Today was the much anticipated Demo Day event for Shotput Ventures. The partners (and honestly, the companies too) have been waiting twelve long weeks to talk about what they are working on and what they’ve accomplished. There was a lot of speculation about the companies and who they might be (no, Wifi Cat isn’t one of them). So here in all their glory are the eight Shotput Ventures companies, my take on what they do, and why I think they are great companies. An upcoming post will talk about the things that I thought went right and wrong during the summer. So here we go in the order they presented at Demo Day.
EventHive started life under a different name (ConfTek). The founders wisely realized that people would misspell the name of their company so they found a better name over the summer. In a nutshell, EventHive gives conference organizers the ability to create a shared discussion forum for a conference. Okay, so that doesn’t sound that different than using a hashtag on Twitter right? Well, they’ve also thrown in the ability to do live polling of the audience through their platform. The integration with presentation tools is great and provides for real audience interactivity without having the downside of the guy getting the microphone for a “question” and instead launching into a monologue. That right there is total gold. This post may go up too late for you to participate in the forum for demo day but just in case, you can check it out here. For those of you coming to Startup Riot in 2010, you may see this company again.
Looxii also started this summer under a different name (honestly, I’ve forgotten what that name was so it’s probably good that they changed). Now you know that anything Twitter related would be something I love. And Looxii is no different. Looxii provides some great analysis of real time trends on Twitter and blog posts based on what you’re interested in. The implementation is fantastic and really lets the non-techie get up and running quickly. The guys from Looxii have really nailed a drop dead simple interface that gives you what you want without jumping through a lot of hoops.
ShoutNow is a pretty awesome business. Coming to us at the start of the summer ShoutNow already had a considerable service and business built. In case you don’t know, ShoutNow was hatched at Indianapolis Startup Weekend late last year. I’ve known these guys for a while since they even came down to present at Startup Riot this year. So clearly I was a fan before they started with us this summer. In a nutshell ShoutNow lets anyone send mass messages to people over the phone. Pricing is simple and the entire process is self serve. Now your business, organization, or even your personal life can be managed via phone messages to those you need to talk to. Again, a simple straightforward service that is priced simply. Oh yeah, they’ve even been covered by Mashable.
SocialGuides is an interesting twist on everything being discussed about the real-time web. A lot of people are looking towards Twitter and other sources and trying to categorize what is being discussed. This is pretty difficult and fraught with pitfalls. Instead the SocialGuides folks encourage you to talk but about the places that you’re going to or have been to. In doing so you automatically can see what people have said about a place before you go there. The great benefit of categorizing this way is that your comments are easily relevant and can be found by your friends or those who follow you. I haven’t used SocialGuides as much as I should have but you can find me as sanjay on SocialGuides.
If you’re going through the trouble to read this blog post you hopefully know who I am and have some level of trust with what I’m writing. But what if you start reading a post from someone you don’t know. How can you be sure that they are an authority on what they are writing about? Maybe they’re just a crackpot. This is the problem that Zeta solves. They’ve got some algorithms to crunch and analyze your online persona to determine just how good of a contributor you are and how much trust someone should put into what you write. Take a look and feel free to check out my ZetaPage although I clearly think my rating should be WAY higher. :-)
Ninja Post is tackling the whole issue of real-time collaboration. Ninja Post provides a service that lets sites run their own intelligent customer forum service. Sure there are forum services out there already you’re saying. Well, compared to what Ninja Post has, they suck. All of those forum providers have updates that are based on the very web 1.0 model of post/update/refresh. Ninja Post has a much better back end that allows more collaborative discussions and lets companies really engage with their customers. Plus they have all kinds of AJAX hotness.
So you use open source software, huh? But if you need help with your open source software where do you go? Oh, you’re going to start that painful cycle of trying random keywords in your search engine of choice. Yeah, that’s going to be fun. OpenHatch is changing how open source developers are working with themselves and with their userbase. OpenHatch is building a community that aims to help open source developers connect with other developers, projects that need their expertise, job opportunities, and the user base that needs their help. The end result? Better open source software for all of us. Now that’s an idea I can totally get behind.
Okay, we all know it – I’m not the most advanced when it comes to gadgetry for my mobile device. That said, Khush has coolness to it that I wish it would run on my Razr (okay, maybe I’ll get a new phone before the next decade). So you think you can sing but it doesn’t sound good without some musical background to it? Khush has got your back. Their first app, LaDiDa, lets you record any vocal track that you aren’t embarrassed to sing out loud (this is gonna be huge in Japan). After recording the track the software automatically adds background music based on some simple selections you provide. But know that this isn’t just adding the same repeating background to a song like the five dollar synthesizer you had as a kid. The software analyzes the vocal track and matches up the music and beats to your voice. That means the song is different every time you record a track.
That’s it. Eight great companies over a great first summer. Keep an eye out for these folks. There is some great stuff cooking here and we’ll definitely see more from all of these companies and these entrepreneurs.
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While all the projects certainly look interesting, I haven’t read any sort of revenue models for any of them (except for khu.sh, where the app store makes sense). Was this covered at demo day?
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