5 startups to watch from DreamIt Ventures NYC
demo day 2012
By Ki Mae Heussner
Aug. 8, 2012, 3:57pm PT
After three intensive months of refining concepts, building out
business models and testing new products, fifteen startup founders
took the stage Wednesday to pitch their hearts out at startup
accelerator DreamIt Ventures’ NYC 2012 demo day.
The companies, which were selected from a pool of 500 startups and
make up the program’s second New York class, ran the gamut from
an online marketplace for connecting artists and venues to a
location-aware gaming studio to subscription services for beauty and
romance. All presented to the crowd hoping to raise seed, if not
Series A, rounds of funding.
DreamIt Ventures, which launched in Philadelphia and will be adding
Austin, Tex. to its program in 2013, has graduated six classes in total.
As of today, the accelerator has helped launch 80 startups, including
social media ad buying startup Adaptly, online tickets marketplace
SeatGeek and teaching app ShowMe (previously Easel).
The startups that debuted today originated from all over the world,
including several from Israel and others from Stockholm and Costa
Rica. Here are a few that I’ll be watching.
IndieWalls founder and CEO Gavriel Wolf on
stage at Dreamit Ventures NYC demo day.
IndieWalls
Recognizing that hotels, cafes and other venues inevitably need art
to decorate their walls, and artists are always looking for space to
show off their work, IndieWalls wants to be the marketplace that
beings both parties together. It charges venues a monthly
subscription fee between $200 and $1,000, which allows them to
choose from a selection of curated work from local artists.
The service allows local businesses to change up their decor and stay
current without spending a premium to outright buy new art. For the
artists, it provides a mechanism for showcasing their artwork in
rotating exhibits and, potentially, making new sales. All of the art is
displayed with QR codes and links so that passersby can purchase
the items on the spot (IndieWalls takes a 25 percent commission). So
far, the marketplace includes more than 2,000 pieces of artwork from
100 artists and is hosting 28 current exhibitions.
Tripl
One of the more buzzed about startups in the current class, Tripl
launched last month with a website showcasing friends’ travel stories
based on their Facebook and Foursquare activity. Several startups,
including Wander (which graduated from TechStars NYC in June) want
to give people a dedicated, travel-centric social platform. But Tripl’s
focus on storytelling won me over.
As my colleague Ryan Kim noted in a piece about the startup, Tripl
aggregates pictures, comments and check-ins into a story that is
supplemented with Wikipedia information, stock photos and pricing
data on flights. It not only gives users an interesting day to day
window into their friends’ journeys, it can also serve as a good
resource for people when they’re planning trips. The startup has
already raised a $700,000 seed round and launched an iOS app
yesterday.
Winston
To be honest, I was a little skeptical about this one when I heard that
it involved a speech-enabled personal assistant. I was intrigued when
Apple launched its own voice-activated assistant and then quickly
tired of playing the ‘Let’s ask Siri’ game. But my interest piqued all
over again when I saw the Winston demo (and I don’t think it’s just
because I’m a sucker for British accents).
The app, which is set to launch this fall, connects to Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks, as well as social news
apps, and gives users an audio update on the latest activities across
those platforms. For people who live in a text-centric world, the app
could be a nice alternative for keeping up with friends’ updates, top
headlines, the weather and shopping deals in more of a “lean back”
way. As people get ready for work in the morning or as they’re
preparing dinner, they could listen to the updates as they might listen
to the radio, for example. The team has just been working on the app
for four months, so I expect it to have a few kinks to iron out. But I
appreciate the innovation around the new interface and am curious to
see where it goes.
KidNimble
KidNimble estimates that, every year, parents spend upwards of $25
billion on summer camp and about $8 billion on after school
activities. And, said CEO and founder Darius Goore, they expect their
kids to come home from camp “fluent in Mandarin and with a curve
ball.” But despite the significant amount of money and time they’re
willing to invest in their kids’ extracurriculars, parents don’t have the
most sophisticated tools for researching activities or communicating
with other parents about those activities.
Initially launched as CampGurus, KidNimble gives parents a platform
for searching for activities and reviews, as well as way to
communicate and collaborate with parents who might not be their
friends, but are the parents of their kids’ friends. Through the site,
parents can find out more about local camps, get opinions on after
school programs or figure out the best day for their kids’ soccer
practice to take place.
Sabor Studio
Sabor Studio’s first game Pota-Toss was built by two guys in four
months with just $14,000, which they raised from Kickstarter. But it
helped the Costa Rica-based company get attention from press all
over the world. The game, which is like Angry Birds but features
flying potatoes, reflects the developers’ focus on making location-
aware games. As users play the games, the scenery is dictated by
the user’s location. A player in New York, for example, would see the
Empire State building in their game; a Parisian would see the Eiffel
Tower. The company said it currently has 65 locations in its game
and plans to drill down to venues (like Starbucks locations and other
stores) in the future. Mobile gaming is certainly a crowded field but
given the interest Sabor Studio was able to generate with its first
game, I’m interested to see what the developers do next, as well as
how they use the location context for advertising opportunities.
Daily Archives: August 9, 2012
Berlin, one of Europe’s self-anointed tech start-up hubs, could be about to see a lot more investment and acquisition.
GP Bullhound, one of digital media’s leading VC and M&A advisory houses, is acquiring seven-month-old Berlin financial adviser Pure Equity.
This year, GP Bullhound has advised on the sale of 192business to Experian, on We7’s sale to Tesco and a $75 million fundraising for Russian e-commerce site Avito. Pure Equity only launched in January, the operating name for corporate finance adviser and Bullhound friend Julian Riedlbauer.
Bullhound co-founder Hugh Campbell says (via release):
“We see incredible opportunities for our client base in continental Europe, and the technology buzz in Germany was tangible at our Summit in Berlin this May.”
Says Riedlbauer, who joins GP Bullhound as partner (via release):
“GP Bullhound represents the best platform for Pure Equity to provide its clients with access…
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“Cause-related marketing,” which aims to align the social issues that matter most to customers and the commercial goals of the business, has been proven to positively engage consumers. Dawn Saves Wildlife is a great example of this – the detergent-maker not only donates thousands of dollars to wildlife organizations, but has also developed an educational program about the impact of oil on wildlife and has donated thousands of bottles of Dawn to help clean animals impacted by oil pollution. The program helped Dawn make Fortune’s list of the World’s Most Admired Companies.
There are plenty of strong cause-related reasons for the deployment of smart grid technology: more efficient use of energy resources, a smaller carbon footprint, and consumer empowerment, to name a few. These are all are powerful motivators for customers to embrace the modernization of the power grid.
But efforts to improve consumer perceptions around the deployment of…
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The consumerization of IT is more than a buzz phrase: It’s a very real disruptive force affecting corporate IT and business management, employees and a company’s value chain of customers, suppliers and distributors.
Though the iPad created the consumer tablet market, GigOM Pro forecasts global tablet shipments — growing from 60 million to over 375 million in 2016 — will cross over to the point where over half will be used for business.
Business tablets may start as simple email and web browsers, but they will rapidly insert themselves into collaboration, file sharing and content creation. How can business best support these laptop replacements inside and outside of their corporate networks?
Hear the panel of experts discuss these topics:
- How fast tablets will become adopted as enterprise devices and which applications will need support
- How tablets will optimize getting work done via content and collaboration processes
- How collaboration tools focused…
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The United Kingdom, one of the laggards in Europe when it comes to superfast broadband, has finally passed the two million subscription mark or roughly 10 percent of the UK’s fixed lines, according to broadband research firm, Point Topic. Their data shows that UK superfast broadband has downstream bandwidth of over 25Mbps. [What speed you actually get at home is a whole different thing, but that’s a story for another day.]
Cable broadband along with Copper/Fiber hybrid broadband technologies are taking market share away from the plain old DSL, a trend that has gained momentum in US over the past few years. Of the total 21.3 million fixed broadband lines, there are 16.3 million that use old broadband technologies. The UK during the “first half of 2012 saw the tipping point where DSL, for the first time, started to lose subscribers overall,” Point Topic notes.
During the second…
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Facebook (s fb) will allow app makers to pay to promote their apps in the news feed in what could be one way to help solve the company’s mobile monetization problem. Facebook said Tuesday that developers will be able to target a specific audience and set a budget for their ads, which will appear as sponsored apps in a “Try These Apps” unit in a mobile user’s news feed. If a user who doesn’t already have the app clicks on the ad, they will get taken to the Apple App Store (s aapl) or Google Play store (s goog).
This is noteworthy because it’s the first time that mobile users will see ads in their feed that are not triggered by their actions or those of their friends. It opens up the news feed as an advertising space that any developer can target, whether or not they have a relationship…
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When we last caught up with GoPago, the San Francisco startup was trying to sell consumers and businesses on the benefits of its line-skipping app that let people order ahead. But that opportunity apparently wasn’t big enough. Now the company is the latest to line up against Square and is introducing its own mobile payments system called GoPago Live.
That pits Chase-backed GoPago against not just Square but a big line-up of deep-pocketed rivals such as PayPal (s ebay), VeriFone (s pay), Intuit (s intu), NCR (s ncr) and new startups like PayAnywhere, SalesVu, LevelUp and others. But GoPago believes it’s got an ace up its sleeve: it’s offering an entirely free package for retailers with no monthly charges and free hardware, including an Android tablet(s GOOG) with Verizon 4G service (s vz), a tablet stand, cash drawer, receipt printer and a credit card reader. It’s also throwing in…
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For many startups launching social or mobile apps, one of the biggest challenges is avoiding the “empty room” phenomena, where not enough users populate an app to make it worthwhile for others to join. Poshmark, the mobile clothing-swap app that came to the iPhone in December, now has the opposite problem: How do you make a site populated with thousands of items conducive to virtual window-shopping?
On Wednesday the company will announce updates to its Poshmark iPhone app and “Posh Parties,” a critical feature of the app that distinguishes it from other clothing resale apps like Threadflip, which provides a very similar service. The updates include curated lists of items picked by bloggers and easier ways of sorting and searching, in an attempt to keep Poshmark from devolving into the eBay or Etsy experience of search rather than browse.
“It’s a very scalable way to find products in…
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Near-field communications for mobile payments still hasn’t made much headway as most consumers and retailers haven’t yet transitioned to wireless payments. That doesn’t mean NFC is a dead technology however. We’ve already seen Bluetooth headphones that pair up by tapping them to an NFC-enabled smartphone. Now the world’s first NFC mobile keyboard is here.
Elecom is showing off the device, says Akihabara News, which folds up and comes with a carry case. When unfolded, an NFC-equipped phone fits in the middle of the split keys and communicates wirelessly with the keys at a frequency of 13.56MHz. There’s no Bluetooth or other wireless technology used here; NFC is used to initiate the connection and to transfer the keystroke data.
Since NFC is a short-range, low-power wireless technology, the keyboard only works when a phone is within 10 millimeters of it. Elecom says the keyboard battery should last six months and…
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Americans love driving. They also love receiving steep discounts on meals, shows and consumable goods. Someone was bound to find a way to combine the two, and that company is daily deal startup Roximity. On Wednesday it launched a new version of its deal-finder app that integrates with Ford’s(s f) connected car platform Sync.
Think of Roximity as a hyperactive version of Groupon Now(s grpn). It doesn’t just find nearby deals, it actively pushes offers to you as you near a participating business. The new app available through iTunes(s aapl) has all of the capabilities of its old service, but if you also happen to be the owner of Sync-equipped vehicle it adds an extra dimension to Roximity’s bargain-hunting service.
At any time you can query the Roximity app through Sync’s voice command interface for specific types of deals. Sync then spits out all of the offers available in…
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