Smarter in the City announces selection of five new startups for its third cohort
Smarter in the City today announced the selection of five new startups for its third cohort.
The following tech-based businesses and organizations will join the firm’s accelerator in Dudley Square from this September through January, 2016.
ULink
Founders: Philip Ellison, Jubril Lawal, Parisa Esmaili
ULink is a web-based platform to assist students in community colleges successfully transfer to four-year universities.
The Problem: The turnover rate of students who want to transfer from community college to universities is extremely low. There are not enough resources available at the colleges to assist students with logistics or career guidance.
The Solution: Manage the transfer process from the earliest planning stages with an automated system that helps both students and the community colleges.
Founder Phil Ellison successfully transitioned from community college to Tufts University, but saw many of his colleagues fail in the transition process for reasons he believes are avoidable. Many students miss important annual deadlines while they are still debating the move, are not familiar with the financial aid process, or do not have proper guidance in choosing the right university for their career goals.
ULink is piloting work with Roxbury Community College.
BeautyLynk
Founder: Rica Elysee
Problem: Salon time for women is time consuming and often presents many logistic challenges.
Solution: Provide in-house salon services
BeautyLynk is a marketplace platform that provides on-demand hair and makeup services at the user’s location. They connect qualified, vetted and certified beauty professionals to clients.
Beldwell
Founder: Jamila Smith
Beldwell is dedicated to helping people build happier, more financially secure lives. Money matters can be stressful and, too often, even a taboo subject. Beldwell believes this doesn’t have to be the case. They are creating beautiful physical artifacts that connect to, and reflect, your financial habits and change your experience with money.
Beldwell will celebrate the major milestones, as well as the small steps of the journey along the way to better financial habits. Much like wearable devices like Fitbit have inspired physical behavior change, we provide a platform for people to passively engage with their finances in a beautiful and encouraging way.
Haute House University
Founder: Taneshia Camillo-Sheffey
Problem: Fashion designers often lack key business skills needed for branding, manufacturing, management of their operations, and getting to market. This leads to losses in revenue and stunted growth in sales and product development
Solution: Online business modules and consulting specifically for the fashion and design industry
Taneshia operates her own fashion design studio – Haute House Studio, and knows the issues and problems of management first hand. HHU is both targeting existing entrepreneurs in the fashion industry and teaming up with academic institutions to provide training modules before design students even graduate.
Our Space, Our Place
http://www.ourspaceourplace.org/
Founder: Cheryl Cumings
Our Space our place, Inc. is a nonprofit organization based in Roxbury, which provides an after school and career exploration program to blind youth.
They have used theater, dance, and sport to develop the relational and soft skills students need to become employed. In addition, they work to increase student’s knowledge of possible career options.
The reality is that over two-thirds of people who are blind and want to work are unemployed. For blind people who are minorities, the statistics are even more dire.
Problem: Blind youth, especially in lower-income communities, lack access to extra-curricular activities involving technology.
Solution: Engage blind youth in technology, specifically coding, to enhance their career possibilities. This could entail new internships possibilities, hands-on experience, programming workshops, problem solving hackathons and more activities for these students.
