The TechStars NYC Demo Day went down this morning, and thirteen new companies have officially come to market, ranging from a Pinterest for places, a social wireless MVNO, and a mobile workforce communication product, to a social network for trades and transactions, a moving industry disruptor, and a leisure class aggregator.

Some are venturing into a brand new world, leveraging social media and our online identities to disrupt retail, consumer engagement with brands, and communication within workforces. Others are traveling back to the past, elbowing their way into traditional industries and trying to make a difference.

If you happened to miss our earlier coverage, here’s a rundown on the whole lot of them:

Lua is a project management and communication tool for any mobile workforce. It allows one-way and two-way messaging among the whole crew or specific groups and comes complete with read receipts and conference calling. Oh, and the service works on any phone, from iOS to Android to a flip phone, so no one gets left out.

Karma is introducing a brand new idea in the land of mobile: social bandwidth. Here’s how it works. You pay $69 for a 4G wireless hotspot. It’s pay-per-use, so each GB of data costs $15. You sign in to your Karma hotspot network with your Facebook ID, and along with a free 100mb you get for signing up, all of your data is attached to your Facebook. Then, anyone who tries to tap into your Karma hotspot through Facebook will net you an extra 100mb of free data. The more people who jump onto your network, the more free data you get.

At first glance, PopTip might seem like a fancy version of TwitPolls. But it’s actually quite different. PopTip lets you ask a question on Twitter with a cc/ #poptip and hashtagged potential answers, and you just sit back and relax as you watch the results flood in in real time. Even better, tweeters are free to misspell words to their little hearts desire, and if they forget a hashtag, PopTip picks it up anyways. Each results page then has detailed metrics on who’s answering what, and when.

We’ve seen a few curated shopping apps on the iPad, like Buyou, but none pull in recommendations from your friends like Pickie. Pickie has tons of categories for you to choose from as you embark on your mobile shopping adventure, letting you browse socially (looking at friend’s recommendations), view editorial pages, see trending products, and check out a full-fledged discover page.

10sheet is looking to disrupt an old, old industry: bookkeeping. With a solid mix of automation software and real-life bookkeeping services, 10sheet can get the job done much faster and for much less money than a traditional bookkeeper.

ConditionOne is a new iPad/iPhone video player brought straight to you from a professional war photographer turned Academy Award-nominated documentarian. The player doesn’t require any new hardware to shoot the film, but lets the viewer pan and tilt the iPad around to get a full 180-degree view.

Wander is the intersection of Pinterest and Yelp. It beautifies a list of places you’ve been or dream of visiting with tons of gorgeous templates. It also introduces a new form of internet language: the star mention (*mention). This way, users can not only browse vertically through a person’s Wanderlog, they can also search horizontally through a specific place’s wanderlog.

Classtivity aggregates all the leisure and fitness classes around you with filters for time, date, place, and price. You can even book some of the classes straight from Classtivity. For both the user and the venue, it’s a win-win.

Marquee is a simple web-based authoring tool that allows publishers to build beautiful pages with no coding experience whatsoever. Using drag-and-drop tools, Marquee integrates with the cloud to let you pull from your desktop, Dropbox, Soundcloud, Vimeo or Instagram, and publishes directly to Facebook or Twitter with your permission. Since the technology only captures a data representation of your page (rather than the data itself), it’s compatible across almost any publishing platform.

Bondsy is a new social network that makes simple transactions and trades really simple. In fact, it’s as easy as snapping a picture of your old TV with your phone and uploading it to Bondsy. From there, only your friends and friends of friends can see your goodies, allowing a level of discovery and trust into the experience.

Rewind.Me captures your entire digital history. Right now that means your Foursquare check-ins but eventually that will include all your likes, your Twitter hashtags, your Instagram mentions, and any other piece of your history that manifests itself in digital form. Using this data, Rewind can then help brands better target customers and offer loyal users rewards.

Moveline is David going up against the Goliath world of the moving industry. But remember, David won. The idea is that the moving industry currently takes a lot of time, energy and paper to give you a single quote. Moveline takes all of your inventory through FaceTime or through videos sent in on the Internet, and can offer you quotes from multiple companies to make sure you’re going with the right (and the cheapest) service.

SmallKnot harnesses the power of crowdsourcing and brings it back home. The service lets you invest small amounts into local businesses that you both frequent and care about. The business can then repay you in kind, costing them very little but likely gaining them even more loyalty from you.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Lua, a company focused on enhancing communication and project management within mobile workforces, has just launched today at the Techstars NYC Demo Day. The software allows any mobile workforce, from a production crew on a film set to construction workers to salespeople, to communicate throughout the day on their smartphones. It’s a messaging platform, at its core, that facilitates one-way messaging, two-way messaging, conference calling and document sharing among every member of a crew.

So let’s paint a little picture.

A director or producer on a film set has about a million different teams to work with. There’s hair and makeup, wardrobe, talent, camera crew, sound crew, and probably a whole bunch of other ones that I don’t know anything about. Not all of them need to see or hear the same messages, so Lua allows the admin to categorize people into specific groups, either from the app or from a web dashboard.

From there, the admin can make an announcement and see read receipts for each individual to make sure that the message has been heard loud and clear. The admin can also require an actual response as a confirmation of receipt, in which case the workers see a Copy That button.

Messages can be sent to the whole crew, specific groups, or one-to-one, and conference calling is also available within the app itself.

Lua has already signed on clients like the Batman production crew, the Mets baseball team, and American Idol, and today announces a partnership with YouTube who is taking Lua to the Olympics this year. Lua is available on iOS and Android with an SMS app plug-in allowing every phone to get in on the action.

Click to view slideshow.

Check out all of the cool stuff that came out of TechStars NYC Demo Day here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today at the TechStars NYC Demo Day, Pickie launched onto the scene. At its core, it’s an iPad magazine that is totally personalized based on all brand mentions from friends and the people you follow. Nothing’s stronger than the power of word of mouth, and with social networks abounding, bringing those personal recommendations online only makes sense.

On Pickie, shopping with the help of your favorite blogs and friends becomes super simple. The layout is somewhat Pinterest-esque, with category tiles for Home Goods, Arts, Gadgets, Furniture, Crafts, Gifts, and Clothing. Once you’ve clarified the categories you’re interested in, Pickie pulls in only viable products that have been recommended or mentioned by your friends.

Content is broken up into four different verticals. Social content is only the content your friends have been chatting about, whereas trending content offers up the most popular items within your categories. Pickie also includes editorial pages compiled by the Pickie team, along with a Discover page. The more Pickie learns about you, the better the Discover page will look to you.

In essence, product data and social data are coming together within the well-designed app to make purchasing that much easier. Any product you click on will display a price, availability, and anything your friends have said about it.

The service is launching on the iPad, where 90 percent of mobile shopping goes down. Revenue comes in through sponsored products, marketing in a natural way to users without being intrusive.

Pickie is currently in the process of raising a $1 million seed round.

Check out all of the cool stuff that came out of TechStars NYC Demo Day here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

One thing small businesses struggle with most is bookkeeping — it’s tedious, time-consuming, and it can be really confusing come tax season. Because of this, most folks turn to bookkeepers to do the dirty work for them, at a cost of hundreds of dollars a month. That’s where 10sheet comes in.

The old model, which involves a traditional bookkeeper, leaves people hauling stacks of paper to their bookkeeper and wrangling together shoeboxes full of receipts. With the new model, it’s as simple as hopping online.

You set up your financial accounts the same way you would with Mint.com, and you have two routes for sending in your receipts. You can either snap a photo and send them in through the app, or book a FedEx pick-up direct from within the application to have your receipts messengered back to 10sheet.

Through machine learning and computer vision techniques, 10sheet has a rather powerful automation tool that takes care of most of the heavy lifting. This includes categorizing transactions and matching up receipts to bank statements and credit card statements. Every user is also assigned a real-life bookkeeper who works out of 10sheet’s NY office. The bookkeeper is on-call to answer any questions via phone or email, and check that everything matches up properly.

It’s this mix of software and service that keeps 10sheet way ahead of the competition in terms of pricing. Whereas you’d spend at least a couple hundred dollars a month using a traditional bookkeeper, 10sheet only costs $69 per month, saving small businesses quite a bit of cash. That goes a long way in this economy.

Lauching out of TechStars NYC Demo Day, 10sheet is available now to anyone. So if you’re interested, check out 10sheet now and get started.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

More often than not, a crowdsourced answer is the right one. Just take a look at Estimize — the anonymous user base of 6,500 users is more accurate than Wall Street 67 percent of the time when estimating the trajectory of a company’s stock. So it only follows that brands would want to harness this type of data, which is why PopTip has just launched into existence at TechStars NYC Demo Day.

The service offers real-time polling for any question and can handle misspelled words or responses that haven’t been hashtagged.

From there, pollers can see results fly by in real-time, and check out organized reports of each results page, which can then be shared. To ask a question, you simply write out a question (like “Who makes the best hardware?”) followed by possible answers with hashtags (like “#Apple #RIM #HTC #Motorola #Samsung #Sony #LG #Nokia), and cc/ #poptip. Whether you’re tweeting from the PopTip dash or Twitter the results will be tracked and sent straight back to PopTip.

For now the service only works with Twitter, but eventually PopTip will head to Facebook and be able to give brands more knowledge around long-term engagement and specific demographic data. This, and real-time result tracking, are the main differentiators between TwitPolls and PopTip.

Here’s a look at how it works:

Poptip Product Walkthrough from Poptip on Vimeo.

Check out all of the cool stuff that came out of TechStars NYC Demo Day here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Danfung Dennis is a war photographer.

He’s covered the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was nominated for a 2012 Academy Award for his documentary, “Hell And Back Again”. But he’s ready to tackle a new space: technology. His company, ConditionOne, has created a video player for the iPad and iPhone that offers a full 180 degree view, allowing the user to pan or tilt the device to look around inside the video.

So you open up the player, either through the C1 app or inside a branded application, and calibrate by pressing a little cross hair button that pops up. After setting your positioning, you can move the iPad around in front of you (similar to how you would with an AR app) and look around 180 degrees while the video is playing.

Brands are able to use an API to bake the viewer right into their own app, or market their content as a stand-alone product.

Brands and media companies can license the software from C1 to distribute content through the ConditionOne player, and then create real-life experiences for their users and consumers. The key here is that the C1 player doesn’t require any new camera hardware or interrupt the usual work flow of photographer or filmmaker, making it an attractive avenue for brands. A number of companies have signed on to joint the ConditionOne pilot program, including Mercedes, Discovery Communications, XL Recordings, The Guardian, and Popular Science.

In fact, Popular Science has just released a ConditionOne-equipped app that takes you through the ATLAS Large Hadron Collider.

We’ve also learned that Mark Cuban has invested $500,000 in the startup.

Check out all of the cool stuff that came out of TechStars NYC Demo Day here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Class. Most of us spend our entire teenage and early adult life trying to get out of it, only to realize that going to a class and learning something new is a walk in the park compared to a life with bills, professional responsibility, and a generally over-obligated existence. But Classtivity has an answer: a class.

See, founder Payal Kadakia was a dancer her entire life, before attending MIT. But she realized after leaving these worlds that she missed dance, and looked to find a local ballet class to get her groove back. She realized, to her own dismay, that there really wasn’t a service that aggregates various class information on a local level, so she built one.

Classtivity pulls in information from throughout New York for 8,000 leisure and fitness classes per week. This includes anything from dance, yoga, sports, physical fitness, and martial arts, to photography, cooking, arts and crafts, beauty and fashion, and music and vocal. Users can choose classes based on their own filters, like location, interest, schedule, and price.

Users will be privy to expert reviews, ratings and reviews, and even sign-up for optional class reminders through email, calendar and text message. They’ll be able to browse venue-specific commentary in a feature called “Expert Says” and check out teacher profiles for various classes. Social is also built in to let users share classes and follow their favorite class providers, all of which provides an easy environment to stay motivated.

Most importantly, Classtivity offers a portal to book classes through the site itself, for select classes. This is the crux of the company’s business model, as Classtivity will take a percentage of every transaction. If Classtivity proves to be a success with end-users, scalability shouldn’t really be an issue. If a certain gym or organization isn’t set up to perform bookings through Classtivity, it only takes a couple handfuls of new users getting filtered into classes through the service for that gym or organization to realize that the system can be just as beneficial to them as it is to the class-takers.

The private beta is currently in New York City, but the company has plans to move into Los Angeles and San Francisco later this year. The secret sauce, as Kadakia told me, is the ability to aggregate the most classes in the fastest way possible, allowing for national scalability at a rapid pace. In fact, Kadakia claims that Classtivity has the ability to offer a half a million classes nationwide every month.

Check out all of the cool stuff that came out of this season’s TechStars NYC Demo Day here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

These days, everyone can be a publisher. All you need is something to publish, and you can throw that thing on a Tumblr, a WordPress blog, or even publish it as an eBook. There are plenty of channels through which you can offer your creations to the world, but layout continues to be an issue.

Marquee aims to change all that. Launching today at the TechStars NYC Demo day, Marquee is offering a web-based authoring tool that lets you drag and drop content from the desktop or the cloud and format with simple tools.

Files can be pulled from the computer or Dropbox, and Marquee has plans to add SoundCloud, Vimeo, and Instagram support in the next few weeks. After simply dragging and dropping content, users can re-size images or text boxes, format the text, add links, and mess with alignment. Coding isn’t even a part of the picture.

Marquee also has templates for users that can’t quite get their feet off the ground, but users are more than welcome to start from scratch and build something totally unique. But what’s publishing without a social sharing layer built right-in? That said, users will be able to build pages sans sign-up, or sign-in with Facebook, Twitter or email to save their pages in a collection. If users opt-in, Marquee will even publish their work direct to Twitter or Facebook, and soon downloading pages as ePub or mobi files will be possible as well.

But the plans for this thing are somewhat limitless. See, Marquee stores a data representation of your page rather than the page itself, meaning that the page can be served over an API allowing almost any third-party application or website to properly integrate it.

But how do they make any money? As usual, it takes money to make money, which is why Marquee is soon integrating tools that allow for digital payments and for downloads and subscriptions. Pair that with premium collaboration tools and voila! Marquee has a business model.

Click to view slideshow.

Check out all of the cool stuff that came out of this season’s TechStars NYC Demo Day here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch