Just Released!

This amazing deal on premium web design assets brought to you by Impressto.com.  This bundle is priced at only $30 and available for a limited time.  It includes tumblr and wordpress themes, UI packs, vector packs, typefaces and some really cool goodies.

Some of the contributors included are Grooveshark, Wijmo, Chris Spooner, Nick Pettit, Galen Gidman, Derek Bender and Mike Rogers.

3 months FREE to Grooveshark

Premium WordPress Theme by Chris Spooner

Tumblr Theme and Food Vector Pack by Derek Bender

FREE download of the must have book Running Lean

and sooo much more!

They even were nominated for a CSS award for the creative use of web fonts and new CSS elements.

Get it while you can!  http://bundle.impressto.com

We even got some premium freebies to give away {see below}.  Just shoot us an email or share this post!

As a way to give back to the industry and introduce the game changing creative storefront community, impressto has decided to get together with some amazing web designers, developers and companies to offer a killer web design bundle. They will be giving it away for FREE to one lucky person every week until the launch on June 6th. Just sign up and tweet the page to enter.

The bundle will include wordpress themes, tumblr themes, icon packs, vector art, typefaces an ebook and some crazy coupons.

Some of the contributors included will be Nick Pettit from Carsonified, Derek Bender of Videroo, Onur Oztaskiran, Umar Irshad, Mike Rogers and much more!
Jump on early and take advantage of this cool deal!

Impressto.com is planning their launch at The Front End Design Conference in Tampa, FL on July 22nd.

Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work on our latest joint venture with Digital Propaganda… TheMiniPrinter.com! Today all of the hard work paid off, as we finally launched the new site!

We met with Bobby Bharwani, the owner of Digital Propaganda, a few months back to discuss ways to increase DP’s online presence. While the DP e-commerce site was being developed, we decided to start developing niche printing websites to target specific demographics. The first of which would be TheMiniPrinter.com. All of us had noticed an increasing demand in smaller “profile” or mini business cards. This trend was especially big in the Creative Industry, including Designers, Photographers, and Marketing Reps that want to stand out.

After deciding on the first few products we would roll out, we focused our attention on the marketing for the company. We knew that we wanted to have the community involved in developing the brand and create a grass roots following. To get the Creative community involved we created a Design a Mini Tee Contest. The idea for this contest was to allow designers to create and upload their Mini Printer T-Shirt designs. After they submitted their designs, they would have their friends vote for their shirt. This way the designers would help drive traffic to TheMiniPrinter and increase brand awareness. At the end of the contest, the two shirts with the most votes would be printed in a limited edition run and available for sale. The winners would receive a free shirt with their design on it. We love T-shirts and like to think of them as walking billboards!

Next we decided to create a Social Media contest and thought Twitter would be the perfect place to gain immediate recognition. We knew we had to give some incentive to get people to promote the brand. So we came up with the idea of running a Twitter hash tag contest and giving away a FREE AppleTV to one lucky winner. In order to increase or followers, participants had to follow @theminiprinter and send out a Tweet using #theminiprinter. We installed a widget by TweetGrid to populate all tweets containing #theminiprinter on the Twitter Contest page.

As I’m writing this, I was just informed that #theminiprinter is a trending topic in Orlando, Fl! Woohoo.. it’s working! Stay tuned for more updates!

Flavors.me launched early this year and has felt positive growth instantly.  The site was developed by HiiDef Inc. which is an incubator startup for a few other creative web projects and founded by former Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and David Marcus.

The majority of users utilizing the internet these days, as a social platform, have multiple profiles from various sites.  The issue is that, to manage and stay relevant to the users, they have to go to the different services to update and stay connected.  Flavors.me is a solution and the ultimate goal in the social platform to create one internet presence, which spans and pulls together all the social services.

So how has Flavors.me positioned themselves for instant success?  Simple,  they solved a common problem and created a solution for potentially millions of people.  The site is extremely simple and a user can create a beautiful presence in 10 min. “CODE FREE!”  They are not adding to the problem with more social platforms.  They are simply utilizing existing API’s to create an organized social presence for any user, without the constraints of not knowing HTML/ CSS.

Of coarse there are plenty of other sites out there that pull your web presence to one place. But nothing this slick and simple and your end result is really cool.  Unlike other similar services out there, Flavors has created a platform that is scalable to cover the complete other side of the social profile management issue.  Hint, sites like threadsy.com

Flavors.me launched early this year and has felt positive growth instantly.  The site was developed by HiiDef Inc. which is an incubator startup for a few other creative web projects and founded by Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and David Marcus.

Find my Flavors… http://flavors.me/derekkohn

Impressto.com, an online buy and sell marketplace, is about to open it’s doors to a select few Creatives to help with Beta testing! If you’re a designer, photographer, developer, artist, or any other kind of creative that would like a FREE storefront to sell your work, Impressto is for YOU! Interested in becoming a Beta tester… Email doug@impressto.com

I have been looking for simpler ways to manage my life online.  I currently have about 5 email accounts that I manage through my email client.  I have all my social network accounts and some of those I even have multiple accounts for.

Even talking about it makes me want to pull my hair out!  I am looking for a simpler way to do all this with out it intruding my day to day too much.

After looking around I ran into Threadsy.com.

Threadsy is a social communications platform based out of San Fransisco, CA and founded by Rob Goldman and Udi Nir.  They received there series A funding in 2008 and have been dedicated to developing the most user friendly communication tool since. It recently opened its doors for beta testing by the public.

The goal of Threadsy is to group together all of your email, twitter and facebook accounts into a real time social communication interface right in your browser.  I have found it to be the best designed UI for on the web for this application.  The only downside I have found at this point is that it doesn’t include anything for tumblr and a few other key social networks.  I am sure they will scale to that in the future.

I am very impressed and will continue to use it.  Check it out today and let me know your thoughts.

Hey,

We are creating the promo video and viral content for IMPRESSTO.com “the creative storefront community”!  We decided we really wanted to try our hand in some animation.  So where is the best place to start??? Stop motion!  It was a much better idea then it actually was to execute!  We designed each animation frame by frame in illustrator and took screen shots b/c we wanted to get the illustrations in the actual element of the illustrator software.  It was a long and tedious creation but we had a lot of fun and are excited for everyone to see the final product!  COMING SOON!!

BEHIND THE SCENES. VIDEO 1!

Impressto Promo video! Stop Motion 1 from Derek Kohn on Vimeo.

BEHIND THE SCENES 2!  Syncing frames with scratch audio!!

STOP MOTION PROMO VIDEO 2 from Derek Kohn on Vimeo.

Right Side Capital is the latest company to announce their seed-phase fund, which will invest in 100-200 start-ups per year.  Their approach is to focus on quantity, not quality.  In their eyes this gives them the best shot at finding the “black swan” start-up that other wise would have been missed because of the vigorous typical funding process.   If you are a technology start-up looking for funding to get started, all you would need to do is submit an online application and wait to hear back.  Not everyone that submits an application will be funded obviously, but your chances are a lot higher with a seed-stage company like Right Side than a traditional VC fund.  In fact, VC money has been in serious short supply lately, just as demand is reaching an all time high.

Right Side Media follows a very similar model of Y Combinator, which started seed funding companies a couple of years ago.  Y Combinator runs a three month program two times a year, exclusively in the Silicon Valley area.  You don’t have to be from Silicon Valley to be funded, but do have to travel and live in the Mountain View area of California for the three months where you will receivve private coaching and be introduced to key contacts and investors.  A typical company that is accepted into the Y Combinator, or Right Side Capital program will receive $10 – $20,000.00 and give up 6%-10% equity of their start-up in return.  Right Side Capital differs from Y Combinator in that start-ups that are funded will also need to put up a little bit of their own money to ensure they have some skin in the game, and founders will not receive as much one-on-one coaching time.

Y Combinator Seed Funding Company Located in the Bay Area

I love the model and have been thinking for a while that there was a lack of small scale seed funding for the companies not ready for VC, but need some start up cash to get on their feet.

Start-Up Guru and Founder of Y Combinaror Paul Graham with a Class of His Start-Ups

If you like whiteboarding, IdeaPaint is a dream come true.   It is also a successful start-up founded by three Babson College undergrads in 2005.  The concept for IdeaPaint came while Jeff Avalon, John Goscha, and Morgan Newman where involved in an intense brainstorming session but had to keep erasing the whiteboard to fit new ideas (hate when that happens).  For three years, with help from chemists, they invented a durable, smooth, and nonabsorbing paint.

The product was first marketed in 2008 at a NeoCon home-furnishing trade show, where it won its Innovation and Gold Awards.   The three founders, all mid-twenties, were first successful in raising angel investment while at college still, and recently raised $5 million from Breakaway Ventures of Boston.