Planet Jeffro

Image via CrunchBase

I was able to pop by GA and check out the demos for Startup Weekend #nycsw .  It was interesting to hear the pitches.  The format was 5 minutes to pitch + 2 minutes for questions from judges. About 21 companies pitched, so it was a little tedious, but interesting.

(I wasn’t a participant, just a spectator.)

There should be:

(a) a primer or some sort for all participants so they have a solid lay of the land of startups before embarking on stuff that’s been done already and

(b) all the *stuff* that comes out of this should be documented and open sourced (to some extent) so others can easily pull the research and customer development that went into these pitches.

It’s a shame it mostly ends when the event ends. A lot of that knowledge and market research should be retained for the entire community. (Hey, maybe that’s a startup idea?)

I found the event particularly interesting because I’ve personally developed products that some of the ideas basically were pitching.  So it was cool to hear their research and thinking around them.  Here’s a brief review of the stuff I heard:

Ideas near and dear to me:

TaxiKnow.me

TaxiKnow.me is cool way to save money on cabs and connect with friends. Use TaxiKnow.me to find nearby friends who are traveling in the same direction and are also looking for a cab.

I am the co-founder of FareShare, an app for sharing cabs that started in NYC (we launched at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010) but has migrated to London where we have a license deal with a cab company that will be launching it in January to scale for the Olympics. I’ve spent a lot of time on this problem and know everyone in this space.  It’s not an easy place to play.  TKM’s advantage is that you ride with friends, but all that does is cut down the number of people to ride with… something you can’t afford to do when you want network effects.  Also, there’s no way to build this and charge people a monthly fee that they propose.  You’re limited to ads and local deals via the app to make money until it becomes indispensable.  It’s too broad a problem so the solution needs to start out hyper-targeted in time (Friday nights only?) and space (only works at NYU’s campus, or at Tech Meetups) to maximize the shares. I’d love to see this idea actually gain traction, just haven’t seen it anywhere. Literally, in the world, I can’t find a place that has had luck with this idea. That’s why I’m getting emails regularly from folks in Japan, Italy, France, UK, various US cities, and elsewhere asking about bringing Fareshare to their city.  It’s crazy.

Urban Safari

Have fun at next networking event, use Urban Safari to target who you meet and break the ice in a fun and engaging way.

I built Cnvrge, an SMS based service to introduce people quickly at meetups and networking events. I’ve run 5 events and I can tell you few people want to download an app or play a game. They just want to meet people.  Cnvrge is about the least invasive solution - it is literally a text message that tells you who to meet and where in the room to meet them.  That’s it.  I’ve talked to CupidsLab, Matt at MeepMe, and have seen tons of these types of services.  They basically have all hit road blocks. My sense is a game just adds complexity to what should be very simple - you want to meet people but you’re not great at working a room.  It should tell you who to meet and that’s it.  No points or badges or clues or pictures. I just want to maximize who I meet.  Most people don’t have a problem with meeting “the wrong” people at a small(ish) meetup event which attracts a generally homogeneous crowd - I’m happy meeting anyone at a tech meetup.  I’m all about building community and getting to know everyone since you never know where a given introduction might lead.  I’m not a big fan of “only meet the right person” mentality - it’s limiting and probably inaccurate, but also undermines the point of a meetup which should be attracting like-minded people to begin with.

PitchRack

A platform for pitching ideas and getting feedback. Choose a problem. Pitch a solution in a one-minute video. Get crowd-sourced feedback. See which pitches get the most support and use the feedback to improve upon the ideas.

This was Noah’s pitch (he won the last hackathon at GA a few weeks ago with Buildingly.com).  I dig it, but it’s just a bit too oriented towards hackathons so the market is tiny.  I know they’re thinking bigger than that, but the pitch seemed too narrow and targeted to these kinds of events.  I dig this and would love to see it generalized for regular events so I could meet people doing stuff I find interesting.

In fact, the first iteration of Cnvrge was basically a ‘hot or not’ for pitch ideas prior to coming to a networking event.  So participants would post their pitches (anything, like “I’m an investor looking for healthcare startups” or “I’m working on a travel site and looking for a designer”) and then people would vote on them (prior to the actual event).  The votes would be tallied and the “right” people would be introduced to each other - the intro being something like “Bill, meet Jon. You liked his pitch about ‘travel site, looking for developer’” and voila, you now have a direct conversation topic and can spend the next 5 minutes really focused on that.

Waag.it

We’re a cooky gang of designers, marketers and developers that are trying to solve the problem of ‘who’s going to watch my dog this weekend?!’

By creating a trustworthy and fun online community of dog lovers, we’re pushing for people to discover their local pets and form connections that go beyond casual meetings at the dog park. We’re all about dogs and we’re all about people loving dogs.

When I heard this on Friday night I came home and told Maddy (my wife, who also runs the NYC Greyhound Meetup group).  We thought the idea would be tough since most dog *owners* don’t have this problem.  When we got our greyhound we quickly met a bunch of dog owners. It’s easy when you go to the same spot every morning and 100 other dogs are hanging out there.

Next, when you walk your dog a bunch you quickly meet other dog walkers just because you know the dogs and that “hm, this person isn’t the owner…”.  So we have a rolodex of reliable dog walkers if we need them.

Finally, we have a network of greyhound owners we know well - we like their dogs, we like them.  We call on them when we go on vacation.  They call on us when they need someone to watch their dogs. Plus they live in the neighborhood so it’s easy.  A meetup group solves nearly all other problems as you can quickly network with owners of your own dog breed. Most people think their dog breed is the best in the world, so you bond quickly over that.  Greyhound owners are fanatical.  We would never look after a random person’s dog: we’re particular about which breeds we want to let in our apartment, does the dog get along with our dog, is it an active dog, does he bark, etc.

My sense is most dog owners already have a pretty good network of people they would trust to look after their dog and whose dog they’d look after.  I would definitely not want to give my dog to someone who doesn’t own a dog. They have no experience, so that’s an all around bad idea.  All that said, I dig Audrey’s enthusiasm and think there are probably dog owners/dog lovers out there that a Waag.it would help, it’s just probably not relevant for us, at least in the current iteration.

Full List (and my comments) below or linked here:

OxyMusic

Neat music booking service for venues and artists.  These guys seemed to really know the market.

NoteHub

Cool collaborative note-taking service

Instafame

Still unclear why people would go to their site and not just use instagram. Maybe I missed the point.

AskWhoWhat - AskWhoWhat solves two major problems with market research.

For businesses, AskWhoWhat utilizes technology to eliminate the middle men. We make it easy for everyone and anyone to obtain hyper-focused answers from their target market without consultants or the extra legwork.

For users, we made sure surveys get them cold hard cash and products they can pickup right away from local businesses No more annoying points systems or sketchy survey sites with the “”chance”” to win an item.

Not sure how this is much different than just going to mechanical turk and having random (or targeted) people answer questions.  There is also a startup (can’t remember the name) that presented at NY Tech meetup last year that did exactly this.

Schware - community resource sharing

I like that these guys know a ton about owning boats and horses.  I don’t think they got enough credit for knowing their market so well.

How I Bling (formerly If I Win)

Our website allows users to experience the thrill of divvying up their (virtual) lottery winnings while checking the winning lottery numbers. They can spend their hypothetical jackpot on a host of items, ranging from consumer electronics to luxury cars (reflecting real world pricing), by filling a virtual basket.

Cool, but I’m doubtful of the usefulness of the data from this.  The site isn’t totally open ended on what you can buy virtually. Instead it just gives you specific things to buy, like a house or a startup or diamonds.  If it instead hooked into real markets like Amazon, Newegg, Crunchbase, etc etc where you could really go and buy cool stuff you want, then maybe it would yield interesting data.  But giving me an option to date a celebrity and saying that’s $60k … well that’s not something I’d spend a dime on even if I did win.  But they some great research on who the lotto market consists of.

amusemi

Amusemi is the best way to meet new people.

Look through profiles, choose people you’d like to meet, say which days you’re available. Amusemi will set up a group dinner where you get to meet at least one of the people you chose.

Alex was the only solo act, so it was a tough presentation to pull off.  I like the concept, but it’s treading very close to grubwithus and those types of sites.

Closed Capp

Closed captions for your everyday conversations!

Don’t know sign language? Need to get your message across clearly? Speak into your phone and the words are projected large on the screen. Talk with anyone face to face using Closed Closed Capp.

Great presentation, great energy.  I liked that they actually hacked a funcitonal prototype and showed it off.

Eventiply

Post. Bid. Celebrate! Reinventing the world of event planning

Nice interface.  Seemed well thought out.  My friend is building a site called mypotluckapp.com. Alex (one of the organizers) is building bridesview.com for wedding planning.  And that’s just the apps I know of being built by friends… this is crowded.  But if they can take the hassle out of planning a big event (like a hackathon?) then that’d be pretty awesome.

CK Tech

Building a prototype that enables us control home appliances remotely to facilitate lifestyle change to a more efficient way of life, and also to support going green by saving energy

Cool - there was a demo of something like this at NY Tech Meetup last month. Maybe it was the same thing?

HealthShare

An application to track and share your daily health; food logs, exercise, and glucose levels with your personal physician.

Will pregnant women use this?

Poll US

Poll US is a platform to rapidly and inexpensively generate polling data for political candidates. We are constantly acquiring data through polls on our platform, so our information is as recent as possible.

Not totally sure what the target is here.  They started by discussing the cost of election polling but ended up showing an app designed for civic engagement.  Am I missing something?  

Kastr

liveKASTr brings you the ability to broadcast LIVE video from your mobile device and have thousands of viewers around the world NOT ONLY watch your liveKAST, but actually interact with you live — providing feedback via Tweets and posts, and even telling you which way to turn and what to film next.

Cool tech.

Outovate

Outovate is an innovation crowdsourcing platform for consumer products. The idea is to do for consumer product innovation what Twitter did for news: give the power to the people. Outovate will connect great product ideas with companies to bring them to market, while helping those companies innovate and validate like lean startups.

I like that they actually talked directly to people at large companies to see if there was something there.

Motive List

Most people’s current todo list program has them leaving behind a trail of unfinished todos and long-forgotten lists. Motive List will change all of that – it’s a todo list which takes productivity to the next level by connects them to real-life rewards and punishments.

This is a fun idea that’s been done several times before. I’ve read about something like it on Techcrunch and definitely saw a demo at the NY Tech Meetup.  Charge me when I don’t complete a task.  My friend Zak could use it!

Park.IT

Park.IT is a crowdsourced, mobile based real-time app that guides its users to the city’s best parking spots. Parking spots that are available include street parking, garage parking and individually offered parking by community members. The application connects strangers to share unused and underused parking spaces throughout the city and bring people together transact.

This has been attempted so many times.  Parking panda, Roadify, and parkingauction.com just to name a few (the latter two I know first hand).  My main question, as a car-owner in NYC, is how do you ‘reserve’ a space?  No one owns the spot so it *will* be taken immediately by someone if it’s in demand.  This would make sense if it were like an AirBnb for my driveway or personal spot that I own (this is what Parking Panda does).  Also, safety is a huge concern: I definitely don’t want people poking around on their phone while driving around looking for a spot.  Personally, I think cars and street parking should be largely eliminated from NYC entirely.  I’m the first to say it’s way way too cheap for me and my wife to own a car in the city. We need more sidewalk area, congestion pricing and *really* expensive parking spaces. Like, $5 for 10 minutes.  Make it hurt to drive in the city, most of it is totally unnecessary. Then use those revenues to make the MTA not suck completely.

Postd

Postd is a platform for connecting people with their favorite influencers in physical, printed form.

Matt, you’re a funny guy!  I guess I’d like to receive a postcard from Charlie Sheen, totally randomly, and not even know who sent it.  No room for a personal message? Really?

Reading Buddy

Improve reading comprehension of students K-8 through an e-reader tool

This should have gotten a lot more praise. I’m a fan of edu-tech apps… but when they are actually coming from the teacher/administrator of a school!?  She is her own customer and she knows the market better than anyone.