NYC's Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator kicks off its 2014 winter class with ten startups

For its sixth accelerator program, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator continues to focus on startups that could thrive in New York City.

The ten companies include a cloud-based mobile dispatching platform for taxi companies, a social dining network for gourmet events, and a crowdfunding platform specifically targeted at opening up franchises in local communities. ERA’s four-month long program offers the startups office space, extensive advice, and a $40,000 investment (with potential for follow-on funds).

“This group has a great diversity between B2B and B2C and a focus on a lot of really interesting emerging segments,” said Jonathan Axelrod, managing director at ERA, in an e-mail to VentureBeat. “Mobile and data analytics are a key part of many of these companies and that’s not surprising given how strong those trends are in general right now.”

There are plenty of accelerators in NYC, but I’ve always been struck by ERA’s ability to consistently choose quality companies. Past graduates include intriguing companies like NumberFire, which brings quantitative modeling to sports predictions, and MXHero, which is aiming to redefine the way we work with e-mail.

“We see the companies that can get early traction in general have the easiest time raising their follow-on rounds quickly,” Axelrod wrote. “That’s not a surprise but we’re continually impressed how quickly many of our companies today can get customers and revenues over the course of our four months of working with them.”

Below, check out ERA’s 2014 winter class:

Bookalokal: A social dining network for curated gourmet events. Whether traveling to a new city, or exploring locally, guests can choose from group dinners to food tours, cooking classes to cheese workshops. Events are hosted by people who love to cook, host and share—from food bloggers to aspiring chefs and wine connoisseurs.

CommonKey: A cloud-based password management platform, providing SMBs easy to use security tools based on the highest industry security standards. Teams can securely share login credentials, easily manage permissions, while giving management statistics on a company’s security activity and strength.

CUPS: A mobile-first subscription service for coffee connoisseurs and the independent coffee shops that serve them. The app makes the city’s coffee scene accessible and convenient by offering Unlimited, Cup a Day and Prepaid subscriptions for use at participating coffee houses.

Dashride: A cloud-based mobile dispatching platform that simplifies ride management for the livery industry. Its white-label platform integrates with existing software, helping livery companies reduce costs, maximize driver efficiency and provide an app to end-consumers—and helps them complete with new industry entrants.

Farmivore: A box subscription service that sources the highest-quality produce from local farms and delivers it fresh to your door. Farmivore offers custom options that ensure the right mix of fruits and vegetables for any size household: build a box based on personal preferences or select a right-sized variety box.

Franchise Fund: A crowd funding platform that helps job creators raise money they need to open a franchise in their local communities.  The platform allows a local resident to propose a new franchise for their area and leverage cutting edge crowd funding tools to help bring the products and services they want into their local area.

LingoLive: A distance learning service for personalized foreign language instruction. For a fraction of the cost of a conventional private tutor, students get live one-on-one instruction anytime with accredited native-speaking tutors. Tutors follow a curriculum developed by PhD linguists and track student progress with real-time reports.

Mezzobit : A trust-based tag management platform. It helps publishers of websites and apps better manage how they exchange data with their business partners, addressing the concern of data leakage. Customers use Mezzobit’s portal to configure data flows for their properties, enabling visibility and control of third-party data collection tags.

RetSKU: A business intelligence and analytics platform for retail brands selling via traditional brick-and-mortar merchants. The platform collects in-store competitive placement data in real-time, analyzes it to provide actionable insights and helps to improve promotional effectiveness and new product launches.

Shopalytic: A suite of easy-to-use business analytic tools which help e-commerce merchants better understand their customers. Shopalytic’s cost effective products provide small to medium-sized merchants key insights, which help them improve customer retention and, most importantly, increase sales.