unfiltered and genuine moments in life. “Beme” captures videos with the rear camera in four-second bursts by covering an iPhone’s proximity sensor. The screen goes black so users have no way of previewing the content. Viewing others’ content is done via a snapchat like interface where you hold down your finger to play and when the video finishes, it’s gone forever. The app lets you react to other peoples’ content with the iPhone’s front camera by sending a selfie to someone as they watch the video.

So what makes “Beme” different or better than other forms of video sharing, such as Snapchat? Being frustrated by the superficiality of social media today, Neistat feels that “Beme” allows users to consciously capture their life without altering it to make it seem like something that it’s not. With such widespread use of social media, Neistat felt that there needed to be something that could capture life in the most unaffected, candid manner. Neistat states that he loves sharing apps, such as Instagram, but it’s not the right platform to share little photos of what he sees throughout the day, rather it’s a place to share beautifully edited aspects of his life. According to Neistat, social media today is built to share with the world a version of who you are. Now, “Beme” wants you to share who you really are.

Within eight days of release, “Beme” users shared 1.1 million videos and sent 2.4 million reactions. As of now, Neistat and Hackett decided on a slower, invite-only rollout to ensure that each user had at least one friend on the app. The partners said that they hope to upgrade the app’s background soon so that they can do away with invite codes and let anyone join. In addition, while this is currently only available on Apple devices, they are working to develop it into an app for Androids as well.

3 Comments

Categories : App, Blog, Film, Great Ideas, Millennial Enrepreneuers, Smartphone, Technology, Uncategorized, YouTube

Millionaire at 16

Posted by Dan Dorman

· Friday, October 2nd, 2015

· 1 Comment

Owens was inspired to get into the business world by the former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs. At age seven Christian Owens received his first computer. Then at the age of ten he taught himself how to web design. By the time Owens was 14 he had created his own companies by the names of Mac Bundle Box and Branchr. Mac Bundle Box was the first venture website Owens had created.

Mac Bundle Box was created to make it cheaper for consumers to buy popular Mac applications. Owens made this possible by selling these applications in a bundle rather than the applications being sold by themselves. This new way to sell apps had great early success by pulling in $700,000 in its first two years.

Owens then used the money earned from Mac Bundle Box to launch another company named Branchr. Branchr is an advertising pay-per-click company that Owens launched only a year after Mac Bundle Box. It works as a stage for owners of websites to sell advertising, and for business owners to buy this advertising. In its first year Branchr brought in a whopping $500,000. Combining this with the success from Mac Bundle Box is what made Owens a millionaire by the age of 16. Branchr now has over 11,000 clients and sells more than 250 million advertisements a month.

Even with the success of his two businesses Owens does not plan to stop anytime soon. Owens plans to become the top name in mobile advertising and the top name in the internet world.

1 Comment

Categories : App, eCommerce, Millennial Enrepreneuers, Millennial Entrepreneurs

She Reads Truth

Posted by Megan Cotterman

· Sunday, September 27th, 2015

· 3 Comments

The idea of She Reads Truth began in 2012 with a few godly women who wanted to help girls get into God’s word daily. In 2014, She Reads Truth became more official and launched a website and an app. They wanted to help foster a community of women committed to growing closer to Jesus by reading His Word. She Reads Truth is a daily blog of devotionals that are either written on one book of the Bible or on a topic, such as Advent or Lent. She Reads Truth is also an e-commerce store selling beautiful devotional books that mirror the daily blog, creative prints and other merchandise that help bring women closer to the Bible.

I discovered She Reads Truth on Instagram with their lovely images of daily Scripture verses and other truths. I was intrigued by their social media, so I visited their website and was drawn in by the clean design and by the truth they were sharing in their devotionals. She Reads Truth is the first model I have seen that merged a website, an app and social media to get women studying the Bible and interacting with each other. She Reads Truth is able to offer free devotionals because of the support they receive in their e-commerce store which supplements their blog. Each time I scroll down to the comment section, I feel like I am a part of a vast community of fellow believers.

She Reads Truth is a high touch entrepreneurial business. It is more than a website and an app, it is helping women all over the world pursue meaning and purpose in their lives. I would encourage you to check out their website and start exploring what they offer. And if you are a guy, you are in luck, they just launched He Reads Truth this past month, so go check it out!

3 Comments

Categories : App, eCommerce