Rochester Startup Archives - Serious Startups

Eh You Need My Guy, Rochester Startup Takes On Angie’s List INTERVIEW

Nothing says recommendation like when your good buddy says “eh you need my guy”. Whether you’re looking for a plumber, deck builder, photographer, heck even a birth coach. Whatever independent contracting service you need, a new Rochester startup called You Need My Guy has someone for you.

When we first heard about You Need My Guy we immediately drew a comparison to top ranking, publicly traded Indianapolis startup Angie’s List. You Need My Guy’s founder Joe Cassara says that YNMG is different because Angie’s List is a paid model with mostly blue collar providers. They also offer no accountability to insure the identity of users. While Angie’s List is a great resource for some, they are plagued with stories about bad experiences sprinkled all over the internet.

You Need My Guy is the hybrid in the middle. You can find accountants and carpenters on the startups site at youneedmyguy.com

YNMG integrates social networks by allowing perspective clients with links to their perspective service providers Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter profiles. This way users can vet out their service providers, going a little deeper than traditional reviews and referrals. Review systems can be plagued with fake reviews, created by service providers to “push down” any bad reviews. Of course in the case of referrals most service providers only provide referrals from people who have had the best experiences.

One of the best assets for this New York startup is Cassara himself. He’s thoroughly entrenched in the up state New York startup ecosystem. He has a background in strategic consulting. But what’s more important is that Cassara is also the managing partner of Harvest Ventures an early stage venture-funding firm as well as a mentor at New York accelerator StartFast.

We got a chance to interview Cassara about You Need My Guy. Check out the interview below:

We travel an awful lot. Most of our readers know that we’re on a sneaker strapped, nationwide startup road trip, which means we stay in the car a lot, but in hotels a lot too. The biggest challenge in hotels isn’t about bedding, towels, or even what’s on tv. We book rooms based on wifi, availability and pricing. The problem is even when you do a preliminary check on a hotels wifi it’s still slow as molasses and typically a horrible experience.

Outside of bringing our own wifi (which we do as backup) there hasn’t been much change since hotels started offering wifi. Free or not most hotels have less than subpar wifi.

Well a Rochester startup called Wi3 is doing something about that.

We first met Wi3 at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas back in January. They were demoing their innovation award winning WiPNET product. As you can see from the video above, WiPNET in home allows the user to set up access points with the bulk of the load making it from point a to point b over coax. This is ultimately the same thing that cable internet providers are doing from the node to your home.

WiPNET makes sure you have a clear wifi access point with very little (if no) latency or loss of signal from the entry point to the end user. Pretty magical stuff.

Well now they’ve announced that they are offering their product to the hospitality industry (hotels)

WiPNET allows many devices to simultaneously access HD and rich media digital Web content on the same hardwired network using existing coax cable infrastructure and a hardwired access point in every guestroom. This innovative application of MoCA technology eliminates the problem of network buffering caused when several devices are accessing the Web within the same environment. It also simplifies network management and oversight, even allowing hotel owners to create tiered-access services as an additional profit center.

“Serving hotel guestrooms or commercial properties with just one WiFi router or a few WiFi repeaters across a property does not meet the needs and demands of the ever increasing WiFi enabled mobile consumer,” said Wi3 CEO Bill Thompson. “Wi3’s patented in-wall Ethernet and WiFi products enable properties that have coax connections to convert every room or space into a full-bandwidth dedicated access point to satisfy even the most heavy of users, thus simplifying and eliminating today’s singular WiFi router approach.”

Now in a nutshell, every hotel guest in every room will have their own dedicated wifi access point and won’t overload the Belkin or Linksys routers that are typically not so strategically placed in hotels.

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