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So What’s The Big Deal About Amsterdam Startup: Karma

(photo: TheVerge)

The tech based interwebs typically go hog wild anytime Josh Topolsky and the crew at The Verge write about anything. It’s just about the same reaction when Michael Arrington suggests something on Twitter. 90% of the time both Arrington and the Verge are right about what they are writing about. But as far as I’m concerned, not this time.

An Amsterdam based startup called “Karma” was in the spring class of TechStars New York and presented on Thursday morning during TechStars NY Demo day.

Their product was actually pretty cool, and under a different set of circumstances, or maybe two years ago, it would have been a game changer. But really, it’s not. Combine that with the fact that they lied on stage during their demo day presentation and we’re quickly called out by Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick, and well, maybe they should just go back to Amsterdam.

But before we get into the lies, the cars and the planes… let’s talk about why fundamentally this is a stupid idea, in 2012.

Karma is a “hot spot” sharing startup. According to their pitch deck they promote what they are calling “social telecom”. It works like this. The actual user purchases a re-packaged Sprint/Clearwire Overdrive miff portable hotspot for $69 from Karma. They then pay as they go $14 per gig for internet.

Then, they share their wifi with complete strangers. Now it’s pretty secure that’s not the issue. When a sharer signs onto XX persons Karma mi-fi they are taken to an “about” page about the owner of the hotspot, perhaps you can do some of your own advertising or invite them to see pictures of your dog.

The “sharer” signs into the miff using their Facebook and they are given 100mb of internet on that particular mifi. The person who’s miff they are on is given a matching, free 100mb. So potentially if you let 10 people sign on per week through their Facebook you’re earning an extra GB in free internet from Karma.

Now statistics show that the average Joe uses 221mb of internet a month so it’s really not a bad deal on the surface.

Why don’t I like it? Well first off it’s Clearwire’s WiMax service. In June 2012 unless you live under a bridge in the arctic circle you know that Clearwire nor Sprint is taking on the daunting task of building out any more wi-max network. That faux G is over and making way for LTE.

Clearwire most likely has no interest in this partnership with Karma for their LTE product which is still a good ways away.

Now secondly, it may be against something you didn’t read in the Clearwire TOS, in fact it probably is, but there’s nothing that says you can’t sell your wifi/mifi password for say $2.00 or $5.00 to a colleague or friend. If you get a couple of those guys, then you’re paying your whole internet bill in no time.

Then there’s that whole issue of Facebook, and tracking and data going back to Facebook, Karma, Clearwiere and everybody’s partners.

Next is, how do you go about sharing this anyway. Do you sit down in Central Park and say “Hey Bro, you can get on my wifi, all you gotta do is sign in through Facebook”, yeah that doesn’t sound the last bit shady.

Now we may not have to worry about Karma. They lied on the stage at TechStars Demo day today and it didn’t slip past the great crew over at Betabeat.

Reportedly (and now admittedly), Karma’s CEO Robert Gaal, stood on the stage at Demo Day and said that they had already forged partnerships with ride sharing startup Uber and American Airlines. Whoops….

Apparently their partnership with Uber was a total lie and Kalanick quickly took to Twitter to correct Mr.Gaal with these tweets (source:BetaBeat)

Gaal failed miserably at trying to diffuse the situation and then eventually took to Tumblr to all but admit he was lying and not just about Uber about American Airlines too. Gaal said on Tumblr:

We apologize profusely for claiming Uber and American Airlines are working with us – a statement we never received explicit permission to use. And we apologize to TechStars and the whole TechStars community. We did not mean to overstate anything or unfairly take advantage of the network and the opportunities it has opened up for us.

The Verge and their comment community hypothesized that for Karma to be truly successful in the United States, they would need to partner with one of the major carriers, after today’s spectacular Demo Day performance, that’s not likely happening.

Linkage:

I mean if you want to, you can check out Karma here

Here’s the source piece from the Verge

And the story about the mistruths from BetaBeat

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Brother can you spare a Big Mac?

Nebraska Startup: Arch Get Photo & Video Answers To Your Questions From Anyone

A Nebraska based startup called “Arch” has a different spin on the recommendation space. With Arch, you join the ArchCrowd network and then you are tasked with the duty of helping your fellow Arch network members with their requests for information, pictures and video.

Suppose you live in Kansas and you’re about to partake on your first trip to our nation’s capital in Washington DC. If you sign up for Arch you can ask questions, like “what is there to do in Washington DC”. From there Arch will find someone in the Arch network in Washington DC who can answer your question.

The Arch person answering your question can take photos or videos of things to do in DC and send them back to you. You’ll receive a push notification when a fellow Arch member has responded to your request. As more and more Arch members arrive in Washington DC to start their day or what have you, they will also get a notification to answer your question. Soon you’ve crowd sourced a bunch of things to do in Washington DC.

Arch makes it easy to supply answers via photos, videos or even just text. If you’re looking for things to do, hotels to stay at, places to eat, places to walk or just a quiet corner to read a book on a trip, Arch lets you connect with real people who have decided they want to help people, by signing up for Arch.

The Arch platform at archcrowd.com is still in private beta. In fact Co-founder Joe Smith attended Apple’s WWDC conference in San Francisco CA this week and was fielding Arch requests from the San Francisco area all week long.

The Arch team of four co-founders spoke last month at Cornstalks a monthly forum for individuals interested in high growth entrepreneurship.

The team includes: (from their website)

Tim Hermanson: (top left) Arch project manager – Tim received a B.S. in business administration/finance from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2006. Tim has over 5 years of experience managing various projects at a large, local bank with a focus on compliance and operations.

Mike Ackerman: (top right) Webserver architecture and API specification for Arch – Mike graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2006 with a B.S. in Computer Engineering and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He has since worked in Industrial Automation and Software Engineering focusing on .NET.

Joe Smith: (bottom left) Mobile client application design and implementation – Joe received a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Joe has 6+ years experience as a software engineer designing and implementing both server-side and user-facing software projects using a variety of technologies and platforms.

Kari Petsche: (bottom right) Arch graphic design lead – Kari graduated from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh with a degree in graphic design in 2001. In the past ten years, Kari has won several design awards working with clients such as Tim Burton, Warner Brothers, NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, 20th Century Fox, Tavern On The Green & The Bonnaroo Music Festival.

Linkage

Check out Arch at their website here

Follow them on the Angel List here

Big props to our homies at Silicon Prairie For this story and that pic we borrowed

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Boston Startup: PingUp, Text Messaging Businesses INTERVIEW

When Boston startup PingUp, co-founder and CEO Mark Slater was onhold for an ungodly amount of time with his cable company for a two minute conversation a lightbulb went off in his head. He thought to himself, “wouldn’t it be great if I could text the cable company”. That’s where the idea for Pingup came from, as we’ll learn in just a few minutes in our interview below.

Imagine the ability to text in a tee time at your favorite golf course, or text the auto shop to see if your cars done. Now there’s no need for waiting on hold forever or miss-communicating information with a third party in trying to find out basic information.

Imagine if you could text the restaurant to say you’re running five minutes late. Maybe you would want to text your favorite clothing store to see if they have the pants you love in your size.

None of these elements of conversation take more than a minute on the phone, and even less time via text message. While some people I know don’t get the inherent idea about why texting is such a great method of communication for business, it is.

Texting has become such a natural way of life and as millennials pour into the work force a shift will come and texting will continue to trump actually talking on the phone. Sure people rather hear voices for context in some situations but, “do you have the new jordans in a size 12” doesn’t really require much for context.

All of this is why PingUp will most likely do great. Check out our interview with Pingup below the break.

Australian Startup: Attendly, CEO Offers Infographic: What Founders Should Be Able To Do

Attendly is an event registration and ticketing platform focused on the needs of event managers and web developers. It’s fully white labeled so the event organizer can adopt Attendly’s technology as their own and let Attendly run the background for any well attended event.

The Melbourne Australia based startups CEO and founder, Scott Handsaker is a world traveler, black belt in Taekwondo, sky diver, and he doesn’t eat meat or fish. More importantly he is an entrepreneur and a founder himself. As such he has developed this inforgraphic to show the things that Founders of any startup should be able to do.

The highlights include, understanding a term sheet, cold calling c-level executives, and writing a novel. Check out the info graphic below and see how you measure up to this interesting infographic.

Linkage:

Check out Attendly here

Help a brother out here

Toronto Startup: Kytephone Is A New Android UI Just For Kids

A Toronto startup, that was also a member of the winter Y-Combinator class, is hoping to lure parents who are equipping their children with Android powered smartphones. The startup is called Kytephone and it provides a new “launcher” or “UI” to Android phones that it is installed on, with parental controls, great kid friendly graphics and access to apps and functions that children of any age could use.

The best part about Kytephone is it’s customization ability. What Kytephone does, is it allows parents to lockdown certain things on their children’s Android phones. In some cases it could be for younger children so they don’t go off and dial 900 numbers by accident and in other cases it can be customized for tweens or teens to restrict access to features that could get them in trouble.

Kytephone allows the parent to customize access to just about every function of an Android phone. For instance Kytephone could be set up for a younger child, say 4-7 who could use the Kytephone UI to make calls to mom, grandma and brothers and sisters. They could also have access to the phones camera for taking pictures, and maybe a few games.

For tweens and teens, Kytephone allows the parents to set parameters for texting times, and even game playing times. When time is up, the child could be restricted to just texting mom and dad, and they may have to wait until the next day to finish that level on that game they played for an hour.

Kytephone has also found that some of their users are installing the Android app onto phones of senior citizens and elderly folks who may not want the bells and whistles of a full fledged Android smartphone.

There are all kinds of companies out there that are offering some sort of software, similar to Kytephone however it seems that in customization and design Kytephone may have a leg up. In fact one of the competitors, Play Safe, has very similar functionality to Kytephone because their founder, Beakit.com reports, was in the Y-Combinator class with Kytephone co-founder Renat Gautaullin.

Kytephone has since graduated out of Y-Combinator and moved back home to Canada where they are part of the RyersonDMZ Incubator.

Overall Kytephone seems a little more customizable and a lot more robust than competing products. It’s also not tied exclusively to a carrier which means down the road if a user got a new Android phone on a different carrier they could just download Kytephone again and reuse it.

Kytephone is available free in the Google Play store. Gautaullin reports that they are working on some premium features, like timers to close off certain types of apps like games, and other things in the pipeline.

Linkage:

Find out more about Kytephone here

Download it here in the Google Play Store

Source: Betakit

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Austin Startup: Top5Foods Is A Scoreboard For Restaurants

Alex Zwernemann, the founder of Austin based startup Top5Foods, created an easy to understand ratings/scoreboard style platform for restaurants. Top5Foods was the Statesman’s featured startup over the weekend. It takes a totally different approach to the food app and food site.

While apps like Urban Spoon serve up restaurants one at a time in a ratings based model, Top5Foods does exactly what the name suggests and serves them up according to the top 5. The data is crowdsourced across the network of Top5Foods users.

Top5Foods shows the restaurants and their local rankings but if you would prefer to see how they do across the entire network you can do that as well. If you’re a die hard foodie Top5Foods could serve as a great starting point for a trip to discover the best restaurants in the US. If your favorite restaurant in Austin is outranked by another restaurant in San Francisco, it may be worth the trip to San Francisco to try it out.

Zwernemann told the Statesman in an interview that the concept was born after a 2009 trip to San Francisco. He set out to find a couple great restaurants to go to and it took over 2 hours of research. Naturally he thought there was an easier way.

Top5Foods is unique because the user base is constantly moving restaurants up and down the scoreboard similar to a way a story moves on reedit or hacker news.

Top5Foods is already operational in Austin, Houston and Dallas. Zwernemann hopes to bring Philadelphia and Washington DC on soon as well.

He hopes to continue improving Top5Foods by adding more and more categories like top 5 lunch spots, top 5 happy hour spots etc.

Linkage:

Check out Top5Foods here at their website

Source: Austin Statesman

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New York Startup: SinglePlatform Acquired By Constant Contact For $100M

Another New York startup has just had a really big exit. This time it was, web and mobile advertising specialists SinglePlatform. As the name implies, SinglePlatform is one centralized robust advertising platform that allows advertisers to update their advertising in one centralized location.

Our friends at tech.li report that SinglePlatform estimates their reach to be 200 million people every month. SinglePlatform allows the management of advertising space both big and small.

“SinglePlatform lets small businesses quickly distribute rich content so that consumers can find it at the very moment they are looking to make a purchase decision,” Constant Contact said in a press release. “The SinglePlatform offering complements the current Constant Contact suite of online engagement marketing tools by helping small businesses reach and engage their next customer even earlier in the customer lifecycle.”

Forbes reports that the deal was structured as $65 million in cash, $5 million in cash and equity for retention purposes, and up to $30 million based on performance over the next two years, for a total of $100 million.

The company expects the deal to contribute $10 million in 2013 and adds that it should be accretive in late 2013 to early 2014.

Linkage:

Chicago Get Ready For TechCocktail June 24th

The other TC (TechCocktail) will be holding one of their great mixer events in Chicago on June 24th as part of the TechWeek celebration.

This event takes the shape of their normal TechCocktail mixers which means plenty of networking, casual pitches and cocktails of course. You’ll be able to meet Frank Gruber and the entire TechCocktail team at the event being brought to you in part by the fine folks at Motorola Mobility.

They also have a little known soft drink company called Coca Cola sponsoring as well. Yes, us non drinkers can perpetrate a great TechCocktail fraud at the event.

If you’re a startup in the area you can apply for a demo spot here

If you’re a tech enthusiast you can get a ticket here

TechWeek badge holders will get in free but need to RSVP here

Ethics statement: We love Frank and the staff at TechCocktail for their commitment to tech and startups all over the country. We don’t do events ourselves but love to hang out at all the TechCocktail events we can, we’ll see you there.

Vancouver Startup Thinkingbox: touching consumers and corporations alike

via thinkingbox.ca

Everywhere Else: Thinkingbox is Vancouver based startup with offices in Vancouver, Toronto and Los Angeles. They bring touch to the advertising space. As they state in their about page, “As a true interactive house, our focus is to provide a 2-way communication for all brands.

[DISCLAIMER] I HATE ADVERTISING, I felt it was necessary to mention that prior to going into this article. I believe it is a necessary evil as it provides us with great and useful information for “free” (ala Google) or provides an income for sites like ours (however modest, in our case extremely modest). I tend to have ad blocking on most of the computers I use and on all my Android devices. The reason is simple – very often ads get in the way of the experience. Either through pop ups that have impossibly small close buttons or by being rudely smartly placed by those who run sites like ours.

I have to admit that a company such as thinkingbox could be what changes my view on some advertising. One thing that has always been missing in most ads, I believe, is the actual ability to truly communicate with the companies. I don’t know if thinkingbox can change that just yet. What they have managed to do is make advertising campaigns more personal by adding interactive elements to in-store displays, billboards, and building full featured digital campaigns. They explain what their focus is, “Serving the advertising industry we focus on alternative media such as Touch Screen Billboards, 2-Way Interactive Campaigns, Touch and Motion Storefronts, Mobile and Tablet Applications and everything digital.”

I have wondered how long until all the different forms of advertising would converge into a unified experience. Thinkingbox is pushing towards that idea. Once they can provide websites like ours with advertising that can really pull our readers in we hope that the (extremely modest) ad income might be able to become something better – like decent.

We will be following up with them and hope to have an interview with the founder Amir Sahba and/or Director of Interactivity Natalie Elbracht within the next couple of weeks. I’ve included videos to some of their recent work. You can find their portfolio here

Starbucks – My Starbucks Rewards Interactive Display :

Starbucks “My Starbucks Rewards” Interactive Display from thinkingbox on Vimeo.

Approach: Thinkingbox implemented a fun, whimsical and engaging interactive application which was prominently featured as a touch-interactive display window. Animated falling stars beckoned passer-byes to engage, touch and explore. Players can make the stars follow their finger, collapse into a gravity well or explode off the screen. Delightful animated details such as motion blur and bouncy spring motion enhanced the whimsical nature of the piece. The application was deployed and ran on both Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

Another example is from the Nike #KobeSystem brand. In thinkingbox’s words,

Scope: This custom app was featured along side the Nike Kobe VII System basketball shoes at a downtown Toronto Nike retailer. Customers could try out Nike shoes and then watch funny commercials featuring Kobe Bryant himself, explaining the Kobe System to various celebrities. These videos were compressed and optimized into the app that would also capture metrics on how well the app was able to engage customers.

Approach: A rich multimedia experience was required to showcase the Kobe System brand. An iPad was chosen as the medium because of its portable multitouch capability, multimedia options and ease of development.

The Kobe video can be found below:

Linkage:

Thinkingbox

Nibletz: On The Road Again – We like Ramen but we love Dinner For Two

Philly’s Novotorium Hosting “Not A Hackathon” Entrepreneur Sleepover June 27 & 28th

Mike Krupit and the crew at Novotorium are holding a really cool event June 27th and 28th in Philadelphia. The event, that they’re calling the “Not a hackathon” Entrepreneur Sleepover. The event is not a “build a startup in 48 hours” type event. Rather it’s more like a weekend worth of valuable office hours to refine your startup, develop your product, work on your marketing and pick the brains of Krupit, and other great mentors.

Novotorium promises 36 straight hours of “eye popping, brain swelling, undulterated business progress”

There is a $20 participation charge which of course will cover things like fuel (food and red bull) along with other considerations. But not only that, there will be a $2,000 prize. Krupit told Nibletz.com the companies won’t do “pitches” but their progress throughout the weekend will be judged by the Novotorium and SeedPhilly team. Both Novotorium and SeedPhilly will meet with each startup individually.

The best part of the entire process is that everyone will be on hand all 36 hours, so if you’re knee deep into problem solving at 3am you’ll be able to get a mentor to help you solve your problem.

Krupit responded to criticism on the Phily Startup Leaders List Serv saying:

“We know that there are entrepreneurs are reluctant to attend hackathons or startup weekends because they don’t own what the community helps them produce. That’s why we called this a “Not-a” hackathon – to demonstrate its approach from another perspective. We added the cash prize as an incentive to those who maybe weren’t purely in it for the community, learning, and fun.

The $20 registration is a token to basically ensure that people show up. It’s even lower than other similar events.

This model isn’t for everyone – and we never intended for it to be. There are already a number of registrants, so I’m assuming some find it interesting. For those that do, we’ll build some good business models and product, build more community, and have a good time.”

We totally get it here at nibletz, as we said the best way to describe it is 36 straight hours of office hours type access to some of the best mentors in the Philadelphia area to help any startup who registers, work on their business.

Linkage:

Find out more about this event here

Find out more about Novotorium here and Seed Philly here

This is part of Philly’s Entrepreneur Summer Camp, more here

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New York Startup: Return On Change Crowd Investing For High Impact Startups INTERVIEW

As we get closer and closer to the SEC’s July 4th deadline to come up with rules for crowdfunding startups, we’re likely to see more and more crowdfunding startups emerge. Earlier this month we reported on Ohio crowdfunding startup Fundable who has already opened for business, with a more traditional Kickstarter, Indiegogo model until the crowdfunding rules are announced and brokers are approved.

A New York startup called Return on Change LLC, has also thrown their hit in the crowdfunding arena. They’re now in a private beta and promise to provide a way for investors to connect with game-changing startups.

“The timing could not be better,” said Sang Lee, founder of Return on Change. “We saw the huge potential in crowdfunding, and now, with the signing of the JOBS bill, look forward to connecting investors with ventures that can make a real difference.”

RoC also announced a contest that provides incentives for startups to register. The first 100 startups that meet RoC’s criteria will have the opportunity to win one of three $1,000 funding prizes. The company is seeking startups in the areas of clean energy, biomedical, social ventures and technology.

With all this excitement about crowdfunding we got a chance to speak with Sang Lee, one of the founders of Return On Change. Take a look at the interview below the break.

Toronto Startup: Hashcaster Receives Top Honor At Social Media Camp

I remember the days as a kid at Pine Forest Camp in Greeley Pennsylvania. At the end of the 8 weeks of sleep away camp we’d all gather around the Netsie Playhouse to see who won the coveted camper awards. Fast forward to 2012 and we’re not talking about a nice sleep away camp for jewish boys and girls, we’re talking about a cutthroat and fierce competition between social media companies, called Social Media Camp.

The awards at Social Media Camp are called “Coasties” and they were presented Friday night by Erica Ehm. The Social Media Camp is the largest gathering of social media talent in Victoria British Columbia, eh? (I couldn’t help myself)

The event received more than 100 nominations that began with a public vote and concluded with a panel of expert judges from around the country evaluating the finalists in each category. The judges panel included: Jay Baer, Convince and Convert; Sean Moffitt, Wikibrands; Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD., hummingbird604.com; Simon Salt, The IncSlingers; Scott Stratten, UnMarketing; and Angela Crocker, Beachcomber Communications.

Out of all the entries Hashcaster was named the “Most innovative social media product or technology”.

In a nutshell Hashcaster is a Twitter and hashtag management platform and dashboard specifically catering to the event marketer. Think trade shows, demo days, forums, discussions, sporting events, big conventions etc, they would all benefit from Hashcaster.

Why? Because Hashcaster makes sense of the quickly flowing hashtags. It provides real time analytics for the hashtags that you’ve created for your event and captures tweets that often scroll to quickly across a screen, Twitter wall or smartphone, to make any real use out of them.

Trust, me if there’s one thing I know about, with over 100k followers on Twitter, is Twitter and hash tagging.

Hashcaster also makes it easy for you to manage hashtag variations. Usually leading up to a major event like CES, Comiccon or SXSW, the “official” hash tag and the “unofficial” hashtags get mixed up into a hodge podge of hard to manage tweets. HashCaster allows the event organizers to keep tabs on their major hashtags and variations there of.

In addition to winning the aware Hashcaster actually kept up with the event itself.

Referred to as a “Hashcast”, the platform curates in real-time photos, videos and stories from the event’s hash tag community as it trends on Twitter. It then pushes this content to an event branded web site and advanced in show Twitter wall where participants and visitors from around the world can experience the event virtually. Finally, the platform determines “who and what” is most important to the hash tag community; making highly valued content more visible and helping the community connect with top influencers.

Linkage:

Find out more about Hashcaster here

See Social Media Camps Hashcaster here

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Three Free Things Every New Startup Should Do

Do you remember when you used to be able to go to the school nurse and get three for free? Never mind.

Here are three things that every new startup should do when they first start out. It actually shocks me when I get into serious discussions with startup founders who have a pitch deck, a website, a social media presence, but neglect these three free things.

CrunchBase

Regardless of how you feel about Silicon Valley the biggest source for startups on the planet is CrunchBase. This data base of startups, entrepreneurs, founders, venture capitalists, angel investors, incubators, accelerators, and other startup related people in resources is amazing.

Creating a profile is free. The profiles have to be approved but that process usually takes less than 24 hours. Once approved though your profile as an individual and as your company has a place on CrunchBase.

This is where all the significant news and milestones is compiled “for the record”. When you have news of new top level executives, a funding round, a pivot etc you can add those entries to your CrunchBase profile.

CrunchBase is free. It’s a service of AOL (since the TechCrunch sale to AOL in 2010). Really every semi-serious startup needs a CrunchBase profile.

Angel.co

We give the Angel List (angel.co) a hard time because 90% of their trending news is based in the Valley, 5% in New York and the rest everywhere else. We do report on companies on the list form everywhere else. But again, like CrunchBase it’s free.

Angel.co does a great job of showing what’s hot and what’s not, and it’s actually not the founders of angel.co’s fault that startups “everywhere else” don’t trend. It’s not a matter of what they think, it’a all about traction and how many people endorse you, give you references, invest in you and follow you.

Naturally with the startup ecosystem in the valley they have more startups on the list, and hence trend better.

Regardless of the trending though you really need to register, again it’s free.

FounderSync

FounderSync is a startup themselves and based in Cleveland. It’s another great free resource for startup founders.

Once you sign up for FounderSync you can network with other founders across the country. It’s also not exclusive like FounderDating, and being that they’re from “everywhere else” they encourage startups from “everywhere else” to join the site.

Collaborate with founders, find your technical founder, get recommendations for developers, designers, make new friends and network network network.

So on our road trip if we meet you, do office hours with you, or judge a contest that you’re part of, please make sure you’ve done these three things.

Linkage:

Crunchbase

Angel.co

Foundersync

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Cornell University Startup: Empire Robotics Wins Five Minute Pitch Contest

A robotics startup founded by Cornell University students in Ithaca New York took home the top spot in the recent Worcester PolyTechnic Institutes Venture Forum Five Minute Pitch Contest.

The young entrepreneurs are hoping to develop their robotic gripper technology, think those wild orange gripper things, that functions robotically.

According to the Worcester Business Journal
The gripper is a ball-shaped elastic membrane filled with granular material attached to a robotic arm. The air pressure inside the ball is manipulated to adjust the softness or hardness of the gripper, allowing it to conform around and squeeze objects.
This exactly the kind of tech that’s missing for bringing more agile manufacturing to the United States, to automate manufacturing lines in the United States, and that’s exactly what we intend to do with this patent pending technology,” John Amend, the company’s chief technology officer told a roomful of businesspeople, investors and others gathered in the school’s campus center Tuesday evening.

The team took home a prize of $2500. While they aren’t breaking the bank with that kind of prize money, they are getting invaluable exposure from the investor community.

A company called SafeSiren which makes a safety device for school students took home the second pace prize. Other ideas presented included a better way to sterilize catheters, an energy management system for hotels and a blue tooth device designed to replace hearing aids. Check out the source link below for more on those companies.

Source: Worcester Business Journal