Today is Demo Day for TechStars NYC. I’ll be at the event, but here is a little preview from when I visited last week. TechStars organizers David Cohen and David Tisch showed me around the New York office. In this video, I get a peak at a smart digital sign being developed by Immersive Labs and a very cool learning app from a startup called Veri.
The digital sign is a large flat screen display with a camera on top that detects the faces of people who stop and look at the signs. It tries to determine gender, age, distance from the sign and how long each person is paying attention. Software then tries to serve up the most relevant ads based on whether it thinks more men or women are looking at it, and other factors. Yup, this is exactly the kind of thing that leads to a Minority Report type of world.
The other startup I saw was Veri. Founder Lee Hoffman took me through the basics. It is a way to learn deep topics through fun, multiple-choice quizes. Anyone can create a question and set of answers, and supplement each one with a video or other reference material for people who want to learn more. He will start with a couple topics like wine (with Gary Vaynerchuk videos) and lean startups.
I could see this becoming an interesting front-end for dense sites like Quora or a way to curate knowledge in a fun way. It makes the whole proces sof learning a topic much more approachable.