The 3d printing revolution is off to an amazing start. Within a year, 3d printers for the home have come down to an affordable level. Two years ago at TechCrunch Disrupt NY we saw the first 3d printer, MakerBot. This year at the same event there were several startups in the 3d space including, Cincinnati based 3DLT, a 99 designs for 3D templates, and 3dindustri.es.
3dindustri.es is hoping to become the go to search engine for 3d printing. They are very unique in that they don’t use search terns, keywords or typical algorithms. 3dindustri.es is all about geometry and shapes. 3dindustri.es, or 3DI as they’re affectionately known, is based in London.
“What Google did for words and text on the web, we aim to do for shapes and 3D models,” said Dr. Seena Rejal, the founder and CEO of 3DI in an interview with Forbes. “We are ordering the 3D world.”
That’s a tall order to fill with the rapid growth of 3d printing. That’s why the company has already inked partnerships with companies that will prove to be influencers in the 3d printing industry, like 4DLT.
We also got a chance to talk with Rejal. Check out our interview video below:
There’s more where that came from check out over 40 startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.
A New York startup called AdhereTech has created a sensor laden pill bottle.
The bottle looks just about the same as a regular pill bottle, with a little extra girth for both the sensor and a 3g radio chip. When the 3g radio chip is coupled with the sensors in the pill bottle it can provide information on dosage timing, how many pills are in the bottle and if the bottle is being opened and closed at the correct times.
The ability to communicate this data to a care provider and also to a health management app can be game-changing to people dependent on taking lots of medication.
We talked with the team at AdhereTech about taking multiple prescriptions,and multiple bottles in the same home will not cause any kind of conflict.
We got to interview them at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2013. They are also going to participate in the AARP/Live Pitch 2013 Health Innovation Conference in Las Vegas. Out of 100s of applications, AdhereTech was chosen as one of 10 to pitch their product on the main stage.
They aren’t the first health startup to add sensors to products patients use everyday. At CES 2013 earlier this year we met the team from Geckocap that has installed sensors on asthma inhalers which help track children’s albuterol treatments and gamifies the use of the inhaler for young patients to insure they take their inhaler medication.
Check out the video below and for more information visit adheretech.com.
Have you seen these startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013?
At TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 two weeks ago we got to spend some time with Minoj Shinde one of the three co-founders of 3 Other Things. Their Mumbai based startup is tackling the bridge between off-line and online shopping experiences, a nut many startups here and overseas are hoping to crack.
The divide between online and offline retail is much larger than we, as consumers in the United States, are led to believe. For instance, in India, where 3 Other Things is based, the divide is 97% off-line retail. In the U.S. it’s actually a whopping 80% offline retail. For retailers to be extremely effective, to drive more traffic to their brick and mortar sites, and their websites, they need to consider both customer subsets. Something that Shinde has been observing over the last 14 years.
By combining the powers of a social network, with a “wish list” feature and customer profile, retailers in the lifestyle, clothing and home decor categories will have one resource to work from that provides a robust snapshot of their customer base. Not only that but 3 Other Things will provide retailers with true customer data with the things that the customer wants and not just algorithmic fluff.
Shinde says that 3 Other Things really comes in handy in non urban centralized areas. For example, some of the stores his family likes to shop at are nearly an hour away from their home. Naturally, investing the time and money into traveling to the store just to find they are out of what they are looking for is a big turn off.
3 Other Things allows users to create a wish list of the products that they actually like. The user can than let the individual retailers know an approximate time of when they will be in their store and the store can come back and say whether or not they have that inventory. Unlike other systems in a similar space, a store clerk using 3 Other Things will physically find or locate an item to insure it’s correct, providing for another level of customer service, that’s often recognized by repeat business.
The social network portion of 3 other things allows likeminded users to share ideas and tips. For instance I like t-shirts with cool designs on them, while Shinde prefers more business casual dressier shirts. I can tell Shinde, using 3 other things, that I saw the perfect shirt for him at a specific retailer and then he can add that shirt to his wish list. The retailer can then market to both of us more effectively.
In the video below with Shinde, we talk a bit about Mumbai’s up and coming startup scene. Watch the video and check out the next disruption in off-line/online retail.
So this concept isn’t entirely new. This New York startup, GetAppRewards, wants to reward users for engaging with apps and games that are in their app network.
The more time you spend using the apps in the GetAppRewards network, or playing their games, you’ll earn points. Points can be redeemed for things like other games, electronics, clothing, gift cards and more. The hope is that by rewarding users, they will be more loyal to the apps that are in GetAppRewards network.
In it’s simplest for, GetAppRewards is a mobile advertising platform for app developers to get both more users and downloads as well as improve the time that a user engages with their app.
“GetAppRewards offers instant rewards to users for spending more time in your app, and viewing in-app advertisements. When we reward users like this, they will reward you with their time, attention and purchases. This is a simple and effective formula that helps you monetize your app to the fullest extent.” the company says on their Facebook page.
They also hope to improve in app purchases: “With us showering rewards on the users for launching your app, watching video ads and tapping any ads, it’s hard not to make in-app purchases.” they said.
There are other products out there like Junowallet for instance, that reward users for downloading apps. GetAppRewards secret sauce isn’t in just the downloads but also in the engagement and time spent.
Check out our interview below and for more info you can find them on Facebook here.
H.Bloom is probably the most well known flower delivery app. They allow you to order flowers from your smartphone and have them delivered to that special someone for whatever occasion arises.
New York startup Fl3ur takes ordering flowers to an entirely new level. Using their proprietary mobile technology a user creates the arrangement they want on their iPhone and then, working with traditional brick and mortar florists, the arrangement is created in real life and delivered.
The big difference between the two is the customization. H.Bloom lets you customize to a degree however with Fl3ur (as you can see in the video) you start with a completely blank canvas. You can arrange whatever you want the way you want. The app also keeps track of the budget for you so you don’t break the bank with a $500 arrangement, unless of course you want to.
Fl3ur also allows you to send a screen shot of your arrangement via email, text or social media. You can also take a picture of yourself or the sender and place that virtual bouquet or arrangement in their hand to send as a virtual card. While they want you to use that virtual pic to show someone what’s coming in the real world, you don’t actually have to follow through with sending the order to a florist (but that’s the best part).
Fl3ur officially announced themselves to the world at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 two weeks ago in New York City. Check out our video interview below and for more info visit fl3ur.com
Well we’ve never seen this idea before. While we were at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 we met Anton Velikanov the CEO and co-founder of SandSign. This unique startup allows users to deliver a customized message in the sand.
In it’s simplest form, SandSign has a network of photographers across the globe. These photographers live in beach areas and are contracted through the website at sandsign.com.
A user goes to sandsign.com and can order a “sand sign” to say whatever they would like. Once the user pays for the order, the photographer is contracted to draw the message in the sand and then they take a photo of the name or message in the sand. They also offer candle signs, where messages are made from candles and signs with video. The company can also have your message designed in a field and than shot from an airplane or helicopter.
So you see what I mean, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It makes a lot of sense and messages can cost anywhere from $20-$150 and it’s a unique message, but is it something that can build scale?
Check out the video below and for more information visit sandsign.com
Some of the best graphic designers in the world don’t know a lick about HTML, CSS, Javascript or anything else involved in web development. Unfortunately for many of those designers, their great work can be hacked up quickly when trying to fit the best designs into the limitations of the web.
Now, thanks to a startup based in both Israel and New Jersey, called Webydo, professional designers can create and manage cross platform websites without knowing one bit of code.
More than 38 million graphic designers currently working to create professional websites are enslaved to an old process that depends on handwritten code. This process is slow, expensive and cumbersome, marginalizing the designer’s role and preventing direct communication between designers and their clients. On the other hand, the DIY platforms offer only preformatted templates that are not suitable for professional web creation.
Webydo solves this problem with a sophisticated DMS (Design Management System) that liberates designers from their dependency on handwritten code or limiting DIY templates. Using the company’s sophisticated online software, designers can bring any creative web design to life. With the click of a button, an advanced HTML website is published online including a friendly built-in CMS (Content Management System) for the website owner. No programming or technical knowledge is needed. With Webydo, DMS plus its CMS integrated system, designers can finally focus on the creative side of web design.
Behind the scenes, Webydo’s innovative code generator (US patent pending) automatically generates both a cross-platform HTML website updated to the latest industry standards and optimized for SEO, and a friendly built-in WYSIWYG CMS that enables the website owner to update the website content, independently.
Webydo is a community driven platform created for designers, by designers who know what they need from a SaaS product like this.
“In essence, Webydo is about unchaining millions of graphic designers from the rusty old ‘designer-programmer-client’ process of designing and managing websites,” said Shmulik Grizim, Webydo’s Co-Founder and CEO. “With Webydo’s powerful cloud platform designers can finally bring any web design to life, without writing code. Now, we want to share this technological innovation with the global design community.”
Webydo launched last week at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 and we got a chance to spend some time with Grizim. Check out the video interview below and for more information visit webydo.com
Here at nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups everywhere else, we’ve profiled a few startups that have made the lives of those living with autism easier. Often times these technology startups come in the form of mobile or tablet applications to assist with communication. Whether it’s picture based short messaging or assigning pictures and graphics to simple sentences, doctors have praised the work of those entrepreneurs creating these kinds of apps.
Chad Ruble, a New York based entrepreneur has created something similar, but this time for his mother, who suffered a stroke.
We met Ruble on our sneaker strap road trip when we stopped at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. It was there that he told us that communicating with his mother was very important to both her and him. So he went to work to create a mobile app that allowed her to send simple messages that were assigned to pictures.
TapGram lets users communicate by tapping large icons to signify moods and needs. After suffering a stroke TechCrunch reports that Ruble’s mother has been dealing with a condition called Aphasia which prevents her from processing language the way that she used to. TapGram was born out of a Microsoft Kinect hack that Ruble put together to help his mom write emails.
TapGram has been in public beta over the last four months and Ruble has found that people who suffer from Autism, brain injuries and of course strokes are using TapGram to assist in their communication.
Check out our interview with Ruble below and for more information visit tapgram.com
I’m going to date myself here and say when I first heard the name of this Norwegian startup I thought about the fat baby dancing on Ally McBeal. I’m sure some of you are thinking, who the heck is Ally McBeal.
After getting over the uber cool name (and you know we love great named startups here at nibletz) we got to talking with the startups co-founder Gunnar Wold, about just what an OogaBaby is.
In the simplest explanation, OogaBaby is Instagram for babies. Using the OogaBaby app, gushing parents everywhere can upload baby photos to their hearts content. They can also track their baby’s height, weight and even the circumference of their heads. Parents can add milestones and special moments as well in this social network for babies and their parents.
Now as a parent myself I totally understand and get it, I just wish I had it five years ago. Speaking of which Wold says you can track your kid as long as you want but it’s primarily designed for baby’s up to age five.
Oogababy is great for parents and their friends with kids, but it’s also great for friends without kids. Why? Because with OogaBaby parents can stop flooding their Facebook walls with pictures of their babies.
Wold created OogaBaby after he became a father and realized there was really nothing like it on the market.
Check out our interview with Wold below and for more info visit Oogababy.com.
Serial entrepreneur, restauranteur, and startup junkie Andrew Batey, the cofounder of Los Angeles startup Hater, credits Maryland startup CoFoundersLab with helping to lead him to Jake Banks the founder of Hater. We ran into Batey talking with Shahab Kaviani, the founder and CEO of CoFoundersLab at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.
Batey and Kaviani were talking about how CoFoundersLab is way more than just a place to find co-founders. There are several startups in the “cofounder finding” space. One of the most popular ones is Silicon Valley based FounderDating. Many entrepreneurs feel that FounderDating is too selective and doesn’t reach the core of the startup community.
Community is what drives Kaviani who’s already had his successful exits and is working on CoFoundersLab to help startups find the perfect team.
CoFoundersLab helps link cofounders through a profile based system. Kaviani is quick to point out that the perfect cofounder may not be that friend or relative you think you want to start a company with. Through their online system and their in person events, hosted in 25 cities so far, CoFoundersLab is about linking real people with each other to foster great ideas.
The non elitist community at CoFoundersLab is over 10,000 members strong and to date has helped 100 teams form. One startup founder came over to Kaviani’s TechCrunch Disrupt booth to tell him that not only did they cofounders find each other on CoFoundersLab but to date the team has raised over $2.7 million dollars.
CoFoundersLab is also about the community. In addition to finding a cofounder you may find other key team members within the community or find a community member that can help you get over a hurdle or a pivot.
CoFoundersLab was a finalist in the Startup Maryland, Pitch Across Maryland bus and they are also a member of the Fort in DC which is now housed at 1776.
It’s free to join CoFoundersLab however there is a pro membership available too that gives founders access to personality assessment tools and other tools to refine the cofounder search. There is a small fee, usually ten bucks or less, for their in person events.
Kaviani founded CoFoundersLab after realizing it was the founding team at the first startup he was part of, HyperOffice that became the widely known WebOS.
We love talking to British entrepreneurs and founders, it’s just something about the way they say process that makes them seem so professional and articulate. The same goes for Jonathan Knight the cofounder and CEO at Qmee. Knight was quite animated when he told us that Qmee was based in Gloucester England, in the countryside where they have cows and hills, but very few tech startups.
So it was the perfect place for Knight and his co-founder Nick Sutton to launch an internet startup. What amazed me was the idea that these guys have come up with.
Qmee is a platform that pays you to search for stuff on the internet. It works with all of the big search engines like Google, Bing, Amazon, Ebay and Yahoo.
Once you install the browser plugin everything magically happens in the background. When you search for something that Qmee has advertisers for you will see an unobtrusive sidebar on the left side of your browser. This sidebar serves up relevant ads and alongside those ads is the amount that you’ll actually get paid for clicking through to the ad. Now this isn’t some kind of crazy deal where you only get paid if you agree to three offers that will set you back $1000 this is pretty simple, search, click, get paid.
One of the best parts about Qmee is that users can take their payments whenever they want. Payments accumulate in a “Qmee Piggybank”. You can look at your piggy bank balance anytime you want and see what you’ve made so far. Whether it be $80, $800 or 80 cents, you can have Qmee pay you via paypal whenever you would like.
Not bad for some guys from the British countryside right?
Check out our interview with Knight below and for more information visit Qmee.com
Here are over 25 great startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013
Luca Parise was working at a nice cush job in Sao Paulo Brazil for FRAM Capital, an investment management firm, when he decided to launch his own startup in the art world.
Nailonwall helps take the offline world of Latin American art and put it online for people around the world to find. But Parise doesn’t see it as a show and tell site by any means. He’s hoping to apply what he’s learned in the finance world to Nailonwall because “Art is a huge market and an investment opportunity”, he told us in an interview.
Parise hopes that by linking the Latin American art world to art collectors and investors globally artists’ works will become worth a lot more. So in affect Nailonwall is an entire art marketplace rather than just a showing of art work from Latin America.
Parise hopes to bill $500,000 in commission from helping to facilitate the sale of the artwork on nailonwall, this year, according to Portugese site exame.com.
There are several art marketplace startups out there, but so far none that have focused on artwork in Latin America.
Check out our video interview with Parise below, and for more info visit nailonwall.com
This year marked my third trip to TechCrunch Disrupt NYC and my 7th trip to a TechCrunch Disrupt event overall. Typically we expect to see some cool big data startups, social mobile startups, food startups and over the last two years, hardware startups. I don’t think in all the startup events I’ve ever been too, I’ve seen anything quite like Dialexa.
Dialexa is a startup themselves, but what they actually are is a technology development company. The company, formed by entrepreneurs Mark Haidar and Scott Harper, Dialexa was founded upon recognizing a huge market demand for innovative and scalable technology solutions. Mark and Scott serve as Co-CEOs jointly spearheading operations, strategy, local and international sales, product development and engineering for clients and Dialexa Labs.
Harper and Haidar met each other at 2GO Software where Haidar was the CTO and Harper joined as Head of Operations. 2GO was the recipient of the 2010 Honeywell Scanning and Mobility ISV Partner Of The Year.
Prior to meeting at 2GO, the founders had a multitude of experience in technology and starting companies. Previously Mark led the development of a state of the art research and development project for the US Army Tank Automotive Research Development Engineering Center (TARDEC). He was able to successfully research, design, develop, and validate an original service-oriented intra and inter-vehicle communication system for transportation, robotic, and military systems. This technology enhances each vehicle’s situation assessment and awareness in military combat situations and has the potential to help create safer and more efficient highway systems. Scott previously started a web based marketplace for tutors in the college tutoring market, a web based suite of software tools that helped non-profit organizations enable their supporters to give money for free, and was part of an initiative to start up a bank focused on the medical community that heavily leveraged technology and eventually led to the buyout attempt of a several hundred million dollar bank.
So what are they working on at Dialexa? Oh just little stuff like:
A surveillance and protection system for the Nigerian navy. The Nigerian navy is losing $6 billion dollars a year in crude oil. They don’t have the man power or equipment to cover their entire shoreline. Dialexa is developing a system using drones, small submarines, cameras and a monitoring system to alert the navy when people, or machines are stealing their oil.
They also have a GPS system in the works that will allow someone to track anything. The system can track packages, people, kids, money in armored cars, etc. What’s unique about this system is it’s designed to require just a charge once a week and works through a variety of mobile systems.
They also have a system in development that will print 3D teeth from 2D scans. Haidar told us in an interview the entire process of evaluating a tooth for surgery could take months. Now it is down to just hours.
Haidar credits the team they’ve assembled to the success they’ve had so far and the team continues growing. No project or startup is too big or too small for Dialexa. They even have your general mobile startups within their portfolio of companies that they are helping take to market.
Watch our video interview with Mark Haidar below and for more information visit dialexa.com
Summit founder Jeff Rosenthal and Skrillex, interview each other at IMS Engage (photo: billboard.com)
Sonny Moore, who’s much more widely known as electronic artist Skrillex, was part of a fireside chat at the IMS Engage event in Los Angeles last month. IMS Engage is the International Music Summit’s event that bridges music, technology and innovation. To give you an idea of the scope, in addition to this fireside chat with Skrillex and Jeff Rosenthal, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, had a fireside chat with Diplo at the same event.
The interview opened with the usual background story that Skrillex tells, but they spent less than five minutes on the background. Skrillex seemed more impressed with what Rosenthal and his co-founders with the Summit Series have done as entrepreneurs and innovators.
The Summit Series is a series of events created by Elliott Bisnow, Ryan Begelman, Brett Leve, Jeremy Schwartz and Rosenthal. They wanted to create networking experiences for young entrepreneurs, not just run of the mill conferences. Their first event was a free ski trip to Park City Utah and had just 19 attendees.
Now they’ve grown into a global organization with headquarters in Malibu. Tony Hsieh, Russell Simmons, Imogen Heap and Dhani Jones have all attended their events. They were also able to garner support from former President Bill Clinton.
They are now preparing on their next big thing which is purchasing a mountain ski resort to create an innovation city.
Skrillex spent a majority of the interview actually digging this information out of Rosenthal. While Skrillex has also taken on building community and creative space for electronics “in the box” musicians in Los Angeles, he resonated with the entrepreneurial growth inspired by the Summit team.
Rosenthal talked about how he and his co-founding buddies had maxed out their credit cards and gone in debt on their first couple of events. Skrillex said he can totally relate having been in debt $50,000 just 1000 days (three years earlier). Like a true entrepreneur, Skrillex leveraged everything he had to build his artisti base. He had rented a warehouse and lived in it with his buddies. The warehouse space served as studio space and at one point Skrillex was evicted. He finally started making money and had $1 million dollars in the bank and then he made a conscious decision to blow all of that money on production giving his fans “the most incredible shows in the world”.
Skrillex credited Hypem the music blog aggregator and Soundcloud with helping bring him to fame.
Rosenthal and Skrillex both agreed with musicians and entrepreneurs it’s all about a body of work.
Towards the end of the conversation Skrillex asked Rosenthal why they created the Summit Series. Rosenthal replied that at first it was for them, they didnt have a peer group. “We like to connect and inspire the thought leaders of our time” Rosenthal told Skrillex.
Really this is a great interview, Skrillex is so passionately into what Rosenthal is doing, and really this was a fireside chat, not an interview.
Kyle
The 3d printing revolution is off to an amazing start. Within a year, 3d printers for the home have come down to an affordable level. Two years ago at TechCrunch Disrupt NY we saw the first 3d printer, MakerBot. This year at the same event there were several startups in the 3d space including, Cincinnati based 3DLT, a 99 designs for 3D templates, and 3dindustri.es.
