Kuapay, a startup offering a consumer mobile wallet application and accompanying loyalty platform for merchants, is rolling out an upgraded version of its mobile app today. The app focuses on improved speed, security and a new user interface that makes it easier for users to track their credit card details, as well as discover nearby local merchants that support the Kuapay service.

Based in Santa Monica, Calif., the company was founded in 2011 by Joaquin Ayuso de Paul, previously the co-founder of Tuenti, which sold to Telefonica for $100 million. The company uses an interesting combination of QR codes, barcodes, NFC or manual entry, any of which can be used at point-of-sale as an alternative to the credit card swipe. For security purposes, the app doesn’t actually transmit the credit card information between the phone and the register. Instead, the company integrates with POS systems like NCR, Micros, Aloha and others to complete the purchases.

Security is a big focus for the company, which PIN-protects its app and encrypts financial data in a Kuapay vault, which is also only accessible with device-specific, encrypted tokens. In the case of a lost device, users can remotely disable their accounts via the web, which would prevent anyone from using their credit card data, even if they could get past the PIN.

Around this time last year, Kuapay had 40 supporting merchants, mainly in the Santa Monica area. Today, it has grown its worldwide footprint to 600 locations. Instead of targeting the market region by region, however, Kuapay is spreading out in Europe, South America and Latin America, in addition to the U.S.

The company is running a pilot program with KFC here in the States, which includes trials in more than 100 KFC stores, a dozen of which are also testing a mobile ordering system that allows customers to pay ahead of their arrival at the store. It’s now piloting trials at two gas stations (76 Gas) which would allow drivers to pay without having to swipe their cards at the pump, too. And it has closed deals with several major retailers in Europe, including two large pizza delivery chains. Meanwhile, in Chile, it has moved into production mode with three banks and the national processor in the country. (The company has $4 million in funding from a single, private investor in Chile, it should be noted).

Stateside, Kuapay is being used in Santa Monica, L.A., San Francisco and New York, primarily with small businesses like dry cleaners, coffee shops and bookstores, for example. In the updated version of the application, users can now view all these merchants in their area and view their locations on the map, which is especially helpful in tracking food trucks using the service.

Though Kuapay has some significantly sized deals under its wing now, the company’s efforts in attacking a worldwide market instead of growing region by region may find it struggling to gain consumer awareness and adoption. Shoppers already have far too many alternative ways to pay on hand, including Square and its overseas clones, PayPal, Google Wallet, and NFC-based initiatives, such as U.S. carrier-backed Isis, plus mobile payments services from leading credit card companies and banks. None have yet to establish a significant traction at point-of-sale — consumers still just swipe their cards or pay with cash. The fragmented mobile payments market is due for consolidation, which means smaller players like Kuapay may either get swept up by larger firms, or find themselves in need of a new strategy.

On that front, Kuapay has another potential area of expertise it could fall back on, as it turns out. The company is supporting e-commerce transactions, too — in Europe with the pizza companies, but with a few major retailers here in the U.S., as well. De Paul says he’s not able to disclose which U.S. e-retailers are on board, saying only that the deals are “in the works” now and we’ll hear more about those soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When I used to work in Fairfax, Virginia as a computer consultant during the dot-com boom (actually I was a documentation specialist) we’d all go down to Pizza Hut for their lunch buffet. They had pizzas all laid out – three or four flavors, plus dessert pizza. A salad bar. I’d go with a bunch of people whose names I forget now (I didn’t make a lot of friends when I worked in Fairfax. I’d go for long, meandering runs in the Virginia countryside, pounding along the highway past sagging shacks that were destined to be torn down for gated communities that sprung up in the early 2000s like Queen Anne’s Lace along the berm.)

We’d eat a lot of pizza and feel horrible after but we were young and we didn’t have a lot of cool stuff to do in our lives so we’d eat that lunch, go back to work and edit documents for a tax system, and go home. Some days I’d fall asleep on my floor. I can’t tell you why. I probably exhausted myself with the monotony and loneliness of it.

Then I’d go to raves. This was like 1998 and people still went to those. I’d dance to Drum and Bass. It was my specialty. I treated it like an exorcism and I was so into it people just stared like I was an absolute freak but I was young – 23 or so – and this life I chose was pretty horrible and I wanted to do something creative so I figured if Michael Stipe could twist around like a noodle in his videos, I could do the same.

I still hate the thought of those long, triangular meanderings from my office to the grocery to the Tower Records with my apartment in the middle like a reminder of how far I was from anything like home.

I moved to Warsaw a year later and things got much better. I doubt this jolly, DIY LED-encrusted tie, called the Ampli-tie, would have made me feel better back then, but I bet it totally would improve your day if you made one. You can see the instructions over at Adafruit.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While the question remains whether or not you should be eating Domino’s pizza at all, a clever service now allows you to pay for your pie with Bitcoins. The service is far from an official Domino’s app and is instead a gateway or broker between the world of pizza and the world of popular virtual currencies.

The site, PizzaForCoins, asks for your address and then brings up pizza places near you. You place your order and send over your coins – the exchange rate is “APPROXIMATELY $0.50 Cents less then the current Mt.Gox Rate,” their emphasis – and wait for your pizza. Then you eat it.

The team behind the site, Matt Burkinshaw and Riley Alexander, built the service as a conduit between bitcoin and the real world, a key tool that will improve the visibility and viability of the platform.

The pair are working on adding other pizza places to the service including Papa John’s.

Bitcoins are currently trading at about $25 so two pizzas and bread bites will cost you $17.75. You can also add things to your order like wings, different crusts, and the like. It’s a fascinating tool and far more valuable to the average user than sites like Silk Road where bitcoins are used for more illicit purposes. I’m sure an entire subset of users would love a way to use an untraceable currency to pay for everyday things and pizza is a great start.

via DigitalTrends

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Order Mapper, which makes apps for ordering a variety of goods (starting with pizza) from any business, just announced that it has raised a $550,000 round led by Vegas Tech Fund.

The company’s flagship product is Order Pizza, an app that allows users to order pizza from any pizzeria that you choose. The app submits orders automatically, via phone call, email, fax, or website (depending on what the restaurant accepts). Co-founder and CEO Jim Bricker told me via email that humans only step in when an order doesn’t go through. For example, if someone tries to order from a pizzeria that doesn’t deliver to them, Order Mapper will text the customer to ask if it’s okay to order from Pizza Hut or Domino’s.

Order Pizza has already delivered orders to 30 percent of the pizzerias in the U.S. It doesn’t need to have any kind of preexisting relationship to place an order, but Bricker said the company is working with the top 50 chains to add full menus. Apparently the biggest challenge is handling “rush times like Friday nights and during the Super Bowl,” but Bricker added that the app actually helps pizzerias take more orders, since they don’t have to devote as much employee time to “sitting on the phone.”

The company also offers an Order Beer app in Dallas (it’s a graduate of the Dallas-based Tech Wildcatters incubator). Bricker said he plans to expand the platform to include flowers, massage, and other types of food, and he wants to launch internationally.

Order Mapper was founded in 2009, and it was part of the first group of startups backed by 500 Startups’ Twilio Micro-Fund back in 2010. When I asked why the company hasn’t raised a significant seed round before this, Bricker said:

We started when people still didn’t know what apps were and had difficulty raising money from traditional investors. We survived the most challenging phase of launching a startup and investors are now eager to help bring the vision of Order Mapper to the masses.

In addition to Vegas Tech Fund (whose partners include Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh), Bricker said a number of angels invested in the round.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here’s my favorite Big Idea of the year so far, via John Robb, who’s always worth your attention: The Dronenet, a “short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol.”

He fleshes it out in a series of posts, but basically, it would be a network of drones that would carry things the same way the Internet carries data: in packets, over a series of multiple hops, routing on the fly.

Sound like a pipe dream? Not at all: Matternet is a startup working on implementing just that for delivery of high-value goods (pharmaceuticals, electronics) to developing countries and/or rugged locations where the roads are so few and/or terrible that UAVs become the superior option. Their idea is for drone transportation to – literally – leapfrog trucks in those areas in the same way the cell phones leapfrogged land lines.

Robb’s, typically, is bigger. Essentially, he envisions the Dronenet delivering to individual buildings and even houses, eventually replacing UPS, FedEx, DHL, and the postal system. What’s more, it would dovetail awfully nicely with the 3D-printing revolution: I’ve argued before that almost nobody needs their own 3D printer, but the Dronenet could ultimately provide not just same-day but often same-hour delivery of newly printed items.

Feel free to be skeptical about the economics or the logistics, obviously – we’re talking about, by definition, a lot of moving parts – but hey, at least you can’t complain that this idea is boring.

Best of all, though, it lets me quote one of my favorite lines in all of science fiction:

The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just
human nature and you couldn’t fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap
technical fix: smart boxes.

–Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Just as shipping containers (and pallets) revolutionized shipping, the Dronenet will need standard-sized, interchangeable, reusable smart Droneboxes. (Which in turn every self-respecting 3D printer will be able to crank out pretty much from scratch.) They will be to the Dronenet what packets are to the Internet.

If I may step back into a slightly philosophical stance, this would actually be quite a striking development. People have been talking and speculating about the “Internet Of Things” for so long that it has actually threatened to become a little boring before it even begins to exist. Until now my assumption has always been that the Internet-Of-Things mostly just meant ubiquitous Internet connectivity coming to things that already exist in the physical world. But the Dronenet would be different: The Dronenet, if it happens, would instead be an instance of the physical world becoming more like the Internet.

Will it actually happen? Who knows? It may become yet another beautiful notion slain by that tragic assassin named economics. Or niche Dronenets may arise in a handful of places around the world where they make economic sense, but fail to ever quite mesh into, well, a world-wide web.

My greatest concern, though, is not economic but political: it’s that someone will start packing drones full of Semtex and sending them after political targets. I’ve been thinking about drone disasters for some time: a whole four years ago, before drones were big, I wrote (and CC-released) an entire novel about their misuse by terrorists.

That seems inevitable, and it seems likely that when it happens it will lead to a ham-handed, TSA-style clampdown on all drone activity everywhere, and a government monopoly on the use of drones (perhaps for panopticon surveillance), throwing the Dronenet baby out with the terrorist bathwater. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. But I fear I have a lot of trouble coming up with reasons why it won’t.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Teburu, a newly launched tablet-based online and mobile ordering system for restaurants, is now live with a handful of restaurant chains in the Southern U.S, including Gondolier Pizza, Pita’s Republic, and Little Greek Restaurant, and it has also recently signed a contract with a large, undisclosed Middle Eastern restaurant management company with 600 locations.

The company, whose name is Japanese for “table,” got off the ground in May 2011, following its win at the USF Fintech Business Plan Competition hosted at the University of South Florida. The startup is also one of the first success stories from the local incubator, Tampa Bay’s Gazelle Lab.

According to founder Greg Ross-Munro, who started Teburu with business partner Leon McIntosh, the idea for the company came from their own experience building software for restaurant owners at SourceToad, Ross-Munro’s Tampa-based custom software engineering firm. “We had to tried to do this before at our day jobs, writing code and systems, building websites, and writing mobile apps,” explains Ross-Munro, “but when we tried to work with the point-of-sale companies, they were just so expensive and so difficult to deal with. We said, there’s got to be a better way.”

With Teburu, the company offers restaurants a package which includes a 7-inch Android tablet and a mounting system that can be attached to the wall or at point-of-sale. The tablet runs Teburu’s software, which is hooked into the online and mobile ordering system tied to the customers’ websites. Teburu can either integrate the online ordering component into the restaurant’s existing site, or can build them a new site from scratch, if they prefer.

The basic plan for the online ordering system is $50 per month per location, while an upgraded plan for $120 per location per month also includes a custom app in the App Store as well as an in-store advertising system that can power digital displays at the restaurants’ various locations. This latter option involves an HTML5 app running in a Webkit-based browser connected to a TV screen of some sort. This app displays the restaurant’s digital menu and in-store specials, both of which can be updated on the fly by the restaurant owner.

For restaurants, Teburu’s system offers a more affordable alternative than enabling web transactions on their point-of-sale. “Not every company has the same kind point of sale, and not every company wants to deal with turning web transactions on which can cost up to $2,000,” says Ross-Munro. “Why pay a point-of-sale company a ton of money when you can have a $200 tablet that’s insured and sits or your desk and is going to keep getting better, unlike your point-of-sale system which is still stuck in 1975?”

Teburu’s system, he points out, can be updated overnight via its internet connection. “You shut down your restaurant tonight, wake up, and go to work tomorrow and the tablet has been updated with the ability to scan Groupons right at the register,” he says. To be clear, Teburu’s system doesn’t support that Groupon-scanning option today, but one of its newer features (still partially in development) is a social component that alerts restaurants to the real-time check-ins from customers on Foursquare and Facebook.

Although generally it can be tough for new companies outside of the larger startup ecosystems like San Francisco and New York, for example, to gain traction, Ross-Munro thinks that, in Teburu’s case, Tampa is an ideal place to run this business. “In terms of strategic advantage, Tampa has more headquarters and more startup test restaurants that become chains and franchises than anywhere else in the country,” he says. Notably, restaurants headquartered in this region include OSI Restaurant Partners (Outback Steakhouse, Carrabba’s, Bonefish Grill, Fleming’s, and Roy’s) and Checkers/Rally’s, as well as the new startup restaurants from OSI vets, including Outback founder and OSI Chairman of the Board Chris T. Sullivan (Carmel Cafe) and Outback co-founder Bob Basham (PDQ), among others.

Teburu competes with other online ordering systems, like those from GrubHub, Seamless, ChowNow, OLO, Just Eat, and more, but Ross-Munro says that his company’s advantage is that it allows restaurants control over their brand. “In systems like GrubHub and whatnot, you kind of lose control over your customers – you’re going through someone else’s systems. Sure, you have to put your faith in our system, but it runs on your website. There’s no iFrame that gets loaded up – it’s your website,” he explains. “[Restaurants] want to own their brand,” he adds. “They would put their logo on a cocktail napkin – they’re that kind of people.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The team behind the ridiculously named food daily deals site MunchOnMe is on to the next one, launching a new startup, Caviar after Munch On Me’s acquisition. Caviar is Seamless “done right” i.e. a platform that allows users to order food “seamlessly” via web. As of today, users in SF can sign up for access to the Caviar beta, which differentiates itself from Seamless by only offering orders from restaurants that don’t typically deliver.

With its focus on curation, Caviar limits its inventory to restaurants that have four stars or higher on Yelp. “[With] Seamless, you don’t really need to use them to get the food. You can call the restaurant yourself and they’ll take the order over the phone and deliver it to you,” says founder Jason Wang, on why Caviar is a net value add in an already crowded space.

In addition to cherry-picking vendors, Caviar also offers picture menus, real-time delivery tracking and no minimum order limits in order to be competitive with startups like Seamless or Grubhub. It also offers scheduling options in addition to “Deliver Now,” with a $9.99 flat rate anywhere in SF and Treasure Island.

“Our sweet spot with Caviar is businesses. When we ask them what their current solution is, they tell us GrubHub, Seamless, or a catering company such as Cater2me, or Waiter.com/Waiter On Wheels,” says Wang, “We’re better than GrubHub and Seamless (and there are others like Eat24hours and Delivery.com) in every way. They have a laundry list of every possible restaurant and nearly all of them you don’t really like that much.”

In San Francisco, the service is presently offering deliveries from local foodie favorites like Pork Store Cafe and Little Star Pizza, which you’d otherwise have to use something like Postmates to get food from.

Wang tells me the bootstrapped service, which takes a 25% cut from its restaurant partners, is already profitable. In user testing since early July,  the average Caviar user has spent $154.07 in the past month.

Today, the first 150 TechCrunch readers who want in on Caviar will receive their invites immediately, and then it’s first come first serve with new invites rolling out daily. The team is hoping to hit up obvious target NYC after it conquers SF’s rarified hunger pangs.

Last December, Postmates launched with the plan to offer up a courier delivery service for local businesses throughout San Francisco. But then the team had a brilliant idea: What if it gave its couriers pre-paid debit cards, which would let them purchase goods for customers and then deliver them anywhere in the city?

That idea evolved into the Get It Now app, which Postmates launched in private beta in mid-April. Since then, the app has attracted more than 1,000 users in just four weeks. Not surprisingly, many of those users come from tech startups themselves, with employees of Twitter, TaskRabbit, Square, Cherry, and Yelp all signed up to use the service.

More than just acquiring beta users, however, the app has been making money. Since launch, the app has pulled in $20,000 in revenue, with the average user spending $116 per month. And it’s getting stuff to people pretty quickly, with average delivery time under 30 minutes. To achieve that, Postmates has greatly increased the number of couriers that it uses for deliveries, from 20 or 25 to 60 altogether.

Being able to show that its app makes retailers money gives Postmates some leverage as it tries to get them signed up for its local delivery services. For some top venues in San Francisco, like Little Star Pizza, Pakwaan, or Papalote, offering up a way to offer delivery services without having to actually hire delivery guys seems like a no-brainer. And for lazy customers, or those who don’t necessarily live near their favorite restaurants, being able to get an In-and-Out fix (ANIMAL STYLE!!!) without fighting tourists in Fisherman’s Wharf is a clear win.

Co-founder Bastian Lehmann told me he expects the Get It Now app to be released publicly over the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you want to test out the app for yourself, you can sign up for the closed beta at postmates.com/getitnow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

And we’re off: the TC New York Mini Meet-Up is on for tonight, May 8, from 6pm-10pm at Bar 13 on 13th St. and University Pl. It will be a Blastoise.

Special thanks to our volunteers and good old Jordan for spearheading the entire operation. A special thank you goes out to our sponsors. And thank you for making this a potential success.

You can RSVP on our PlanCast page for the Meet-Up.

Remember: don’t give us paper. Give us a small card with your website on it and prepare a 40 second elevator pitch. Also, we are the ones with the free drink tickets so look for folks in TechCrunch T-shirts and/or Jordan, Peter Ha, Chris, Matt Burns, or I.

Yext helps provide amazing local search results with PowerListings, a local information hub that syncs listings across a network of premium sites and mobile apps. With Yext PowerListings, small and large businesses can quickly and easily update their business information, photos and specials from one central location. Today, Yext PowerListings syncs information for over 45,000 locations.

Traducto is a powerful and easy to use translation and localization app.
With Traducto users can leverage human translation to translate documents, emails, newsletters, social postings, marketing materials and more. TraductoPro allows developers to convert iOS or Mac apps, into a multilingual application, making the app available to a wider global audience. By making it simple to localize your application and offering 16 different language translations, TraductoPro is designed to reduce the pain typically associated with localization. Our integrated approach combines automating app localization through direct Xcode integration, with a high quality human translation service all within a single application. TraductoPro offers support for content translations, app store metadata and Xcode projects localization.

WhatRunsWhere is a competitive intelligence service for online media buying. It allows you to look up what advertisers are doing online; where they are running ads, who they are buying their inventory through and what exact ads they are using. WhatRunsWhere allows you to see what is happening on any website; who is advertising there, who’s selling the inventory for them and what ads are they using. With data from multiple countries and actionable insights regarding the data, WhatRunsWhere quickly allows anyone to dissect advertising campaigns resulting in reduced risk and a higher ROI media buying process.

Parlor® is the creator of unique branded communication applications: GroupCall™, TopicTalk™ and MobiCast™. Our goal is to make useful tools to communicate globally, both efficiently and for free. We will be unleashing these three awesome applications on iOS and Android at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012. Follow us at http://Parlor.fm for news and updates.

Speak to any business in the world with MyGenie™, a location-based 2-way communication platform that allows iPhone and Android users to speak to businesses in real-time! It’s free, it’s quick, and it’s simple to use. No need to find a manager, an email address, or a telephone # to contact. With MyGenie™ consumers send questions, comments, complaints, feedback, and more (can also upload photos) directly to any business they choose via their smart phones. Businesses can immediately respond (and include special offers) via a business portal. MyGenie™, not just ratings, not just feedback, it’s anything and everything you want it to be! Free on Apple App Store and Android Market.

Return on Change (RoC) connects innovative startups and investors who are looking to change tomorrow’s world today. Entrepreneurs with great ideas need capital funding to jumpstart their businesses, and investors are looking to help fund the next big idea. RoC provides the online medium through which startup companies and entrepreneurs will be able to pool capital through crowdsourcing. For more information about Return on Change, please visit www.returnonchange.com or contact RoC at RoC@returnonchange.com.

PeoplePerHour is Europe’s leading marketplace connecting startups and entrepreneurs to freelance talent worldwide and we’ve just landed in NYC! Project by project we’re awakening an enormous latent workforce, from the stay at home mom and the retiree to the moonlighter and the hobbyist, removing the constraints of the traditional 9-5 office. Be it for a quick logo design, building a website, copywriting or a small translation… we’re helping businesses keep their core lean and to get the job done fast. Our vision is for this to be the defining factor in the future of work.

TouchTunes Interactive Networks is the largest interactive out-of-home entertainment network in North America. TouchTunes provides entertainment and marketing solutions to 52,000 bars and restaurants. Founded in 1998, the network has become the largest of its kind with 54M monthly users who played more than 900 million songs in 2011. The TouchTunes mobile app allows consumers in bars, restaurants, hotels, retail and arenas to play any song from our catalog without having to leave their seat and is socially integrated. TouchTunes network is the largest digital out-of-home advertising network in the US (Nielsen) and includes TouchTunesTV, a unique screen-within-a-screen interactive television experience that provides custom advertising capabilities, venue promotions and social networking opportunities. TouchTunes is a privately held U.S. corporation with offices in New York City, Arlington Heights, Illinois and Montreal, Canada. For further information, please visit us at touchtunes.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is important, so listen up.

The people I’m about to describe are the most awesome of all the awesome people as they have volunteered to help out (free of charge) with our massive meet-up here in NYC next week. It’ll be amazing.

Let me paint you a little word picture: Imagine a sweet girl named Gail welcoming you to Bar 13 with a few drink tickets. As you walk up the stairs, you find two floors and a roof deck filled with guys in jeans, startup t-shirts and blazers. They graze the room like a herd of lean, brilliant cattle in search of the nearest TC editor and/or VC, beers in hands. (They aren’t real cows, so they can hold beers.)

From the dark corner on the second floor, a girl named Zhila appears. She’s holding a box of pizza, offering it up freely to hundreds of hungry hands as she gracefully crosses the room. Meanwhile, Nathaniel and David (more badass volunteers) are re-hanging our sponsor banner after a giveaway kerfuffle brought it to the ground.

A floor above, John Biggs is firing Nerf discs into the crowd out of sheer jadedness, as I sing Cher’s “Turn Back Time” at the top of my lungs courtesy of our sponsor TouchTunes’ Virtuo karaoke machine. On the other side of the room, Matt Burns and Chris Velazco are posing for a photostrip in our TC-flavored photo booth, as volunteer Kevin (at a hearty 6’2″) keeps a rowdy group of developers from accosting Peter Ha.

Honestly, how can you resist a night like this?

You can’t.

So get yourself familiar with our volunteers:

David Sikorski

Besides trying to find a way to directly download his thoughts to be stored in a cloud based network, David still has the AOL dial up sound haunting him from time to time. He spent the last couple years in Public Relations before returning to what he knows best as a Social Media Advisor throughout the Northeast ranging from Forbes top 100 companies to local non-for-profit groups. He was just very recently scooped up by the former CTO of Sony Corp America, the legendary Philip Wiser to be his right hand man and project manager as he moved to New York to be the first ever Chief Technology Officer of the Hearst Corporation. “We’re in a Digital Revolution, it’s never too late to join in the fun!”

Gail Axelrod

Gail works on marketing at BetterCloud, an NYC-based application developer that builds security and management tools specifically integrated with Google Apps. She’s also incredibly funny, and gluten intolerant (so it’s all work and no pizza and beer for her).

Kevin McIntyre

Kevin is a large nerd-jock who not only excels as a computer science student but also at lifting things. He’s interested in all things technology; particularly software and web development. He enjoys competition and good humor. If he’s not learning something, He’s bored. He doesn’t like to be bored. Start-up culture intrigues Him. If the right opportunity comes his way, he’d love to work at one; be it as an intern while he completes his degree or as an engineer after he graduates.

Nathaniel Padgett

He’s from the San Francisco Bay Area, previously worked at Google on the Google Apps team, but is now a Community Ambassador for Quirky Inc. He loves craft beer, collaborative product development, and kittens. Little known fact about him: He’s a master eye-brow dancer.

Zhila Shariat

Zhila is a Columbia Business School MBA graduate who lives in Brooklyn. She currently works for Constellation Energy, where she manages the electricity pricing desk for the New York and New Jersey markets. Outside of work, you can find her recording dj mixes, interviewing comedians for the serial optimist, posting Instagram photos, or making homemade donuts.

Full disclosure: I realize that all five of our volunteers are particularly beautiful people. I promise, however, that I was unaware of their attractiveness until after they were selected.
Here’s a refresh on the deets:

You can RSVP on our PlanCast page for the Meet-Up, which will go down on Tuesday, May 8 from 6pm-10pm at Bar 13 on 13th St. and University Pl.

And another look at our sponsors:

Yext helps provide amazing local search results with PowerListings, a local information hub that syncs listings across a network of premium sites and mobile apps. With Yext PowerListings, small and large businesses can quickly and easily update their business information, photos and specials from one central location. Today, Yext PowerListings syncs information for over 45,000 locations.

Traducto is a powerful and easy to use translation and localization app.
With Traducto users can leverage human translation to translate documents, emails, newsletters, social postings, marketing materials and more. TraductoPro allows developers to convert iOS or Mac apps, into a multilingual application, making the app available to a wider global audience. By making it simple to localize your application and offering 16 different language translations, TraductoPro is designed to reduce the pain typically associated with localization. Our integrated approach combines automating app localization through direct Xcode integration, with a high quality human translation service all within a single application. TraductoPro offers support for content translations, app store metadata and Xcode projects localization.

WhatRunsWhere is a competitive intelligence service for online media buying. It allows you to look up what advertisers are doing online; where they are running ads, who they are buying their inventory through and what exact ads they are using. WhatRunsWhere allows you to see what is happening on any website; who is advertising there, who’s selling the inventory for them and what ads are they using. With data from multiple countries and actionable insights regarding the data, WhatRunsWhere quickly allows anyone to dissect advertising campaigns resulting in reduced risk and a higher ROI media buying process.

Parlor® is the creator of unique branded communication applications: GroupCall™, TopicTalk™ and MobiCast™. Our goal is to make useful tools to communicate globally, both efficiently and for free. We will be unleashing these three awesome applications on iOS and Android at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012. Follow us at http://Parlor.fm for news and updates.

Speak to any business in the world with MyGenie™, a location-based 2-way communication platform that allows iPhone and Android users to speak to businesses in real-time! It’s free, it’s quick, and it’s simple to use. No need to find a manager, an email address, or a telephone # to contact. With MyGenie™ consumers send questions, comments, complaints, feedback, and more (can also upload photos) directly to any business they choose via their smart phones. Businesses can immediately respond (and include special offers) via a business portal. MyGenie™, not just ratings, not just feedback, it’s anything and everything you want it to be! Free on Apple App Store and Android Market.

Return on Change (RoC) connects innovative startups and investors who are looking to change tomorrow’s world today. Entrepreneurs with great ideas need capital funding to jumpstart their businesses, and investors are looking to help fund the next big idea. RoC provides the online medium through which startup companies and entrepreneurs will be able to pool capital through crowdsourcing. For more information about Return on Change, please visit www.returnonchange.com or contact RoC at RoC@returnonchange.com.

PeoplePerHour is Europe’s leading marketplace connecting startups and entrepreneurs to freelance talent worldwide and we’ve just landed in NYC! Project by project we’re awakening an enormous latent workforce, from the stay at home mom and the retiree to the moonlighter and the hobbyist, removing the constraints of the traditional 9-5 office. Be it for a quick logo design, building a website, copywriting or a small translation… we’re helping businesses keep their core lean and to get the job done fast. Our vision is for this to be the defining factor in the future of work.

TouchTunes Interactive Networks is the largest interactive out-of-home entertainment network in North America. TouchTunes provides entertainment and marketing solutions to 52,000 bars and restaurants. Founded in 1998, the network has become the largest of its kind with 54M monthly users who played more than 900 million songs in 2011. The TouchTunes mobile app allows consumers in bars, restaurants, hotels, retail and arenas to play any song from our catalog without having to leave their seat and is socially integrated. TouchTunes network is the largest digital out-of-home advertising network in the US (Nielsen) and includes TouchTunesTV, a unique screen-within-a-screen interactive television experience that provides custom advertising capabilities, venue promotions and social networking opportunities. TouchTunes is a privately held U.S. corporation with offices in New York City, Arlington Heights, Illinois and Montreal, Canada. For further information, please visit us at touchtunes.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch