Here are the 10 finalists for Vator Splash SF!

Steven Loeb · February 12, 2013 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/2d87

Don't forget to vote for your favorite startup on Wednesday night!

The day we've all been waiting for is only a day away! That's right, Vator Splash SF is finally happening tomorrow night!

We here at Vator have got 10 great startups on deck who are anxiously waiting to present to you! They were chosen through two rigourous voting rounds, including an online popular and judges' voting round, from some 100 startups. In just a over a day they will begin to take the stage to pitch their companies to some of the top tech VCs in California and win prizes worth more than $25,000, plus sit-down meetings with five top VCs.

At the event, there will be a People's Choice winner. To win, the startup has to have the most votes from fans. If you can't make the Splash event, be sure to check VatorNews Wednesday evening (pitches start around 6:15 pm and end 8:45 pm). We'll have instructions on the code you need to text for your favorite startup!

Here are the 10 startups that will be presenting tomorrow night:

Recognize.im is an API platform which enables any mobile app to recognize photos and implement image recognition technology to any mobile or web application.

Users can sell products through photo recognition and install high speed photo recognition technology in their mobile app.

Using image recognition, Recognize.im can create web and mobile applications that can analyze sent images in real time. It lets the user snap a photo of any shelf in the store to obtain various data, including percent of product share on shelf, correct display of product, and much more.

CreativeWorx is solving the global timesheet problem to increase revenue and accelerate invoicing. By making the capture of hard-to-obtain employee workflow data effortless, the CreativeWorx platform automatically generates business intelligence that  helps organizations & individuals capture more revenue, reduce costs, streamline processes, and have better visibility of operations.

Younity creates a personal cloud for all your files, built from your devices and your online services, so that all your devices work as if they were a single device. With younity, you can grab whichever device is most convenient without ever thinking about where a file is.

Younity is a data protocol that integrates into device OSes, making them multi-device aware. With younity, users can use any device they own and have access to any file as if it was stored locally on that device, regardless of available storage. With younity, devices simply become screens.

Glyder enables small businesses to create, preview and send messages to customers on 10 different platforms with no design, marketing or coding expertise required.

It is an exclusively mobile experience that removes all the content creation, design, and technology challenges that prevent small businesses from communicating with their customers online.

Glyder is already integrated with leading social networks, email and CRM platforms, including: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, the iOS Address Book for email and SMS, Apple Passbook, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Salesforce, Highrise CRM, and several more in the works (Google+, Tumblr blog, etc.).

Pokitdok is a price transparent health marketplace where consumers shop directly from providers for high value health services. Consumers can search by condition or specialty and request a price quote directly from providers.

PokitDok is the first solution to integrate all competitive solutions (consumer reviews, brokered pricing, provider listings, bookings and Physician Ratings) into one health marketplace capturing and retaining consumer attention from activation through conversion. 

Learn27  seeks to take eLearning from Isolation to Collaboration with our social eLearning platform.

Higher Ed institutons can utilize Learn27 to launch a Digital Academy that offers eLearning classes, courses & certifications for their students and / or employees, partners, vendors etc. They can charge fees and built a new revenue stream.

Instructors can upload / embed their course materials in the form of videos or documents. Or even stream their classes utilizing our API integrations with Livestream and Ustream. Students can learn from the instructor and from each other via a social learning environment with tools like message walls, activity feeds, Q&A, polls, surveys, groups, chats, networking lounge, contests, points & badges.

Learn27 digital academies can be accessed from anywhere on any device – laptop, mobile device, tablet, and at any time!

Delicious Karma  is a social shopping site that makes it fun and easy to discover, learn about, and buy exceptional artisanal and gourmet specialty foods, at great prices, while also supporting the community of artisanal food producers.

Delicious Karma customers have access to highly curated, delicious-tasting, all-natural, hard-to-find products and learn the stories of the passionate, talented artisans who make them.  Customers enjoy special “insider” promotions, product reviews and recipe ideas from our team of Taste Gurus, the ability to engage and share with friends, and a chance to earn Karma Kredits that can be used for product discounts or to support our Karma Kauses.

Super Gas Me delivers the best mobile payment service while disrupting the credit card companies by creating a new payment concept, and consequently taking away credit cards from people’s hands.

The service allows customers to save 20% by preloading the gas expense onto the car lease and use the client app to purchase gas from selected gas stations.

Supergasme is working in association with car factories to distribute its product bundled with their cars. At the moment we are closing a deal with Honda; we will have more than 1000 dealerships and around 30000 representative sales pushing our product to its customers in the US.

Delightfully is an MIT startup that adds thoughtfulness to digital gifts.  Through our web-service, gift givers can deliver gift cards, subscriptions, e-books, apps, games, and other digital gifts through interactive webpages made from their own content.  The result is a digital gift that feels like a real gift.

Delightfully focuses on the gift recipient, allowing the givers to put in their time and effort to deliver a better experience. By integrating into the merchant checkout process, they create high switching costs for merchants and a barrier to any competition.  WIth access to many merchants gifts, they will also collect data on the gifting across the internet.

The Kive Company allows parents to take, tag, and chronologically store your child's art and school work - then turn it into a hard cover book with little more than the touch of a button.

Nearly every parent in the world has faced the same problem: what to do with all that artwork kids create. It may seem like a trivial issue, but the initial, overwhelming response to Artkive would tell you otherwise. With Artkive, you'll never again feel guilty about throwing stuff away.

What does the winner get?

At the end of the night, the judges will vote for their favorite! That startup will be the Vator Splash Winner. At the same time, the audience will vote for their favorite. That startup will become the People's Choice Award winner. 

All presenting companies will receive a magnum of wine, courtesy Manifesto, but the winner will also get:

  • A demo table at the next Splash event
  • Discounts to Vator events
  • Opportunity to be an online judge for the next Splash event
  • $24,000 worth of free services, courtesy Rackspace
  • Two-hour accounting consultation courtesy KPMG
  • Free services, courtesy Backops
  • Two-hour accounting consultation, courtesy Sycamore Park
  • An one-hour sit-down VC meeting with Javelin Venture Partners, Floodgate, Alsop Louie Partners, Correlation Ventures, and Morgenthaler Ventures, the early-stage VCs behind Evernote, Lending Club, and Siri.

The Splash winner also wins an Apple iPad!

Check back tomorrow night to see which of these lucky startups have taken the top prizes!

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Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

Delicious Karma

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on


 

Delicious Karma® launched in August 2012 and is a social shopping site that makes it fun and easy to discover, learn about, and buy exceptional artisanal and gourmet specialty foods, at great prices, while also supporting the community of artisanal food producers.

 

Delicious Karma customers have access to highly curated, delicious-tasting, all-natural, hard-to-find products and learn the stories of the passionate, talented artisans who make them.  Customers enjoy special “insider” promotions, product reviews and recipe ideas from our team of Taste Gurus, the ability to engage and share with friends, and a chance to earn Karma Kredits that can be used for product discounts or to support our Karma Kauses.

 

Delicious Karma is passionate about supporting the artisanal food community.  We have committed to donating 1% of our time, 1% of our profits, and 1% of our equity to philanthropic efforts, our Karma Kauses, which foster and support small food producers and educate consumers about the healthy benefits of eating real, good foods.

 

Delicious Karma...discovering delicious goodness!

younity

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

younity creates a personal cloud for all your files, built from your devices and your online services, so that all your devices work as if they were a single device. With younity, you can grab whichever device is most convenient without ever thinking about where a file is.

younity is a ubiquitous data protocol that integrates into device OSes, making them inherently multi-device aware. With younity, users can use any device they own and have access to any file as if it was stored locally on that device, regardless of available storage. With younity, devices simply become screens. Customer Problem:  Consumers today are overwhelmingly multi-device users, yet OSes are still designed around single device usage. Consumers have lots of data stuck on their devices. They are unable to put it all in the cloud and/or it costs too much; existing solutions are also management intensive, requiring constant user interaction.

Solution / Product:  younity makes all a consumer’s devices work as if they were a single device. By extracting the file system from an OS and putting it into the cloud, younity establishes a singular file system from multiple devices that is pushed back into the native OS. Thus, the OS does not know where files are stored – on the local hard drive, on another device or some online service or all of those places. This eliminates a file’s stored address from a device to an identity. Any device registered to a user has all that person’s files and all devices look the exact same. The only difference between devices is whether there is enough storage to store local or virtual copies.

 Competitors:  younity is most similar to iCloud. However, unlike iCloud, younity is OS agnostic, application agnostic, file-type agnostic, vastly easier to use and cheap or free for any amount of data. 

Target Market:  Consumers with 3 or more Internet-enabled devices (over 220M people in the US alone). Research shows: the average household will have 2.2TB of data by 2013; consumers will have an average of 5.8 devices/person by 2015; and 51% of households have both MS and Apple products (as of late 2011). Data synchronization products that accommodate partial data start at about $450/year for 250GB of online storage, with utility online storage costing vastly more. There are currently no cross-platform solutions for users that can accommodate all their data, let alone deliver it into their native device functionality.

Questions and Answers

Q. You've been around since 2010, What's the traction been like?

A. The idea for younity was born in 2010, but the company was angel funded and started hiring in summer of 2011. Our product is not a strong fit for "lean methodology"- it is enormously complicated and simply requires a lot of hands working the keyboard to make it work (typical for heavy duty, client-server software). 

The additional challenge was making it simple for consumers. After hiring our team late in 2011, we were able to take our prototype and get a private beta done by July, then launch into public beta in December 2012. Traction has been good since launching in December 2012, we've been adding thousands of users/month and engagement is high.

Q. How are you marketing this? Is there a viral component?

A. Our product is inherently personal (it's a "personal cloud"), which makes the viral coefficient low. However, we've been developing a unique way for people to share any file that is stored on any device making them sharable directly to another person via a private Facebook post. This will be launched the week of Vator Splash.

Q. What's the distribution model? What's the business model? How much will you be charging for this service?

A. younity has a direct to consumer strategy and will be offered as a freemium service that is free for up to 3 devices. For 4 or more, there is a flat annual fee that we anticipate will be around $24/year (although we have not finalized this yet). Other than the limit on devices, the free version of younity is not limited in any way- it is the same as the premium version.

Q. Where do you go from here? What other services could you offer?

A. Currently we are working with a variety of app vendors to enable offline data in their apps via our API. As a ubiquitous data protocol, younity is really about unifying data around a user's identity. This has a variety of applications, with younity being the first. 

Q. Is this a consumer-only product? Are you making something for the enterprise?

A. For now, we are focused on leading in the consumer market. However, we are well aware of a variety of enterprise applications to enable an on-premise younity server with a policy engine attached to it. In fact, we regularly are asked if this would be available now (it isn't).

The Kive Company

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Nearly every parent in the world has faced the same problem: what to do with all that artwork kids create.  It may seem like a trivial issue, but the initial, overwhelming response to Artkive would tell you otherwise.

With Artkive, you'll never again feel guilty about throwing stuff away. Artkive is the easiest and fastest way to take, tag, and chronologically store your child's art and school work - then turn it into a hard cover book with little more than the touch of a button.  Think Grandma wants to see that artwork? We make that easy too...

Here's a short video about a mom who gets caught throwing away artwork:

Artkive Video

Recognize.Im

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Logo

Recognize.im enables any mobile app to recognize photos. Simply, go to recognize.im, download a code, embded it into your mobile app. Now you mobile app can sell products through photo recognition. 

Recognize.im is an API platform which allows you to implement image recognition technology to any mobile or web application.

  • Sell more products - Start selling products through photo recognition in your mobile app. Choose from unlimited possibilities of interaction. Find new ways of the information distribution, which will help you achieve deserved marketing goals.
  • Fast and unlimited access - Install high speed photo recognition technology in your mobile app in less than hour. Start quickly recognizing pictures taken by your customers. Get unlimited access to photo recognition technology which we have built, we develop and maintain.

 

New solutions

  • Our image recognition technology can be used in many different markets. We are currently in the process of developing a new B2B solution for Retailers and FMCG Producers. Using image recognition, we can create web and mobile applications that can analyze sent images in real time. It lets the user snap a photo of any shelf in the store to obtain various data, including percent of product share on shelf, correct display of product, and much more.

 

About the company

 We are a rapidly growing company based in Poznan, Poland and Dallas, TX which was founded in 2010. Our investor at the seed stage was SpeedUp Venture Capital Group. At the beginning of this year, new members joined the group of our investors: Nest Innovation fund (founded by Piotr Wilam and Marek Kapturkiewicz, the creators of the biggest Polish news portal, Onet.pl) and business angels: Rafał Han and Stephane Senkowski (France). This year, we will begin the next round of investment, and we will also be looking for new partners in this area.

 

 

Our Clients / Partners

Facebook, Evernote, Tribal DDB, Poznań City Hall

Our technology is used for promotions of products by largest publishing houses operating in Poland, i.e.: Weltbild, Legimi, Helion, Nexto.pl, Gildia, Znak, Zysk i S-ka, CH Beck, audioteka.pl, Fabryka.pl.Examples of implementation: SaveUp, Art4Europe, Art4Note, Tribal Employee, Envisage, Migam.pl.

Case studies: http://www.recognize.im/site/showcaseApp 

 

PokitDok

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Provider of a cloud-based application programming interface (API) platform designed to make healthcare transactions more efficient and streamline the business of health. The company's platform enables third-party developers such as payers, health systems and digital health companies to process eligibility checks, claims, scheduling, payments, and other business transactions, enabling hospitals and health systems to build new patient-centered experiences. With DokChain, an evolution of PokitDok’s platform utilizing blockchain and other distributed technologies, PokitDok seeks to remove even more waste from healthcare administration while enabling new value creation by healthcare and other industry stakeholders for the consumers they serve.


 

Learn27

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

 

Learn27: Social27 (parent company) launched Learn27 in mid 2012 and in a very short period of time we have got a lot of traction from our existing clients and also new clients. We are profitable and bootstrapped currently, but have decided to seek Series A funding to invest into the launch of the self service version of the social learning platform.

Demo:

http://vimeo.com/60983941

Mission: Learn27 seeks to take eLearning from Isolation to Collaboration with our social eLearning platform.

Customers: Our current customers include Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, Cengage Learning, Ultimate Software and more...

Enterprise: Our easy, powerful and affordable SaaS solution can be used by SMB or Enterprise organizations to create digital eLearning Academies-- train their employees, partners and vendors. Educational institutions:

Higher Ed institutons can utilize Learn27 to launch a Digital Academy that offers eLearning classes, courses & certifications for their students and / or employees, partners, vendors etc. They can charge fees and built a new revenue stream. Instructors can upload / embed their course materials in the form of videos or documents. Or even stream their classes utilizing our API integrations with Livestream and Ustream.

Students can learn from the instructor and from each other via a social learning environment with tools like message walls, activity feeds, Q&A, polls, surveys, groups, chats, networking lounge, contests, points & badges.

Mobile: And most importantly the Learn27 digital academies can be accessed from anywhere on any device – laptop, mobile device, tablet, and at any time!

Company Vision: Social27 (parent company) was founded with the objective to develop social B2B applications that bring the best practices of the B2C and social media world to the Enterprise. Our first solution Events27 (launched in 2010) is focused on Digital events.

Glyder

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Small businesses need a better way to create & share effective content for email and social platforms. That's why we built Glyder.

Over 6,000 businesses are using Glyder to communicate with 3,300,000 customers and contacts.

Businesses love our app because it enables them to create, preview and send messages to customers on 10 different platforms with no design, marketing or coding expertise required.

It's an exclusively mobile experience that removes all the content creation, design, and technology challenges that prevent small businesses from communicating with their customers online.

Glyder is already integrated with leading social networks, email and CRM platforms, including: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, the iOS Address Book for email and SMS, Apple Passbook, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Salesforce, Highrise CRM, and several more in the works (Google+, Tumblr blog, etc.).

More Info here:
https://angel.co/glyder
http://press.glyder.co/company

More videos here:

 

Super Gas Me

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

We have created an easier and faster way to pay and save money when buying gas.

Our product helps customers to save 20% on gas by pre-loading the gas expense onto the car lease.

 

 

 

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Delightfully, Inc.

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Delightfully is an MIT startup that adds thoughtfulness to digital gifts.  Through our web-service, gift givers can deliver gift cards, subscriptions, e-books, apps, games, and other digital gifts through interactive webpages made from their own content.  The result is a digital gift that feels like a real gift.

We have a live product that has earned thousands of dollars in revenue and brought many a loved one to tears. 

 

Openhour

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

 

Openhour

 

One of the key problems with most enterprise systems is they rely on manual entry of data from workers.  CreativeWorx has solved this problem for certain organizations and continues to expand the market potential with additional solutions.

By making the capture of hard-to-obtain employee workflow data effortless, the CreativeWorx platform automatically generates business intelligence that  helps organizations & individuals capture more revenue, reduce costs, streamline processes, and have better visibility of operations.  

The first product on the CreativeWorx platform solves the global timesheet problem to increase revenue and accelerate invoicing. 

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Key Problems Solved for Customers: One of the most challenging problems for an organization is its inability to efficiently collect accurate data related to how worker’s spend their time. The ramifications are significant as poor data collection routinely leads to missed revenues, unnecessary operational costs and delayed invoicing. The CreativeWorx platform eliminates these challenges by automatically collecting this information, performing real-time analysis and then notifying the right people at the right time.

Products & Services: The first CreativeWorx product is the patent-pending TimeTracker, which silently captures real-time data from an employee’s open applications, email, browser, phone calls, mobile phone activity, GPS location data and more to generate accurate timesheets. TimeTracker provides unprecedented efficiencies that capture billable activities which are typically lost, reduces the costs associated with timesheets, and accelerates invoicing and revenue collection.

Target Markets: TimeTracker delivers measurable value to organizations that generate revenue via billable hours. This includes attorneys, accountants, consultants, software developers, advertising agency & creative professionals, and contractors. Though TimeTracker is market-agnostic, CreativeWorx is targeting the advertising industry initially to leverage the founders’ deep industry expertise and TimeTracker’s distinct competitive advantage.

Total Addressable Market: In 2011, $18 Billion was spent on tools that directly improve the creative production process. The CreativeWorx platform and tools will compete favorably in this space. The business intelligence market is relatively untapped and addresses the $45 Billion of production services.

Customers: We have two paying customers: the global ad agency JWT and another mid-sized ad agency, to be publicly announced shortly. TimeTracker was released as beta product in September, 2012.

Competition: The CreativeWorx platform provides workflow solutions with a focus on business intelligence and extremely appealing user experience. Competition is fractured in the creative space with very little focus on business intelligence, and in most cases the time tracking software is a manual operation. Many enterprise platforms (SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce.com) offer a time tracking component, though we will provide an alternative solution by integrating TimeTracker.

Strategy/Barriers to Entry: Our expertise with the Adobe Creative Suite platform provides competitive advantages related to our real-time data gathering in the creative industries. We anticipate first-mover advantage for implementing real-time business intelligence for creative professionals improve operations and directly improve bottom line results. Additionally, CreativeWorx has filed two patent applications and will continue to file where appropriate to protect our unique IP.

Business Model: CreativeWorx derives the majority of its revenue from subscription services. However, there are additional revenue streams including application licensing, commissions from third party services, support agreements and subscription to data analyses.