Startup Battlefield At Disrupt: Day One, Session Two

Yossi would like another round of applause. Yossi's in charge. I should say, Yossi has said backstage that he's going to liven up the crowd, so it's all Yossi this time. I'm just going to sit quietly.

You scream a lot or they don't invite me next year.

Take it away.

Sure. Hey everybody. My name is Dorrie Monglick. This is my cofounder Mike Lewis. Together, with an incredible team of engineers, we've built SpotOn. SpotOn is the easiest way to go to new places with your friends. Let me paint a familiar picture for you. You're going to a new place for coffee with your friend and you want a place to go.

You have your favorite coffee place, but you're in the mood for something new. So, you search away on the internet and you try to find a new place, but you still end up at that same old coffee shop And why does that happen? It happens because we don't want to take the chance and try to go to a new place, because we're not sure that we're going to like the experience.

But, when we do take the chance and the experience is amazing, it ends up feeling great. We know that. We want you to feel great all the time, want you to experience the double rainbow all the time. And that's why we built Spoton. Spoton cuts through the noise by pulling in your existing social network data from Facebook and FourSquare, uses it to build a profile of you to give you personalized and actionable recommendations.

So, let's jump into the iPhone application.

So right away, you'll see that my top recommendations are loaded up on a map. So all the places that you'll see are actually completely personalized for me based on where I've checked into on FourSquare and what I've rated.

So, on top of the fact that these are completely applies for me. These are different pins. Mike will see different recommendations. Every single place has a social layer that pulls in reasons why you should go check out a place. So for example, seven of my friends have rated this place very highly.

These are my friends. These are not random people. These are not Yelp reviewers that I don't care about. For example, when I see that my coffee-lover friend has rated a place four out of four, that means a lot more to me than if a completely random person had rated that place the same exact rating.

So pins are great, but pictures are even better. So we built this gorgeous pix view, so you can go through these recommendations one at a time, get a good sense of what the place is like. This is really important to us. We do not want you to spend a lot of time, wasting, trying to figure out where to go.

We want you to actually find a place, so you're enjoying... spend more time actually enjoying the place with your friends. So, say I want to go to this place, learn more about it. Right away, I can see that it's bookmarked. I can share it with my friends. If I want to see more information about the place, I seepieces of information that actually matter.

I see that my friends have rated it highly. See that my other friend has saved it. I see who's been there. Spoton even tells me who I should go there with. So, not only is it telling me what places I should go, but it also tells me who would else would enjoy this place with me. Where does Spoton get all of this really interesting data?

We start by pulling in data from Facebook and Four Square, that's really just the beginning. Within Spoton, we make it really easy for our users to give us a lot of their preference data in a really fun and an engaging way. For example, I pull your Four Square check ins that you haven't had a chance yet to rate on Spoton, and let you rate them them really quickly and in a really fun way.

So if I love this place, I can give it a 4 out of 4 petal rating and share it with my friends on Facebook and Twitter. And I can go to the next place. If I didn't like a place so much, I could give it a 2 out of 4 petal rating and so on. I'm going to go through these places and rate them and give Spoton a lot of information.

This is really cool for two reasons. One, it helps Spoton make my experience better, but more interestingly, it actually helps the experience of everybody else who uses Spoton. Every piece of data that I contribute to Spoton adds to this entirely new layer of information that did not exist before.

And I can also see what's done in my activity feed, see my friends are rating places and saving places.

So we take all this information. What can Spoton do to take this data and turn it around to our users in an even more useful way? Say you have a filters page. Filters are usually pretty boring in most other applications, but on Spoton it's actually pretty cool, because we can do some pretty interesting things.

So with one touch of a button, I can say only show me places that at least one of my friends have been to. Or only show me places that I've never been to. I'm in the mood for something completely new. But then Sporton knows where I like to go, knows where I've been before. It can present this information back to me.

So we know where you like to go, we know where your friends like to go, we know your how you've rated places, we know your bookmarks. So we present this all to you in a very simple but very powerful way in a final search view. So right away you have access to your top recommendations, your bookmarks, even places your friends loveWith one tap of a button, even the categories that we present to you here, are organized in a way that's completely personalized for you, and this is just the beginning.

Spoton is not about the recommendation. It is about the end experience of being at that bar with your friends and having a good time. So, if you think about other really great recommendations services like Netflix or Pandora, they 're great because you enjoy the movies. You enjoy the music. You enjoy the end experience and that's what we want to bring at Spoton.

To that end, we have a lot of interesting things in the pipeline. For example, imagine you're about to go out with your co-workers. You have five people. You add them to Spoton and out pops the group recommendation. Or you see a new place, a new restaurant, you see that two of your friends have bookmarked it.

You can just make a plan, right then and there. So in that way Spoton is not at all about the recommendation, it is only about the experience, and it's changing the way that friends come together in the physical world. Thank you.

Alright . So judges, who to way in first? I'm going to start this with Chris.

Okay, well, it looks like a really cool app.

Thank you.

I guess my main question would be at the location based service space is pretty crowded right now. What's your plan for not cutting out the noise and your marketing plan?

Sure. So, this place is really hot. We completely recognize that. We're actually trying to go way past just the taking your data and doing cool something with it. We want to take it into making it into an entire experience. Instead of just giving you a recommendation, we want to help facilitate you to actually go to the place with your friends.

Beyond that, this new technology is really interesting. And we're getting data from a lot of different sources as well as making it really easy for you to collect a lot of data on SpotOn and then a recommender is pretty first class as well.

looks smart. My question is the petals, what do they indicate. I mean, how do the petals correlate with SpotOn?

The petals are almost like stars, like the more traditional rating mechanism. One petal if you don't like it very much, and four petals means you loved it. So, we actually test it a lot The first time a user sees it, it's a little bit like, "What is this?" 'cause they're used to seeing stars or a like or dislike button.

But we actually found that that quick rate view is the most addictive feature of our application, and that on average users rate over 10 places each, so...

So, Spoton, I like the name. I think you're going to be...you 're going to be going up against Foursquare. And as I look at some of the features you have, they're a little bit better, but my feeling is if you're not...if you don't have 50% better features than Foursquare, why would you use your app? So if you can talk a little bit about how you specifically are different than Foursquare.

Do you think you're 50% better than Foursquare?

Yeah, this is my favorite question to answer.

Okay, well I didn't even plan...you didn't plan it with me, but that's my question back to you, so...

Sure. So, we love Foursquare. That's why we decided to take ...start with Foursquare's data and try to do something interesting with it. I use Foursquare a lot, I check in all the time. Dennis actually uses a really interesting example when he talks about how other people try and do check-ins. And he says that other people just try to slap on check-ins to their future set, and try to create something.

But the check-ins are the core of course. That's what makes it so great. I'd actually think that's very similar to Spoton, and Correspond is the recommendation experience, and having a friend go with you to these places. And since we're starting with that, as opposed to the check-in or something else, we can own that entire experience.

And also, Foursquare is just Foursquare. As for the data, we'll be pulling in data from Foursquare or from Facebook. We'll also be even be wanting to pull in data from Hunch, from FoodSpotting from anything that we can get our hands on, pretty much, to build an entirely immersive experience.

Yossi, you convinced?

I would like to ask you to tell me a little bit about yourself.

Sure.

How long you're working on it, what you've done before.

Okay.

And who are your partners?

So I graduated from NYU in May. SpotOn actually started out of an entrepreneurship class taught by Lawrence Lennihan and I was all set to work in finance as a computer science major and then I took this class and I was like, oh, I can do something else with my computer science degree, and then I quit my job, and starting working on this full-time, been working on it since then.

Mike is, my co-founder is working on an event recommendation engine before this actually, so it's very ideal that he's our CTO. And our team is also a mix of other engineers and product and design people. They're a pretty large team for being so young.

You know in this business, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.

Yeah, that's true.

If you win it will be fine. What will happen if it will not fly? What will you do then?

I'll try again.

Try again. Okay, that's a good answer.

So just so I understand.

She said she would try again if she fails.

This is a one man applause cue. He gets applause for any statement on Earth. It's amazing.

Tell me were you're happy with the level of applause? The truth?

I think you guys could do a little bit better.

Yeah?

That just got weird very quickly.

So just so I understand the use case, the plan is for me to use SpotOn everyday and I check in with it, I rate with it and we're leveraging other networks But this is the primary one, like I wouldn't use Foursquare anymore.

Well, right now you can't check in through Spoton. That is the most highly requested feature, so we are thinking about. We'll probably we'll do it, but SpotOn is "where should I go, what am I in the mood for, who do I want to hang out with"? All of the kind of, like, experience questions when you are about to hang out with your friends in a bar, or coffee shop, or restaurant.

Chris, you look far from convinced.

Oh, no, I think it's very interesting, a cool app. Sorry. No, I think it's a very cool app. I worry just in general, in the app space in general, there's just a ton of stuff going on, and I did my own analysis of the top hundred iPhone apps and, like, half of them like bought their way to the top through all these things, like, I forgot the name, Tipjoy, whatever.

I don't know. Like it's just Tapjoy. Like it's a very, it's just a very tough space. A lot of noise, a lot of aggressive tactics being employed, you know.

Yeah.

I don't know. So.

You have to thank you for the encouragement Would any of you guys used this? Is this something that you're thinking?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's cool. I mean.

Well, yeah, it's cool, but would you use it?

Yeah, I would use it.

Okay, and you jump straight in, Sarah. You would use it?

Yeah, I would use it, and I actually disagree a little bit with Chris. I mean, we didn't have any marketing budget when we launched Food Spotting. We 've done pretty well in the location space, so I think you've got a good shot.

Thank you.

I'm challenged with what I'd characterize as app overload, so it's just, there's so many different apps. I don't know if you guys will be able to rise to the top.

You want to say any final driving words.

I maintain, as I always maintain, that nobody knows anything until they will launch it and give it a little bit of time. Nobody will know, and it either may win or may not win. If you don't try, you don't win. That's for sure.

Fine words. Big round of applause then for Spoton.

All right. So, a strong start. Positive, positive responses from the panel. I now say we

Forward from the last one. We were a bit further back. I assume we're going to creep slowly foward as the day goes on until we're basically just sitting in the audience. For those who can't see, Mike Arrington and Sara Lacy have decided to sit scarily close to the stage at the front just to stare down the entrepreneurs as they pitch.

So if they seem more nervous than the last time, it 's because Mike is staring them right in the eyes and demanding quality. Alright, Mike, would you use Spot on? You'd like for me to do better? I'm trailing the pitch. So, this is my appraisal. This is the new- No, I think it's great. I... you do?

Of the five you've seen, of the one you've seen so far, it's your favorite?

I didn't say that, but I like that one.

It's not even your favorite of the only one you've seen so far? Of this section?

Of the day.

Oh, I see, of the day.

The only criticism we heard that this is a very busy space.

Yeah, there are a lot of locations.

And the problem that if the application is going to be very popular, it will be in a very busy place. That's the fact. I'm not saying it will be popular, it won't be popular, but the place is busy because everybody is going there.

Well it might be that it's getting too busy because we have.

As Yogi Berra says that he doesn't like, that this place is empty because everybody's going there you remember.

Alright we have, well it's about to get busy because we have a second location location location based app. Please welcome to the stage from Karizma, Andre Sabatin and Dimitre Oofave. Hello Tech Crunch. I'm going to show you a new one of a kind video messenger app. It's simple. It's small ball, it's fun, it's called Karizma.

The next thing that you will see after you sign up is we. Sorry, it happens. Hey, hey, hey. Okay the first thing you'll see after you sign up is that we make your profile using your existing data from Facebook and Twitter. So you don't have to fill your profile initially.

The second thing that you will notice is that they also populate your friends list, using your existing contacts from Facebook and Twitter. But this is just a single side of the story, the second side is that immediately after you sign up, you would be able to see the people nearby, not only your existing contacts in your social group.

You would be immediately able to interact with them. You would be able to see their profiles and so on.

Let's see who I've got here. For example, we've got Tanya. And the thing is that unlike another networks, you can immediately try to reach [xx].

[phone rings]

Hello Tanya?

Hi, Andre.

I am here on the stage with Techala Ann Shavant and I wanted to show people how easy it is to reach people nearby using Karizma.

I 'd love to help you but, you know, I'm a little bit busy right now, can you try someone else?

Oh, OK, great. Thank you anyway.

Okay . See you later.

So, the thing is that you can do that. Another section of the app is called Sparks. Say, for example, if you are in Interested in someone nearby, but then you kind of decide that you are a bit reluctant to play the first call. You can actually send them a spark to encourage them to call you back. Sparks are like interactions and emotions between people and we love all of this, like friend requests, call requests, missed calls, received calls.

And in fact I've got a call request here. It's from someone named Laura, seems to be a nice girl. How this is going to call her? Hello Laura. I just noticed that you wanted me to call you back in Karizma.

Yes, I see that you're a finalist here at TechCrunch Disrupt, and I'm traveling to Russia and I saw that you're originally from Russia. So, I was wondering if you could give me any tips on things to do or any cool startups to visit.

Oh, yeah that would be great. Can I see if any of you can you please come out and join me on stage? Yep.

On stage?

Come say hi, don't be shy.

Okay. So, as you see guys, during this presentation I'll just give a couple of calls when I meet a nice girl and we're gonna discuss some plans later tonight. Maybe having a drink, right?

Sure, definitely.

Yeah, you wouldn't be able to do this kind of spontaneous interactions using the usual old school dating sites. You know, on all of them you have to fill lots of different questionnaires, upload pictures, send messages, but in the amount of time Not so is Charisma. For Charisma, Charisma is mobile.

We will launch on Apple devices and Android will follow. It's location based. You can interact with your existing contacts as well as with people who are outside of the existing graph, with people nearby. Charisma is social. You can immediately open profiles of people, see who they are, before calling them.

So, they can do it. And Charisma is realtime. You actually see people right now, right here. You see how far from you they are. You can filter them by age and so on, and you can actually call them right now.

About ten seconds.

We work on or off wi-fi, 3G. And we are initially ads based, with a subscription to turn off ads. And there are different other uses of the planter. Call your nearby store actually to see whether they have a new WiDi phone installed. Or you could call your nearby bar people go in there to watch a game to actually see where the bar is busy or not.

Okay we are out of time but a round of applause for Karizma. Alright judges, I imagine you have questions. Yossi do you want to jump in?

You know I remember this kind of activity but not exactly well. For me it was quite many years ago.

Did you ever use apps?

A little bit.

Do you have a question about Karizma. Go Chris. You're alright.

So just to clarify, the people that you see on the list are strangers in many cases?

Well not exactly. I mean like you can use that to communicate with your existing friends.

But it's also to meet new people? Is that kind of the idea?

Yeah .

Okay. Because I guess I have seen about five companies that are doing the social network for people you don't know who are nearby you. I think it's an interesting idea and I'm not sure who will, which one will succeed. But I think some of the ones I saw. Getting over the initial problem if you have no other users on the thing, then you have kind of a bad initial experience because it has network effects.

The thing is you don't have to require people to be online constantly, all the time.

But if they're using your app, if you're in a bar and you're only using your app, then you won't see anyone. Do you This will always be people in the network no matter how far. But the thing is, as soon as they call someone they get push notification and they can immediately respond to. So you wouldn't be left in the void.

How long you are in development mode?

We have been in development since February.

Since?

February .

Can you talk a little bit about how you're going to market the product, cause it is a busy space and the network effect that Chris was talking about is important. So how do you get people to know about Karizma?

Well the thing is that we have launched [xx] before and in September we have presented comes around here [xx] in San Francisco. And that d another partner company recommended like about 5 million user base that they actually plan to market to Karizma initially too, so we will have some users upfront.

At least to some several thousands, maybeseveral hundred thousands.

You have a social network that has five million users that you're going to market to? Is that what you said?

Yeah.

Ok. And, that's primarily where? In the United States or is that worldwide ? Where are the five billion users?

They're worldwide.

So, my question is, are you gonna censor content at all? I mean Grinder didn't, Chat Roulette didn't and this seems like a nice amalgamation of the two and so sometimes filtering content can help to keep everything clean but the same time. Do you have any rules or regulations for what people can do on your platform?

Thing is about filtering and actually finding nice people to talk to, that's the major point. First you can filter people you don't want to speak to. Say, for example, if they don't speak your language, you can filter them out. Second, if you don't like them, you see their pictures, you see their description and you just shouldn't accompany them.

And third if for some reason they start to annoy you, you can block them. And all the rest is just real interactions between people as they happen in real life.

I 'm going to ask the same question I asked before. Would you guys use this? Yousi, you said

My wife may watch the streaming. So I'm not going to use it.

No one is going to make you use it.

Using an app or not using an app is kind of a subjective part. For example, yesterday He arced a chance on the Hecazon Presentation. They've seen a lot of people have actually exploring the nearby dating area. And maybe for some that wouldn't be as ideal in this case. But there is really a lot of potential on that.iven that they are not exactly dating, they are not exactly online messaging, given that we maybe help by calling nearby so that they can actually find good friends in life.

That would be useful. Obviously be useful.

Just on the filtering for it I do think you're going to have to be careful about sex, basically. It's gonna be video as shown by many other websites is a good place for porn, so as you think about your content, you guys could grow with porn or you can grow without and it's going to be where the decision factors.

Say, for example. Let's consider Chat Roulette. Really famous for showing porn online right? The problem is such services is that they don't have a unique way to identify users and effectively block them. It's not our case cause sometimes there's a real run on hardware devices that have unique identifiers inside of them, and say, for example, if someone blocks you three times, like one person, another person does it, and then another person says that you are bad, they will block your UID.

And you wouldn't be able to integrate a new profile on the same device. If you wanted to create a new profile you would have to buy a new device.

I didn't follow the video conferencing you developed or it 's overlay on some existing service?

Pardon me?

The video conferencing.

The video conferencing is not currently in, and we haven't started doing that but we have really considered that it would be a really good start but it's a bit complicated for the start.

Alright. So we're just about out of time, so one more round of applause for Karizma.

Thank you guys.

Alright so we 've had some potential porn. We've had a just a more safe

location, location, location device which describes itself as magical in this, in this program. So I mean, that's, that's a big sell. So I'm hoping they can, they can live up to it. So please welcome to the stage from Sonar, Brett Martin, the founder and CEO and Brent Hargrave, the lead developer.

Hello everyone. We're Sonar. Thanks for having us.

Before I begin, take a look around the room. Please, look at all the faces that surround you. Somewhere, someone in this room has your next big deal. Someone has the next great tech story. Someone in this room has the potential to be your next co-founder or maybe even your future wife.

I'm Brett, this is actually Ajay and we're Sonar and we're here to help you make that connection.

I don't know about you guys, but maybe you've come to an amazing conference like TechCrunch Disrupt full of brilliant and beautiful people, only to stand by the conference bar eating peanuts, wondering who you should talk to next.

Or maybe you've gone out to a bar, out to meet people, to a crowded bar and found yourself obsessively checking your texts, emails, and tweets, sent by people thousands of miles away. Or maybe, you just wanna tell everyone tonight that you're from San Francisco, and you wanna tell everyone that you're here to party tonight, or perhaps just that you're trying to hire ruby developers.

So have we, so has everyone, and that's why we built Sonar. The concept is absolutely simple. Sonar is a mobile application that uncovers the hidden connection that you share with everyone else in this room. Sound cool? Let's check it out.

So, you pop open Sonar and we give you a list of trending venues nearby. All it takes is one click to see how you are connected to everyone in that venue. We're at TechCrunch Disrupt, so let's see who I should be talking to. When you pop open the app, Sonar scours the web for people at this venue, then aggregates and synthesizes publicly available profile data, and then sorts the room by who's most relevant to you.

So, for me, the most relevant person here is Daniel Clauss, which is not suprising since I work with him. But just below him is Fergus Hurley, with whom I share a couple Facebook friends. Sounds pretty interesting, let's check them out. So, with one click, Sonar gives me an instant overview of Fergus and how we're connected.

I can instantly see that we share a bunch of interests on twitter and three Facebook friends. Sonar also provides me with a bio so I can get a quick overview of what Fergus is up to. He's a mobile entrepreneur and a product designer. Sounds like exactly the type of person that I came to TechCrunch Disrupt to meet.

But first, let's dig into our connections. Voilà! So this is kind of Sonar's magic moment. With one click, I can see Fergus, who five seconds ago was a complete stranger, that he's friends with three of my good buddies. Will Brestman was a friend-of-a-friend from college. Kyle Daugherty I worked with for three years out of school, banking.

And Trevor Owens who is a MIU Tech head mogul here in New York. So I can already hear, maybe, the clocks turning in your head. Which is like, wow, that's amazing and that's cool and that would probably work in most venues, but what about in a gigantic place like TechCrunch Disrupt? How am I actually going to find Fergus?

One of the best things about Sonar is that you're never more than one click away from a hyper- targeted introduction to the person you want to meet. "Fergus, what's going on? I used to work with Kyle and also TechCrunch. Let's connect. Let's hang out at the coffee bar when we're done." So, to summarize, with my first click, Sonar bottled the thousands of connections that I definitely would've missed in this room and then rank order them for me by importance.

With my second click, Sonar gave me an Instant personalized overview of Fergus and how we're connected. And with my third click, Sonar sent a personal hyper-targeted message to someone in this room with enough social proof to get the conversation started, but Sonar is not just a powerful hyper-local social CRM tool that is going to save you time and money.

We'll do that, but it's much bigger than that. Actually, our goal is to democratize the meet space. So, if you look at all great social web products, they give people a new medium of self expression. So does Sonar, a hyper-local one. So there's myriad services elsewhere that tell people elsewhere that you're here.

But Sonar is laser-focused on giving you a way to tell people here that you're here and this is what you're about. It's a form of visual, local self-expression that you can use to share what you're proud of and what you're looking for with the people here. So, I'll leave you guys with this thought.

We share so much of ourselves online right now. Why not use that information to connect with the person sitting next to us? So many of you guys paid thousands of dollars and flew thousands of miles to come to this amazing conference to meet that person, to make that connection, to get that story, to get that deal.

Are you guys really going to leave that up to chance? Download Sonar. We can help. Thanks a lot.

Sonar . I like that.


Thanks, man.

That was good.

All right so...Yersi?

I like it and I can see it can be very useful. It's like almost local LinkedIn in a sense, but more wide in the demography.

We think Sonar can have lots of use cases from business to social. It's whatever data layer you want to put on top of it. So we started with Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter for our Beta, but you can imagine how cool this is gonna get as we start to add services, like LinkedIn Food Spotting, Last.FM, Event Planning, Plancast, Meetup, etc.

It's a premium business model or how do you guys plan to make money?

So we know where people are, who people are, where they are and what they're talking about. So, we think that we're gonna be in a nice place with all the data that we have. But, if there's one thing sort of the social web has taught us is that one thing people love is attention. So, we're actually kind of interested to follow this concept of promoted people.

So, it's a concept that at any venue, you can rise yourself to the top of the list. Put me higher on the list. Yes. That's an interesting model. I mean, it works, if you've ever heard of Baidu. It's one of the biggest, fastest growing networks in the world. it's a dating service, and people pay for promotion.

It's a common model with dating and also it's a common model with professional services like LinkedIn. So if you could imagine what about the ability to send a personal message to someone else in this room?

I mean, personally what I like about this is that I understand that if I'm the only person using Sonar it still works correct? In other words, your product has network effects, but it also has what people call a single player mode, in other words, like because Josh Actor great delicious always talks about how the best products have single player mode.

They're useful if you have one user, but they also have networking effects, sort of multi-player mode. I understand that yours does and that's a really smart way to kind of getting it going. We call it bootstrapping the single player use case, and we do that with consumption. The plan is to get people on board.

You guys can pull it out, download it right now. It's Sonar in the apps store and get value out of it and as more people get on it, we want to use it, people could use it as a customizable platform to express themselves and what they are looking for. So, I like it a lot. This is an app I've wanted for a while, but there are probably going to be privacy concerns.

How are you addressing this?

Privacy, so Sonar only uses publicly available profile information. There's nothing we're using that you have not already published on the web, and we're totally fine if you want to yourself out of Sonar. You're absolutely fine to come in and remove your profile, but I think that, like with all privacy things, you'll realize that people value it this much, but when you show them how much they have to gain by projecting themselves, people will end up using this service.

Does that mean I have to opt in to opt out?

If you're not publishing yourself on the internet, you do not show up in Sonar.

Cool.

So you have check-in? I saw a check-in button there. So, are you guys building your own kind of check-in database or are you using an API from somebody else. I don't know if you missed that part of the presentation.

We're happily living on top of these other platforms and, you know, we're using their data, so we want to syndicate our data back to them. We will have a Sonar check-in and perhaps that will enable you to share different types of information than you are That we are sharing with Foursquare. But, I think one of the great things is that everyone is trying to compete for the client, right, to be the check-in app.

And, while we do think that our app. First off, people are always curious and other people always want to know more. Second off, we think we do provide unique value that no one out there does. But thirdly, we have notifications in our app. So, let's say there's this cool app I heard of called Foodspotting.

And, let's say you're at a restaurant and took a picture of food right, but you were signed in your Foodspotting account to Sonar, you could have basically we would notice you checked in on Foodspotting at a restaurant, we'd get that, then we'd analyze in the background if there was anyone relevant to you at that restaurant, maybe perhaps someone that has the same taste as you in desserts.

And then, we would send you a push notification being like, "Hey, you might want to connect with this person or ask them what dessert you should get. But we don't live or die by being a client.

No, that's really smart, you should have access to our API.

I like that.

Food-Spotting is getting a lot of promotion on this stage. People will identify the decision maker in the group.

We would also love to work with the Hunch API.

Alright, any final questions?

Yes, when did you start the development?

A little less than six months ago.

How many people?

Oh we're but four. I'm Brett, this is M.J. Brent, our technical co-founder, is busy coding away and when he is Somebody has to work.

Someone has to work. We can't all be socialites.

What have you done before?

Wow.

Next question.

No, I wouldn't know the answer to that, that was great, that was like, "Oh, I don't want to really say."

How about banking in it's presentation.

Oh banking.

I grew up in a small mid-Atlantic white-trash beach resort town. I went to college in New Hampshire. I banked. I lived on a sailboat for seven months. I came back and I started a band. I went to Italy and lived on a Fulbright Scholarship for a year. I came back, I spent six months disillusioned, wondering what I should do.

I went down to Austin, taught myself how to code Ruby. That business failed. I came back here, started a mobile incubator, actually with Daniel Klaus, and then this I'm pulling out of the incubator and spinning off.

Wow.

Nice.

Nice.

Wow.

Well, and he's way more impressive than I am, so...

Well, we want to hear what you do then, if that's more impressive than that. That's, can we get him a microphone?

He 's got a mic.

Yeah, just talk. Well, yeah, there you go.

I was born in Japan. I'm Indian by descent. I lived there 18 years. I can speak 3 languages. I went to NYU Stern and I studied finance and information systems. I graduated from Stern and I worked at two banks. I didn't like working at the banks and I just taught myself how to code in IOS and I found Brett.

And I'm here today happily coding away.

Nice.

Well that's a lovely story. And a perfect way to end, so a round of applause please for Sonar.


We're done, thank you. Thank you.

All right, I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to say, "I like that" at the end of pitches. I guess I'm supposed to be unbiased, but I do like that. Yes, I also like Karizma and Spoton, for what it's worth. But I particularly like Sonar.

So yes, without any more ado, let's move on.  Surprising enough, another location-based service.  Let's welcome to the stage Clarence Wooten and Matthias Broecheler from Arrived.

I 'm Clarence Wooten, Founder and CEO of Arrived, and we are here to show you how you can get more from your personal relationships.

So if you've ever said to a friend, "Let's hang out the next time you're in town," raise your hand. Right, a hundred percent. Well you may not have realized it at the time but you were making soft plans, and soft plans are casual plans with no set date and time. They revolve around a place as opposed to a set date and time.

Well, the whole point of making soft plans, is so that we can meet up with people in our network when both time and place are right. I'm really busy so it's much easier to connect with someone when they're in my neck of the woods, or at my favorite place. Now there's a big problem. I can't tell you how many times I went somewhere and could not remember who I was supposed to connect with.

And I ended up leaving and then all of a sudden I remember I was supposed connect with so and so, and so and so, and I let that opportunity get away. And you end up kicking yourself. It 's a real problem. Well we've solved that problem. Introducing Arrived, make soft plans and spontaneously meet up when timing is right.

So let me show you the product. Alright, so soft plans start with a place. As we mentioned it's about places. So it can be an actually location, a physical address or it can be an area and since we're here in New York, I think I'm going to select New York as one of my areas. Next, I add people. So social graph.

So those people can come from address book, my facebook, my Twitter, my Foursquare, or my Linkd'n. I think I'm going to use Facebook and let me start with Arington. How about that? I think Mike should know whenever I am in New York and Sherman-two friends okay?

I'm done adding people, at least from Facebook, but I can add people from my Twitter or my address book but for now lets just say we're done. So now I selected New York then I've added Mike and Sherman and so now I'm going to notify them every time I arrived in New York. Now, again, this is big, I don't have to do anything beyond this.

So I'm and start and end with a request or I can request that they notify me or we can make it mutual. So for now, I'm just going to notify them. Now for them, they'll receive an email or a text message that says Clarence would like to automatically notify you when he arrives in New York, Get Arrived.

And inside the app, they can quickly accept or ignore my request. So, I'm going to accept it, real simple. Now from that point forward whenever I arrive in New York, I show up on their arrival screen. But before that, they get a text message or a push notification that basically says that Clarice is here in New York and when they click it they can interact with me in my arrival.

So, looks like today... Now here's my arrival screen... Yesterday, this week... Now today my good friend, Larry Chen, arrived at Olde Pro three minutes ago, where I can now instantly text him, call him, or suggest a meet up. Larry, will you still be there in twenty minutes? Or I'll be there in fifteen minutes?

No, I can't do that because that's in Palo Alto. I'm here, so, it makes no sense for me to send him that. My daughter arrived home from school eight minutes ago. Okay, excellent. And my good friendand Bob is going to be in San Francisco tomorrow. So he sent an "on my way". Well since it is not happening in the moment, I can click a button and add it to my calendar.

So I know to reach out to Bob. And it let me know that I arrived in New York and four people were notified. And if I want to quickly see who those individuals are I can see those individuals. And best of all I can put people on pause, so let me talk about privacy. Arrived is contextually private, meaning we don't broadcast the information to all your friends.

We only send your information specifically to the people that you have soft plans with. And soft plans are about people and their connection to places. So here are the various people...I can really... who follow me at various places. So Susan Baker my friend follows me at nine different places.

I can take a look, real quickly, and here, the places where she gets an alert, or notification, every time I arrive, well, I can pause her at any particular place if I don't want her to know that I'm going to be there. Or I can pause her across the board until I unpause or short of time, this comes in real handy.

And the good news is, for her, she doesn't know she's been paused. Additionally, Arrive allows you to look at your soft plans and the contacts in the places. So here these are the places I'm followed. Cuba cafe is another popular hanging out spot, you know, in San Francisco. So let's take a look at San Francisco.

This shows me the exact people who follow me in San Francisco. So again I can pause anybody from here and I can see who I follow there. But let me back up, because I want to let certain people know I'm on my way to San Francisco, these seven people in advance. So I can say I'm on my way to San Francisco in a few hours and I'm coming their business or I can move up a selected date and say I'll be there on June 24 for business and pleasure, send.

So now those seven people receive on their arrival screen that I'm on my way to San Francisco and they can added to their calender very easily and know to connect with me when I'm there. If they have timeAgain, it's passive. You don't have to respond to soft plans, but you can only, if it makes sense, if the timing is right for you.

Now, last but not least, sometimes you just want to go incognito. You don't want anybody to know that you've arrived.

So incognito mode allows me to take myself off the grid for as little or as long as I need to. So right now I'm going to go incognito until I go public again. My profile page also gives me a quick sense of how many people are follow me and how many people I'm followed by. So lets jump back really quick to the presentation.

Okay.

Alright so quickly flash through some news cases. Again, we notify when your happy hour friends arrive at happy hour. We notify when your workout friends are on their way to the gym and arrive to the gym. We notifynotify when your kids are in home from school. And we notify when your out of town friends come town.

So never miss that opportunity to connect again. This is a real important point. It gets even bigger. If you're anything like me, you have hundreds of friends across your various social networks. Well, you shouldn't have to think about who to make soft plans with, Arrive should do that thinking for you.

So we created Arrivalytics. Arrivalytics is our proprietary recommendations algorithm that leverages machine learning to analyze your sociograph and make Arrival recommendations, based upon the shared interests, locations and travel pattern of people in the network. We think this is big. The reason it's big, is because there's not a technology that exists today that will help you manufacture serendipity, bring you face to face with people in your network when both time and place right.

Okay, we're out of time but a round of applause for Arrive and I imagine every question About the arrival at six, so Ride do you want to jump in?

Something is really interesting. I guess my first question is, "Are you maybe trying to do too much once?" I only say this because I used to love a service called Doppler. I heard you mentioned Doppler when you were speaking on stage 2 and I love just very simple fact that I could tell my friends in advance where I was going and then a map would show up in my Facebook page indicating that I was headed to San Francisco.

And I think they're effective at that.

And of course they sold and their service was shut down. And I think that there are other services out there kind of like Red Rover that helps families keep in touch with where their kids are at any given time. And all these applications are very niche.

And often when you're building an application people tell you to stay focused and pretty niche. So how do you address the question that your trying to solve a lot of problems?

Well we are focused on one specific thing and that's arrival data. And it happens to be a horizontal problem versus a vertical one. And we also believe that user experience is everything. So, even if you have a lot of features, complexity can be controlled through user experience.

So the Arrived app is relatively simple; there are people, there are  places on which I am connected to those people. And there's arrival requests. The good news is once you send out, you make soft plans, the interface gets out of the way. You don't need to pull out the app when you're arrive somewhere, it happens automatically.

I don't want to ask you a question. I would like to make a comment. Today, the issue of crowded places is coming again and again and again, especially in, in location base services, in checking-in services. It's now beginning to be very busy, etc. We have to, I guess we are representing the xactly that you are expecting us to do, but I guess that this is what we have to play.

There are over 350,000 applications on the iPod, on the iPhone and the number of applications on the iPad is growing. The number of applications  in android is also of growing and this is part of the current situation.

If you are going to this space, you are going into a very busy space and the developers have to realize as the investors this is a gambling of the type of very low probability with very high pay off. I think this is the answer to all the applications we saw today.

Very attractive areas. People are using it. Lots of users. Lots of offering. Probability of success is very small. Payoff in case of success is high. That's the nature of the beast, of the 2011 vintage and we as investors should know it. The developers should know it. One of the developers has to know it.

If you don't have the stamina, either to spend your so to spend your money, you should stay away of this space. This is why I, as an investor, more interested in the quality of the people. Whether they have the stamina, they can face failure, what they're bringing into the game in terms of talent, etc, because the idea will be many other ideas.

The differences will be very small but though the differences are very small, somebody we cannot assess it when we see it before, and somebody will hit the soft spot of the users. Who will be that somebody? We cannot forecast it. You can't fill out the questionnaires. It won't help. You have to throw it into the crowd, let the crowd vote on it by using it.

Stamina. You need stamina. Do you have what it takes?

Yeah.

I'm a serial entrepreneuer, this is my fifth company that is called groupsite.com that I am executive crowd, , I'd like to ask the audience.

Who in the audience started a company and developed a product, raise your hands.

Who of those who started a product, failed in their see your hands.

Okay, that's good we begin to see that people are failing
because until now in all the conferences, I met only people who succeeded.

Who of those who failed.

Two more failures on stage, is what you're saying, to encourage

Yeah, yeah, we, we, you know,
Ron Conway and I made the competition last year, who is the bigger failure?

Who won?

The two of us.

Wait it was a draw.What fails to win a filing competition?

No. What I'm trying to say, it's not only about the product. Don't focus on the product. The product will be changed anyhow. You give the developer three months, it will be a different product. Focus on the talent. Focus on the special. Focus on the fire in the belly. Focus on the ambition. Focus on the resilience.

Focus on the investor's willingness to take losses. I think this is much more important then the product itself.

I kind of wanted it to be soaring music, at that point. That was the most inspirational thing from the stage.

You reminded that all the dispute is standing above water.

Yeah, we could all drown at any time. Yeah.

Chris, do you want to, on that cheery note...

Yeah, I completely agree with you about investing in people. From a personal perspective, we almost always invest based strictly on the people.

And we've failed.

Yeah, we have plenty of failures. I have failed investments. I'm not, I wasn't suggesting that because thearea is crowded you shouldn't enter it. I'm just suggesting that you should be aware of that and a good entrepreneur, I am sure you guys know this, are aware of the market they're entering and do what they can to mitigate those risks and just understand the dynamics there and I think, that's all I think and, it sounds like you guys have, or at least I guess, I Out of three hundred fifty thousand apps on the iPhone, how many are profitable?

Well I think lot of them are people, like individual developers, who've bootstrapped them and I think that's actually been a nice trend. It's lead to the return of the Indy game developer.

I am sure that the vast majority, like any market, have failed, but there is actually a whole bunch like if you look at Tiny Wings is a top app and it was made by one guy in Germany and he probably has nice business and probably shouldn't have been venture-backed and he never raised venture money and that was probably smart.

I think that's a question for a lot of these sorts of apps, is that...

I'm going to interupt before this becomes a panel otherwise you guys can just take a seat and we'll listen to these tow. But lets give a big round of applause for Arrived. And, one second, I did not get to say this...Carry on.

I didn't get to say this but this is getarrived.com and we'll roll out the red carpet for you.

Alright hank you very much. Alright, everyone.

Alright, so we have one more. Yeah, you could, you guys can probably carry on the debate during the Q&A in this one as well, but let's welcome to the stage, our last, our last

Omar Hamoui and Haider Sabri from Churn Labs, please welcome them to the stage.

Hello, my name is Omar Hamoui, I'm formerly the founder and CEO of AdMob, and now actually a partner working on something called Churn Labs. And at Churn what we're doing is really exploring what we think are some green field opportunities. We're really looking at areas of technology that we think haven't really been fully explored, fully charted and we're basically building anything in those areas.

We don't care how crazy it is, or how silly it is.into even more interesting opportunities, and so I am going to introduce to Haider Sabri, a member of our team, who is going to walk you through one of our very first projects.

Hello everyone. As you all know the basic principle of building a new product or service is to build something that everybody wants and needs. Yeah, so, we decided not to to do that at all. Instead, we've decided to build something and expend all of our engineering power and our resources and our brainpower on building a product solely around gnomes.

Yes, gnomes, those magical characters that that we all have grown to love. Now you wonder why? The reason why is we thought to ourselves, "Wouldn't it be cool to have a gnome in your pocket, to take him with you, to build your very own custom gnome and take him with you to take pictures with him, to take him to different venues, to take him to different landmarks and record that gnome at that spot?"

And then at some later point, to hand that beautiful gnome off to a friend, give it to him on his device and at that point in his journey, your friend will take him to wherever he goes, again checking him in and taking him to different places around the globe.

That 's actually the entire concept behind - all the while, by the way, all the while you're actually getting updates on where your gnome is, where he went, and who he's with. With and what he's doing.

So that's the high level behind what we're calling non-stop gnome. So why don't you join me at the iPad, so I can go through the quick demo.

So here we got a couple of veteran gnomes. And we're going to talk about Lebowski. Lebowski's actually very special to us, because he was born in the lab, and he's been traveling between devices amongst all the guys in the lab. And he's traveled almost 2500 miles and these are a couple of photos that he's been taking.

his morning he was disrupting. Later on he was on the ledge of the hotel contemplating thoughts. He actually rescued Batman in Times Square on Saturday night and visited David Letterman, and so on and so forth. Hanging out at the lab. And then took a wrong turn, and he got dunked in the toilet. So that's Lebowski and actually, all of these, you can actually see them on the map and follow your gnome wherever he's going.

So We know that everybody here is gonna install this app at some point so everybody would like to know how do you get a gnome on your device and it's very important to know that, a gnome can only live on one device. He's a digital object, but he is uniquely placed in one physical location all of the time.

So how do we do that? There's two ways. One is to create a custom gnome. Just like we created Lebowski, we come in here and design our gnome, and give him the attributes he likes, and give him a name, and a mission in life. The other way actually is what we want to demonstrate where, lets say you wanna transfer your gnome to a new friend.

We're calling this process Lift. So in researching the way gnomes actually transport, we came up with the conclusion that they're magical in the way that they transport. So, here I'm going to show you, I'm not sure if the camera sees this but, we have a gnome actually that was born today. It's his birthday today.

And he's called, his name is Disrupt and he's actually going to leave my iPhone where he Resides currently and he's going to end up on the iPad, in a process that we call 'lift'. So, pay close attention as I do this, because as I open up with the iPad, there's going to be an image finder, or the view finder, and it going to 'lift' Disrupt from one device to the other.

Here we go. So, in that sense now, Disrupt is completely on this device now, and I think we had a small little bug here. Murphy's Law never proves invalid. So, now this rep lives on this. Oh, he's on.

Try it again.

What's that?

I think you should give it another shot.

So, moving on. So, now he actually lives on this iPad and we could take travel entries with him. And the next time That a travel entry is made. Everybody who's had Lebowski or Disrupt, in this case, on his device will actually get a notification saying, "Hey, Disrupt is actually at Disrupt in Manhattan." And here's a picture of him and everybody's who been along that path with Disrupt will actually get to comment and join in the fun.

So, there's actually a lot of other features that we have in the app, but I'm going to hand it over to Omar to wrap things up.

Yeah, so actually I just want to talk a little bit about 'Lift', because we're not going to go into that in too much detail today. But that is kind of one of the things that we thought were more interesting in terms of playing with this application that we're building and what we're really thinking about is, I have an iPad, I have a computer, I have all of these different products, but how can I connect them in a more interesting way?

Is there a way I can do something where I can get drag-and-drop to really work between devices as opposed to on only one particular device? So could I drag and drop through the screen? And so, what you can probably see here essentially is I have my phone. On my phone there are three photos, so it's hard to really see that.

But there 's effectively three photos on my phone that I can basically drag through the phone and drop on the iPad What will happen there is it will disappear and basically appear on the iPad through the phone so I don't know if you guys caught that, so basically on this iPad right now, imagine this is folder or an area waiting to receive a photo.

And on my phone, I effective have some pre-photos that I've just taken. I can drag them over, and go ahead and drop through the phone, and it will basically appear on the iPad. So, that's basically what Lift is, it's way of doing a different way of device interconnectivity. So there you have it: a couple other products we're working on at Churn.

Thank you very much.

Churn Labs everyone. Gnomes, I think, I hope every other startup pitching today has a gnome, 'cause the bar is set way high now. Yoshi - gnomes I don't know how I will live without gnomes from now on. I want to become a gnome.

You 've heard it here first. Yoshi to become a gnome.


So lift looks very interesting. It kinda reminds me of Bump So is that a future plan to have like some type of API that people can use to leverage that Technology?

Yes, essentially, it is something that we came across as we were working on this Gnonstop Gnomes app. We were sort of just not really really liking how device interconnectivity was working.

Right.

And so we are thinking. And so that is a project that's actually underway right now. And as you said, it tends to remind us of Bump too. So, perhaps it could used in a similar way Both with Sequoia as investors, so we'll see how that works out.

Wow.

Interesting. Chris?

I mean Omar is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the last decade, so if he says gnomes are the next big thing, I think he knows more than I do.

It's a huge number of gnome relate apps.

That's right.

We'll see what happens.

I think we might lead the market in gnomes.


Are there any gnomes among the crowd or Are there any gnomes among the crowd? Well, right now the application isn't available yet. Probably in one to two weeks. Another magical process. Then his app store approval has to happen and then hopefully it'll be available.

That's all right? So, oh sorry David Well , I was just going to, I had Omar - Churn Labs, Steve Jenks - Schematic, Kevin Rose with Milk, so there's you know some kind of key entrepreneurs who have started these little labs, how is that, how's that going it seems like, I don't know where you were in the process with the other, obviously milk was just started.

It seems like you started a few months ago, or maybe late last year.

Yeah, I started late last year. So, I think what your nding. Probably among his latest crop of people is. When some body goes through a, when somebody's in a situation where they can do what they want; a lot of people will say, well I'm going to go hang out on the beach or go skiing or whatever.

But I think for all of us this is what we want to do. We just like doing this. And So, whether it's something that's going to be ridiculous and silly, or something that is going to be a little more serious. This is actually what we enjoy doing. And so, I think that just with the process that you're seeing.

It's not a particular, new, crazy way of - the most efficient way to make money. I'm pretty sure that it's not, but it is what we enjoy doing. So, I think that's what all of us are doing.

Right. So, Ryan, any questions or thoughts?

So hard to ask questions about gnomes, right? I knew I would stump all your guys. They're they're digging, "what do I know about gnomes, how can I"?

Yeah, you don't have to ask me a question about gnomes.

No, why don't I ask why gnomes?

Why gnomes?

Yeah.

We just thought... honestly, the concept of, we're in a place now where we're going from the proliferation of these smart phones to ubiquity. Right now, everybody has them. And so, I'm just interested to see if people will do this. Like are they really going to, like, connect their devices, pass a digital object from one physical person to another and then will it matter.

Like 4 people down the chain, am I gonna care that I'm getting photos back from this gnome? It is going to be more interesting to me than all these photos I'm getting on Instagram, or all these other places - because, lots of the photos that he showed are completely uninteresting, but they're all funny to us because we all carry that gnome around, it's like this inside joke thatEverybody who had the gnome or whatever it is happens to be in on.

And so, I'm just curious to see whether or not that kind of social connection means anything. We don't know yet. fine.

It reminds me a little bit of, do you guys geo cash?

Yes.

So, I like love geo cashing and it's like a million of people that do it or whatever, and one of the cool things ready to see. Had the little thing traveled around the world or whatever. And it's like Yeah, exactly. You can see it on the map. So, it's pretty interesting.

Where my bill? Where my dollar bill, where they stamp it. I mean that was another one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And this augmented reality in your picture where you can hold up the phone and maybe see where the gnome might be in the future?

Yeah, actually that's how it works. So when you're taking a picture - we didn't demo that part - but, when you're taking a picture, you actually see the gnome, n the view finder. And you can drag him around and resize him and turn him to scale and then position him. That's how all those pictures came to be.

So, it's sort of augmented reality.

Are you gonna offer non-gnome things - other objects that you could travel around? Or, is it just gnomes for now?

For now, it's just gnomes. It would be a huge departure. We'd have to be careful of that. We don't want to go crazy.

One thing, you've got a lot of room for.. ya. Alright, anymore gnome related questions? Wow, you won the panel over, everyone here is all gnome focus from now on. Alright.

Big round of applause for Churn Labs.

Thanks very much.

Alright, and yeah great way to end always gets to end on a gnome. So just wanted to get one more