South Jersey Startup Roundup: Think Like a Girl, CultureCloud, RunSignUp
Think Like a Girl Engineering Kits: Gabrielle Rochino, founder and CEO of Think Like a Girl: Engineering Kits (Glassboro), along with Megan DeGeorge, cofounder and COO, and Alexis Basantis, cofounder and chief communications officer (CCO), recently released their long-anticipated kits to girls who want to become engineers. These kits have activity sheets, guides, trading cards, tools and a few other “sur-prizes.”
Think Like a Girl is a subscription-based service that caters to girls from ages six to 12-plus. The vision of Think Like a Girl is “to empower girls to develop into our world’s problem solvers!!” said DeGeorge. The startup recently launched a Kickstarter campaign here!
When asked what it meant to think like a girl, Rochino replied: “It means to use your creativity and unique perspective to bring different solutions to the table to solve problems. For example, when the standard ‘soccer mom’ minivan was first designed, it only had one sliding door. This design was created by a male engineer. A woman engineer noticed a few flaws, particularly that a woman with shorter arms couldn’t reach the second seats, so she created a second sliding door. Now you never see any minivans without two sliding doors! This is what it means, to ‘think like a girl’!”
The Think Like a Girl trio have either graduated or are in their senior year at the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering. They wish to inspire girls to learn about engineering for many years to come — through activities aimed at their interests and designed in ways that work best by connecting them to the real world.
CultureCloud: The founder and executive officer of CultureCloud (Gloucester County), Jeff Eker, and cofounders Charlie Grab, Samed Ozdemir, Austin Carrig and Brad Johnson are expanding their New Jersey startup to Germany and beyond!
CultureCloud is a social network that allows users to connect with travelers and residents to find out about the essential places to visit in various locations around the world, as well as the typical tourist traps that should be skipped. On signing up, users are asked a set of questions to determine their “passport profile.” This includes all the languages they speak, their interests, and the places they’ve visited across the world. Once the profile is complete, users get placed on CultureCloud’s “World Map,” which allows them to connect, interact and network — all in real time.
This summer, the team at CultureCloud plans to expand their network globally by interacting with their global brand ambassadors in Australia, Germany, Indonesia, India and Pakistan, among other places, while maintaining the startup’s headquarters in New Jersey.
RunSignUp: CEO Bob Bickel and CTO Stephen Sigwart created RunSignUp (Moorestown) with two things in mind: to make it easier for runners to register for a race and to track the runner’s race results in real time. They achieved this by using various platforms, tools and technologies that have helped RunSignUp become one of the most popular event-technology startups in the nation, featuring more than 10,000 races that resulted in more than 2.7 million paid registrations in 2015.
RunSignUp is the latest in a long line of technologies and innovation that have helped the company grow throughout the years. The startup has made two substantial acquisitions that have enhanced customer experience with the brand. One technology from Race Management Systems is The Race Director, which race timers use to report the results of over 11 million finishers per year. The other technology is RaceJoy, which is the leading GPS tracking app for races; this unique technology allows users to watch a blue dot (indicating a runner) move around the course during the race in real time and to receive progress alerts at each mile so that observers can cheer the runner on.
