About Will Schmidt

Will Schmidt received his BA in English from the University of San Diego in December 2011. He graduated with too many poems to remember, short stories that far exceed the prerequisites to be considered “short,” one screenplay that looks like a hurricane edited it, and a heaping pile of news articles that clog his desk surface. He’s always writing and doesn’t think he could stop if he wanted to. He constantly seeks new ways to extend the reach of his training, and Tech Cocktail is the perfect canvas to paint his next masterpiece.

Recent Post by this Author

Blumoo: Use Your Mobile Device as a Bluetooth Stereo Remote

You have a high-quality stereo system that powers outdoor speakers on your deck? Awesome, but can you manage playlists and change songs without walking inside? Is everything readily available at the touch of a button on your Bluetooth, smartphone remote control? Of course not; that would be impossible. Or is it? This dilemma was all…

Fleshbot Fiction Heats Up the Internet with Electronic Erotica

Lux Alptraum is a woman of many talents: writer, sex educator, and CEO. Her writings have appeared in Cosmopolitan, Hustler, and at SundanceChannel.com, among many others. She has spoken at notable institutions like Harvard, Brown, Yale, New York University, Columbia, and Ohio State University, as well as SXSW. After being featured at New York City’s…

VolunteerMark Makes Managing Volunteers Easy for Nonprofits

The day-to-day for a nonprofit is busy, to say the least. Keeping track of volunteers and their hours, information, and participation history is time-consuming and often falls to the bottom of the agenda. But Andrew Stanley and Venkat Dulipalli – the good Samaritans that they are – decided to take this problem head-on. VolunteerMark was designed specifically…

Get in the Game: Fannect Determines Who the Top Sports Fans Are

Everybody is a fan in one way or another, and everybody has their favorite sports team. Thanks to season-long data, we are privy to what sports team reigns supreme, but it raises an important question: how do we evaluate the sports fans? In the hopes of settling an age-old debate, Will Coatney and Hunter Browning…

“Remember to Buy Milk”: Send Texts Triggered by Location with Locotext

SMS messaging has been the cornerstone of cell phones since before they were smartphones. Anthony Nguyen, founder of Locotext, posed a question to himself one day though: Why has nobody innovated around traditional SMS messaging? What about geo SMS? “My initial thoughts lead me to really dig into geo-sensing technology,” says Nguyen. “I thought it…

AuManil Reveals Hidden Insights in Game Players’ Activity

Bart Bohn founded AuManil to assist the $40 billion online games market by collecting social gaming data to reduce whale churn, increase whale conversion, improve whale acquisition, and managing whales across a portfolio of games. In the gaming world, “whales” are big money spenders and fanatical users. However, the specific social gaming data regarding these…

On Your Mark, Get Set, Photo! Sports Photos’ Platform for Sports Photographers

Brandon Schatz is on a mission to provide an organized platform dedicated to sports photographers and their photos with his website, Sports Photos. “Back in the day when I was playing sports, I remember seeing tons of sports photographers, but I always wondered where their photos ended up,” a nostalgic Schatz explains. The idea is…

Praescient Analytics: Decoding Data for National Security and Defense

Katie Crotty, Yvonne Soto, and Patrick Ryan embarked on a mission when they started Praescient Analytics: revolutionize the way the world understands information with the latest analytics tools. It began as a modest offering, but soon blossomed into a $20-million-dollar business with clients in the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the…

It’s Alive: Leap2 and the Finer Points of a Living Search Engine

Web searches are a new chore in our world. Look this up, find out where we are going; what is the menu for that restaurant again? Sometimes you nail it, but other times you are left out in the cold with the worst Chinese food you have ever tasted. Mike Farmer, along with Dan Carroll…

Launch Fest 2013: Launch Pad Showcases 8 Startups in New Orleans

Launch Fest is an event that combines an entrepreneurship conference with a demo day for the Launch Pad accelerator class of 2013, and yesterday marked their fourth annual event. The goal of this year’s Launch Fest, from the startup perspective, was to showcase the best investment-ready companies in New Orleans to local angel and national…

Collect Blood at Your Convenience with HemaSpot by Spot on Sciences

Scared of needles? Hate getting your blood drawn? Fear not, because Jeanette Hill, founder and CEO of Spot on Sciences, is offering health care specialists and patients a new way to collect blood that does not involve venipuncture. HemaSpot, Spot on Sciences’s blood collection device, comes in a kit that can be used anywhere and…

LoveThatFit Revamps Technologies for More Accurate Online Clothing Shopping

In August, Tech Cocktail covered LoveThatFit, a platform for online clothing shopping, and dug into what inspired founder Gina Mancuso to start her venture. Almost a year later, we went back to see how Mancuso is doing with her third major business venture. Since October, when LoveThatFit received funding from Covenant Capitol, the focus has been…

Share Videos Like Never Before With Vilynx’s Video Social Network

There are so many picture sharing services available that we tend to overlook the cousin to the digital picture: video. People use their camera phones for video recording every day, but seldom does an opportunity arise for organized and easily accessible video sharing. Juan Carlos Riveiro and Hendrik van der Meer, growing ever more frustrated…

Continuous Integration Made Simple with cisimple

The fall 2012 AngelPad class was home to cisimple, as they began their mission to develop a continuous integration platform designed specifically for mobile development. Kevin Rohling and David Justice decided the world could use a platform for automating builds, test executions, and beta distribution to help developers locate and respond to problems quickly. Below,…

Buy and Sell Baked Goods Online Easily With Food by People

Baking is always fun, and half of that fun comes from sharing your baked goods with friends and family. Sharing with the public at large, however, is a bit trickier. To help bakers reach new customers across America, Bernard Huang and Hang Su have decided to take the bakery to the Internet with Food by…

Rock Out to Music Videos Anywhere, Anytime With Rockify

The trend in digital video viewing is shifting to specialized services like Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, and some of the most popular types of web media are music videos. Joel Korpi founded Rockify, a platform to experience music videos anytime and anywhere, to fuse the two worlds of music videos and popular web media together. While…