Startup Roundup: Venmo public and proud at Mobile Monday, LTL gets Garbage Pail Kids, RedLasso will beat us up

Introducing Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup. Here, we’ll parse out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch. Several of the tips in this week’s roundups resulted from a quick email to TP. Without further ado….

DEFINITE READS

Venmo, a young mobile payment startup based in University City received top honors at Mobile Monday Demo Night, after attendees used the service during a five-minute presentation to donate to a Haiti relief organization. Six-hundred dollars were donated in three minutes, adding to the $15,000 that Venmo says it has already raised for the disaster. It will be interesting to watch how Venmo continues to grow, considering XIPWIRE’s competitive platform and business model, also based in the region.

PlaySay, a mobile language-learning flash-card platform was awarded third place at Demo Night. In an email to Technically Philly, founder Ryan Meinzer says the organization has grown to more than 4,000 users. We’re not sure at the moment how that compares to our report that the company had sold 3,000 products by July of last year.

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RJ Metrics makes a rap video and admits it

Jake Stein at left and Robert Moore at right of business dashboard firm RJ Metrics performing in their "Business Intelligence" rap video.

And now for something totally different.

You may be tired of the ironic rap video — we know we are — but sometimes an old idea can pass. Does this?

Jake Stein and Robert Moore, the two Ivy League-educated entrepreneurs behind the business intelligence dashboard RJ Metrics that opened up shop earlier this month, have broken from their cipher and put business on wax.

Stein, who lives in Center City, sings the hook and plays straight man to Moore in their single “Straight Outta Camden,” noting their recent move to the Rutgers University-Camden tech incubator.

Peep the video and score an exclusive download after the jump.

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RJMetrics mining business database information

At least two Ivy League kids graduated in 2006, took fat-salaried jobs at the same New York City equity firm and returned to Philadelphia to reach fame and fortune by mining data for the nation’s small businesses.

The story continues still.

Today is the public opening of RJMetrics, a business intelligence dashboard and brainchild of a pair of 25-year-olds with regional ties: Robert J. Moore and Jake Stein. They want to help small and medium-sized businesses that collect data about their customers better use that information to chart user behavior.

And like any good idea, it came to them while they should have been doing something else.

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