House introduces bipartisan bill on AI in banking and housing
The bill would require a report on how these industries use AI to valuate homes and underwrite loans
Read more...The weather report is great. In fact, it's probably the sunniest Vator Splash we've ever experienced. That's probably the best way to inaugurate the very first Splash event in Los Angeles, happening just three months after the last Splash in San Francisco and less than half a year after the first Splash in New York.
Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, the media and everyone else with a hand in tech has come out to southern California to see the following 10 startups present on stage. Check them out:
Billgastro is a Point-of-Sale (PoS) system enabling restaurants to have a "complete gastronomy enterprise solution." With one click you can contact the founders at vator.co/billgastro.
Emerge provides affordable loans and financial counseling to underbanked workers so that they can improve their financial stability. With one click you can contact the founders at vator.co/emerge.
Mind Body Partnerships is a profitable cloud-based provider of lead generation, conversion, retention, and loyalty tools for health, beauty and wellness practicioners. With one click you can contact the founders at vator.co/mbpartnerships.
Social Game Universe in 2010 launched IGAPI, a social gamification platform to drive traffic, revenue and engagement for apps and brands. With one click you can contact the founders at vator.co/igapi.
SignNow provides an easy way to sign or notarize documents online. With one click you can contact the founders at: vator.co/signnow.
SmartPay offers a downloadable app that lets you pay for things by scanning a merchant's barcode instead of using physical cash, check or credit cards. With one click you can contact the founders at vator.co/smartpay.
SnapShop lets shoppers "virtually preview" furniture and other products using their mobile devices. Using the phone's camera, for example, you can see how furniture looks in your living room. With one click you can contact the founders at vator.co/snapshop.
Splore is offering a new kind of social network (don't say Facebook killer!) that connects users based on similar interests. With one click you can contact the founders at vator.co/splore.
TekTrak is a mobile security company that helps users find lost devices or sensitive data stored on the device. With one click you can contact the founders at vator.co/tektrak.
Wipit is working on enabling the cash-preferred customer make mobile payments. With one click you can contact the founders at vator.co/wipit.
The bill would require a report on how these industries use AI to valuate homes and underwrite loans
Read more...The artists wrote an open letter accusing OpenAI of misleading and using them
Read more...The role will not be filled by Elon Musk, though he will be involved in who is chosen
Read more...Startup/Business
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SnapShop Inc. provides a new experiential mobile shopping platform designed to give consumers comfort and confidence in their “big-ticket item” purchasing decisions.
Our first product, SnapShop Showroom, is an augmented reality mobile app that helps consumers preview home decor in their own living rooms using their phone camera. We work with top retail customers including Pier 1 Imports and CB2 to help consumers "try before they buy".
We use AR (augmented reality) technology to combine product marketing, social shopping, and content creation into an indispensible mobile application that consumers will use during every step of their shopping experience.
The result is an entirely new way to shop that offers significant advantages over the traditional online and retail shopping experience.
Startup/Business
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The overwhelming majority of the 31,000 major resorts/spas lack e-commerce capability in this $100 Billion Dollar Market. They are sitting on 25 million opted-in top tier clients.
They all want an e-commerce store but have no technology budget, are scared of inventory investment and have no way to pick pack & ship.
Three 5 Star resorts are in our Beta.
Shop In Spa provides free, privately branded e-commerce web stores that offer real-time, peer-to-peer transactional capabilities between resorts, spas and salons and the manufacturers that supply them. SIS systems can process sales and purchase transactions, and make automatic payment disbursements in 28 countries.
Shop In Spa retains 25% of every sale and reorder. Our resorts/spas market their branded stores to millions of their customers. Our customer acquisition cost is virtually nil.
We eliminate the costs of carrying inventory for resorts/spas and cut the distributor cost layer for our manufacturers by 90%. Our cloud-based software provides a suite of e-commerce systems, turnkey fulfillment services and customer-acquisition tools that yield long-term residual income for all our partners in this $100 billion dollar market.
SIS has forged strong ties with 20+ national and international manufacturers of premier health, beauty and wellness products by providing them with a unique, and low-cost competitive advantage by dramatically cutting their distribution costs.
Startup/Business
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Wipit is an early-stage venture in the burgeoning mobile payments industry focused on enabling the cash-preferred consumer to make mobile e-commerce transactions. In the US alone, there are over 42.2 million under-banked and un-banked households and a rapidly growing number of over 50 million prepaid mobile-phone subscribers. Mobile e-commerce revenues are projected to grow at a rapid pace to quickly rival traditional e-commerce figures. Wipit is strongly positioned to take advantage of these two disruptive global trends with a highly successful team that includes the Founder and former President of Virgin Mobile USA and former VP of Sales & Marketing of Boost Mobile USA.
Startup/Business
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BillGastro is the innovative Point-Of-Sale ordering system for your restaurant or gastronomy enterprise.
With BillGastro you don't need to buy special devices. BillGastro runs directly in the browser of your already existing PC, mobile devices like Smartphones or tablets. You can also use exiting WiFi networks. However, BillGastro does not depend on a connection to the internet, because it can also be installed locally in your restaurant.
Choose between
With BillGastro you always know how your restaurant performs. All orders can elegantly be entered directly on the table via smartphones or tablet PCs. Orders are immediately sent into the kitchen or bar. This leads to more effectiveness, speed and traceability. It remains more time for the important personal contact with your guests!
Startup/Business
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IGAPI (the Inter-Game API) is the next generation banner, allowing developers to add social interactions, transactions, and game mechanics to their game, site, or app, in place of the standard banner ad. IGAPI helps drive new users, retain existing users, and generate new revenue streams. IGAPI is easy to implement, works across multiple platforms, and provides powerful back-end data analysis
Startup/Business
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Splore takes social networking, crowd-sourcing, and knowledge sharing to a whole new level. The web revolution created an explosion of websites. And that information overload led to a greater dependence on search engines, question and answer sites, and discussion forums. Today, the focus is turning to individuals, and empowering each of us to connect with the right people and the right information, at just the right time - leveraging location services where appropriate. Splore helps people pursue the things that are most important in life - their passions, causes, hobbies...by helping to leverage the increasing wealth of data and knowledge available around the world.
After intensive user and market testing with a generic beta product release, we have just recently "pivoted" towards an initial focus on peer to peer healthcare. We are actively developing (but have not yet released) a custom instance of Splore targeting this industry.
Chronic illness affects nearly half the population of the United States. While physicians provide critical diagnosis and treatment options for their patients, these individuals and their loved ones must deal with traumatic lifestyle changes every day, often for the rest of their lives. Not only do these conditions result in 7 out of every 10 deaths in the world, and many billions of dollars in medical costs, but they also leave hundreds of millions of isolated and unhappy people in their wake.
Splore was founded by physicians and technology professionals. Its immediate goal is the development of social/mobile software solutions to empower patients to create meaningful peer-to-peer connections with other patients, healthcare providers, and an entire wellness ecosystem looking to improve the lives of those suffering from chronic disease.
Startup/Business
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What do you do when payday doesn’t come soon enough?
For 50% of American families, this is a pressing question every month. 1 in 10 Americans turned to predatory lenders last year to meet financial needs. With exorbitant interest rates and two-week repayment periods, short-term solutions lead to long-term problems, setting off a vicious cycle of debt and stress.
Jonathan Harrison founded Emerge to offer a solution to the 40 million+ who work full time, yet have no access to affordable credit. Emerge is sold as an employee benefit—providing low interest loans to solve urgent problems while helping workers build long-term financial security. Key innovations include an online next day loan platform, simplified repayment through payroll plus a savings feature to encourage long term stability. Workers also have access to online financial education, webinars and crisis counseling by phone.
Emerge is a scalable, sustainable model for migrating millions of underbanked workers to mainstream banking relationships. It saves workers’ hard earned dollars and repairs credit so they qualify for mainstream bank products and rebuild their financial future.
Startup/Business
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SmartPaySM is a mobile payment processing platform using optical code identification to facilitate merchant payments across multiple mobile operating systems, using QR Code® optical identification technology.
To put it more simply, SmartPaySM is an alternative to debit and credit cards that allows users to pay for things by simply typing in the amount they want to send, and then scanning the merchant’s QR Code®.
© 2011 SmartPay, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
QR Code® is a registered trademark of Denso Wave, Inc. of Japan.
Startup/Business
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Most people still print, sign, and scan/fax documents to sign them. SignNow is the easiest way to sign documetns anywhere you go. SignNow is easy and free. Download the apps or try it at https://signnow.com.
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
TekTrak is the team behind innovative mobile security software that protects your phone and the valuable data stored within. By harnessing the powerful Assisted GPS hardware integrated in smartphones, TekTrak is insuring no one ever loses their phone and privacy again. What started out as frustrating experience of losing a phone with pictures and data, has now become a mobile tracking and security business. Our security application allows users to remotely locate their phone, lock it, send a message, set off an audible alarm, and remotely wipe the data from the device.
TekTrak is currently available on iOS and on Samsung Android-based devices, and will be available for other major platrofms within the next year.