SA New Tech Introduces New Startups

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

This month on SA New Tech: Want to find the most authentic places to visit in downtown San Antonio? Now there’s a map for that. Plus, SPoTS can help you motivate your sales reps and SportyBird.io helps small soccer teams use big statistical tools.
The Loc@List Map

The Loc@List is a printed tourist map to downtown San Antonio that identifies the most historic and authentic establishments the city has to offer. Created by San Antonio natives Eddie Romero and Christopher Perez, the map will be released quarterly and will designate 13 places in the downtown area that tourists should visit. The company plans on designating new establishments each time they release a map, though there will be some reoccurring locations. The layout of the map was created by graphic designer Robert Salinas.
“We all wanted to do something in San Antonio to highlight great places and kind of get past this ‘San Antonio is lame’ kind of stigma that everyone has,” says Romero.
Romero and Perez pick the locations themselves – drawing from their own experience and keeping an eye on local blogs like Puropinche and sites like Yelp. The product will generate revenue by selling add space on the back of the printed map.
The maps will be available downtown at B-cycle locations, hotels, and various places along E. Houston Street.
The Loc@List is currently in the process of establishing an online presence and plans to produce a series of YouTube videos highlighting San Antonio’s downtown area.
The Loc@List is currently looking to hire people to help market their product.

SportyBird.io

SportyBird.io is a mobile app designed to keep track of soccer statistics in a user friendly way. The app was invented by co-founders Joshua Swank and John Trenholm. Swank has been involved with soccer for most of his life and had the idea for the app while coaching youth soccer.
“After college I started coaching youth soccer and realized a lot of teams don’t have a resource [for statistics],” said Swank. “Over 70 percent of coaches between youth soccer, college, and professional teams use statistics in some form or fashion – a lot of them still hand-write them on paper.”
SportyBird is designed to make recording these statistics much easier. The app can not only gather simple numerical data such as the number of saves, corner kicks, and shots on goal for a team, but it can be used to record the location of those shots and saves on the field. The mobile app links to a web interface where a coach can login to their SportyBird account and see graphs and detailed information about his team’s performance – both per game and over the length of a season. The app can also be used to record statistics outside of games such as how many practices a player has missed. Swank envisions the app one day being scaled up to a point where entire soccer organizations, such as division one clubs, can use it.
The SportyBird.io Team app is scheduled to come out in about a month. Swank hopes to market the product to youth clubs and lower-level professional teams. Their pay structure will work by charging a monthly or yearly rate for the product.

SPoTS

SPoTS is a web based application that is designed to help structure compensation for sales teams – essentially helping users identify and reward their sales superstars while not overpaying those employees that are not generating adequate revenue. Founder Dan Sevigny created the product to correct a problem he dealt with in his own sales experience while working for State Farm Insurance.
“The way I got compensated never lined up with the way the agency made money,” said Sevigny. “So I wanted to develop a tool, and we’ve come up with the solution of SPoTS.”
SPoTS stands for “scorecard production tracking system”. It started back in 2008 as an excel spreadsheet with some nice graphics. The system allows employers to identify and easily communicate to sales reps what products are most profitable to sell at any given time. The sales reps then can focus on selling those products and can receive better compensation by focusing on what makes their company the most money. The employees will also be able to see how their pay will increase if they make certain sales benchmarks.
SPoTS has improved their product each year, making the spreadsheet look progressively more appealing and adding better compensation system to let employees know what the best products for them to sell in the future would be. In 2012, SPoTS made $600,000 between their spreadsheet system and their consulting services.
Now in 2013, CTO Seth Watson has put the system online – making the system accessible from any computer or iPad. Every day, team members can see an online paycheck letting them know how much they’ve made. More importantly, they can see a “scorecard bonus scale” that shows how their paycheck will increase as they sell more. The scale is generated based on point values and indicates how profitable each product is for the employee to sell at any given time. It also shows how the employees commission will compound as they achieve certain benchmarks.
“They can see exactly what they need to sell, when they need to sell it,” says Sevigny. “All of the real time analytics are there.”
SPoTS also consults agency owners on how to manage their team and create the compensation system that is best suited for their production needs. To even better inform agency owners, the SPoTS product comes with analytics that show owners how and where their sales people are making the agency money.
The company currently has around 400 users – most of whom are State Farm Insurance agents. Right now, 2.2 percent of all State Farm Insurance agents use the system.
The company is currently looking for people to help them market their product.

Wimbo Music Inc.

Wimbo is an iPhone app with a very simple, yet difficult to execute, music function. It allows users to listen to their favorite songs while independently controlling each instrument and vocal track in the song. Users control sliders on a virtual mixer that allows them to mute, or change the level of, every element of a song.
“Wimbo music was born so that we could make playing music, practicing, and rehearsing much more fun,” says founder and CEO Denis Ouellette. “Music is the ultimate social media, and playing alone sucks.”
By using Wimbo, musicians can now play along with their favorite bands without having to play over them. A guitarist could mute the lead guitar in Sweet Home Alabama, for example, and play those notes himself instead. A drummer could mute the drums in his favorite song and experiment with different rhythms to fill in that space. Ouellette envisions musicians using Wimbo to practice, teach, analyze, and experiment with their favorite songs. They could even use the product as a portable Karaoke machine.
The trick to making Wimbo work, however, is obtaining a user’s favorite songs in a large, multi-track format where the instruments are not pre-mixed. Most bands, both past and present, do not keep their multi-track mixes. And if they do, the master recordings of the songs normally belong to an artist’s label and are very expensive to acquire. Wimbo Music resolves this problem by obtaining the right to reproduce popular music from the relent publishers, which is cheaper, and then re-creating popular songs by partnering with special studios, musicians, and sound engineers across the county. These studios have the resources and the talent to re-create popular music, including older music from artists like The Beatles, with an almost indistinguishable difference in quality from the original song. They can even replicate the voice of a popular singer like Christina Aguilera with around 90% accuracy.
Currently, Wimbo Music plans to have 50 to 100 songs available by their products release in mid-April – focusing on classic rock and country at the time of launch. They are also planning to work with upcoming musicians and indie bands to grow their library. At launch, Wimbo will charge $4.99 per song.
Ouellette sees Wimbo as a huge opportunity for artists to make more revenue and increase their interaction with fans.
“Artists are doing everything they can to engage their fans and there is no more intimate way than to actually let them play and mix their songs,” says Ouellette.
Wimbo is currently looking to hire developers with music backgrounds to grow their company.