An essay by John Melonakos
Startup Riot 2013 Recap
Startup Riot today was excellent. I took notes on the companies that presented. Very impressive all round.
1st Hour of Pitches
- Get credit for what you read
- Points system for reading about certain topics
- Get pushed content where you are weak
- Once you become an expert, you’re content will be pushed to others
- How to make money? Will sell to publishers
- How to get users? We will hustle
- Klout and Quora are semi-competitors
- 10+ million people with 1099 income
- Take picture of receipt from phone and do away with your box or file of receipts
- Pay less for tax prep
- Almost in beta (will be a 60-90 day beta)
- $20B/yr in crop loss
- $4.5B/yr on insecticide
- Labor intensive process to catch bugs in sticky traps to know how much insecticide to spray
- Replace sticky traps with smart traps that automatically report back to farms how many insects exist on the farm
- System will pay for itself in 1-year
- Sold 30 units in the last 60-days
- Tries to bridge communications for students, faculty, and administrators
- University licensing and backing (charges a startup cost to implement at standard solution + a monthly retainer fee)
- Charge local and national vendors to push events to the network
- Mobile app to replace jukeboxes
- Send a selection of 6 million songs to the jukebox from your phone
- Requires bars to be in compliance with music sharing law
- Getting ready to do a beta
- Student debt is $1 Trillion; average debt is $27,000
- Online market for selling handmade items
- Etsy is too saturated to get their items noticed; too hard for students to compete
- Differentiator is the focus on students as sellers, instead of professionals
- Within 1st year, targeting 20 campuses, 4,000 student sellers, $40,000 in revenue, $3 million in transactions (all benefiting students)
- Alumni will be a key part of the buyer market
- Helps make smart hiring and managing decisions
- Predicts behavior and motivation in the workplace
- Maximize profit through reduced turnover of employees
- 2 paying customers on their first version
- Quick and easy to find creative agency
- Replaces Google searchers for helping companies find agencies
- Charge agencies for listing beyond 1 service (most agencies do more than 1 service)
- Been collecting ratings since November
- Interactive software for science education
- US is 27th in science
- Need to help students learn skills rather than tidbits of information
- Real-time assessment of student learning
- Price point is $3/student/year
- Replaces bad software that costs $10,000/year
- Startup by Michael Mealling (also a rocket building entrepreneur)
- You are greater than the sum of your social graph
- Helps make recommendation engines better
- Pilots with Pretty in my Pocket, Proteus Technologies
- Looking for other B2C companies that need an AI analytics partner
- Funded company (but curiously looking at other investment offers)
2nd Hour of Pitches
- 80% of all travel is booked by women
- Product reduces the stress of planning and booking travel
- Builds a taste graph from social sites
- Content comes from Expedia, TravelAdvisor, and other travel bloggers
- The Github of science
- Publish papers, track authorship, and compare to other similar researchers
- Science is not a sexy market (I beg to differ here!)
- Market size is $6 billion in US and $20 billion worldwide
Guardian Watch
- 911 systems are broken
- Provides better data (mobile-based) feeds to 911 responders
- Helps save lives
- Provides secure transfer and storage of medical image data
- Cloud based storage
- The social network for social people
- Know who is going where and when
- Coordinates schedules and helps find exciting opportunities
- Uses Foursquare and Facebook APIs
- Will be available next month on iOS (and Android later this year)
- Advertising revenue model
- 55% rate of unemployed graduates
- Online recruiting is a $5 billion market and growing to $10 billion by the end of 2016
- Free for students and k-12
- Paid subscriptions for employers and universities
- Makes digital coupons easy
- Helps local businesses connect with shoppers through coupons
- Coming out of UGA in Athens
- Mobile app
- A mobile app to help brokers and their clients share information better
- Store floor plans and flyers, rate commercial properties, take pictures, take notes, and evaluate building options side by side
- Replaces paper-based tests with tests on tablets, smart phones and laptops
- Makes grading and administrative tasks much easier
- Gives teachers their time back
- Generates a unique score that tells you your financial health
- 35 million US households use personal financial management software
- Revenue model is to have banks give this to their customers as a value add
3rd Hour of Pitches
- Pays customers to give feedback to merchants
- Requires the management of special promo codes and extra receipts
- A wholeseller for vacation rental properties to try to improve returns for property owners
- Founded by a guy that gave up a Harvard Law + McKinsey career path, guysy!
- An online community that uses game mechanics to promote healthy lifestyles by connecting wellness programs with event directors in growing participants and sponsor opportunities
- A cloud scalability platform designed to test your application under real traffic conditions, to validate cloud deployments and enable customers to scale
- Sophisticated web load generation, load testing, and application performance analytics enable customers to uncover performance issues before they impact their business
- A SaaS platform that serves as your 1-stop shop to create and monetize custom offers quickly and easily, without a developer
- match.com for gaming
- Flairtab provides a platform that helps doctors extend patient interaction through specialized programming, direct messaging, and content delivery from the cloud to the waiting room
- In combination with internet access which is virtually ubiquitous in all medical offices, there is no reason why patients can’t be entertained, informed, and educated while they wait
Unfortunately, I missed Bookup, EmZen, and Pavo Collection, and quick searches came up empty for their web presence.
It was another great event. Surprising how many university oriented, student founded, and education-related startups represented. Also a fair amount of UGA presence at the show that is typically dominated by Georgia Tech stuff.
Only idea for improvement is to get a new hashtag, for the reason first vocalized by Urvaksh who was not there, but followed via twitter first vocalized by Stephen Fleming, who proves being first here 🙂
What did you like best about Startup Riot? Who were your favorite presenters?
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
Paola Moretto
Thanks for your recap! Too bad you missed CloudyDays! Check us out http://www.cloudy-days.com, @thecloudydays
melonakos
In reply to an earlier comment
Thanks for the link (couldn’t find the site before due to all the weather-related stuff that came up). I’ve added information about you guys in the post now.
Looks like a great product and something that is greatly needed out there. If I can be helpful to you guys, let me know. We’ve been in the high-performance computing business for 6 years now. Different customers, but similar approach in improving people’s performance.
Good luck!