Enigma Reinvents Public Data And Wins TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield

Public data is a huge gigantic mess. Some municipalities offer everything in indexed searchable sites, while others send you cd roms of property values and tax records. Still, some municipalities require that you go down to their town hall or courthouse and sift through filing cabinets as if they’re trapped in the 1970s.

Cumulatively you’re talking about 100’s of millions if not millions of records of data, and none if it’s uniform. It’s possibly the largest big data project in the world. An ambitious project, taken on by Hicham Oudghiri and Marc DaCosta co-founder sof Enigma.io, as well as CEO Jeremy Bronfmann.

There are mountains upon mountains of public data. What is “public data” it’s really determined by the municipalities themselves. For instance, tax records, property records, marriage licenses, etc are just about public data in every town and city across the country and around the world. In some municipalities though, restaurant food scores, public transportation records and even dog licenses are considered public data.

Sure there are scammy data sites that off-shoot to wanna be background reports, but Enigma is out to do something bigger. They want to create an entire new layer of the internet in the next five years.

Enigma has already raised $1.1 million dollars in seed funding from Triple Point Ventures, CrossLink Capital, and angels like YouTuber Brent Hurley. They’ve also inked some important partnerships with Harvard Business School, Gerson Lehrman Group (a research firm), S&P Capital IQ and The New York Times.

One of the challenges Enigma faces is the rapid rate at which more and more data is released to the public. Yet another thing that Bronfmann says their team is ready for.

Enigma started to amass this huge collection of data by sending a ton of Freedom of Information Act requests. They’ve had to compile the data in one simple, easy to use format even though it comes in a variety of sources. Bronfmann told us in an interview that some data even comes on “print outs”.

The scope of what Enigma is looking to achieve along with the powerhouse team and the work they’ve done to date, was enough for them to win the TechCrunch Battlefield competition on Wednesday. That honor comes with a $50,000 non-equity prize and of course startups that have won in the past like UberConference and GetAround, have gone on to raise huge rounds.

Check out our interview with Bronfmann below and sign up for more info about Enigma here at enigma.io.

See how this Cincinnati startup went from Startup Weekend to TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield.

Ashton Kutcher: Drugs, Ammo, Assholes And Anonymity At TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013

Ashton Kutcher, Mike Arrington,TechCrunch Disrupt

(photo NMI 2013)

Ashton Kutcher was back on the mainstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 after taking a year off. We first saw him at Disrupt in 2011 when he was being interviewed by Charlie Rose. It seems like so long ago. It was right after the Charlie Sheen blow up and after Kutcher had taken Sheen’s place on Two & A Half Men (which was off limits at Disrupt).

On Wednesday, during a fireside chat with Mike Arrington, Kutcher along with investment partner Guy Oseary (Madonna’s manager and the founder of Maverick Records) they discussed everything from what their investment firm likes to invest in, what they see in the future, a new fund raised at $100 million dollar valuation and drugs, ammo,assholes and anonymity.

When Arrington asked Kutcher about what he technologies he was looking forward to in the future, Kutcher talked first about sensors, and products that incorporated them. Then, he started talking about decentralizing currency and decentralizing security. In this part of the conversation he talked a lot about BitCoin and what the attraction is.

In evaluating deals Kutcher sometimes turns to “Hacking Volume” which he described as the number of people that are hacking a solution to a problem. Kutcher says that the fact that people are so widely hacking Bitcoin validates the value of the service and the money.

“…The fact that people are hacking BitCoin really hard almost harkens back to when banks first started and they didn’t have safe-safes and people were going into the banks and just robbing the money out of the safes it actually validates the value of the money itself…”

Arrington re-confirmed what Kutcher had just said asking him “…The fact that BitCoin is being hacked at almost every point in the network is a good thing?”

From there Kutcher said yes and then talked about how the BitCoin infrastructure and anonymity could be used as a vehicle for people to police themselves and eliminate “Big Brother”. Obviously this speaks to anonymity and CISPA which was recently defeated in Congress.

To reiterate the value of BitCoin, Kutcher said “I think the fact that you can by drugs and ammo with it is actually a validator of the currency itself.

As to decentralizing security, Kutcher is looking forward to a time when we can “…civically monitor each other in anonymous way actually keeps the anonymity of the internet, we don’t have to worry about big brother, and that same infrastructure that built out BitCoin for mass good” Kutcher continued “it’s the old sort of, if everyone had a dart gun and we drove around, and shot darts at assholes driving, we’d know really quick who all the assholes are”

At that point Arrington started cracking up on stage and said he could just imagine how many darts he’d have in his car.

Watch this great video clip from that fireside chat below.

There’s more TechCrunch Disrupt coverage from nibletz.com here.

WebKite Can Help You Easily Create A Kayak For Anything

Pittsburgh entrepreneur and angel investor, Eric Silver, was in the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 on Tuesday showing off his latest startup called WebKite. The idea behind WebKite is to aggregate data in a comparative analysis format enabling anyone who wants to create a site like kayak.com, do just that.

Silver and his team noticed the value in comparative data sites like Kayak but quickly realized there weren’t more of them because the back end coding and data aggregation is a long lengthy process. They’ve simplified that process by allowing anyone to create a comparative data site.

As Silver explains in the video below, the data can come from a variety of sources, API’s, spreadsheets and data scrapes just to name a few.

Once the data is put in it’s output is fully customizable, easily updatable and comparable. For the example at their Disrupt booth they showed off a site that compares juicers. With this particular “kite” when new juicers are added to shopping.com or Amazon.com they are automatically added to the juicer site.

It seems that Silver has found a hole and was willing to put his money where his mouth is. He is the principal with alt-capital which invests in early stage startups. He invested in ModCloth and has also founded a startup called Pikimal that has since pivoted to WebKite.

Pikimal is a decision making platform that makes fact based recommendations over a wide range of categories. The startup was growing fast, until the “Google Panda” changes back in February 2011 just about crippled it.

Silver, a Peace Corps alum, is a natural born problem solver who had the patience and foresight to solve his Pikimal problem. What he decided to do was pivot to offering the technology that Pikimal was built on, as a white label service, and eventually turning it into the WebKite product we saw at Disrupt.

It’s not sexy or a cool new social food restaurant finding comparison app in the cloud, but if Silver executes on this the way it looks, WebKite could be one of the biggest things to come out of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.

Check out our video interview with Silver below, you can check out WebKite here.

Here’s more great startup coverage from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013

EatWith Is The AirBnB For Dinner Parties. Watch Their TechCrunch Disrupt Pitch Here

Eatwith was one of the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participants on Tuesday afternoon. This exciting new startup is like the AirBnB for dinner parties. Guy Michlin, the CEO of EatWith discovered that eating at a complete strangers home, while traveling, was one of the best ways to experience what the locals have to offer.

“The inspiration for EatWith came while I was travelling in Greece and had the opportunity to share a meal with the Papadakis family. It was a wonderful opportunity to experience authentic local food with a local family that made me feel at home. The food was tastier, the location more interesting, and the experience was by far the highlight of my trip, ” Michlin said in a statement Tuesday morning.

“When I came back home, I did some research and saw that this dining experience exists today all over the world but it’s hard to find and there’s no consistency or feedback for you to know which hosts to trust. I realized that there was a real opportunity to build an online platform that enables people all over the world to connect around the dining table and have a similarly unique experience.”

Michlin said that on that trip to Greece he and his wife wanted to find the unique places that locals ate at but towards the end of the trip they had eaten at every “tourist trap” in Greece. So he asked a complete stranger on the street “where do the locals eat”. The bewildered stranger looked back at Michlin and said “at home”. Thus the idea was born.

Eatwith allows amateur chefs and cooks to share their homes for a meal with complete strangers and make a little money on the side. The startup is insured and vets the diners so that there is minimal risk. It’s a lot safer than say advertising a dinner party on Craigslist.

Michlin saw the service take off in it’s beta testing stage, but what he didn’t expect was that locals were actually signing up as well and they were dining out multiple times each month, using the Eatwith platform.

The platform provides guests with a beautifully designed site that allows them to easily find a local host. The site features a wealth of information about each host including information about the food, the location, and the price of the meal allowing guests a perfect experience catered to their needs. Mirroring this is a set of tools that hosts can leverage to share information about their offering and attract guests.

Some of the most important elements of the service are the processes and tools created by EatWith to ensure the trust and safety of both its guests and hosts. This includes a vetting process for hosts by the EatWith community, the EatWith Guarantee — third party insurance coverage, and a ratings and reviews system.

When it came time for judging David Tisch asked Michlin how many times people were expected to open up their homes to strangers. He seemed shocked when Michlin reported some hosts were hosting 4-6 times a month. Tisch felt that with 72 dinners a year, isn’t that in itself becoming a “tourist trap”.

Michlin shook that question off and powered forward through the rest of the questioning. Overall it’s a new innovative way of getting to know people, trying new things and for the hosts, perfecting their culinary skills on new diners they couldn’t otherwise cook for.

Check out their pitch video below and for more information visit eatwith.com

See even more of our startup coverage from TechCrunch Disrupt here.

This Berlin Startup Has A Great Idea But Is The US Patient Enough For It?

A startup from Berlin Germany called ParkTag came out to TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 all decked out to draw attention to their startup. Parktag is a peer 2 peer social parking application.

Here’s how it works:

You’ve parked in a public parking spot and gone into your favorite restaurant for lunch. When you are getting ready to finish lunch you go to ParkTag and let the app know you’re about to leave your parking spot and where it is.

Someone who is in the area and needs the spot will see that your spot is coming available. They go to the spot and wait for you to arrive and move out of the spot.

Once you pull out, they pull in, in what ParkTag calls the “Handoff”.

When the new person parks their car, they send you a thank you and voila they have a parking spot. Users can earn point by making the transactions as smooth as possible.

ParkTag is up and running in Europe where they say people love it. Things could be a lot different in Europe but I’m not sure that drivers in the U.S. have the patience to effectively use ParkTag. There’s a good chance that while you’re waiting for the spot you would block traffic and people would quickly become frustrated with you.

Without building immense scale people in the US aren’t going to understand that you reserved the spot via the app.

ParkTag doesn’t seem to have those problems in other countries. I’m very interested to see how it turns out if they do come to the US.

Check out the video interview and learn more about this great idea below.

3DLT From Startup Weekend To TechCrunch Battlefield

Pablo Arellano Jr is serious about starutps and entrepreneurship. How serious? Well he just went through Arkansas’ Ark Challenge accelerator with one idea, pitched a different idea (3DLT) at Startup Weekend Cincinnati last summer, is a startup event organizer and the Startup Digest curator for Cincinnati, Arkansas and Northern Kentucky.

We met Arellano at Startup Weekend Cincinnati last summer. It was there that his idea for a “99 designs for 3D printing” was born. Naturally with 3D printing being such a hot space it was selected to build over Startup Weekend and they came in second.

Arellano kept pushing and while he was in the Ark Challenge program with his other starutp he met the rest of his 3DLT team. They realized quickly they were onto something extremely hot. When Ark Challenge closed out Arellano and his teammates returned to Cincinnati where they are housed at the new Cintrifuse incubator. One of their biggest mentors and advisors is Rob MacDonald, co-founder of Cincinnati’s “The Brandery” as well as the son of the sitting CEO at Proctor & Gamble.

In February the team from 3DLT won a spot onto the Battlefield Stage at an event in New York City. From there it went into hyper mode so that they could pull off a great pitch and get ready to serve the public. For their big kick off Arellano is giving away $10,000,000 worth of memberships on the site right now.

3DLT has evolved from a simple place to buy 3D templates to a marketplace for both templates, and eventually goods that a consumer can produce in their home.

In the feedback section, David Tisch was concerned that Arellano didn’t talk enough about the business, “Why did you just spend 6 minutes talking about 3d printing and not your business.”.

Other than that hiccup the team seemed to have good answers, but overall the truth of the matter is that 3D printing is on fire, just six months ago it was unheard of to have a 3D printer in the home. On the way to New York I saw an at home 3D Printer in the SkyMall magazine for under $1000 and Arellano told me there was a kit to build a 3D printer at home for under $200.

The team at 3DLT sees a time coming, sooner rather than later, when people will be able to create products they need or want in the home. Toys, shoes, sunglasses, cups, plates and other items will be cheaper or easier to produce in home rather than travelling down the road for WalMart.

President Barrack Obama said 3D printing was a gamechanger, and Arellano didn’t let that slide, a video clip of that speech was in his presentation.

If they keep their fingers crossed 3DLT could end up finishing in the top 3. They’re ready for the 3D world and no Zach Sims, there aren’t any other platforms out there like 3DLT, we checked.

Here’s Arellano pitching 3DLT at Startup Weekend last summer:

3DLT made it from a Friday pitch at Startup Weekend, to this, pitching on the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield stage.

Here’s more awesome startup coverage from everywhere else, at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.

VC’s From Top Firms, And Naval From AngelList, Talk About What They Are Looking For

Tuesday morning at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, Mike Abbott (Kleiner Perkins), Aaref Hilaly (Sequoia Capital), Naval Ravikant (Angellist) and David Tisch (Box Group) were part of a panel moderated by TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis, called “Lot’s of Venture, but what’s to gain”.

With Venture Capital firms shrinking and the rumored “series A crunch” entrepreneurs and startup founders have a lot of questions. One of those is what are the different firms looking for, and even more than that, what are the individual partners at each firm looking for.

Each of the panelists fielded the question. Ravikant talked about how important it is to build a network when preparing to pitch VC’s.

Overall the VC’s and Angel (Tisch) on the panel agreed that they are looking for disruptive companies in technologies that they know. Where some entrepreneurs may believe that a certain firm is good for them because they invested in a competitor, the panelists think that can be a bad idea. Obviously the firm feels they already have the winner.

Abbott pointed out that in the case of this particular panel, all of the investors had actually started their own company. Ravikant is still currently running his. Having started their own companies gives this group of investors an advantage of being in the shoes of the entrepreneur.

Hilaly spoke later in the panel (not in the video) about the days of having to drive up and down Sand Hill Road and getting doors slammed in his face and dreams burned, “entrepreneurs have a lot ore resources available to them now”, of course one of those big resources is Ravikant’s Angel List.

Check out the video below to shed some light on what investors are looking for.

David Tisch is tired of this bullshit that VC’s tell women founders.

David Tisch On The Biggest Bullshit VC’s Tell Women Founders & Entrepreneurs

Alexia Tstotis sat down with a pretty powerful VC panel at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2013 on Tuesday morning. The panelists were Mike Abbott (Kleiner), Aaref Hilaly (Sequoia), Naval Ravikant (AngelList) and David Tisch (Box Group, former Techstars NY). Tstotis asked some great questions of the panelists and overall the panel shed a lot of light on the world of VC, especially for young entrepreneurs and startups.

Tstotsis final question revolved around women in technology, startups and entrepreneurship. Everyone wants to know what will help even out the amount of venture capital going to women founders, as their male counterparts.

Overall the number of women involved in VC and angel backed startups has been increasing. Lot’s of attention lately, has been focused on women run, and founded startups. We even feature a “Bad Ass Start Up Chick” on a regular basis here at nibletz.

At the panel though David Tisch, who’s known for speaking his mind and off the cuff, got applause from the audience when he talked about one of the biggest problems women face when in the meeting, pitching the VC.

“VC’s that tell a woman founder, let me ask my wife…It’s total bullshit” and he’s right. For years there have been women led companies, women focused brands, and women focused technologies, this is nothing new. Tisch felt it was off-putting and a total cop out for VC’s to say this, but as he points out, it happens all the time.

Check out the video clip from this morning’s panel below.

Check out more of our TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 coverage here.

Celebrities Love The Startup The World Has Been Waiting For: Hater App

There are haters everywhere, or at least that’s how the song goes. Lord knows I have a bunch. That’s why Jake Banks created Los Angeles startup Hater. It’s the world’s first social network surrounded by things people hate.

The social network is alive and growing at a very quick rate. People are finding lots of commonalities over the things they hate. It can be anything from hating the New York Yankees to hating pickles on a Big Mac. It can even be hating your ex-girlfriend. But, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Andrew Batey says “It’s not about bullying”.

Hater App works on your mobile device. Download it from the app store and you can immediately start identifying the things you hate and identifying with the people who hate similar things. If a person becomes the subject of too much hate, or things get inappropriate (to a degree) they will get filtered out.

To date there’s been nothing available like Hater, and it’s caught the eye of celebrities like Teyana Taylor, Wiz Khalifa and Fat Joe who will feature the app in his next show. “Fat Joe’s people found out about Hater and reached out to us” Batey explained to nibletz.com at TechCrunch Disrupt NY.

Hate isn’t always used as a bad thing though. Batey explains that there are celebrities that are getting together over issues like global warming and getting users to say why they hate global warming. “Users may say things like I hate global warming because I can’t breathe” Batey said. It’s a great awareness tool and it’s blowing up.

Hater launched at SXSW and since then Batey and Banks have been hard at work promoting their startup globally. They recently did New York Tech Day, TNW in Amsterdam and now TechCrunch Disrupt 2013.

“You don’t always have to like something, and the option to hate or dislike has been missing out there. Everyone has something they hate; now you can and it’s better than therapy.” Banks said in a statement.

Mashable recently featured Hater in “8 standout apps from March” which is a particularly big honor considering how many apps were released at SXSW which fell during that month. They’ve also been featured on Wall Street Journal live. People are quickly beginning to see that Hater app is a lot deeper than you may think.

Check out our interview with Batey below.

More from TechCrunch Disrupt here at nibletz.

Swedish Startup Offers Cable TV With No TV. Interview With Magine. [video][disrupt]

Companies like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu have started making a dent in traditional cable tv consumption. More and more people, globally, are watching tv shows and movies on other screens like, laptops, mobile phones and tablets. This has caused most cable companies (especially in the US) to move to other sources for revenue like telephone lines and cable internet.

Hulu, Amazon, Netflix and other similar companies are offering shows and movies a la carte and on demand. You subscribe to one of these services for a nominal fee and you can access whatever programs you want to watch, when you want to watch them. This model is working very well for many consumers, but the space as a whole is gearing up for another disruption.

There are some startups like, Jacksonville startup whata.tv, that are hoping to reinvent tv by allowing users to subscribe to one channel a la carte and get the entire programming from that channel in real time or on demand. Many analysts have suggested that this kind of model is where tv is heading.

On the other hand, you have startups like Sweden’s Magine, which is a full fledged cable operator, delivering the same programming, and functionality as traditional cable companies, on multiple screens and with even more features.

Magine allows viewers to watch programs in real time or on demand, without the need for a dvr. Magine, of course allows you to watch the content on any connected device.

With the stranglehold that the US cable operators have, it’s not likely that Magine will ever find it’s way onto US soil, but people in Europe love the freedom that the service is giving them. Beta testers, including TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois, love Magine, and of course we see why.

Check out our interview with Simon at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, below.

Check out these other awesome startup stories from TechCrunch

AppArchitect Could Be The Easiest Way To Build An App [interview][disrupt]

AppArchitect is an idea that was actually born at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2011. It was there, at the Disrupt Hackathon, where the first lines of code were written.

Over the last two years the team behind AppArchitect has been refining the product. They’ve also been through the DreamIt Ventures accelerator in Philadelphia and raised $325,000 from Actinic Ventures, BHV, DreamIt and other angels.

They finally went live just before 4:00pm on the Battlefield stage at Disrupt 2013. Co-Founder Ilya Zatulovskly took to the stage and showed off what could be the easiest platform ever to build a native iOS app. AppArchitect sets itself apart from other DIY app generators because it’s not template based and not just a “wrapper”.

Users who want to create a new app simply need to know how to drag and drop things, to create an app using AppArchitect. Zatulovskly says “if you can build a slide deck you can build an app”.

It’s such an easy platform that Zatulovskly created an app during the quick Battlefield presentation.

That may not have been enough to wow the judges in their Battlefield session called “Get Things Done”. The judges: John Frankel, Hilary Mason, Megan Quinn, and Sam Yagan seemed to take notice that the competitive landscape in the DIY app creation space were plentiful. They also weren’t exactly sure who the end user was.

Naturally, the end user is anyone who wants to build an app. However, design agencies and advertising firms are already employing developers and DIY app creation tools that have already been on the market. With over 1 million apps across all of the app stores, it’s getting harder and harder for any app to stand out.

AppArchitect could come in handy for mom and pop shops, small restaurants and small businesses who are looking to get into the app world with something specific for their business.

Regardless, Zatulovskly and the AppArchitect team are hoping to use this experience, coupled with the knowledge and experience gained at DreamIt, to raise another round of capital and continue building AppArchitect.

Check out our video interview below and for more info or to try it out yourself you can find AppArchitect here.

More startup coverage from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 here.

Brazilian Startup Peela Is Gift Cards On Steroids [video][disrupt]

Brazilian startup Peela is getting some major traction in it’s native country. Peela is a reusable giftcard app and platform that allows users (buyers) to purchase physical or virtual gift cards that can be reloaded from the stores, restaurants and businesses that they were purchased for.

Peela patners with major merchants and vendors to offer the gift card, but more importantly, with reloadable gift cards, they offer a loyal customer. Perhaps your dad really loves the coffee shop he goes to every day, now everyone in the family can continually reload his card, it’s almost like a prepaid credit card for one place.

Peela has three main marketing channels, retail, e-commerce and businesses. So far it’s taking off, Peela’s Executive Director Guilherme Coelho, showed us a map detailing Peela’s penetration across every city in Brazil.

They are looking to expand the platform and were part of the Brazilian pavilion at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2013. Check out our video interview with Coelho below and for more info you can visit them at peela.com.br

We’ve got much more from Disrupt check out our startup coverage here.

Croatian Startup MediaToolKit Wins It’s Way To TechCrunch Disrupt, Here’s An Interview

Croatian startup MediaToolKit started as a social media monitoring web app targeted towards journalists. Journalists from blogs, newspapers, video outlets and other media resources can tap into MediaToolKit and discover trending content on Facebook and other sources from their competitors. Southeast Europes netocratic.com called it a “spy tool”.

Media Toolkit’s Ivor Bihar was on hand at TechCrunch Disrupt New York after the startup competed in the WebUp startup competition as part of the webfest.me conference last fall and won a trip over to the United States to present MediaToolKit to the US here at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Over the last few months MediaToolKit has continued to iterate. Now they offer a suite of tools for journalists, hence the name Tool Kit, including press clippings and alerts. The startup comes out of Zagreb based social media agency iStudio.

Check out our video interview with Bihar below and for more information you can check out mediatoolkit.com

And here’s more awesome TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 coverage here at nibletz.com

Israeli Startup Glide.me Is The Video Walkie Talkie [disrupt][video]

One of my favorite messaging apps is Voxer. Voxer allows me to send and receive voice messages, much like an old audio pager or Nextel’s two way radio function used to work. Now imagine if Voxer had a video element. That’s what you would get from Israeli startup Glide.

Glide allows multiple people to have two way video messaging over mobile device in extremely close to real time. You can have a two way conversation, ala Facetime or you can send a video message and the recipient can get back to you when it’s convenience for them. The big differentiator though is time.

Adam Korbl, the co-founder and CMO at Glide explained that these video messages and sent and received within fractions of a second. It doesn’t take that 8-10 seconds you will find trying to get a Skype going and the waiting you sometimes get from Facetime.

Being on the road all the time, I’ve found a new love for Facetime. When I’m on the road I’m constantly Facetiming with my five year old daughter. Glide will give us the option of having a two way conversation or if one of us is busy we can leave the equivalent of a video voice mail message.

According to TechCrunch Glide has raised seven figures to date from stakeholders including; Orey Gilliam, former CEO of ICQ and AOL IM and Philippe Schwartz the founder of ooVoo.

Check out the video interview with Korbl below and for go download Glide here.

Seriously there’s a whole bunch more Disrupt coverage here, brought to you by videojuice.co