San Francisco-based Screenleap, which was founded in 2011, is now a member of the Rackspace Startup Program. Screenleap turned to Rackspace after the startup had concerns about how its previous cloud provider could handle its unique usage patterns, CEO and Founder Tuyen Truong says.

“We’ve had a great experience with Rackspace so far,” says Truong. “We were using Amazon EC2 to service our screen shares, but had worries about reliability and cost-effectiveness given our usage pattern. We initially moved some of our screen share servers to Rackspace as a test and had great results. We have subsequently moved the majority of our screen share servers to Rackspace.”

With those concerns out of the way, Screenleap can focus on making it easy to share your screen with anyone online.

While Java is currently required to share your screen with Screenleap, viewing can be done on any device with a web browser without having to download or install any additional software. Truong notes that other screen sharing tools require viewers to either install additional software or have Flash installed to view another’s screen.

“My cofounders and I were fed up with how hard it was to get a screen share started using WebEx and GoToMeeting,” explains Truong. “I used GoToMeeting at my previous company for sales demos and I found myself wasting a lot of precious time. Instead of being able to jump straight into demoing my company’s product, I found that I was spending the first five minutes of every meeting helping my potential customers install screen sharing software just so they can see my screen.”

Truong continues, “I thought that there had to be a better way and my co-founders and I started hacking at the problem. The solution we came up with was the foundation for Screenleap. After building an initial prototype, we applied to Y Combinator and got accepted. We launched Screenleap four months later in February 2012.”

The simple idea that guides development at Screenleap is the belief that sharing your screen is now a fundamental online interaction –  it empowers people to work together online more effectively. Team Screenleap is passionate about helping people collaborate better online.

“We want to make it even easier for people to start sharing their screen,” concludes Truong. “Our installation-free viewer makes it super-easy for people to view your shared screen. Our Screen Share API makes it easy for developers to add screen sharing to their own applications. Our users can now initiate a conference call with the users they are sharing their screens with without leaving Screenleap. We’re going to continue to make it easier for people to share the contents of their screen with others.”

Are you an entrepreneur with a startup idea to revolutionize the cloud? If so, the Space Cowboys would like to hear about it. Send us a message if you are searching for the rocket fuel to launch your startup. We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Bucketfeet, a Rackspace Startup Program member, was inspired by two unlikely stories from two very different individuals. Aaron Firestein started drawing on shoes back in college, and Raaja Nemani was looking for an escape from the world of finance. In 2008, they independently moved to Argentina on a whim. Aaron was working as a photographer and Raaja had just started a yearlong backpacking tour of the world. The two met in the villas of Argentina, and bonded over a love for art and shoes. Before Raaja left Argentina, Aaron designed a pair for him, and those were the shoes Raaja wore across 25 countries and six continents.

“My business partner Aaron (co-founder & Chief Artist) and I founded Bucketfeet after meeting while backpacking around the world,” explains Nemani, co-founder and CEO of Bucketfeet. “The idea really stemmed from a photo project with talented artists from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. There are millions of talented artists around the world, but very few get the awareness and exposure they deserve. We took Aaron’s small-scale shoe customization business and turned it into a brand that represents individuality and the idea that shoes can be more than just a product, but a way to connect people and spread art.”

Launched in the spring of 2011 in Chicago, the philosophy at Bucketfeet is: art is not meant to hang in an expensive gallery, it is meant to travel and be seen. With every pair of Bucketfeet shoes you purchase you are spreading art on your feet, and connecting artists to brand new audiences. And the company gives a portion of each shoe purchase directly back to the artist, while you get a pair of shoes that are as individual and original as you are.

“Everyone loves art, and we aim to connect those people with all of the talented individuals we meet from around the world,” continues Nemani. “Through the love of art, we’ve tripled the size of the team and grew the company over 200 percent in 2012. Rackspace has been a great partner, supporting our growth with consistent web hosting services and terrific customer service. This year we expect to continue the growth trend domestically through online and retail, but also internationally in a few key markets. We’re growing fast, and we expect to bring on at least 25 more artists from many new countries.”

And the Rackspace Startup Program was there to help Bucketfeet build its business on a world-class cloud computing platform. Drop the Space Cowboys a note and let us know if you need any help facilitating the dream of your startup from ideation to implementation. Our mission is to provide rocket fuel for the startup movement!

Within the startup movement, there are plenty of events happening globally in June 2013. The Rackspace Startup Program is here to keep you up to date with valuable information on events and happenings inside the global startup community. What follows is a partial list of global startup events complied by the contributors of StartupDigest:

Austin
AUSOME-Analyze, Influence and Engage Your Customer
Startup or Shutup – Live Podcast Recording Session

Baltimore
Hack for Change Baltimore

Barcelona
Jobfluent.com Startup Fair: Management
Failcon Barcelona

Berlin
StartupWeekend: Food Innovation
Wherecamp

Birmingham, UK
Entrepreneur to Investor
Tech Wednesday

Boulder, Colo.
Boulder Civic Hackfest
New Tech Boulder Monthly Meetup

Brazil
Curso Lean Startup
Agile Brazil

Buenos Aires
Mobile Dev Con 2013
Social y Performance

Cardiff
Oi Conference
National Digital Learning Event and Awards

Chicago
Zen U. Chicago
Co-Founders Wanted of Chicago

Cincinnati
CDX and CincySM present: “On The Make”
Design Research & Usability Testing

Cologne
Business Model Presentation

Columbus
Ohio Growth Summit

Copenhagen
Growing Games – Management, Boards, and Advisory Boards
CONNECT Denmark – Pitch Training, Sparring, and Screening

Czech Republic
Barcamp Brno
StartupSummit Prague

Dallas
Data Libre DFW Code for Irving Workshop

Denver
TEDxMileHigh: Values + Instincts

Detroit
Telematics Detroit 2013
Detroit Technology Exchange Showcase

Dublin
Startup Weekend Dublin
Dublin Launch 48

Gainesville, Fla.
Android Bootcamp

Guadalajara
PulsoConf

Hamburg
Lean Startup Meetup
Startup Rally

Helsinki
Beach Boost
PitchHelsinki Spring 2013

Hong Kong
StartLab.HK – Opening Ceremony and Keynote Seminar
Lean Startup Machine

Houston
National Civic Day of Hacking

Hungary
Innotrends Hungary 2013
TEDGlobal 2013 Live from Debrecen

India
UnPluggd Bengaluru
RubyConf Pune

Italy
Startup Live
LeanStartupMachine

Kansas City
Hack To School
Hack The Midwest

Latvia
Riga Toastmasters Meeting
Python User Group Riga Meetup

Lexington, Ky.
Awesome Inc U iOS Development Crash Course
Open Coffee with Lean Analytics Author Ben Yoskovitz

London
Intro to the London Startup Scene – Breakfast
Capital On Stage // London

Los Angeles
LA Unplugged // 3 Day Camping Trip
Silicon Beach Fest

Manchester
Business Book Club Meetup – Making Ideas Happen
Introduction to XP – 3rd Birthday for XP Manchester

Melbourne
Functional Programming
Melbourne Silicon Beach Drinks

Miami
Hack for Change: Miami
ProductCamp South Florida

Montreal
AccelerateMTL
48 Hour Mobile App Challenge

Munich
Isarnetz Webwoche
The Lean Entrepreneur

New York City
AngelHack NYC
Northside Festival: Next

Orlando
National Day of Civic Hacking

Orange County, Calif.
Women 2.0 Founder Friday
Co-Founders Wanted of Orange County

Oslo
Failcon Oslo
Startup Summer 2013

Ottawa
C100 presents AccelerateOTT
CocoaHeads Ottawa/Gatineau

Paris
Startup Weekend Paris
Barcamp e-commerce 2013

Philadelphia
Random Hacks of Kindness Philly 5
GDI Philly::Understanding Audience Needs through User Interviews

Philippines
Call for Ideas for Social Innovation Camp Philippines
Startup Leadership Program

Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh TechFest 2013
The Hardware Store Launch Parteeeeee

Raleigh/Durham
Paradoxos Durham
IDEA Pitch

Scotland
Lean Agile Edinburgh
NW eHealth Hackcelerate Weekend

Seattle
Enterprise Lean Startup Workshop
Conversation on Culture @ Work

Seoul
NEXT Conference: On Innovation & The Future

Singapore
Geeks On A Plane (Southeast Asia)
Crowdsourcing Week

Silicon Valley
Startup Grind hosts Jessica Livingston
Verticalize

Stockholm
Django Drinkup
24 Hour Business Camp (24HBC)

Stuttgart
Gründertagung Bad Boll
Karlsruhe: Start Me Up – Kapital für Schlaue Köpfe! 

Taipei
Computex Taipei
Business Next Meet x AAMA 2013

Tampa
How to Create UX in a Technology Product
Tampa Bay Startup Weekend

Thailand
AngelHack Bangkok 2013
Digital Innovation Asia Awards

Tokyo
METI Symposium: Encouraging People to Develop New Business
J-Seed Ventures Networking Event

Toronto
Persuasive Psychology for Interactive Design
Founder Dating – Start a Side Project with Awesome People

Vancouver
Enterprise Lean Startup Workshop
Ruby on Rails: Deep Dive Workshop

Washington DC
AngelHack DC
Find a Co-Founder in Washington, DC

Startups…get involved with the movement and participate in an event in your community. There is no better time than now to build or strengthen your network. Networking with other entrepreneurs allows you to form and maintain a strong circle of contacts that will serve you well for years to come. If you are an entrepreneur with a new idea in cloud computing, an application that makes people’s lives better or the next big thing online, drop the Space Cowboys a note and let us know about it. The Rackspace Startup Program is looking forward to hearing all about it!

“I’ve managed teams and projects for years, so I’ve used the major SaaS project management applications and collaboration tools,” says Tim Abbott, Founder of okdo.it. “I love them and they are for people like me, but let’s face it, people still keep sending action items in email. I remember one day opening my email and seeing how many tasks I had forgotten because they were embedded in my email with zero organization or due dates and I was floored. That’s what made me realize I had to do something about it.”

Bootstrapping a startup is never an easy endeavor, especially when there are families and children involved. Abbott was originally based in Kansas City, Kan., and was searching for a way to lower his expenses, expand the okdo.it team and keep food on the table. So, he moved the startup overseas, took on a variety of projects to make ends meet and assembled a group of incredibility passionate hackers to build okdo.it. “We’ve kept our base in Kansas City, but we work mostly out of Bangladesh, designing and coding from Dhaka.”

The okdo.it team and its software thrive on productivity.

“I would say that there’s one word that defines our passion: productivity,” says Abbott. “We love to be productive, love to collaborate and love to remove obstacles. It’s funny that when I had the initial idea, no one was really talking about this. You couldn’t find articles about issues with email, productivity, the problem with task management apps; and all of a sudden in the span of a year and a half, tons of people are talking about the space. We may not fully solve it, but we think we’re getting a lot closer than other solutions we’ve seen.”

In reality, okdo.it is the result of understanding that there had to be a better way of working with email and tasks. “It had to work for me and my workflow,” explains Abbott. “If okdo.it didn’t work for me and the teams I tend to work with, I would consider it a failure. But, the more people we’ve shown it to, the more people fall in love with it. They always have this look on their faces when thinking about the simple approach we took that translates to, ’Why didn’t I think of that?’”

Reputation, support and the fact that members of the okdo.it team had been Rackspace customers in previous startups was enough for the team to consider becoming part of the Rackspace Startup Program. “Honestly, Rackspace is awesome, and we were Rackspace Cloud users even before we joined the Startup Program,” says Abbott. “We’ve been really impressed with the new offerings and the move to OpenStack and the various possibilities that affords. Also, the entire startup team is awesome and we love Robert Scoble’s approach to giving advice, and answering questions. We haven’t been disappointed and we would encourage anyone to apply to the program.”

Abbott has seen teams really using the productivity application, and is focused on keeping up demand in the future. “We’re solving a real problem and, unlike most of the other apps we’ve seen, we aren’t built on top of Gmail or any market leading email solution, so scaling it is going to be where we keep our eyes. We’ll also be working on text and voice chat integration and possibly our desktop application. We’re working on adding more real-time features and mobile apps to the okdo.it arsenal. We think real-time is going to be awesome and mobile apps have been part of the roadmap.”

Within the Rackspace Startup Program, our focus is exceeding the startup’s expectations and helping our program companies by providing a world class open cloud computing platform on which to build their businesses. Drop the Space Cowboys a note and let us know if you need any help facilitating the dream of your startup from ideation to implementation. Our mission is to provide open cloud rocket fuel for the startup movement!

He holds an MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His professional career spans as District Manager with ASAP Software and a Partner Development Manager at Sun Microsystems.  He founded a growing online business from scratch, Fat Tone Guitars, a multi-channel marketer of electric guitars, amps and effects pedals for musicians.

An entrepreneur, brand developer and channel management professional, Phil Vickman took the time to talk to the Rackspace Startup Program about what’s involved in architecting, developing and deploying sites for startups. What follows are Phil’s thoughts on being a Drupal web application and website development company and its partnership with Rackspace.

How do startups benefit from the Promet Source expertise?
Startups benefit from working with Promet via fast deployment of web applications and complete 24×7 application support. Promet utilizes the Agile Development approach, which allows startups to quickly prioritize features and functionality prior to deployment.

What business wins has Promet Source achieved?
Promet has developed and deployed the C2ES Geaux Green, Third Party Trust and the Grinnell College websites on the Rackspace Cloud. The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) is a non-profit organization working together for the environment and the economy; Third Party Trust is a Chicago based B2B site that is a social site for corporate security professionals, focused on streamlining the security governance and risk management processes between enterprise organizations and their service providers; and Grinnell College is a private, coed, liberal arts college founded in 1846 in Grinnell, Iowa.

How does Promet Source help grow startups?
We provide fast, flexible and affordable development options for our startup clients. By partnering with Rackspace, we offer the best option for rapid development, secure and flexible management and operations, along with the easiest and most comprehensive scalability options.

With Third Party Trust, and with Grinnell, Promet and the client jointly created their workflow. Promet worked with the client to help them identify their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) on launch; and their future releases. We were able to help them prioritize their budget, to get the most out of each product release.

What best practices does Promet Source incorporate into your customers’ sites?
Promet utilizes numerous Drupal CMS deployment best practices. We must engage in both short and long term site planning with our customers. Promet must understand the customers’ content types and end user characteristics in order to plan a responsive web design solution for the startup. With Third Party Trust, Promet, along with the client, incorporates best practices of separate development, staging and production environments, and code review and use of GIT.

How has a partnership with Rackspace benefitted both Promet Source and the startups you work with?
Our partnership with Rackspace gives Promet the ability to offer [an amazing] hosting platform to our customers. We can provide best of breed solutions for the full array of needs facing a startup: speed of development, ease and flexibility in feature rollout, secure and automated management, scalable, pay for what you need hosting and support for the entire stack.

What straight up business advice would give to a startup?
Think about your startup’s growth prospects, business capabilities, end users, content type and budget to build a site before architecting, developing and deploying a scalable site for your business.

The Rackspace Startup Program thanks our favorite Drupalganger, Phil Vickman, for taking the time out of his busy schedule to enlighten us on how Promet Source is a Drupal web application and website development company that offers expert services and support for startup sites deployed on the Rackspace Cloud. For more insight on hosting your startup on the Rackspace Cloud platform backed by Fanatical Support™, contact the Space Cowboys today.

“Plutora was conceived from real world experience while dealing with the non-existent Enterprise IT Release Management software problem,” explains Sean Hamawi, director and co-founder of Plutora. “Our experiences as executives delivering complex systems within large financial services institutions over the last five years and with no other direct product offerings meant this market was ripe for disruption.”

Hamawi and his colleagues saw a need for a simple and transparent way to manage the flow of features from business stakeholders through various IT environments, ultimately culminating in a release to customers. The IT landscape was also becoming more complex through multi-sourcing arrangements, multiple vendor involvement, globally distributed teams and a move to cloud-based services. Passionate about building a better solution, the executive-assembled team at Plutora left their corporate roles to build the startup. Plutora, which is a member of the Rackspace Startup Program, is a privately-held company since 2012.

“We started out doing this via various spreadsheets, intranets and extranets, which were updated manually,” says Hamawi. “Maintaining these disparate sources just wasn’t working and was eventually abandoned. This often resulted in costly delays and failed releases. Every other tool we explored didn’t do what we needed or was bloated with features we didn’t need. So, we built the Plutora software and application platform from the ground up on Rackspace. We came to the conclusion that Rackspace was the leader in cloud hosting solutions. We felt that the flexibility, scalability and level of control that Rackspace offers was the best cloud solution for Plutora and our customers”

Looking ahead, Hamawi says, Plutora will focus on growth.

“At Plutora we are building software using deep subject matter knowledge of the problems we are solving. We are passionate about these problems and our solution as we have lived through the pain of bad process and lost efficiencies,” concludes Hamawi. “User feedback has validated our passion through stellar product feedback, and when your users are telling you that you’re onto a ‘winner’ you know all that hard work will pay off. This is going to be a busy year for the team at Plutora. Our core focus will be on customer acquisition, product marketing, product development and hiring talented people.”

The Rackspace Startup Program continues to provide more and more startups with a world class open cloud computing platform upon which to build their businesses. Contact the Space Cowboys to find out how you can get the rocket fuel to launch your startup.

To keep Apple growing, Woz and Co-Founder Steve Jobs found angel investor Mike Markkula, who was willing to make the investment, under one condition: Woz leave HP and focus on Apple fulltime.

After some resistance, Woz relented, realizing he could be an engineer, not a businessman with Apple. It was then that Apple was truly born. And while not every startup will be Apple, Woz says it’s important to go all in with an idea. You have to want to succeed. You have to have a reason. Personal motivation, he says, can carry a budding business further than stock or salary.

“You’ve got to really, really want to make it go, so much that you’re living and breathing it 20 hours a day; even in your dreams,” Woz says.

Here, Woz talks about Apple’s humble beginnings and offers advice to startups:

Check out the previous installments of Rackspace On Startups featuring Rackspace Startup Liaison Officer Robert Scoble, author and speaker Guy Kawasaki, Rackspace President Lew Moorman, Springboard founder Sean Kane and Rackspace Chairman and Co-Founder Graham Weston.

“When I relocated from Oxford to London for my job, I found it is expensive to buy new furniture to furnish my apartment,” explains Trung Huynh, founder and man of many hats at RentHouseMap. “Looking on Gumtree or eBay for secondhand furniture, the price is usually increased by the cost of delivery. I was wondering whether anybody in my neighborhood was selling stuff that I needed and soon realized that there was no existing platform that enabled sellers and buyers to trade stuff easily in their local areas.”

RentHouseMap, a member of the Rackspace Startup Program, was then born as a location-based trading platform for sellers to trade with buyers in their local areas in the UK. Initially RentHouseMap has five categories including Properties for Rent, Properties for Share, Furniture for Sale, Electronics for Sale and an employment section. Soon Huynh, RentHouseMap’s CEO, CTO and COO, recognized all those categories were too broad to focus on and decided to thin the herd, and focus purely on rental and shared properties.

“RentHouseMap is passionately aimed to solve existing problems in the property search market,” says Huynh. “At RentHouseMap, we think browsing page by page is not the right way to search for properties. Our customers care about property location. Thus we believe the customers will have a much better user experience if properties are displayed on maps, the central focus at RentHouseMap. The second problem that we want to solve is the dispersion of property listings from an overwhelming number of portals. And the third problem is spam, validity and availability detection. We hope to solve this by crowd-sourcing.”

So, if you’re searching for a rental or shared property in the United Kingdom, the RentHouseMap search engine can save you some time by bringing them all together and allowing you to view wanted properties on maps in the neighborhoods you’re are interested in living in.

And in 2013, RentHouseMap will focus on growth and raising awareness, Huynh says.

“I am trying to market RentHouseMap to more people, adding more data and property filters,” he says. “We are working on ways to monetize the site in 2013 and make many more people aware of RentHouseMap. Regarding product development, RentHouseMap will soon have full data coverage over Great Britain and many more property filters.”

The Rackspace Startup Program is here to help entrepreneurs in the early stages of startup. If you are involved in the startup movement, the Space Cowboys would like to hear from you. Drop us a note and let us know what ideas you are building in the open cloud.

Graham Weston lives and breathes entrepreneurship. As one of Rackspace’s founders, Weston says that building a startup is all about the energy, and the excitement of wondering where a fledgling business will lead. Will it fail? Will it succeed?

While there’s no secret formula to building a great startup – it’s about finding what customers want and focusing on that, Weston says. At Rackspace, we keep that spirit alive through our Rackspace Startup Program where we focus on companies that aren’t necessarily funded by VC’s and can often be overlooked.

It boils down to innovation. That’s the lifeblood of a startup. Startups are disruptive. The cloud lets these startups innovate and disrupt inexpensively, while an open cloud gives them a neutral platform upon which they can control innovation and progress of their ideas. An open cloud enables startups to move at the speed of the future, Weston says.

In this video, hear more about why Rackspace and Weston love startups and why we want to help as many of them succeed as we can.

Check out the previous installments of Rackspace On Startups featuring Rackspace Startup Liaison Officer Robert Scoble, author and speaker Guy Kawasaki, Rackspace President Lew Moorman and Springboard founder Sean Kane.

If you answered yes to any of these questions, Taxi for two, a United Kingdom-based startup and member of the Rackspace Startup Program, is building a solution for sharing taxi cabs in London. It’s a mobile phone-based service that enables people who are going in the same direction to easily and safely get in touch, with no mobile phone numbers shared between parties, and arrange to share a taxi. It works on any mobile phone with an Internet connection.

Taxi for two is the brainchild of founder and Managing Director Garry Prior a UK-based Rackspace employee. He has been involved in the mobile and Internet industry for 15 years and previously held the position of Head of Apps for O2. His experience in this role, and his deep understanding of the power of mobile location-based services, led him to cook up the original idea of a taxi-sharing service. Nick Bishop, co-founder and experienced web developer, came on board shortly after, impressed by the initial concept development work.

“I approached Nick and asked him to help me build Taxi for two,” explains Prior. “After several months we had a version ready to launch, to start testing out market demand. We went live during the Mobile World Congress in February 2012, where Taxi for two was featured as the official event smartphone app.”

The launch was supported by mCrumbs, an augmented reality specialist that was responsible for Taxi for two being the featured app at the 2012 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Since launch, the co-founders have showcased the service at several events in London. Taxi for two has been well-received by the collaborative consumption movement, which praises its ability to encourage people to live more sustainably.

“We genuinely believe there’s a big market opportunity here, a chance to change the way people travel via taxi,” says Prior. “There are lots of taxi-booking apps such as Hailo, the Black Cab App, already in the market, but we believe we’re the only people looking to make taxi sharing more effective. Longer term the same principles and technology could be applied to car sharing, although there are already a number of companies operating in this space.”

Taxi for two has also received a number of positive reviews in the online and offline media. Rachel Botsman, a high profile social innovator who writes, consults and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through network technologies, has encouraged her Twitter followers to use the service. Taxi for two has been mentioned in London’s Daily Telegraph, Look Magazine and Metro News; online at Mobile Entertainment and Watch My Wallet; and on the American online news site, The Huffington Post.

What’s going on right now at Taxi for two you ask? Prior tells us, “We are testing a number of marketing approaches right now. Clearly as a start-up we have virtually zero marketing budget, so every penny has to count. The challenge we face is building sufficient demand within targeted geographic areas so that taxi sharing starts to work. There’s no point of one person logging on to share a taxi if there’s no one else looking to make a similar journey at a similar time. We are also continuing to develop the product itself, and looking at how we can utilize Facebook and Twitter integration to drive the social word of mouth effect.”

Prior says he is looking at the year ahead as a prosperous one for Taxi for two.

“As already mentioned, it’s important we start to gain a foothold within key geographic areas. London is an obvious market for us, so I’d like to see us have some kind of presence at the major train stations and airports,” Prior concludes. We’re also looking at ways to address the business-travel market, which could be through partnerships with companies directly or potentially with people running local businesses. By the end of 2013 I’d like to see Taxi for two well established and starting to generate revenue through charging a small fee every time someone arranges a taxi share through the service.”

Are you an entrepreneur involved in an accelerator, university program or backed by a venture capital firm? If so, the Rackspace Startup Program can assist you in launching your business by providing a world class open cloud computing platform powered by Rackspace and backed by Fanatical Support™. Just talk with the Space Cowboys!