TechStars Demo Day Preview: Immersive Signs And Veri Cool Learning

Erick Schonfeld

Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

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.

Company: Veri
Website: veri.com
Launch Date: February 2011
Funding: $1.22M

Veri turns online content — including articles, blog posts, and videos — into a fun and free way to learn. Users can take courses by answering community-generated questions and consuming content within any topic. Veri was part of the inaugural TechStars NYC class in 2011.

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Company: IMRSV
Website: imrsv.com
Launch Date: December 30, 2010
Funding: $1.88M

IMRSV is code for innovation. A technology company developing solutions for real-world, real-time data analysis. Cara is developed by researchers at IMRSV. The company’s Cara software is a breakthrough in rich audience capture design. Cara turns any camera into an intelligent sensor. It’s a new way of measuring the world. Cara provides real time anonymous audience analytics from real world environments using a standard web camera. Enabling new methods of interacting with objects and spaces based on number of...

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Company: TechStars
Website: techstars.com
Launch Date: October 1, 2006
Funding: $34M

TechStars is the #1 startup accelerator in the world. We’re very selective. Although thousands of companies apply each year, we only invest our money and time in about ten companies per program location. We have selection rates lower than the Ivy League, so you have to be among the best of the best to earn investment from TechStars. We offer five TechStars programs in top startup locations (Boston, Boulder, New York City, Seattle, & Cloud in San Antonio), on...

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