By Steven Wise
TechCrunch Disrupt is the preeminent forum for startups that crave visibility with investors, potential partners, the technology press, and anyone who wants to be in the know about what’s hot in technology. The event is held three times per year: in NY in the spring, in San Francisco in the fall, and in Europe toward the end of the year. The most anticipated component of the event is the Startup Battlefield, where companies get to make a six-minute pitch then answer six minutes of questions from a panel of judges.
Tech Crunch Disrupt NY 2016 took place last month and didn’t disappoint. As usual, the startups that got the coveted Battlefield slots represented a wide variety of categories. Several related to health and wellness (like WaterO, next generation water purifier and ArtVeoli, a hardware start-up using algae and microfluidics to produce oxygen and freshen indoor air). Others related to the Internet of Things (IoT), like Lumenus, which integrates electronics and LEDs into smart-clothing, and Spinn, an internet-connected centrifugal coffee maker. We’ll take a closer look at some of the hot new companies worth checking out.
New ways to create and manage content
TimeLooper promises “immersive time travel technology [that] enables tourists to experience destinations at key moment
s in history through VR videos on smartphones.” While visiting popular tourist destinations, consumers download the TimeLooper app to their smartphones, which they place into an inexpensive holder, similar to Google Cardboard.
TimeLooper content partners will create short augmented reality (AR) films that recreate an historic event that you can watch in the place that it happened. For example, look around at the 1666 Great Fire of London while visiting Tower Bridge Museum or watch the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as you stand at the site in Germany.
TimeLooper envisions a freemium content model where some AR videos will be available for free while many others will cost a few dollars, which they split with the tourist destination operators. They also plan to generate revenue from native advertising (imagine a Coke billboard in the Berlin Wall video).
Laugh.ly was one of the “wild card” startups presenting at Disrupt, meaning they were selected by a vote of the conference audience and TechCrunch editorial staff. Essentially, they want to be the Pandora app of comedy. Laugh.ly already has over 400 comedians onboard whose material will be distributed through the app. Consumers can enjoy playlists based on artist or themes (e.g., jokes about in-laws) and can share playlists or specific jokes with friends. The app creators made a point of explaining this is not just a comedy content play. Their vision is to expand to other forms of spoken word entertainment and they’re building proprietary technology for indexing and searching content in audio files. The app is available to consumers at no cost but those willing to pay $7.99 for a monthly subscription can enjoy the service ad free and can download content.
Botify Is designed to help digital marketer control how Google understands their websites. They claim that Google’s search bots ignore 35 per cent to 55 per cent of web pages across various commerce verticals like travel and classifieds. Webmasters at beta customers including Expedia, eBay, Airbnb, and Time Inc., have all used the Botify tools to analyse which pages are not getting crawled by Google, so that they can redesign their site structure to improve coverage.
Botify reports sites have been averaging a 35 per cent improvement in Google indexing within the first 6 months of use. This Paris-based startup completed a $7.2 million series A funding round and will offer the tool through a SaaS subscription model.
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