By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Eight companies pitched to a crowd of more than 100 potential partners, investors and others at the Co-founders Meetup at Capital Factory Monday night.
Jason Brown, a game designer with many Microsoft games to his credit, is working on games to help autistic children interact. From moving a spaceship up and down by smiling or frowning to mirroring games with “smiley” faces that have various facial expressions. He’s gotten positive feedback from both teachers and parents on the games.
Daniel Senyard from Vivogig explained the new sponsorship platform his company is creating for its app and website that allow people to share photos of bands on social networks. The sponsorship platform would connect companies looking to sponsor specific bands or performances with discounts on the company’s goods and services. Points and discounts can be earned by followers of the band who share the band’s photos.
Adam Gravois has 18 years experience creating visual effects for film and commercials and is creating a company to let customers virtually try on items—such as eyeglasses—just by taking a picture of themselves on a tablet then clicking on images in a catalog. He works with developers to communicate how to transform visual effects into digital products and has created 3,000 pairs of glasses so far. Gravois is looking for someone with a business development background to help create relationships with corporate customers.
Tom Maiaroto was looking for technical help and investors for his company Virality Score, which creates an index measuring the virality of web content. He has created a score based on shares and web addresses, known as Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs, mentioning the content which can help creators optimize their content to increase sharing. He is measuring more than 15,000 URLs every hour, updating every 15 minutes. At present, he said, he has no customers but he anticipates the NFL will soon be a client. At present, it is possible to go on his website and check the virality of one URL vs. another.
Nickolay Shestapalov, founder of Ecoscape Solutions, introduced his early stage idea of a clean technology that could be used by commercial buildings to greatly reduce the amount of water they use for landscaping. At present, he said, the idea has no hardware. But Shestapalov, a computational scientist, said that existing smart irrigation systems schedule watering to reduce the amount of water used, but never measure the existing moisture in the ground.
“This would be like trying to treat a patient without taking his temperature,” he said. His system would not only measure the existing moisture in the ground but would connect with weather systems and postpone watering when there was a particularly high chance of precipitation.
Raymond Westwater, founder of Futureware, has devised a new video compression algorithm that delivers video 4-to-5 times faster than existing systems. He calls his compression technology Zpeg. Westwater was not looking for help with the technology, he said.
“I can’t take investment yet, I’m really far from that. And you’d have to be one hell of a damn good compression guy to out produce me. What I need,” he joked, “is my alter ego, the Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll, the lying, treacherous CEO.”
Adam Singh is a digital marketing consultant with Phunware and is working on an Internet marketing report system that scrapes information from Google Analytics and translates it into easily read dashboards that explain SEO metrics for customers who are not SEO literate. He’s looking for a technical cofounder who can help him iterate based on close contact with customers and their experience with the team.
Ron Lasorsa, founder of Local Magnet is trying to raise money and work on getting a larger sample to validate his service which is lead generation for businesses that rely on customers calling during emergencies—like plumbing services or roadside assistance. His click-to-call platform sells a certain number of calls to a given business and allows them to see specific metrics on return on investment. For example, the company bought a certain number of calls, it could track how many customers and what kind of income it made directly from that call.
The next meeting of Co-Founders Austin is October 7 at the Capital Factory.
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