July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SAN FRANCISCO- The 5 winners of the coveted Demo God award are Kinsa, PanaCast, Volio, MakerSwarm, and Beer Hunt.

The Demo God award is given to the startups that are not only building innovative products, but also made compelling presentations to a room filled with entrepreneurs, investors, and press.

23 startups pitched at Demo Mobile today. These companies are using mobile technology in innovative way to address issues in health and productivity, and a few even try to help you have more fun. The demo event has been a staple of the startup community for years and is now a large scale international organization. This was executive producer Erick Schonfeld’s first event and he said that as the leader, his goal was to provide as much value as possible to attendees.

“There is a lot of noise right now in the launch space,” he said. ” I wanted to be away from the noise, to become the place where all the best companies launch. That’s always been part of the brand, but there are a few things I am doing to hammer that home. One is being super selective, another is to focus on product and promote founder education.”

Kinsa makes a smart thermometer that seeks to monitor and precent the spread of disease. The Kinsa thermometer takes temperature and then prompts users with cute little icons to list their other symptoms, such as fatigue, cough, cold, or headache. The accompanying application tells you how to avoid getting ill, or how to get better faster if you are already sick. All of the collected data contributes to creating a “real-time map of human health” and providing a “health forecast” for different locations.

PanaCast is “the world’s first panoramic video in the cloud solution” that incorporates hardware, mobile applications, and cloud services. The technology enables Bring-Your-Own-Device panoramic HD videoconferencing. It was developed by Altia Systems.

Volio‘s technology simulates conversation using artificial intelligence to give real people the characteristics of virtual assistants. These personalities can interact with people in “one-on-one” environments to answer their questions, or even ask what they ate for breakfast. The technology creates major opportunities for brands to connect with their consumers (and vice versa) and for customer support in a way that melds the comfort of real human contact with the convenience of technology.

MakerSwarm is an “authoring tool for the Internet of Everything.” MakerSwarm gives people visual tools so they can see the capabilities in every device (like sensors, a compass, or cameras) and drag-and-drop it into a new app, which can also connect to your social network. The goal is to enable anyone with technical expertise to build Internet of Things experiences, and turn anyone into a maker. It was developed by technology research and design lab Maya Design.

By marrying hardware and user-experience design, Jawbone wants to help people to make more informed decisions about their health.

So the wearable computing maker today acquired MassiveHealth, a maker of apps to promote healthy eating; and Visere, the design firm behind the Unstuck life coach app, for an undisclosed sum. 

As we pointed out in a review, it’s one thing to receive data about your sleeping habits and calories that you’ve burned, but it’s another to actually improve your lifestyle choices. The goal with these acquisitions is to improve the user experience around Jawbone Up, the health-tracking wristband.

Source: Jawbone

A Jawbone Up user

Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman said in a statement, “Both companies have shown a deep understanding of the intricacies of designing engaging products and experiences, and we’re eager to continue to harness talent of that caliber here at Jawbone.”

Up is the brainchild of Jawbone’s chief creative officer Yves Behar, the design wunderkind behind some of the most iconic tech products of recent years (including Kickstarter sensation Ouya, a video game console that plays Android games). It will be interesting to see how an infusion of design talent — notably Massive Health founder Aza Raskin — will transform the product.

Raskin is the son of Jef Raskin, the human-computer interaction expert best known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple in the late 1970s. Prior to starting Massive Health, he led the user experience team at Mozilla Labs.

A blog post from Visere’s Adam Wulf indicates an ongoing relationship with Jawbone — so it’s not a surprise that the Oregonian firm would come on board. Massive Health is a bigger get — the San Francisco-based startup has raised over $2 million in venture capital funding

According to GigaOm’s Om Malik, about 25 new people will bring expertise in data science and design. The company has not yet decided what it will do with Massive Health’s Eatery app, which received rave reviews but failed to reach a critical mass of users.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by writer Andy Meek 

ProfitBricks, a global cloud infrastructure provider, has big ambitions despite not yet having widespread name recognition. The Boston-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company this week announced the launch of a foundation program for the startup community.

Amazon, with its cloud computing power, is the giant in the space. But ProfitBricks — the company that launched in a major way in the U.S. in September – wants to change that and believes it has the tech to back up that goal.

The reason why might not seem obvious at first. But it is intended to directly help the company’s larger mission.

The ProfitBricks Foundation Program is rolling out initially in New England and then nationwide in 2013. Through it, the company is offering startups the possibility of getting virtual data centers at a sharply reduced cost for one year.

Startups are a key market for Profitbricks. And by offering incentives for ProfitBricks’ next generation cloud computing services, it lowers the risk for a startup to try an alternative to Amazon. Companies with below $1 million in revenue will be eligible to use a cloud server from ProfitBricks for one year without cost. They’ll also get 20 percent off their IaaS services from ProfitBricks for one year.

“Our goal is to offer ProfitBricks’ virtual data center technology to startups who value access to cost-effective, next-generation cloud computing services,” said ProfitBricks USA CEO Bob Rizika.

Or, in other words, the goal is to add incentives where possible to further motivate startups to look outside the Kingdom of Bezos. And in a broader sense, the ProfitBricks story is one of a team of German computer engineers who regarded Amazon as forcing customers into buying packages they might not fully need.

The company was founded in 2010 by serial entrepreneurs Achim Weiss and Andreas Gauger. And with funding from the founders and United Internet, ProfitBricks built and is offering virtual data center technology with a host of benefits – flexible user defined instances, live vertical scaling capability, double redundant cloud storage — with basic minute-based billing. The team spent time and money to create ProfitBricks’ IaaS environment and presence, which now includes more than 100 team members from 17 countries.

They’re not the only ones attempting something similar. Along those same lines of pay-per-use economics, HP this week announced its HP FlexNetwork Utility Advantage Program at an event in London. According to HP, the new program allows communications service providers in collaboration with HP to help enterprise customers modernize their network with prepackaged network solutions with no upfront cost involved. Customers then work with the CSP for the network offerings they need on a pay-per-use basis, according to the company.

Andy Meek is a journalist in Memphis who frequently contributes to outlets including Fast Company, Forbes, Politico, and several tech blogs.

Image credit: HappyDancing/ShutterStock

Dynamics is hoping to turn the credit card and payment industries upside down with an innovative new kind of smart card and payment system. The ePlate system is a way for developers to get direct data on customer purchases and extra revenues from each transaction via “payment apps.” With ePlate, Dynamics hopes to change the way people pay for goods and services by motivating them to earn some very specific rewards from their favorite book authors or other goods providers. And, in a twist that could motivate a lot of partners to join the rewards program, the author or the goods providers get a cut of every transaction made with the credit card.

That completely changes the way the card operates and the benefit that the consumer receives from using it. Dynamics’ system includes the ePlate payment device, which is a battery-powered Visa credit card that allows a consumer to change the app that is running on the card. You can apply for a card today on Dynamics’ site, and you can change the reward you earn with every purchase.

Dynamics has gathered a bunch of partners to participate in what it calls an “ecosystem of experience providers.” Each delivers an individualized brand experience to the consumer via an app on the ePlate card. Before purchasing, a consumer selects multiple experience apps on their smartphone, tablet, or computer to port to their ePlate device. At the time of purchase, the consumer can use different buttons on the ePlate device to select different “experience apps.” Those apps give the consumer a reward whenever he uses the card.

Each experience provider gets 50 basis points, or half a percent of the value of every transaction. So for a $100 purchase, the provider gets 50 cents.

Dynamics founder and chief executive Jeff Mullen (pictured right) said in an interview with VentureBeat, “You can get your reward before you put your card into your wallet.”

More than 30 apps will be available at launch. The first-generation device has two buttons on it, so you can store two different applications on the card. You can use your PC or smartphone to select the experience apps that you want to have on the card.

The system is the brainchild of Mullen, who said his team worked on the technology for 2.5 years.

The ePlate cards have batteries that last three years, and they work with the existing 60 million mag-stripe credit card readers in the market today. The cards have 70 electronic components embedded within a plastic card.

“We form the card around the electronics,” said Mullen.

He said that integrating ePlate into the payment system “is so fast that consumer benefits for an ‘app’ will be delivered before consumers can even put their ePlate device back into their wallet.”

He added, “The result of the ePlate device is a new payments landscape — where a consumer can earn exclusive, disproportionately valued benefits instantly in ways never before envisioned. This holiday season, consumers will have a second decision to make at the point-of-sale: First, what to purchase; and second, what app to experience with that purchase.”

One example of an experience app comes from Warren Adler, the best-selling author of dozens of books including The War of the Roses, which was made into a popular film. Each time a consumer spends $400, he or she earns one of 29 different Warren Adler ebooks. That may be a $5 to $15 value for the consumer (depending on the price of the eBook), and $2 goes to Adler himself.

Within seconds of qualifying for the purchase, the consumer gets an email with a link to instantly download the book. Adler has also written an exclusive novel for ePlate users. With every earned book, the consumer earns a chapter of the new exclusive work. Any consumer who earns all 29 Warren Adler eBooks also gets a signed physical copy of The War of the Roses delivered to his or her doorstep, said Mullen.

When I saw the ePlate platform, I thought this was an innovative way to engage my fans,” said Adler. “I also wanted to reward them with a unique way to experience more of my books and a way to reward them with an exclusive work.”

Dark Horse Comics has created two new comic book series for ePlate, including one called Conan: The Phantoms of the Black Coast. Another is the team up of three separate characters: X, Ghost, and Captain Midnight. Upper Deck, the trading card company, will introduce a series of collectible cards.

Founded in 2007, Dynamics is a familiar company to readers of VentureBeat. The company debuted at the DEMO conference in September, 2010, and walked away with the top $1 million prize as DEMOgod. In June 2011, Dynamics raised $35 million from Bain Capital Ventures for its computerized smart cards and payment systems. To date, the company has raised $40.7 million. And Mullen appeared at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in April to unveil the first details of the ePlate payment system. The company has almost 100 employees, up from 24 employees a little more than a year ago.

Consumers can apply for a Dynamics ePlate credit card on the company’s website.

“We are covering all of the categories and will introduce new experiences as we go,” said Mullen. “You’ll see individuals like celebrities, authors, and athletes. We can partner with time-sensitive and seasonal brands. And we can partner with the brands you wouldn’t see on a credit card.”

The apps available now include the following:

Entertainment apps

Big Star Movies (www.dynamlcsinc.com/BigStarMovies)

Bob Mayer (www.dynamlcsinc.com/BobMayer)

Hercules (www.dynamicsinc.com/Hercules)

Katie Armiger (www.dynamicsinc.com/KatieArmiger)

Warren Adler (www.dynamicsinc.com/WarrenAdler)

Hobby Experience apps

Dark Horse Comics (www.dynamicsinc.com/DarkHorseComics)

Jersey Jack Pinball (www.dynamicsinc.com/JerseyJackPinbalL)

Upper Deck (www.dynamicsinc.com/UpperDeckCards)

“For Your Kids” Experience apps

Kidz Bop (www.dynamicsinc.com/KidzBop)

Gaming Experience apps

GameFan (www.dynamicsinc.com/GameFan)

Adventure Shopping Game (www.dynamicsinc.com/AdventureShoppingGame)

Black Friday: The Game (www.dynamicsinc.com/BlackFridayTheGame)

Scavenger Shop Game (www.dynamicsinc.com/ScavengerShop)

Health Experience Applications

Fit Orbit (www.dynamicsinc.com/FitOrbit)

Charity Experience apps

Greater Good: The Animal Rescue Site (www.dynamicsinc.com/AnimalRescueSite)

Greater Good: The Breast Cancer Site (www.dynamicsinc.com/BreastCancerSite)

Lemonade Day (www.dynamicsinc.com/LemonadeDay)

Greater Good: The Hunger Site (www.dynamicsinc.com/TheHungerSite)

Toys for Tots (www.dynamicsinc.com/ToysForTots)

Retail Experience apps

Cologne by Scentiments (www.dynamicsinc.com/CologneByScentiments)

Perfume by Scentiments (www.dynamicsinc.com/PerfumeByScentiments)

Fresh Direct (www.dynamicsinc.com/FreshDirect)

International Star Registry (www.dynamicsinc.com/InternationalStarRegistry)

Food Experience apps

iGourmet: Coffee of the Month (www.dynamicsinc.com/CoffeeOfTheMonth)

iGourmet: Tea of the Month (www.dynamicsinc.com/TeaOfTheMonth)

iGourmet: Salsa of the Month (www.dynamicsinc.com/SalsaOfTheMonth)

Travel Experience apps

Bahama Trip with Triton Submarines (www.dynamicsinc.com/TritonSubmarines)

Henry Cookson: African Safari (www.dynamicsinc.com/HenryCookson)

Social Experience apps

Facebook (www.dynamicsinc.com/Facebook)

Twitter (www.dynamicsinc.com/Twitter)

Other Experience apps

Dynamics Credits (www.dynamicsinc.com/DynamicsCredits)

Win $10,000 (www.dynamicsinc.com/Win10000)

Bootcamp Ventures has helped connect three young Israeli startups with $2.25 million in new funds, including promising mobile security company Zimperium.

Bootcamp has global offices and partners in Tel Aviv, Istanbul, New York, Berlin, and Venice. With this setup, it can provide what it calls a “Global Innovation Xchange” that makes fund-raising seed rounds outside of Silicon Valley easier. Basically, it connects startups with VC firms and provides “strategic input” on the deals.

The Israeli startups Zimperium, Clarisite, and an unnamed business intelligence startup received funds. Zimperium, a mobile security company we spoke with at DEMO Spring 2012, got $250,000 U.S.-based Lazarus Israel Opportunity Fund. Clarisite, makers of web transaction software, got $500,000 from Lazarus as well. The unnamed intelligence startup secured $1.5 million from Russia’s Bright Capital Fund.

Zimperium especially stands out on the list because it addresses the serious threat of mobile security with its software for enterprises. “Mobile phones are replacing the traditional home and business computers,” CEO Zuk Avraham told us back in April. “Mobile security is therefore a growing concern, and most people don’t realize how vulnerable they really are.”

Stack of new sheqalim via Shutterstock

DEMO 2012 in Silicon Valley was sensational. Launch day for a new company unspools like a 24-hour rollercoaster ride; our own team returned to Washington, DC, sleep deprived, technology addicted, and ready to try out a dozen new web and social innovations shared by our co-presenters from other startups.

Yet as I stood outside the packed ballroom at the Santa Clara Hyatt grabbing the mini-sliders and puff pastries, the girl in me emerged. I couldn’t help but scan the crowd looking for other female co-founders and C-level execs.

Frankly, there weren’t too many. So I grabbed one of the few women I saw right away — Catherine Spence of HireQ — to help me hunt down more women for some pre-conference female bonding.

Coming out of an education non-profit, I am keenly aware that we need great models of female CEOs and leaders to inspire the next generation of girls to choose entrepreneurship and STEM related opportunities.

For instance, Inc. Magazine recently reported women make up half of the workforce but only one in four workers in the technology industry and 15 percent of senior management.

And according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, women comprise only 11 percent of tech workers in Fortune 500 Companies.

So who were some of the rock star women of DEMO 2012? How can we all cheer them on as they build great companies that will build more jobs for our country? In their own words, here is what several had to say on how they got into technology and their advice for the next generation.

How did you get into technology?

Catherine Spence, co-founder of HireQ: I am a bit of an accidental entrepreneur.

While some people know they want to start a business (or many businesses), I was driven by my passion for this idea: everyone should love their job, and companies should love their employees.

My background is not in technology, but it’s clear to me that technology has the potential to solve some of the challenges that face job seekers and companies in finding each other. Using technology in sleepy industries like recruiting is way to create big change.

Rebecca Bahr, co-founder of Flinja: I got into technology from high school when my physics teacher would introduce us to various technologies and just make everything sound really cool from the invention of post it notes to solar systems.

Melissa Tyree, co-founder and CIO of Itography: Both my father and grandfather were programmers, so I took all of the computer science classes that I could in high school.

I ended up studying civil engineering at Texas A&M but followed my tech roots and was a systems analyst at Deloitte right after college. It seems that whatever industry I work in, tech always draws me back in.

Anna Anisin, CEO of 4sync: I think of myself as a geek in heels. I was that girl wearing pink lipstick and playing around with all the latest gadgets.

I finally took a leap of faith and launched my first startup in my early twenties and have been an active member in SF’s tech community ever since.

Courtney Titus, co-founder and CMO of GivingTrax: It all started in 2002 with my first marketing internship for KACE in Silicon Valley.

What career advice would you give young girls?

Tyree: Don’t be afraid to fail. Do things that scare and challenge you and you will never be bored. I encourage my daughters to try many different things. You never know what might inspire you!

Titus:Intern, if you’re in college. Find great mentors. Try and try again; don’t give up.

I’m currently part of the startup leadership program down in San Diego, and it’s been a great experience. I would definitely recommend it to other aspiring women in tech.

Anisin: No matter what career you pick, it’s very important to work hard and never stop believing in yourself.

It is also very helpful to find one or two solid mentors, who can guide you and also brainstorm with you. I wouldn’t have made it this far without the support from my mentors.

Bahr: My advice to all girls thinking of going into technology is to never lose hope and never get intimidated by others. Technology can be fun, creative and challenging, but its not an easy journey so don’t give up.

Spence: As women, we hear a lot about the challenges that we face balancing work and family as we move through our careers. These challenges are real, and there are no right answers.

What works for you might not work for your best girlfriend. But these challenges do not need to be constraints. We are empowered by choices, to construct our lives and our careers based on our values, hopes, and dreams.

I am reminded of a quote by Marianne Williamson: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

My advice to girls is to accept the challenge of dreaming big and making choices.

Photo credits: Demo Fall 2012

Julie Kantor blogs weekly for Huffington Post and In the Capital on issues around social recruiting, job search, entrepreneurship, women in the workforce and more. She is the co-founder of Barrel of Jobs, a startup that made its debut at DEMO Fall 2012.

Out of the 77 companies that demonstrated their products at this week’s DEMO conference, only five won the coveted DEMO God award. These startups don’t only have great businesses, but were awesome on stage. Here they are:

Neumitra’s Bandu

Stress can completely paralyze some of us during life’s most important moments; for others, it’s more of a silent killer, leading to anxiety, insomnia, poor digestion, alcohol or drug abuse, and other health problems. Bandu detects changes in your motion, temperature, and skin conductance to identify signs of increased mental stress. If stress flags start to fly, the device will alert you with an invitation to use your smartphone to take your mood in a different direction. It might ask you to listen to some music, play a game, or call a friend or family member.

Neurotrack

Neurotrack provides a simple-for-consumers but highly sophisticated diagnostic test that tracks eye movement to diagnose Alzheimer’s three to four years before any symptoms occur. You sit in front of a computer screen with an eye-tracking device and view a series of images, some novel and some not novel. Based on how much time you spend looking at the novel image versus the image that hasn’t changed, Neurotrack can give you a prognosis. Neurotrack’s second product removes the need for the eye-tracker, making the test even more accessible and affordable for families and indviduals around the globe. The redesigned test uses a mouse or track pad. The company hopes people will take the test and help pharmaceuticals develop drugs to fight the effects of Alzheimer’s.

Electnext

Electnext’s free survey helps you discover where you stand on the political spectrum and which candidates are the closest match to your interests. You can register for free by signing in with Facebook or Twitter (don’t worry — it doesn’t post your political views to your news feed). It asks you to order the issues that matter to you the most, including health care, immigration, and education. It then prompts you on how strongly you agree or disagree with controversial statements. At any time, you can peruse comments and discussion threads to get a better handle on an issue. Ultimately, the goal for the site is to increase access to information and stimulate civic engagement.

Ecolek’s Birdeez

Birdeez is an iPhone app that makes it “ridiculously easy” in the words of cofounder Jeff Simeon, to identify birds and then share your sightings on Twitter. Birdeez takes you through the identification process via a few simple steps (see screenshots below). Figure out its rough category, select a size and color, and then narrow it down to matching species. Once you’ve found a match, you can read a detailed description and behavioral information. If you press the “spot it” button — the high tech version of writing down the bird in your life list — Birdeez will save the time and place of your sighting, and optionally let you tweet it.

Birdeez is still pending approval from the Apple iTunes App Store.

Flinja

Flinja is a startup that uses the talent, energy, and financial need of college students to create a freelance workforce. On the marketplace, students post services they want to provide, which alumni and staff can directly book. The site provides an opportunity for students to build their professional networks, find jobs and internships, and make a little extra cash. The site securely processes all transactions with a third-party payment system and escrow facilities.

The company is launching on a school-by-school basis. It is already available to the University of Southern California community. So far, 12 percent of the current USC population are registered Flinjas, with significant adoption from members of the class of 2016. An official Flinja student association is also on campus.

Ube — People’s Choice winner

Ube is a startup focusing on bringing the Internet of things to life inside the connected home, starting with an iPhone app and three hardware products: Smart Dimmer, Smart Outlet, and Smart Plug. Ube brings a centralized, cloud-based brain and central control system to all your home’s web-connected electronics. All you need is a smartphone, “no professional custom installation required.” Better still, it’s free.

Rentlingo — Alpha Pitch winner

Rentlingo was created by a group of Standford students who wanted to be able to tap into how their friends find apartments. The company is creating a social network around finding an apartment. It scrapes the Internet for listings but also provides places for you to interact with friends who may have lived in that area, or potential roommates. It connects through Facebook in order to maintain “a trusted community of real people.” But the company has big competitors like Craigslist, which already has a big following among college students on the rental lookout, and emerging competitors such as PadMapper.

Photo credit: Stephen Brashear

James Bond liked his martinis shaken, not stirred, but he never specified his favorite brand of vodka. If he had, and if he was a member of DrinkCity, he would have the opportunity to get up to 50 percent off his bar tab. Not that James Bond has to pay for drinks.

DrinkCity won Angel Alley at DEMO. It operates on a simple premise: People like to drink with their friends on the cheap.

The startup puts alcohol brands in direct contact with their fans on its “Happy Hour Any Hour” platform. Booze hounds, or the more temperate who enjoy a glass of wine every now and then, go to the site and fill out their personal information and alcohol preferences, like their favorite kinds of liquor and favorite types of bars. They then have may purchase a certificate that puts them on an electronic guest list at a bar. All they have to do is show up, give their name to the bartender, and the rest is … hazy.

“This is an unprecedented solution for the alcohol space,” said founder Perry Kalmus “A whiskey company can get in front of a large group of whiskey drinkers.”

DrinkCity is starting in San Diego and hopes to expand from there. Whether or not this startup has revolutionary technology or breathtaking design, offering people cheap drinks practically guarantees popularity.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The U.S. has an estimated 48 million birdwatchers, but 74 percent can’t identify more than 20 birds.

I’d fall in that category: I could point out a red-tailed hawk, a turkey vulture, a crow, and … a bunch of little brown birds. But with 900+ species in the country, I know I’m missing a lot.

Fortunately, there’s an app for that.

Birdeez is an iPhone app that makes it “ridiculously easy,” in the words of cofounder Jeff Simeon, to identify birds and then share your sightings on Twitter. I can only imagine that if the geeky Jack Black character in “The Big Year” had this app, he’d have powered to the top of the rankings much faster than that annoying Owen Wilson character.

It’s Simeon who’s the source of the stats above, and when he told me about his company in a recent email, his conviction was a bit contagious. “People of all ages are suffering from nature deficit disorder at the same time that the environment needs a lot of attention,” Simeon said. “Our goal with our products is to use mobile technology to educate and invigorate interest in and about the environment.

“Almost everyone has seen a cool looking or beautiful bird at some point and wondered what kind of bird it is. But for many people, including my wife, current tools are too confusing or cumbersome.”

“What I would love to see is some more automation. Think of Shazam for birds. The right business model here is not ads, it’s around figuring out what people will pay for in a freemium model,” said Jason Krikorian, partner at DCM, at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Birdeez is still pending approval from the Apple iTunes App Store. In the meantime, the company is making its debut at DEMO Fall 2012 this week here in Silicon Valley.

“Do you remember when every tweet used to come with feathers? We gave them feathers again,” said Simeon at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Birdeez takes you through the identification process via a few simple steps (see screenshots below). Figure out its rough category, select a size and color, and then narrow it down to matching species. Once you’ve found a match, you can read a detailed description and behavioral information. If you press the “spot it” button — the high tech version of writing down the bird in your life list — Birdeez will save the time and place of your sighting, and optionally let you tweet it.

EcoLek got started in 2011 when Simeon and cofounders  Patrick Toerner and Thomas Kuo won a business plan competition at UC Santa Barbara, where Simeon was pursuing a graduate degree in environmental science. Other than the prize money, the company has not raised any outside funding.

Simeon is not just hoping to get more people interested in birdwatching and nature (something that wouldn’t be such a bad idea, given that the average age of a birdwatcher is 50 and the majority of people who claim the hobby are white). By collecting data from Birdeez users, EcoLek could also contribute to research on bird populations.

“Collecting sightings can crowdsource something much larger than the individual data. Also, bird watching has a huge social element in person, so we want to take that sharing online as well,” Simeon says.

So the next time you see a bird, you might just want to, well, tweet about it.

Top photo: Left to right, Thomas Kuo, Jeff Simeon, and Patrick Toerner. Photo and screenshots courtesy EcoLek.

EcoLek is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Demo image via Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat

Robert Arauz didn’t intend to become an entrepreneur. He’s actually a scientist by profession and training. Starting a company is just the best way he’s found to solve some of the scientific and medical communities’ biggest problems.

His company, Innovation Choice, seeks to remove some of the blockades between information and the people who need it to solve big, global issues.

“We are solving a communications problem in the way scientists and researchers are able to share and obtain relevant medical information,” Arauz told VentureBeat in an email chat. Innovation Choice aims to be a professional network where scientists, educators, researchers, and students can quickly get accurate information from subject experts, all with a focus on respecting intellectual property and individual privacy.

“Today, these people have very limited options in terms of resources at their disposal that they can access in order to tackle the most important questions of our time.

“They aren’t looking for restaurant recommendations; they are seeking how to cure Alzheimer’s.”

Arauz knows the needs of these professionals well. As a research scientist himself, he said getting access to critical and specific information was usually “very expensive, ineffective, and very time consuming.” Innovation Choice, he said, is set up to be the exact opposite.

“We connect scientists from around the world so that they can collaborate and target technical questions in their field. … Using the medical journals to find information is only accessible to a select few and not very good at giving you exact answers; it just provides specific details about particular data. I want the discovery of the next penicillin to take months, not 10 years.”

Members of the site must be verified professionals in the field, which distinguishes the site from many of its competitors.

“I was a bit surprised by the emphasis on credentials,” said Andrew Rosenthal of Massive Health. “A lot of good stuff is bubbling up from people that don’t have formal credentials, and this company has made a very conscious decision to screen for them.”

Currently, Innovation Choice is in early, formative stages. Arauz expects to launch a beta version of the service in January 2013 and is currently trying to raise money for the startup.

Beyond basic startup goals such as product development, feature roll-out, and new user acquisition, Arauz says he’s also trying to “expand to work within the network of most universities (in their life sciences departments)” in his company’s next steps. He’s already partnered with UC Berkeley Extension and University of the Pacific.

“We are creating a product that can ultimately accelerate medical research,” Arauz concluded. “Our vision can yield discoveries that can positively affect millions of lives and make our world a better place to live.”

Innovation Choice is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top image courtesy of Sergej Khakimullin, Shutterstock

LFE wants you to learn from experience. The roots of the company’s initials are in these words, and its goal is to enable experts to share their knowledge with the rest of the world.

The company is the brainchild of Zeev Glozman, the chief executive of LFE who started it in January. The popularity of search engines and video-sharing sites like YouTube suggests that the world has a voracious appetite for learning. LFE’s goal is to create software and a web site that makes learning easy and rewarding. The company made the announcement at the DEMO conference today.

“I think this is kind of one of the things that makes the Internet so interesting. You don’t need to be a university or a celebrity to have information that’s really valuable.” said Jason Krikorian, partner at DCM at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. “The big question for me would be around customer acquisition.”

LFE is one of a number of sites like Khan Academy and Coursera in the blooming field of social online education. But it differs in that the emphasis is less on academics and more on people who do hands-on work — with their hands or bodies — like carpenters or plumbers.  It will enable experts, or “authors,” to create courses and get paid for their work. LFE walks experts through the process of creating a course and uploading it to the site. The software does not require expertise in Internet usage, marketing, or Google analytics.

Users, known as “learners,” can find courses directly on the site or through an affiliate’s web site. They can also connect remotely via mobile platforms and smart cards. LFE tries to keep everything simple.

“We are passionate to solve this problem because it will change lives in a very large way, across all cultural barriers around the world,” said Mark Messersmith, a spokesman for the company. “There are so many people who would love to share their expertise but either don’t know where to start or are tired of sharing their expertise without getting paid. LFE.com solves both of these problems.”

He added, “Now, hard-working people will be able to make money wherever they are located and in parallel, those who want to learn and have struggled to find quality, step-by-step high-quality educational content, will have found a home. This is very exciting for us. In fact, when we talk internally about how to define success, we always say helping our authors make money so they can better take care of their families as our goal.”

The company has raised about $500,000 in seed money from friends and colleagues. LFE plans on seeking a new round of funding in early 2013. In the meantime, LFE plans a big marketing push and it will create an affiliate relationship program with key industry players. The company has four employees.

LFE is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Computers, TVs, and smartphones are turning us into sedentary beings. Novusport wants to get us off the couches and make us more active through its real-world fitness game that motivates people to play real sports and share their achievements with friends.

The Houston-based startup is one of the companies that is “gamifying” sports so that they are more engaging, trackable, and fun for weekend warriors. (Gamification is the use of gameplay to get people more engaged with nongame applications). By gamifying sports, the company hopes to make people more healthy.

Novusport notes that 81 million Americans visit sports web sites each month as spectators. But far fewer actually participate. Novusport is a social media game designed to promote participation in sports via a mobile app.

While the rest of us sat in the audience during DEMO, the Novusport guys ran a 40 yard dash across the stage and tossed around a football, to demonstrate the technology.

Here’s how it works. You download the app, pick a sport from among 20 options. Then select an ActivR (a predefined sports goal). You check in at the location, where you will play the sport and bring a friend to record video on the ActivR on your smartphone. You upload the video to validate that you performed the activity. Novusport then calculates your stats and adjusts your Sports Graph (pictured in the phone at right) based on 10 physical and mental attributes.

As you complete more ActivRs, you earn points and medals and build your virtual trophy room. You can share the accomplishments with friends and challenge them. you can discuss graphics, stats and tally points within the network.

Hugo Aguilar, the founder and president of Novusport, said in an interview that he has been obsessed with sports since he was a kid. He wanted to play all of them and was thrilled to watch the Olympics. As an adult, he developed a passion for technology and dreamed of a way to combine those passions. He wants to use tech to help people be the best they can be.

He decided to create a tool that could measure the achievements and unique “sports graph” of an athlete, which others could use as a part of a platform to entice all athletes to try new sports, regardless of talent level. Aguilar showed me the app, demonstrating how it could be used for ActivRs such as throwing a football as far as you can or running a 40-yard dash.

By getting fans to participate in sports, Aguilar believes they can experience sports in a different light, getting people to play with each other and become more active. Novusport has raised $165,000 in seed funding and is aggressively pursuing partners.

Aguilar believes that more and more people will be drawn to sports and logging their performance, partly because of the march of technology. As smartphones become part of our daily lives, “lifelogging” will catch on, where people measure everything they do, and that will spread to sports.

“Can you imagine a high-tech, two-week competition with the top 100 overall superathletes in the world?” Aguilar said. “But to get there, athletes must qualify through Novusport.com. Imagine the possibilities. The future is what we make of it, and we at Novusport are working extremely hard to make our future a reality.”

Novusport’s algorithm measures an athlete’s performance based on 10 factors: Ground Speed, Water Speed, Endurance, Strength, Vertical Jump, Accuracy, Courage, Balance, Novusport IQ, and Popularity. Novusport’s iOS app enables users to create their personal “sports graph” using fantasy sports-style statistics that they can share via social media. The company has partnered with YouthAid and the Olympic tae kwon do Lopez Family to use its platform as an aid in the fight against bullying.

Rivals include Fitocracy, Nike+, and Daily Burn. The company has 13 employees, including Daniell Iturbe, its chief executive and cofounder, who asks you not to “friend, like, tweet or follow me…challenge me.”

Novusport is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Salesforce may have some huge competitors like Netsuite and Oracle, but it’s not the big dogs that keep the customer-relationship manger on its toes.

“We spend more time thinking about a Dropbox than we do some of our competitors because that’s where the innovation is,” said George Hu, the chief operating officer of Salesforce at the DEMO Conference.

Hu may have been skirting around the question of “who are your competitors,” but the reality is, innovation from young startups really is something that keeps executives up at night.

A number of startups are directly taking on Salesforce, like Nimble, which is going after “social customer relationship management,” or creating a network around your database of customers and partners.

On the social side, Yammer, recently purchased by Microsoft, competes directly with Salesforce’s business social network, Chatter.

But Salesforce, which first launched at the DEMO Conference, is already expecting to bring in $3 billion in revenue this year and hopes to reach $10 billion soon. The company’s platform division, force.com, is its fastest-growing product and accounts for half of the company’s API calls. Its recent Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Hu said, had 90,000 in registered attendance  – that’s a huge number of people. Numbers like that are exactly what challenges Hu.

“The pace keeps me up at night,” he said. “Things are moving incredibly fast at Salesforce right now. The pace never ends.”

Image via b0jangles/Flickr

“I watched two of my grandparents die ‘alone’ because they could no longer remember their family members who were sitting at their bedsides,” said Elli Kaplan.

In some ways, Kaplan is just one of the millions who’ve lost a family member or loved one to Alzheimer’s disease. But she’s also an entrepreneur who’s aiming her life’s work at Alzheimer’s and related dementia. Neurotrack, her new company, provides a simple-for-consumers but highly sophisticated diagnostic test that tracks eye movement to diagnose Alzheimer’s three to four years before any symptoms occur.

“I want to do something so that my parents and my children do not go through this,” Kaplan told VentureBeat in a recent email conversation.

“Alzheimer’s disease continues to elude scientists, researchers, and physicians in terms of what causes the disease, how to detect and diagnose it, and how to treat it,” she said. “Because the biggest problem with developing an effective preventive or disease-modifying drug is populating the clinical trials with qualified candidates, Neurotrack’s technology has the potential … to have an enormous impact.”

Here’s how it works: You sit in front of a computer screen with an eye-tracking device and view a series of images, some novel and some not novel. Based on how much time you spend looking at the novel image versus the image that hasn’t changed, Neurotrack can give you a prognosis.

“It is a seemingly simple test that brings together two very complex things,” said Kaplan. “First, a human being’s innate preference for novelty; and second, the discovery, made by Dr. Stuart Zola, that by tracking the way an individual moves their eyes, particularly when viewing objects or images, one is able to diagnose impairments that exist in the brain that might not be diagnosable by even more invasive diagnostic tools.”

Neurotrack’s second product removes the need for the eye-tracker, making the test even more accessible and affordable for families and indviduals around the globe. The redesigned test uses a mouse or track pad. “The test works similarly to the [eye-tracker] test, but the images are blurred,” said Kaplan. “A user can bring the images into focus using a viewport that is controlled by the mouse. The mouse movement is exactly correlated with eye movement and renders the same results.”

So what’s so great about an early diagnosis of a currently incurable disease? you might wonder.

“One of the biggest problems that pharmaceutical companies face today in terms of developing preventive drugs for Alzheimer’s disease is populating the clinical trials with the right type of people — those who are pre-symptomatic but who we know will convert to Alzheimer’s disease in the future,” Kaplan told us. “According to Eli Lily and Merck, 80% of the people in Alzheimer’s clinical trials for preventive or disease modifying drugs fail out of the trials at some point because they no longer meet the trial criteria.”

So by making sure clinical trials have the right subjects, testing for new Alzheimer’s drugs and treatments can be made a lot better. Trials can be conducted more quickly, and life-saving drugs could get to market much faster.

Plus, for families, an extra few years to plan financially for Alzheimer’s can be a huge benefit.

“The costs of Alzheimers disease are enormous,” said Kaplan, “$200 billion today and projected to be in excess of $1 trillion by 2050.”

To date, Neurotrack has received $50,000 in state grants from the Georgia Research Alliance. Emory University received approximately $2.3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Woodruff Foundation to support the scientific research behind Neurotrack’s diagnostic tests.
“I wouldn’t raise any more money for this kind of thing, I would partner with a pharma,” suggested Jason Krikorian partner at DCM at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

The Atlanta-based startup, which launched over the summer, is currently raising a seed round of $1.5 million to $2.5 million from strategic and institutional investors.

Neurotrack is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top image courtesy of Kuttelvaserova, Shutterstock

To keep their employees happy, companies are taking more of an active role in professional development and training.

Learn27 is an e-learning startup for the enterprise. Instead of targeting students and consumers like the majority of education technology, or “ed-tech,” companies (Coursera, Course Hero, Udemy, and so on), it’s targeting businesses that already spend vast sums on employee education, with the intent of serving as a better way to for large companies to inform their extensive workforce about new products and services.

Currently in beta, Learn27 is the newest product from Redmond, Wash.-based Social27, an events management service that launched in 2007. Parent company Social27 has pulled in $750,000 in funding, and it has some high-profile customers, including Microsoft and Dell. The founders, brothers Ike and Bally Singh, tell me that some of these large-scale companies are already signed up to use the new product.

The Singhs Learn27′s cofounders, relocated to the U.S. from India and worked at Microsoft for seven years before branching out to form their own company.

“[We] came upon the realization in 2007 that most enterprise apps will need to have social features built in to be effective and relevant,” Bally told me.

On Learn27, any organization can create a virtual learning center and offer relevant professional courses. Employees, partners, and customers can collaborate on courses and training sessions and upload text-based information or instructional videos. On the website, companies can also provide feedback and regular tests for their employees.

Similarly to companies like Badgeville, Learn27 employs basic gamification techniques like badges and points to keep employees motivated.

“Some of the elements of gamification around learning seem forced,” said Jason Krikorian, a General Partner at DCM. “The motivation is learning, it doesn’t need more around it.”

According to the founders, the major benefit for customers is that they will save time and money. This is a similar pitch that their competitors, such as Saba, Skillsoft, and Cornerstone OnDemand, make in the learning management systems (LMS) sector. Learn 27 also competes with established HR software providers SuccessFactors, acquired by SAP, and Oracle-owned Taleo, which have an LMS component.

Furthermore, it makes online education a more social experience.

“Learning online is usually in isolation, sitting at desk, with talking head in front of you,” said Bally. “But human beings have been learning in a collaborative fashion for centuries. We are taking e-learning from islotion to collaboration.”

Interested to learn more? Check out the video to learn more about how it works!

Learn27 is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top Image via Shutterstock

So, a bunch of brainiacs walk into a neurotechnology class at MIT. That’s not a joke setup; it’s how Neumitra, a stress-killing startup, began.

Stress can completely paralyze some of us during life’s most important moments; for others, it’s more of a silent killer, leading to anxiety, insomnia, poor digestion, alcohol or drug abuse, and other health problems. And during that MIT class in the fall of 2009, Neumitra’s founders “realized that effects of stress represent perhaps the largest unmet need in society today,” said Robert Goldberg.

Goldberg is one of the startup’s co-founders; he’s also a cognitive neuroscience PhD. Today, he and the rest of the Neumitra team are unveiling Bandu, a small wristwatch-like device that will monitor the body for signs of stress, then take steps to counteract it.

An audience member named Vince was calmly wearing his Bandu in the front row at DEMO when a man dressed in military fatigues emerged from the sidelines to yell at him in front of the crowd. This exemplified a triggering situation, and the audience could visibly see his stress levels spike.

“It is bold to come into a place like DEMO and amp up the stress levels,” said sage panelist Scott Sangster, CEO of Health in Reach. “Bio feedback is big right now and there is a lot of going on in digital health with the quantified self. At some point though, how many devices can you have on your arm?”

Bandu detects changes in your motion, temperature, and skin conductance to identify signs of increased mental stress. If stress flag start to fly, the device will alert you with an invitation to use your smartphone to take your mood in a different direction. It might ask you to listen to some music, play a game, or call a friend or family member.

“Your phone becomes a new friend during your most stressful times,” said Goldberg. “You can even load custom reminders, such as messages to ‘Take five deep breaths’ or ‘Close your eyes and smile’ to display directly on Bandu.”

Not only does the watch act as a cheer-up reminder system; it can become incredibly intelligent on stress triggers for you personally and for humans in general.

“For instance, we heard from a veteran with PTSD that Whole Foods was causing flashbacks,” said Goldberg. “But it took him three years to figure out this sad fact.” Adding GPS capabilities to Bandu, he continued, produces a whole new set of potentially useful information.

“Imagine mapping whole cities and countries based on when and where stress spikes,” he said. “We dream of a future where stress is a score that we all know and discuss, in the same way we talk about our weight or blood pressure. Imagine how a view of the stressed planet would change how we see stress!”

With that large and detailed a data set, the medical and science communities would also be getting a much better understanding of stress, where and why it spikes, its impact on our lives and culture, and how we can better control it.

Goldberg started down the neuroscience path because of a family history of mental illness; however, his focus shifted as his career progressed.

“My co-founder, Anand [Yadav], had been working on product development at the Human Genome Project and discovered the power of meditation in his personal life. In our first conversation after class, he suggested a wearable sensor for helping the mind and immediately caught my attention.”

Goldberg and Yadav immediately realized that wearable, mobile devices with stress-detecting sensors onboard could drastically help both the clinical and consumer communities seeking to reduce the effects of stress. And since the sensors would be gathering more than 100 hours’ worth of data each week, they’d also be creating vastly personalized data sets and action plants.

“When Safiyy [Momen] came aboard after seeing our presentation in class,” said Goldberg, “we had someone with a deep background in machine learning for missile defense and cognition to help interpret all the data that would be produced.”

Starting now, the Neumitra team is trying to crowdfund the Bandu’s commercial debut. You can join in the fun at StressFriend.com.

“The earliest adopters are encouraged to buy two devices,” said Goldberg. The buyer will get one unit, and the other, he said, “We’ll give on their behalf to patients such as veterans with PTSD and mothers with panic disorder, through researchers, such as those at Harvard Medical School and the Veterans Administration.”

Right now, more than 40 million Americans suffer from clinical anxiety disorders, and doctors write more than 200 million prescriptions for sedatives each year. Also, said Goldberg, around 30 percent of veterans return from military service in foreign wars with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“As we scale these technologies to wider and wider audiences, we look to add the features that are most in demand,” said Goldberg.

“Building hardware is extremely, um, hard, so we aim to be measured in our approach and roll out new capabilities in small batches first before we release widespread products. … We don’t expect to solve stress by ourselves or in one quick leap.”

Neumitra is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top image courtesy of BestPhotoStudio, Shutterstock

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Did you know that walking on your office floor is actually creating energy that could be captured and put to work? Gravitational Systems does, and it’s harvesting this energy for you to use.

“First of all, when we think in terms of human kind today, the one trend that seems to be unstoppable is that everybody wants to live around everybody else,” said Gravitational Systems founder Gare Henderson at the DEMO Conference.

Gravitational System’s technology collects the “waste energy” created from momentum and heat. This includes footsteps on highly trafficked store floors, and wheels on highways and parking lots all release this energy. You can see an example of how Gravitational Systems collects this energy in the photo to the right.

Henderson pointed out that energy cannot be destroyed. Because so many people live near each other, you’ll find much higher concentrations of energy that cannot be destroyed in cities.

“To nature, a city is like one of those abandoned coal mines that catches on fire,” said Henderson. “[That energy is] being converted into heat, vibration, noise, pollution … we need to find methods of emulating my favorite energy systems and that is a self winding watch. It doesn’t run when you take it off, but that’s the point.”

Henderson went on to talk about how much energy we’re wasting through actions like cooling office buildings at night, but we’re losing a lot more energy than we realize.

“You have two choices at DEMO, you get up and you show product, or you get up and you [talk about] a big vision for the world,” said Adeo Ressi of Founders Den at the DEMO Conference. “I felt like I was at Ted for a minute there.”

The company is based in Clifton, Va., and has thus far raised between over $500,000 from unnamed investors. Gravitational Systems is looking for a new $5 million seed round and hopes to one day $20 million first round of funding.

Gravitational Systems is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Stephen Brashear

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — In business, spreadsheet ninjas can reach black belt-worthy levels of skill, and still remain ignorant of the most basic database concepts.

Michael J. Chen got tired of fighting his employees’ love of Excel and decided, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. His new company, BiBo Labs, makes an Excel-based tool for generating reports from a variety of database sources.

BiBo launched at DEMO Fall 2011 today.

“Businesses today are similar to the masses of the Dark Ages,” Chen told VentureBeat in an email, with ordinary users dependent on a priest-like caste of IT managers to transfer data from databases into a more accessible form. “Segovia is a paradigm shift because it is introducing a type of technology that is the equivalent of the movable type. … Power users can now dynamically drive Microsoft Excel for an entire company with [only] a tenuous understanding of [database] schema.”

“Segovia is the equivalent of a modern-day Gutenberg print press in an enterprise.”

Those are big words, but for anyone who has tried to wrestle multiple relational databases into the more accessible format of an Excel file, it’s an appealing story.

For instance, suppose you’ve got a data repository in an Oracle database, along with a CRM system tracking sales data in Salesforce.com, and some additional applications in Netsuite. Using BiBo Labs’ Segovia tool, you can create complex reports that draw data from all of these sources using a simple markup language. Then, your spreadsheet ninjas can access these reports simply by clicking a button on the Segovia web portal and downloading an Excel spreadsheet, pre-populated with data from the database and the formulas and totals you’ve set up.

Chen says that Segovia can pull data from big data repositories such as Hadoop, Mongo, and NoSQL; cloud based web services such as Salesforce.com, Concur, Netsuite, and the like; and traditional relational databases.

“It looked pretty slick, and pulled from all those big data sources. Pretty impressive,” said Claire Lee, head of partnerships for the emerging business team at Microsoft.

Chen created BiBo labs in 2011, incubating it within another company he owns, Evolution Design Lab, which is a distributor of mass-market women’s footwear.

“EDL had spent millions of dollars on our proprietary supply chain system, yet the users were not accepting/adopting a significant portion of the reporting,” Chen said, echoing the lament of ambitious IT project managers everywhere. “As I dove deeper into the implementation, I realized how unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive it would be to migrate off spreadsheets.” Thus, Segovia was born.

BiBo Labs has taken no outside funding and Chen is not seeking any, telling VentureBeat he has the ability to continue to support the company within EDL for several years.

BiBo Labs is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Stephen Brashear

Making servers able to withstand hurricanes, floods, fires, and earthquakes can be an eco-friendly task, according to hardware startup H2Tran.

H2Tran builds disaster-proof safe/enclosures to protect digital data and computer hardware against catastrophic situations. It’s Eco-Green Data Safe (EGDS) enclosures feature a liquid cooling system that helps lower air conditioning costs, and don’t require expensive raised-floor building infrastructures. It is fully loaded with heavily compressed doors to seal out water, twelve industrial grade bolts, numeric key locks, biometric security, and more.

What’s moore, the server racks inside are surrounded by copper tubing, through which you can pump water or freon to keep the hardware cool, even though it’s sealed inside a safe.

In other words, H2Tran is aiming to build the kind of hardware enclosures you’d expect to find for servers in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

“Disaster can happen at any moment in time, said founder Harry Tran during his presentation. “There was the Japanese earthquake, the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina. How do you protect your equipment from fire, building collapses and floods? We designed a safe to help you store your data.”

The safe weighs 2,000 pounds and was too large to be brought on stage here at DEMO Fall 2012, where H2Tran debuted its enclosure. The company is currently accepting pre-orders on its products, with most of the actual production being outsourced for the time being.

Sage panelist Claudia Fan Munce of IBM Venture Capital was skeptical about the likelihood for adoption given technology’s migration to the cloud. Who really wants to manage their own server, after all — even one in a bomb-proof safe? But Founder Institute CEO Adea Ressi sees opportunities in international markets.

“All the incidents Tran brought up were in the developing world.,” he said. “In a lot of the developing world, the infrastructure isn’t there to have a cloud, so a server in the dining room is an option.”

Plus, there’s the lucrative market for superheroes and supervillains.

Founded in 2008, the Pacifica, Calif.-based startup is bootstrapped, but it’s seeking initial funding over the next few months. H2Tran consists of its five founders, who actively participate in product development.

Below, we’ve got a gallery of photos of the liquid-cooled enclosure.

H2Tran is one of over 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top photo: Megan Kelly/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Acuity Systems is unveiling a software platform called TraitWareID that authenticates a person’s identity with the help of a mobile phone.

The Visalia, Calif.-based Acuity Systems started life in 2008 as a video analytics software company in video surveillance. The recession and the collapse of that market forced the company to pivot into identity and access management, using mobile platforms. Heightened fears about mobile hacking and device theft have prompted companies to pay more attention to authenticating employees when they access company information using phones. On top of that, authentication is more important as mobile commerce takes off.

TraitWareID authenticates who a person is with a few questions and then associates that user with a specific mobile device and its digital characteristics. That provides enhanced security as well as a seamless customer experience, making transactions on mobile devices safer. The content that we keep on our phones distinguishes us from other people, so the chances of someone else having the exact same mobile device data is 1 in 360 billion.

The result of this analysis is what Acuity calls an “identity binding token,” which acts like a digital signature, or a proxy for the authenticated user, so that the user does not have to enter passwords every time they do a transaction.

Harlan Hutson, the president and founder of the firm, said ”As a husband and father of two girls, I want my family to enjoy their lives without concern about cybercrime and identity theft. Keeping my family safe is a priority, as it should be for every user of great online and mobile technology.”

Hutson said that organizations that serve mobile users still don’t have confidence in the identity of the user when they’re accessing company information.

“Our solution is the only one of its kind to ensure a safe and secure mobile environment,” Hutson said.

Acuity is working with a large university to test TraitWareID to replace plastic cards for identifying students with digital identities on mobile devices. The company wants to make its software work with smartphones, multiple mobile devices, PCs, tablets, and even door locks. Layering on biometric identification, such as fingerprinting, is also part of the deal.

“What I saw was basically all the thin plastic things in my wallet are going to be replaced by my cell phone, and my cell phone is a better authentication tool,” said Adeo Ressi, the CEO of Founder Institute during the Infrastructure Sage Panel. “I buy that vision. The idea that someone could buy a hot tub with my wallet is disturbing.”

Acuity Systems has raised $5 million from angel investors. The company has two employees, not counting contractors and board members.

Acuity Systems is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Not ones to beat around the bush (or perhaps in his case, the tree), Cyprus-based Softarex manufactures software-with-advanced-research-from-experts. Its flagship product codEnforcer seeks out problem in source code and suggests improvements.

The sleep-deprived, overworked software engineer is something of a tech-scene trope, and the 45 employees at Softarex are working hard to give them a rest.

“CodEnforcer can make the software development process more effective and increase productivity of engineers,” said CEO Alexander Lipanov. “We’ve figured out that using codEnforcer, it is possible to save a minimum of 2,000 hours per year with a team of 150 members. This will allow software developers to spend less time in office and spend more time on other work or with family and friends.”

Basically, Softarex provides an outsourcing opportunity for code analysis as well we assistance with reengineering and refactoring.

“As a developer, I was reading some of the recommendations on how to fix source code, and it gave clear recommendations on how to fix it,” said CEO of Founder Institute Adea Ressi. “When you have a lot of people working on source code, they can get sloppy and make mistakes. The Codenforcer could be great for big projects like that.”

The team has produced a collection of eight solutions that deal with different industry sectors: e-commerce, communications, energy and utilities, public sector, manufacturing, health care and medicine, publishing and advertisement, and education.

Next on this list of belabored professionals to help are event managers. The Promomo platform is in the works, an online booking system and social network for live entertainment.  Performers can publicize themselves on the site, and people looking to hire live entertainment for anything ranging from circuses to frat parties to corporate functions can search through the listings.

I am still unclear as to the connection between these two products, unless the engineers that have additional free time decide to take up cabaret.

Softarex is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Babies are an ordeal to bring into the world, tough to raise, and really, really expensive to buy things for. Baby registry site Bonica can’t help with most of those things, but it does want to help parents make sure their babies have all the supplies they need.

CEO Hans Teja says that the idea behind Bonica is to give expecting parents a better resource for making purchases for their newborns. Bonica’s lists are personalized; parents and loved ones can receive product recommendations based on variables like climate, budget, and habits.

But while most baby registries zero in on baby’s first year, Bonica focuses on the first 24 months. Cofounder Julia Carolina says this is a feature that a lot of mothers have asked for.

Another big benefit of Bonica is its universality. Rather than interface with just one site, Bonica’s compatible with a wide variety of them: from the big guys like Babies ‘R’ Us and Amazon to Etsy and Zulily.

While a big part of Bonica’s business will come from affiliate marketing, the Teja says the service will also gain a lot information on what parents buy for their babies. And we all know how much that sort of data is worth nowadays.

Bonica is one of 75 companies and six student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Prospective Plus makes it easier for recruiters to hire entry-level candidates, and it’s launched its subscription service to the public today.

“Hiring processes today are outdated, expensive, and time consuming,” said Phoebe Farber, the founder and CEO of the Boston-based company. The idea originated in January at Northeastern University, where Farber is a senior.

Like many of her classmates, Farber has applied for over 300 jobs this year and has experienced the frustration firsthand.

Phoebe Farber, CEO of Prospective Plus.

“I had to fill out the same information for each job I considered and big job board sites like didn’t let me offer more than a resume,” Farber told me. Since then, she has recruited a small team of designers and engineers and has set them to work on introducing a new job application that goes beyond the resume.

The app “gives employers meaningful applicant information to make faster, better hires,” she explained.

The major benefit for job applicants, Farber says, is that they don’t have to create a new application every time they apply for a job. They also can use the service to track their application, receive job suggestions, and ask for feedback from recruiters.

Meanwhile, recruiters will receive a more complete profile of each candidate so they can more easily weed out prospects based on experience, references, and culture fit.

During the job-starved economic recovery, digital natives have increasingly gone to extreme measures to stand out from the pack, so this startup is right on trend.

It has not raised any funding, and it currently competes with a number of startups that have launched this year to match graduating college students with a dream job.

Seelio is a Michigan-based startup that provides potential employers with a more detailed view of an applicant. Prospective Plus also competes with AfterCollege, which recently re-launched its product to helps students stand out in the fiercely competitive job market.

To learn more about Prospective Plus, check out the explanatory video.

Prospective Plus is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top Image via Shutterstock

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Evan Williams has started a company or two in his day. You may have heard of a little one called Twitter.

As he goes off into his next startup — Medium — he has a little advice to pass on to the startups getting their footing today.

“Every time you start a company — and I’ve started five or six — you have the opportunity to screw up in whole new ways,” he told the audience at the DEMO Conference. “I tried to be a ski bum when I stepped away from Twitter, and I wasn’t a very good skier.”

He talked about how when Blogger took a downturn, he laid off his staff, and had to hitch rides down to Santa Clara to take care of his small data center. The servers, he said, were duct-taped, and sometimes, just to keep the website alive, he slept in the cold server room.

One thing he’s learned from starting Blogger, Odeo, Twitter, and now Obvious Corp.: The more you’ve done, the smarter you are, and the bigger risks you can take.

“I think when you’re just starting out you have little choice but to succeed through persistence and luck. I like to think of the world as a sort of a casino, except the house doesn’t have the advantage. If you’re smart, you have an advantage,” Williams said. “It behooves you to place a lot of bets … as you get better you can make bigger bets.”

As you take your bets, Williams also highly suggests entrepreneurs create a business that they want to see in the world. You’ll have a different vision of how the product will work because you’d use it yourself.

“I think you should build things for yourself,” he said. “I mistrust anyone … if they’re saying, ‘Well, that market wants this,’ and you’re not part of that market.”

Williams is working on his Obvious Corp., an incubator of sorts, as well as a publishing-industry startup Medium. In order to become an Obvious Corp. company or get an investment, your company must inspire the team, regardless of whether they invest in you.

“It needs to be something that we’d be happy that it succeeded even if we weren’t involved, but we think we can make a difference if we are involved,” said Williams.

For the time being Medium is not yet fully functional, but you can visit the website for a sneak peek of what the team is doing. Williams says they are still filling in some missing pieces and will open up fully in the next few months.

Photo credit: Stephen Brashear

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Doling out work to different outsiders is never fun. But PieceWise hopes to make it easier by focusing on how to outsource pieces of projects to different people.

Cambridge, Mass.-based PieceWise lets you create a public or private plan for a project. As you do so, PieceWise makes suggestions to you about how to fill out the details in your plan, based on other public projects. Anyone can contribute to your public project by making suggestions on the steps it takes to finish and voting on each step’s usefulness. Then others can bid to complete the steps for you. PieceWise is unveiling itself today at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

The team showcased the app with the example of making pizza, a clever choice in a time slot right before lunch. Sure there is the delivery option, but with PieceWise, a group of hungry young entrepreneurs (or anyone) could draw from multiple sources to have fresh, piping hot, homemade pie, without expending any effort.

“We solve the problem of never having enough time to get all the things done that we want to do,” said William Neely, chief executive of the company. “We decided to focus on this because, like all entrepreneurs, we have lots of ideas and projects that we want to see get done but never have enough time to do them all ourselves.”

Once the project plan is complete, you can manage the project by assigning tasks to users, setting up text and email reminders, and marking pieces as complete when they are finished. You can accept offers from would-be workers.

“This means that you could take an idea, get a plan for how to turn that idea into a reality, and know exactly how much it would cost with almost no time investment on your part,” Neely said.

The company hopes to tackle the problem of wasting time trying to find solutions that other have already solved many times over. Companies don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.

“Imagine a world where all you have to do to turn an idea into a reality is push a button,” Neely said. “That’s the world we want to create. You can think of us as the assembly line for everything because PieceWise reduces projects to a set of reusable pieces that are easy to outsource or do ourselves. We all know the changes assembly lines brought to manufacturing, imagine that for the rest of the world.”

PieceWise has received $70,000 in funding since it was started in 2011. The money came from Howard and Kitty Van Bortel. Now the company is working on raising a seed round. Within the next six months, the company wants to grow to more than 100 public projects, thousands of daily users, and an overall user base of 10,000. It will also work on a more sophisticated version of its marketplace to handle transactions. Rivals include Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and eLance. Neely said his site helps its users merge different pieces into a useful whole.

However, participants on the social sage panel Jason Mendelson, Tracey Isacke, and Josh Elman expressed concern over whether the company could reach that critical mass, where there are enough projects and people in the database to make it a genuinely useful service.

The company hopes its advantage lies in reuse of pieces of projects. And it will help companies and individuals come up with more accurate estimates of how much time, money, and effort a project will take to complete. Overall, PieceWise is a platform that merges an online marketplace, project management tools, and crowdsourced project planning.

This infographic from the company breaks down the PieceWise process…piece by piece.

PieceWise is one of 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Business cards are a pain because you have to remember to transcribe or scan them before they’re truly useful.

And most apps that aim to replace them fall short because they depend on both you and the people you meet using the same app.

Enter InTooch, a utility for connecting you with the social media profiles and contact information of the people you meet using nothing more than a phone number.

Whenever you meet a new person, all you need to do is get their phone number. When you call it, the InTooch app (free for iPhone or Android) detects that it’s a new number and opens up automatically. It lets you choose the type of connection you want to make (business or personal) and lets you tick off the information you want to share with the other person, such as your contact info and social network invitations.

The recipient doesn’t need to have InTooch. If they do, the connections are made automatically within the app. But if they don’t, they’ll receive a text message on their phone that directs them to a URL where they can download your contact info and make the connections to you via Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, or what have you.

“Two years ago, I went to a mobile conference and had forgotten my business cards and lost a lot of potential business opportunities because of it,” says chief executive and cofounder Julien Salanon. “I downloaded several apps at the event to solve this business-card issue, but none of them worked. So every time I ended up calling the other person to leave my mobile number. That’s when I got the idea to enhance those natural connections with InTooch.”

InTooch started in Paris in 2010 and moved to the U.S. this year. It incubated at the HEC School of Management, and the app entered beta testing in partnership with SFR, France’s second-largest mobile operator. The company has raised a seed round from former Netgem founder and angel investor Olivier Guillaumin, who is based in Paris, and is actively seeking additional funding.

The app is currently available only on Android and iPhone, but, says Salanon, “We obviously plan to support all platforms and devices and want to be ubiquitous in the marketplace.”

It competes with contact-sharing apps like CardFlick and Mover. You could say it also competes with the built-in contact-sharing and invitation features of LinkedIn and Facebook, but it’s really more of an extension to those networks. And because it doesn’t require recipients to have anything more than SMS, it’s unusually open-ended. As such, it looks like a handy utility.

It may not be an idea to rival the next Facebook, but it promises a level of convenience that could eventually make paper business cards all but extinct. I’m crossing my fingers for that. At the close of the talk, Salanon said that InTooch will free everyone from business cards for good — and he tossed a bunch of business cards in the air (pictured above).

In the on-stage presentation, they probably won the award for most sex jokes. (“I definitely see a poking coming on.”)

InTooch is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

I have always thought it would be nice to have a ninja at my disposal to take care of tasks like protecting me from attacks, stealthily breaking into ice cream shops once they are closed, and infiltrating covert tech companies to gather top secret information.

This dream may never come true, but I at least I’ll be able to hire a Flinja.

Flinja is a startup that uses the talent, energy, and financial need of college students to create a freelance workforce. On the marketplace, students post services they want to provide, which alumni and staff can directly book. The site provides an opportunity for students to build their professional networks, find jobs and internships, and make a little extra cash.

“As freelancers ourselves, we wish there had been a platform like Flinja around when we were in college that allowed us to make money off our skills and hobbies as well as network with the right people,” said CMO Rebecca Bahr. “With the economy the way it is, Flinja helps students earn money doing what they love and gives alumni and staff within their college network the capability to give back to their alma mater by hiring students for the services they need at an affordable rate.”

So far, the most popular tasks are tutoring, babysitting, driving, and language translation.

For security and networking purposes, the marketplace is only available to people with a .edu email address. The team shared that alumni have even asked for their old college email addresses back so they can sign up. The site securely processes all transactions with a third-party payment system and escrow facilities.

The exclusivity ensures safety, but also provides alumni the opportunity to stay connected to their alma maters.

“We are all proud of the universities we went to,” Bahr said this morning at DEMO. “Flinja allows us to give back to that college without having to write a check, connecting students to alumni one job at a time.”

The company is launching on a school by school basis. It is already available to the University of Southern California community. So far, 12 percent of the current USC population are registered Flinjas, with significant adoption from members of the class of 2016. An official Flinja student association is also on campus.

On Sept. 24, the platform debuted at University of California, Los Angeles and is available at Stanford on Tuesday. Plans for expansion include the rest of the of UC schools, followed by a national campaign. Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group said that this network could be a game-changer.

“I really, really want this company to succeed,” he said. “I think there is a huge opportunity here to tie the campuses to the wealthy alumni, creating a network and being bale to drive that network for jobs and money. This is a trojan horse.”

The five person team has extensive experience in tech spanning PayPal, Google, eBay, and Cisco, as well as other startups. They are based in San Francisco.

Flinja is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — It’s a sad paradox that we mostly browse through video clips by means of still images. Whether you’re on YouTube, Vimeo, or another video site, most of what you see are stills — at least, until you click on something.

Gnzo has an alternative: What if you could see up to 30 live videos at once, simultaneously?

Gnzo is essentially a new, more animated way of displaying and browsing videos, and it’s optimized for touchscreens. Instead of square stills, it displays a mosaic of animated videos, each one a 6-second clip from the video behind it.

You can browse through the interface by swiping left and right, or you can zoom in on a specific video by circling it with your finger. At least, that’s how it works in Gnzo’s obviously mocked-up demonstration video below.

The company, which is based in Kanagawa, Japan, and which was formerly known as Gunzoo, showed off its technology today onstage at DEMO Fall 2012.

Founder and chief executive Toshikazu Shinohara (“Shino”) encountered video technology as a university student and subsequently spend 15 years in U.I./U.X. (user interface/user experience) design.

It’s not just a U.I. tweak, however. The company’s “proprietary multivideo compression and streaming technology is what makes the multiple-video playback possible,” according to Gnzo consultant Yuichiro “Woody” Deguchi.

While explaining his company to the audience at DEMO, Shino drew analogies with not one, not two, but three of the major social media channels. He said Gnzo’s goal is to make browsing videos as immediate and accessible as browsing photos is on Instagram, with the ability to see lots of visual content at once like Pinterest, and the immediacy of Twitter.

The challenge for this young company will be finding partners to deliver its elegant U.I. Perhaps it will attract the attention of Google (YouTube’s parent) as an alternative to YouTube’s current, quite horrible interface.

Gnzo has raised $1.5 million to date and is actively seeking its next round of capital.

Gnzo is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — It’s not easy being green, Kermit the Frog sang. A startup called Sure has a way to make it easier: Give people points for making green lifestyle choices.

The Sure system, which launched today at DEMO Fall 2012,  is designed to help individuals, companies, and even whole cities reduce their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. At every level, people get points for making more eco-friendly choices: buying organically-made bread, riding bicycles instead of driving cars, or using compact fluorescent lighting and environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes. And if you get more points, you qualify for discounts on future purchases.

In other words, Sure makes being green into a sort of game. But here’s where it gets interesting: You can gain more Sure points by frequenting businesses or working for companies that have a lot of Sure points, or by living in a city with a lot of Sure points. Conversely, companies get Sure points for having lots of employees with eco-friendly lifestyles, and cities’ scores rise if they have lots of residents who have high scores.

In short, the system aims to make the interconnectedness of a planet into a system for scoring points. If it gets widespread enough, you won’t have to conduct extensive research into a restaurant’s green credentials before you order the free-range chicken special there: You’ll be able to tell from the establishment’s Sure score that it sources its ingredients from eco-friendly suppliers.

Source: Sustainable Reference

Sure depends on your self-reported habits to give you an eco-friendliness score

Sure is a project created by a startup called Sustainable Reference, which was founded by Andy Bäcker in Barakaldo, Spain in 2009. The company has just opened a U.S. branch in San Francisco, as of August, 2012, and plans to expand into the U.S. market. It has $1 million in backing from grants, loans, and private investors.

“I love the planet and the beings who live on this planet,” Bäcker said in an email to VentureBeat. “I believe that many solutions are already out there, and it’s a matter of knowing what’s available and offering value propositions so as to have each individual part do its best in terms of trying to connect with the best possible match. Almost like applying an intelligent magnetic coating where the compatible parts get attracted to each other.”

While individual actions are important, it is ultimately strength in numbers that have the greatest impact.

“One person on their own can’t solve the problem our planet is currently facing,” said Bäcker during his DEMO presentation. “We want to make sustainability contagious, the world is counting on it.”

Sustainable Reference will have several huge challenges in implementing its ambitious vision. Certifying various claims in order to award Sure points will be difficult.

Sustainable Reference plans to offer various levels of certification, from self-reporting all the way up to independent audits, but implementing that in a clear and manageable way will be a significant challenge for the company.

“If you are asking people to go back in and constantly update what they did, what they purchased, or when they turned off the lights, I don’t see that becoming mainstream,” said Josh Elman of Greylock Partners.

Second, it’s a system that’s unlikely to work very well unless widely adopted — but many people won’t use it unless they know it works well and see the Sure scores of products, companies, and services often enough that they’re actually able to use those scores as a decisionmaking tool. In other words, there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here.

Finally, Sure has an unfortunate name, which it shares with a popular deodorant brand in the U.S. That will make Googling it more difficult than it needs to be.

Still, Bäcker’s optimism is powerful, and he may be onto something with the notion of making a game out of the interconnectedness of this world. And Sure’s ambition is breathtaking: It aims to reduce worldwide CO2 emissions by 1 percent by 2016. If it succeeds at that goal, Sure will have definitely made a difference.

Check out the company’s introductory video below.

Top photo courtesy Sustainable Reference. Sure points will help save the polar bears, founder Andy Bäcker hopes.

Sustainable Reference is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Having trouble finding a quality date online with services like Match, OkCupid, or eHarmony? How about going on some video speed dates with new startup Seekly?

Seekly wants to get rid of the “overwhelming” and “misleading” nature of online dating sites and make dating online efficient, less stressful, and more economical. Users can sign up to participate in five-minute-long video speed dates with people who also use Seekly. Users are paired with people within 100 miles, and it does not pair you with people who don’t meet certain criteria. Right now “deal-breakers” include smokers/non-smokers, location, and age. If a video chat goes well for both users, then users’ information is exchanged.

On stage at DEMO conference in Santa Clara, Calif., the cofounders showed the audience how their service will help love-seekers “break the ice.” They also offered a discount to DEMO attendees who needed to get a date.

Unlike competitors, Seekly has ditched the compatibility tests and questionnaires, so you can “get to know the person, not the profile.” To help you get through those awkward silences, “while you’re on a date, you’re prompted with information that your date has already provided,” they explained.

“Online dating can be improved,” Seekly co-founder Susie Steiner told VentureBeat. “The way people see other people can be improved. With Seekly, you cannot prejudge, you cannot choose who or what type you would like to date. You can only eliminate users based on items that are deal breakers for you.”

For pricing, the service will be free in beta, but it will transition to a paid usage early next year. In the near future, Seekly will offer daily ($3.99), weekly ($7.99), or monthly ($29.99) subscriptions. These subscriptions get you unlimited usage.

Seekly almost sounds like a useful version of Airtime, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning’s social video startup that hasn’t really done much since its celeb-filled launch. Instead of video chatting with random strangers or Facebook friends you already know, Seekly is pairing you with people who have the same reason as you to be there.

Tampa, Fla.-based Seekly was founded in January 2012. The company received about $12,000 in “Developer Dollars” in January from Abbeton, a Tampa-focused accelerator. The company hopes to get more funding in the near term.

In the DEMO Sage panel after the presentation, Tracey  Isacke, director of investments and business development at Telefonica Digital, said that she liked the concept of doing speed dating remotely. If you don’t like someone, you don’t have to stay for an extra couple of minutes, she said, “and it’s a great way to meet people.”

Seekly is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Seekly