student startup Archives - Serious Startups

Student Startup StylePuzzle Uses Tech to Simplify Fashion

What’s the first thing you do when you open your eyes in the morning?

Most of you probably thought, “Grab my phone.” First thing in the mornings, our smartphones can tell us how many emails we missed overnight, what our friends on Twitter are up to, and the day’s weather.

If the folks at StylePuzzle have their way, it’ll soon help you figure out what to wear, too. The app, built by students from the University of Illinois, uses machine learning to take the clothes from your closet, occasions on your calendar, and the weather and finds you just the perfect outfit for the day.

Check out our Q&A with StylePuzzle below:

1) What’s your startup called?

StylePuzzle

2) What’s your big idea?

We are building a mobile app that can instantly picks out daily outfits for users, tailored to their preferences, occasions, local weather, and latest fashion trend. We use machine learning and data mining techniques to teach the app how to style fashion pieces, based on users’ own clothes.

3) What’s the story behind your idea?

Our initial idea about StylePuzzle was quite different from what we are doing now. We started off building a Q&A community of fashion for people to ask questions and get fashion advice or tips on what to wear to certain occasions and where to buy specific items. During our idea validation phase, we realized that most users indeed have the problem about what to wear, but waiting for an answer online for hours is somehow frustrating. While the Q&A idea was interesting, there was a bigger problem to tackle. Instant, relevant, and real fashionable outfit recommendations. So we wanted to solve the problem. We certainly feel there is a need for an app, and the community on Twitter seem to agree.

4) Who are the founders?

The app was primarily designed and built by 3 graduate students at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. We are a student startup team with no experienced industry professionals, but fresh minds with superior level of expertise and a vision for future. Our team and idea have made finalists of many startup competitions, including the Student Startup Madness during SXSW.

5) Where are you located?

We are currently located in Illinois area, as we go to school here.

6) What’s the startup scene like there?

University of Illinois is a school with very rich history and culture of innovation. We’ve got a research park just outside of our campus, with many innovative tech companies as well as many student startups located there. There are many startup competitions hosted every year and many events happening as well. We were just selected as one of the 8 finalists of Student Startup Madness, and now we are busy preparing for it!

7) What milestones have you reached?

We just have the beta app ready and now we are having a private beta test. We have been receiving many positive feedback and valuable suggestions. Most of the private beta users are friends and people around us, and they have found the app very useful and addictive. Some of the quotes are:” I found myself looking at my phone first thing in the morning to decide what to wear, which is interesting.” and “Two common problems of ‘I have nothing to wear’ & ‘There’s no space in my closet’ solved with one app! Tech simplifies fashion!”

8) What are your next milestones?

Our next milestone is to publicly launch our app and get more users to try it out. At the moment StylePuzzle is still in private beta, and we are accepting signups. We just needed to ship a beta version to get some feedback and validation and to see what other features people would request.

9) Where can people find out more?

We are at http://stylepuzzle.com, on Twitter @StylePuzzle, and can be reached at info@stylepuzzle.com.

Maryland Startup: Beagle Takes Zaarly, On Craigslist And TaskRabbit On Campus

Beagle, a startup born at the University of Maryland, is quietly taking on the likes of Zaarly, Craigslist and TaskRabbit on college campuses. By offering the Beagle service only to college students with .edu email addresses they harness the power of the highly coveted college consumer.

Traditionally college students are often early adopters, and when they like something they share it on social media networks faster than others. It’s also only natural that Julian Capps, Philippe Azimzadeh, Asif Jamil and Adeel Khan the co-founders of Beagle were college students when they launched the service. In addition to the University of Maryland, Beagle is also available on the campuses of MIT, Harvard and Boston University.

With Beagle, students can order up simple, easy to do favors and other students are the ones who perform the errands for a little extra cash. Delivering a Starbucks, lending class notes, hitching a ride to the airport or home, running to get printer ink and many more little tasks that college students need to get done can happen using Beagle.

Capps says that Beagle being only available to college students makes it a bit safer than other services. Knowing that both users in a transaction need to be actual students means at least they were vetted in the college application process. Beagle also protects both users and forces feedback by holding onto the funds until both users have left feedback, an indicator that the errand has been done. Users can use cash if they prefer.

Beagle says that ease of use is what sets Beagle apart from the likes of other similar services. “There’s a quick, easy feel of the process,” Capps told our friends at Bostinnodescribing what sets Beagle apart from other companies like TaskRabbit, Zaarly, Peddl or Craigslist. “Quick and easy tasks is what it’s optimized for.”

Linkage:

Check out Beagle here

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Portland Startup: Overhead.FM Making Headway At Home

2012 Brown University graduate Stephen Hebson and his co-founder and fellow Brown graduate Parker Wells have developed a new startup called Overhead.fm. The company has decided to tackle a market that hasn’t had much disruption in a number of years. That market, is over head music at venues like restaurants, coffee shops and some retail outlets.

While many may think that business owners just hook up a sirius satellite radio, mp3 player or cd player, there can be serious ramifications to that. While they don’t wear uniforms or carry badges, “inspectors” for lack of a better word, from ASCAP and BMI are constantly visiting businesses to see what type of music they are playing overhead. If a business owner isn’t paying for licensing of music being played for the “public” they can find themselves staring down the barrel of a business life threatening lawsuit.

Muzak, one of the world’s leaders in overhead music charges establishments by their capacity and traffic. Restaurants and businesses can pay anywhere between $30 a month to nearly $200 to play music overhead. While it may seem logical to just not play music, music keeps patrons in their businesses longer and spending more money.

According to Mainebiz, Hebson had received some insider knowledge on the ins and outs of overhead music by first working at a coffee shop and then holding an internship at ATO Records in New York. After learning how high the fees were for licensing music he thought there had to be a better way, thus overhead.fm was born.

Hebson and Wells are building up a great library of music that is heavily weighted by more successful local acts in Portland and Providence. The company is offering the bands a great value proposition by allowing them access to analytics for plays, locations, frequency and more in exchange for licensing their music. The band wins by getting access to the proprietary information that overhead.fm collects. Overhead.fm wins by not having to payout actual fees.

Overhead.fm is going to start curating more “paid” for music shortly. They recently won the student track in the 2012 Rhode Island Business Plan Competition. With that honor came a prize package of $40,000 including some seed capital and legal services to the tune of $10,000.

Hebson told Mainebiz that they plan on using some of those legal services to construct a contract for licensing music to the company.

Hebson feels that businesses will enjoy overhead.fm because of it’s eclectic library featuring local artists. Right now in their test phase, the service starts off as a 30 day free trial and then goes to a $25 per month subscription model. Now remember that may be a little heavy for a streaming service on a personal side but it’s quite affordable when it comes to music being used for overhead systems in businesses.

We are treating [Providence and Portland] as test markets. We know these cities have pretty big independent music and retailer cultures and are small enough that we can get a lot of saturation pretty quickly and use that data” to build out the model, says Hebson said to MaineBiz. “We’ve already had a lot of success at businesses that are already playing off the independent or local vibe already,” he says.

Linkage:

Find out more about overhead.fm here

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