Nothing more frustrating than coming to an office and find out there is no one to greet you, or direct you to your host. Often small offices and start-ups do not have budget for paying a person to perform this task. The team at mygreetly.com saw on this issue a business opportunity. They offer you an Ipad App capable of notifying, directing, and logging your visitors. I like this idea, because it is simple, scales, and solves a clear problem. Also very compelling is their pricing strategy. There is an interview with the CEO at the blog AlleyWatch where he explains more this cool idea.
Looking to Invest? Would you buy stock from a Pro-Athlete?
If your answer is yes, then you should look into fantex.com. Last year, I attended a presentation of the company at MIT; it certainly grabbed my attention because of the innovative way to invest your money. The proposition is that people can own stock which is linked to the future cash flows of the professional athlete. Complicated? Not so much if you have a few basics understanding of underlying assets, cash flows, and stock market. Currently you can invest and own “a piece” of 49’ers wide receiver Vernon Williams, or Cincinnati wide receiver Mohamed Sanu. I don’t have data to show you how fantex is doing; however, this is a good example that new start-ups and ideas are hidden in any industry; best ideas are at the intersection of areas, this one for me is right at the corner of finance and sports.
Voice Recognition and the IoT
While the Internet of Things (IoT) keeps growing, with more start-ups going down that way, it is important that the voice recognition technology evolves. The power of the voice commands complements nicely compelling IoT gadgets and products. Let’s not forget situations where touching screens are not an option – cooking or driving -. Big giants like Apple and Google have deep pockets to pour millions in the developing of the Voice Recognition Technology, but smaller software or hardware companies do not have this financial capacity. The Californian Company Wit.ai is aiming to offer their voice recognition products free in exchange for user data. This is a very interesting proposition, and more than 4,500 developers are already using their products. I strongly advice to take a look at this form of collaboration for your start-up. – This post is based in an Article from the MIT Technology Review (Vol 188/2015 – Written by Rachel Metz)
Avoid the email blah blah…
I stumbled upon this product, spin off from MIT Media Lab, while trying to find an app which could help avoid the irrelevant content of my emails. This company, called Requall, offers you a machine learning technology assistant to make your inbox intelligent. It helps you extract the important content of the emails you received. This proves great while you are on-the-go, therefore their products are applications to install in your smartphone, glass, or wristwatch. Requall is a venture backed business with operations in the US and Asia. The team is great, and it counts with Alex “Sandy” Pentland as Chief Product Advisor (Sandy has a vast reputation on web/network research and more). Try out and let me know what you think. Info here
Designing for the poor
We all know great stories of people, and companies creating an impact in those countries in need. Today, I’d like to introduce you to a company spun off the MIT Media Lab. It is called DtM – Design That Matters. DtM helps, by design, improve the life of people. They use human factor design, and rapid prototyping techniques to identify where their biggest impact can be done. DtM works on those communities who are miss by the commercial market. They have work in Asia and Africa, they use crowfunding and donations to finance their activities. This is a great example of people with ideas and brains willing to make a better world!
If you want to learn more about this great company click here.
Startup coming from Colombia
Lately Colombia has been receiving a lot of attention in terms of innovation. Medellin and Bogota are becoming hubs and references for the Latin-American region. It seems that the giant sleeping is waking up; don’t forget that Colombia has 40Millions inhabitants, it is the 3rd larger country in the region behind Brazil and Mexico. Definitely a market to keep an eye on.
Mashpedia is a service that grabbed my attention because of the simplicity of the product, and ease to use. Mashpedia provides a vast video encyclopedia for any kind of topic. It works as a search engine just for videos. The platform is built on top of YouTube, and it uses the power of Wikipedia. Mashpedia receives 1Million unique users every month, and growing. (check Mashpedia here).
Two fresh concepts
Today, we will bring you two different concepts and ideas. They keep proving that innovations and start-ups can come from many angles.
Swedish company Volumental is in the business of customizing clothing and with a beachhead segment in shoes. They are intending to revolutionize the way we buy online. By scanning our foot and uploading it to the platform, Volumental will suggest the best fitting for us; the company was backup by investors with $3 million in seed funding. (info about the founder here).
Lantern is company which help you asses and improve your well-being based on 5 measures (sleep, body, mood, relationship, stress). Latern will make a diagnosis of your situation, propose daily and tailored exercises, and will give you access to professional coaches for follow ups and feedback. Lantern is used on some university campuses for the well-being of students. (more info here).
So many cool things
I’ve been writing this blog in Spanish, sharing what I have seen lately in the world of innovation; I am focused in products already on the market floor or being developed by Startups. I have tried to throw some variety across the products, hope you like the selection.
We talked about Cubic, a voice recognition device which is able to interact with multiple platforms. Cubic has an attractive design, and can help you perform actions with Nest, Fitbit, and Social Media Platforms (more info). Very cool product to follow.
If you like flexible displays, take a look at Arubix. This device will take 2/3 of your forearm, and it will give you access to a lot of information on-the-go while doing sports or other activities (more info). Remains to be seen if the market will give them a relative advantage vs what the smartphone is already doing! For me it is a cool accessory.
If you public speak often, take a look at polleverywhere. This platform helps you interact with your audience (more info). I have been in lectures or talks where speakers were using it, and the engagement grows exponentially.
Also, we showed new approaches in the job hunting space. We believe that companies, still, adopt very basic techniques when finding candidates. Even today, the resume is king and past performance rules. In this field there is a variety of startups working on disruption to gamify the process. For the moment, we give you two very similar platforms that attempt to give more information to job seekers themuse.com (USA) and tyba.com (Europe).
Finally, we presented two solutions to give you a hand while selling online. The first one is Foldio which helps in taking studio quality pictures for your items, we all know how important a photo is -when transacting online. The second one is the MIT Media Lab spin off: Sold. This platforms helps you finding the right price of your article, and supporting the shipping and payment exchange. It was recently acquired by Dropbox – remains to be seen Dropbox plans with Sold., stay tune!
Como Vender Mejor on-line
La mayoría de nosotros hemos usado portales como ebay.com o craiglist.com para vender artículos personales. Si alguna vez lo has hecho, de seguro te has encontrado con los mismos obstáculos. ¿Cuál es el verdadero precio de mi artículo? Y ¿cómo hago que luzca mejor, o por lo menos no tan mal, en la foto? Bien dos empresas startups se han hecho la misma pregunta y traen dos soluciones. Foldio es un estudio portátil que ayuda a tomar mejores fotografías. Tienen una muy inteligente forma de darle mejor luz a los artículos. La foto hace una diferencia enorme a la hora de decantarnos por un artículo u otro en un proceso de compra – si no preguntar a cualquier agente de finca raíz (info del version 2 del producto aqui).
La segunda empresa es nacida del MIT Media Lab y recientemente adquirida por Dropbox. Sold nos ayuda a calcular el precio correcto del artículo, y nos da una mano con todo el proceso de compra/venta (envíos, pagos etc…). No es muy obvio para que quiere Dropbox una empresa de este estilo, de no ser por diversificar; tal vez la ha adquirido por sus algoritmos y equipo de dirección. Hay que mantenerse alerta para ver lo que produce Dropbox (por cierto otra empresa marca MIT). (Info sobre Sold aquí)
Una Ventana para Observar Empresas
Para los que están en la no fácil tarea de buscar empleo, les dejo estas dos opciones con propuestas similares; en los dos casos, se trata de dar más detalles a los candidatos que los modelos tradicionales (monster.com, indeed.com, LinkedIn.com). Por un lado tenemos a themuse.com, enfocada en el mercado de EEUU; y por otro tyba.com enfocada en mercados europeos. Las dos firman permiten a los candidatos valorar y observar cómo se trabaja al interior de las empresas; es verdad que no permiten ir tan en profundidad, y que alguien podría sospechar de la objetividad de la información que una firma deja ver de sí misma. Sin embargo, solo el hecho que la firma deje ver sus oficinas y esté dispuesta a entrar en el juego, puede ser un buen síntoma.
En mi opinión, on-line recruitment es un área a explorar e innovar; en su mayoría la contratación se sigue haciendo de una manera muy tradicional, currículos (CV), hojas de vida etc… las empresas son incapaces de ver potencial, y más bien miran rendimiento en el pasado. En estos momentos hay muchos más intentos como glassdoor.com, hired.com, y klout.com, además de un puñado de startup tratando de gamificar el proceso de selección. Definitivamente esta es un área que verá muchos cambios en el futuro cercano.
Cool to share 