MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – In recent weeks, residents of this quiet suburb have reported strange activity concentrated in the downtown area of Castro Street. There have been numerous sightings of zombies lumbering up and down Castro, mouths agape, in search of three things. Noted by many Castro St business owners whose shops and restaurants have been frequented by these zombies, they hear only these words coming from the zombies’ mouths over and over, in an erratic fashion: “BRAAAAAAAINS. CUUUUUUUUUSTOMERS.  MOOOOOOOOONEY.”

These are not your garden variety zombies. Despite their appetite for human brains, two of them were recently spotted attempting the Pho Challenge. So it is apparent these zombies have chameleon-like abilities and are able to disguise themselves as human beings – making them all the more dangerous to innocent civilians. Extreme caution should be heeded.

The 12th floor of 444 Castro St appears to be a hotbed of zombie activity and where these zombies congregate at odd hours. Rumor has it that they’ve infiltrated the 500 Startups Accelerator. Ignorant paparazzi have attempted to sneak up to the 12th floor to try and capture footage, only to never be seen again.

And one more thing…. these zombies got some serious moves. 😉

(You can also watch this on SwitchCam)

We’re GHOULISHLY excited to introduce you to our little monsters — the newest 500 Accelerator batch! We’ve got 34 creepy crawly startups spending the next couple months with us in the 500 Secret Lair in Mountain View. 24% of them have women founders, and 44% have international founders, hailing from countries like Brazil, Netherlands, Portugal, Croatia, London, Estonia, Canada, Australia, and Japan.

Happy Halloween!!

And now… meet the zombies. Er, companies:

300milligrams
Priority inbox for team conversations.

Founders: Mark Kofman and Anton Litvinenko
Where We’re From: Estonia, the country with a disproportionate number of startups per capita
Fun Fact: 300 milligrams (about two to four cups of brewed coffee) is a maximum safe dose of caffeine a day. Consuming more may cause: Insomnia, Nervousness, Restlessness,… We picked this name as http://300.mg helps teams to reduce number of coffee (water cooler) meetings to share the information.
Our Theme Song: “Poison” by Prodigy
Our Superhero: It’s Doctor House and his crew.

72Lux
72Lux offers consumers a universal checkout and personalized shopping experience while also offering a white-label version for publishers.

Founders: Heather Marie, Founder / Team members include Michelle Montgomery and Jason Cain
Where We’re From: New York, NY “The city that never sleeps.” …and neither do we!
Fun Fact: 72 comes from the street address we launched from on the Upper East Side in Manhattan
Our Theme Song: Independent Women Part 1 by Destiny’s Child and Run the World (“Girls”) by Beyonce
Our Superhero: Supergirl

BrandBoards
Bringing Google Adwords simplicity and reach to live event digital advertising

Founders:  Kenny Hawk, Tim Schoen
Where We’re From: Detroit, Michigan
Fun Fact: At a BBQ at Jim Steele’s house (COO of Salesforce.com), just before we launched product development, we learned Cisco had built almost exactly what we needed.  Later we were able to take over that product!
Our Theme Song: Eminem – One Shot
Our Superhero: Batman, because I used to dress up as Batman and try to fly by jumping off the top of the couch as a boy. Plus the Bat Beacon was Commissioner Gordon’s way of advertising a specific message

BrightNest
BrightNest is the Mint.com for home maintenance. We help homeowners manage their most valuable asset with customized tips and reminders.

Founders: Allen Shulman and Justin Anthony
Where We’re From: Denver, CO. We have 300 days of sunshine. That’s more annual hours of sun than Miami Beach and San Diego.
Fun Fact: Each member of the BrightNest team is required to learn how to properly caulk a tub.
Our Theme Song: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros – Home
Our Superhero: Al from Tool Time

Cadee
Cadee helps golfers understand and improve their game.

Founders: Sean Rucker, Steve Noone O’Connor, Stephen Taubman
Where We’re From: Toronto, Canada
Fun Fact: Cadee was conceived at a weekly “dragon’s den” night; held so that one day we could be our own bosses.
Our Theme Song: How to Make it in America Theme song
Our Superhero: Roy “Tin Cup” McAvoy

Central.ly
Central.ly wants to connect all of the social media profiles for small business owners

Founders: Chris Bennett, Arrel Gray, Edward Robertshaw
Where We’re From: San Francisco – The city stuck in the future.
Fun Fact: Central.ly started out as a project to sell unwanted airline vouchers and over crepes turned into a small business hub.
Our Theme Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCadcBR95oU – Because we are constantly pushing code.
Our Superhero: Professor X

Chorus
Customer feedback without the hassle. Automatically extract meaning from thousands of customer messages as they arrive in real time.

Founders: Dave Trindall, Dave Kuhn
Where We’re From: Sydney, Australia.
Fun Fact: Chorus development was fueled by Coke Zero and Diet Dr. Pepper.
Our Theme Song: Incubus – Are you In?
Our Superhero: We too admire Professor X

ContaAzul
ContaAzul is a web based SaaS accounting system for Brazilian SMB’s.

Founders: Vinicius “Vinny” Roveda Gonçalves and José Carlos “JC” Sardagna
Where We’re From: Joinville, SC, Brazil – a city in southern Brazil colonized by Germans and with the highest growth forecast in the country.
Fun Fact: The first day of work, we had moving boxes all over the place since JC just moved in.
Our Theme Song: A dois passos do paraíso
Our Superhero: Iron Man

Contactually
Contactually is a personal assistant for your professional email contacts that connects directly with your CRM.

Founders: Zvi Band, Tony Cappaert, Jeff Carbonella
Where We’re From: Washington, DC:  city of crooks, liars, and (increasingly) startups
Fun Fact: Our prototype was built when Zvi was heading to the beach for a few days, and Jeff needed something to do.
Our Theme Song: Wale – Chillin
Our Superhero: Harrison Ford.  In anything.  Or this guy.

DressRush
A “Gilt for Weddings” Dress Rush is making Bridezilla’s everywhere clamor to get couture without the cost. Up to 100% off retail ain’t bad, right?

Founders: Aaron Hall, Sara Morgan, Mike Arace
Where We’re From: Washington, DC, recently named the city with the worst traffic in America (take THAT LA!)
Fun Fact: It’s Dress Rush policy for each member of the team to create their “100 List” of things to do before they die.  Each month we try to check one item off everyone’s list no matter how crazy!
Our Theme Song: “White & Nerdy” by Weird Al Yankovic
Our Superhero: Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies, of course. He is going to shoot a big laaasser beam at the investors if they don’t give us one meeeeellion dollars.

eSpark Learning
eSpark is “Pandora for education” and creates custom playlists of super fun education apps on iPads for elementary school students.

Founders: David Vinca. And the entire team includes Maren McMullan, Faaiz Ahmad, Tom Wolf, Colleen Loftus, Shuaib Ahmed, Joanna Doyle, Mark Sneathen, Allyson Julian
Where We’re From: Chicago, IL  aka Silicon Valley v2.0 🙂
Fun Fact: One 4th grade eSpark student selected the “Entrepreneurship for kids/ Steve Jobs path” in eSpark’s curriculum and is working on an invention that he calls Brother/Sister Repellent. Move over Groupon, there’s a new startup in town.
Our Theme Song: ABC by Michael Jackson
Our Superhero: Justin Bieber. We’ll let you decide: villain or superhero?

Farmeron
Farmeron helps farmers across the world to manage their production data online and to do automatized farm performance analysis using exciting statistics.

Founders: Matija Kopic, Main Cowboy in the Saddle
Where We’re From: Osijek, Croatia, the most beautiful mediterranean country of them all!
Fun Fact: Farmeron was born in Croatia, from where it quickly spread out to London, then moved to the Valley. We’ve met quite a number of farmers along the way, some of them coming from cool places like New Zealand, Brazil, India, Spain and Russia.
Our Theme Song: Country Roads by Hermes House Bands
Our Superhero: Megatron from Transformers

Fileboard
Fileboard is a service accessed from the iPad that helps manage files and attachments across email, Dropbox, Evernote, and other cloud repositories.

Founders: Khuram Hussain, Waseem Sadiq,  Dinesh Duggal
Where We’re From: Netherlands, a place where we say why drink & drive when you can smoke and fly!
Fun Fact: Our founding team is Indian and Pakistani, arch enemies in the real world!
Our Theme Song: Survivor – Burning Heart
Our Superhero: Zorro

Fitocracy
Fitocracy turns fitness into an addictive gaming experience where you level up in real life.

Founders: Brian Wang and Richard Talens
Where We’re From: New York, NY
Fun Fact: Most people call Richard “Dick.” The founding team is “Dick and Wang.”
Our Theme Song: Europe – The Final Countdown (you knew that was coming)
Our Superhero: Gustavo Fring from Breaking Bad. Those familiar with the show need no explanation.

Forrst
Forrst is where developers and designers improve their craft and companies come to hire them

Founders: Kyle Bragger (@kylebragger)
Where We’re From: Brooklyn, NY
Fun Fact: No beards were harmed during the making of this product.
Our Theme Song: Weather Girls – It’s Raining Men
Our Superhero: Patrick Stewart as Patrick Stewart in the hit show “Extras”

Gizmo
Gizmo is a cloud-based multichannel marketing platform for mobile, tablet, social, and web.

Founders: William Kasel (@wkasel) and Laura Castaneda (@Laura_Castaneda)
Where We’re From: Carbondale, Southern Illinois and Windsor, CA (“Wine Country”).
Fun Fact: Gizmo grew out of our last company which designed and developed the mobile & social strategies behind brands such as Kodak, Intuit, and Paramount Pictures.
Our Theme Song: “Everybody wants to rule the world”
Our Superhero: According to www.superheroquiz.com, we’re (collectively) the Green Lantern.

GoVoluntr
GoVoluntr is a social platform that brings together volunteers, nonprofits, and businesses to solve today’s social problems.

Founders: Young Han and Kevin Zittle
Where We’re From: Silicon Valley – The only place you’ll find pirates on land. (Arrrr)
Fun Fact: GoVoluntr was started late at night over a conversation about an iPod Nano watchband. . .
Our Theme Song: Journey – Don’t Stop Believing
Our Superhero: The CareBears! (Young as Polite Panda , Kevin as Champ Care Bear, MJ as Grumpy Bear, and the rest of the ‘Do Your Best Bear’ team!)

Hapyrus
Hapyrus offers the easiest way of leveraging Hadoop to make your system highly scalable.

Where We’re From: Tokyo, Japan
Fun Fact: Notice that our name comes from “Papyrus”? (ancient Egyptian paper)
Our Theme Song: Coldplay – Lovers In Japan
Our Superhero: Doug Cutting – We wouldn’t be here if he didn’t exist.

HighScore House
HighScore House turns a child’s routine into a game, making the lives of families easier and more positive than ever before.

Founders: Kyle Seaman (@kyleseaman) & Theo Ephraim (@theozero)
Where We’re From: Montreal, Canada – An awesome bilingual city on an island in Quebec. We live in igloos.
Fun Fact: Moms LOVE us. Seriously. One of our moms calls our developer “Mr. Quick” for fixing bugs so fast.
Our Theme Song: Obviously we have our own custom theme song – listen here:http://bit.ly/hshdemo
Our Superhero: Buzz Lightyear

Intercom
Intercom lets web businesses build powerful, personal relationships with their users, turning them into loyal customers.

Founders: Eoghan McCabe (CEO / visual design), Des Traynor (COO / UX design), Ciaran Lee (CTO / Ruby dev), David Barrett (front-end and Ruby dev)
Where We’re From: From Dublin, Ireland, recently voted “BBB+/A-2” by Standard & Poor’s. We like beer occasionally.
Fun Fact: Intercom will likely be the first 500 Startups product to literally get its users laid. With their customers. Jokes aside, people love using the product to connect with their customers: “Intercom has changed the way we talk to our users.”
Our Theme Song: Let’s Get It On by Marvin Gaye
Our Superhero: Dave McClure?

LookAcross
LookAcross helps you to have more conversation by improving your odd of connecting with people.

Founders: Meetul Shah and Jeff Nordlund
Where We’re From: We are from sunny Seattle, WA and warm Minneapolis, MN
Fun Fact: Our team mix covers Bengali, Persian, Indian, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian and French
Our Theme Song: Eminem – Lose Yourself
Our Superhero: Gandhi

LoveWithFood
LoveWithFood is the easiest way to find culinary deals & samples, curated by a community of foodies for foodies. For every deal, we donate a meal.

Founder: Aihui Ong (@aihui / @lovewithfood)
Where We’re From: Grew up in food mecca Singapore and now a California girl living in the ultimate tech mecca – Silicon Valley
Fun Fact: Engineers can cook too! Our BACON macaroons won the Hormel BACON Showdown challenge! (see recipe here > http://lovewithfood.com/r/jmz1  )
Our Theme Song: ”Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast
Our Superhero: Kung Fu Panda – always pursuit your passion with a full tummy

MelonCard
MelonCard removed your personal information from companies selling it.

Founders: Robert Leshner & Geoff Hayes
Where We’re From: Built in Chicago
Fun Fact:. Geoff returned from the jungles of Indonesia to build MelonCard. Robert might be an idiot savant.
Our Theme Song: The Kingsmen, Louie Louie
Our Superhero: Arch-nemesis: Rapleaf

MeMeTales
MeMeTales is a mobile game like reading platform for kids. Fun like Angry Birds without the guilt.

Founders: Maya Bisineer & Pree Kolari
Where We’re From: MeMeTales was born in Seattle. Now firmly settled in the Silicon Valley. The founders? They are mostly wanderers.
Fun Fact: Company name comes from meme, but we changed the way we said it when we realized kids love to say Me-Me-Tales.
Our Theme Song: The Alphabet!
Our Superhero: Super Why

MoPix
MoPix is going to define what the movie experience can be on tablet devices and make distribution accessible to anyone with film or video content.

Founders: Ryan Stoner & Drew McAulifffe
Where We’re From: Los Angeles, City of Angels, City of Dreams
Fun Fact: Ryan left the entertainment industry to build a new technology. Drew left Silicon Valley to become an actor. They met half way to solve a problem.
Our Theme Song: My Time to Shine
Our Superhero:  Solomon Grundy

OneSchool
OneSchool is a free mobile app that connects students to the people, places, and things around them.

Founders: David Adewumi, Zach Johnston, Pindi Albert.
Where We’re From: We are from Penn State. This summer we made the 48 hour journey from Happy Valley to Silicon Valley.
Fun Fact: We dropped out of college but ended up being more engaged in education than the average college student.
Our Theme Song: Can’t Touch This- MC Hammer…because he touched us.
Our Superhero: Justice League- we’re liberating data in higher education so it can benefit universities and be used for the greater public good.

PayByGroup
Never front money for group purchases again. We coordinate your friends’ payments to the merchant so you can plan activities hassle-free.

Founders: Camilo Acosta, Frank Langston, Dan Oblinger, and Azat Mardanov.
Where We’re From: Washington, DC, Capital of the Free World!
Fun Fact: Camilo & Frank met as freshmen at Princeton and are on their second startup.
Our Theme Song: Run This Town (Jay Z and Rihanna)
Our Superhero: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Redeemr
Redeemr helps businesses and celebrities get un-ignored by their social media fans.

Founders: Tim Chae, Murry Ivanoff, Mike Maghsoudi, Kevin Liang
Where We’re From: Where the sun don’t shine: Boston.
Fun Fact: We took a leave of absence from Babson College and drove out to SF from Boston in Tim’s small 5-door Mazda in hopes to get into 500Startups and live our tech entrepreneurial dreams.  46 hours, 2 dozen packs of 5 hour energy drinks later, we completed the 3,000 mile journey and moved into our new home in SF.
Our Theme Song: Rick Ross “Every Day I’m Hustling”
Our Superhero: The Joker – Why so serious?

Rota Dos Concursos
The best test prep to get in to the government positions.

Founders: Helio Guilherme, Henrique Guimaraes e Wagner Donizeth (@rconcursos)
Where We’re From: Brasilia, Brazil – Capital of Brazil – city with the best quality of life.
Fun Fact: We took a airplane from Miami to San Francisco and it didn’t fly. After that, we took another airplane and it turned into an emergency landing and finally got the third airplane. At the end we won 10,000 miles as a gift!!! The first Brazilians in 500 Startups.
Our Theme Song: Aquarela do Brazil
Our Superhero: Rocky Balboa. Strong and persistent

Spinnakr
Website targeting triples your conversions, but you’re probably not using it because it’s too complicated. Spinnakr makes it possible.

Founders: Adam Bonnifield and Michael Mayernick
Where We’re From: Proudly Made in Washington DC 😉
Fun Fact: Co-founders were fierce rivals in college debate – after neither seemed able to destroy the other. It only made sense to join forces and build something cool.
Our Theme Song: I Like To Move It, Move It – King Julian (Madagascar)
Our Superhero: Batman – no superpowers necessary, just some creative tools in the right hands can kick ass.

Switchcam
Switchcam recreates the concert experience by combining and syncing fan-recorded videos.

Founders: Chris Hartley and Brett Welch
Where We’re From: Sydney, Australia, home of the world famous Biannual Kangaroo-drawn Chariot Race. And Dropbears.
Fun Fact: Switchcam was called Veokami only 4 days ago.
Our Theme Song: Cinema by Benny Benassi (Skrillex Remix)
Our Superhero: Link from the Legend of Zelda. He’s good at pretty much everything, especially kicking ass.

Talkdesk
Talkdesk lets your company have a contact center in the browser. It provides information about the caller by integrating with services such as Salesforce and Zendesk.

Founders: Tiago Paiva and Cristina Fonseca
Where We’re From: Lisbon, Portugal, one of the oldest cities in the world
Fun Fact: Talkdesk was born after 320 hours of coding, 50 hours of lost sleep and 1/2 bottle of Red Bull
Our Theme Song: The Proclaimers – 500 miles
Our Superhero: Yoda – Small and fragile but amazingly powerful!

Tiny Review
Tiny Review is “Instagram for Yelp reviews”, or a fast and fun way to say what you think about a place.

Founders: Melissa Miranda and Dick Brouwer
Where We’re From: Peru and Holland via Washington DC and Palo Alto.
Fun Fact: Get a “Bowl of pho as big as your head” at Bewesnick Pho and Crepes
Our Theme Song: Johnny Cash – I’ve Been Everywhere  
Our Superhero: Mini Me from Austin Powers

WeddingLovely
WeddingLovely is building tools and directories to promote amazing small and independent wedding vendors.

Founder: Tracy Osborn
Where We’re From: San Jose, CA (Tracy is a California native, which seems to be a rarity now.)
Fun Fact: Tracy is a designer and learned Django programming in order to build and launch the first product, WeddingInviteLove.com, in 6 weeks.
Our Theme Song: Entire Girl Talk “Feed the Animals” album
Our Superhero: Westley, Princess Bride (incidentally, also the name of Tracy’s cat)

If you thought that was the end, think again. We leave you with one more Halloween treat – “Michael Jackson” does a solo performance.