Erick Schonfeld is the Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children.
He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular... → Learn More
We are two days into Disrupt SF, and 31 startups have battled in front of the judges and an audience of thousands to vie for the Disrupt Cup and $50,000. The caliber of the startups across the board was so strong that seven of them are advancing to the final round.
After tallying up the independent judges’ scores and conferring with the TechCrunch writing staff, Heather Harde and I have selected the following Battlefield companies to present on Wednesday at 3:30 PM PT.
(In the spirit of disclosure, two of the companies, Bitcasa and Prism Skylabs, are CrunchFund investments, but we didn’t hold that against them. Along with the other finalists, the judges scored them the highest. The CrunchFund is Michael Arrington’s new venture fund. He was not involved in the final selection of these companies).
You can watch their first-day demos below. They are (in alphabetical order):
we have Bitcasa. Ah, there they are. All right, please welcome to the stage from Bitcasa Tony Gauda and Joel Andren.
Good afternoon. I am Tony Gauda. I am one of three co-founders of Bitcasa. I've actually been programming since the age of eight. I worked at Mastercard where I designed A.I. fraud prediction systems for the credit and debit industries. My other two co-founders are Joel Andren, who's worked at Socialize, Brick City, and several others venture capital-backed startups.
And also Kevin Blackham who worked at Mozy, VMware, EMC, and scaled their infrastructure from two petabytes to well over 100 petabytes. Crazy right? So we raised over $1.3 million from Andreessen Horowitz, from Pelion Venture Partners, from CrunchFund and also First Round Capital. The reason why these companies have chose to invest in us is because we're changing the way that people access their data and use their computers, fundamentally.
So people absolutely love their laptops, their iPads, their desktops. But what they're most concerned about is the data, the pictures, the videos, the media, the documents. And because of this, we're undergoing exponential growth in the consumer storage market. People are constantly looking for different ways, new ways, to share, to sync, to backup all their precious memories and keep it available across all of their devices.
And what happens when you run out of space? You buy another USB stick, you buy another external hard drive, you buy another rewritable DVD, and you start the process all over again. Fundamentally, we think this model is broken. What if you could access all of your data, from anywhere in the world, whenever you wanted without having to worry about it?
What if you could never worry about running out of space. What if you had infinite storage? That's the Bitcasa promise. You'll notice something interesting about this finder window. You see it? It says 17.59 terabytes of space available. That's not the new macbook air. That's Bitcasa. And that's the largest number that the operating system will display.
This folder is infinite. This desktop is infinite. This PC has limitless capacity.
How did we do it? Bitcasa actually virtualizes the file system. It streams your data to and from the cloud in real time. You don't have to do anything, you just install it, and it just works behind the scenes. Your desktop? Your primary storage is now the network and your local hard drive is cache.
I know what you're thinking, this has to be slow. Well, you tell me. Here's an HD movie, QuickTime thinks it's local, streaming directly from the cloud. What about seeking? That will break it, right? Wow, that's pretty fast! But you know, what's better than one HD movie? Two HD movies playing at the same time.
So, how did we do it? Bitcasa actually figures out all the data that your operating system and program files need, before it actually is needed. It downloads it in real time. So, you don't have to do anything. Everything that you need, right now, is local. It's already figured out automatically for you, using the artificial intelligence.
So what about security? Everything is encrypted on the client's side. We can't access your data for any reason. It's always safe. Now what does this mean? Well you could buy a new laptop and have all the data from your old laptop. Appear on the new one. You don't have to email anything to yourself.
You don't have to get a U S B stick and copy it all over. Those are things of the past. You can share any size file, any folder any of your data with whomever you want instantly, why? Because it's already in... cloud, there's no upload and download. And what if all your data was always safe. Because it's stored in a data center that's over one thousand times more reliable than your laptop is today.
I know what you're thinking. This is too good to be true. What's the catch? No catch! Infinite storage, $10 a month. Never buy another storage device again. We have a freemasonry model that is less then infinite, but right now everything is free during the Beta period just go to www.bitcasa.com, and just sign up for the beta.
oh by the way we are absolutely hiring, per infinity we need engineers, C++ guys, Java guys, so please talk to me or the other guy Kevin thank you.
Bit casa. You guys hiring writers at all? Alright so, judges, who wants to jump in? You need to be more enthusiastic. I'm excited about storage. It obviously sounds terrific, can't wait to try it. little bit of the secret sauce. What have you guys done that's not been done before. Oh wow, so that's a great question.
We've actually got about 20 patents to kind of go through that but iwhat 's most interesting is the predictive capability, because what figuring out the things that you need before you actually need them. We're streaming it through the wide area network so You've seen in the past right on your LAN.
But what we've done is taken the internet, and we've made it so that all your data's available. And it's super duper fast and you dont have to worry about anything. you have to usea special folder, you know a web-based interface, it just works in your OS. You don't have to do anything different. That's the secret.
Dustin? yeah, that sounds really cool.you know I love products in this space. Looks like this one's really well executed. I'm curious if you've done any market research on how many people are, sort of, you really emphasize the infinite storage.
Yep.
And my personal experience has been, like, you know I've had roughly the same amount of photo storage year after year but I've moved all my music to Spotify, all my media content is just on Amazon. you know I personally Have no desire to have like you know gigabytes and terabytes of stuff. And I'm curious,you know what percentage of users you found that do, what is all the media they got?
It's really about managing your data. So the infinity the shows piece is just something that we know we can give to consumers. But what we're really doing is just. managing your storage. You don't have to worry about loosing any of your photos, your music, your files, anything that you have. We're gonna keep everything And when you get a new computer, and you use a new device, you can access all the data that you have instantly without having to worry about it.
We're going to take care of that for you. don't want you to ever have to worry about a USB stick again. That's our goal.
Eileen?
You know, there are some pretty big companies out there that have a lot of great technology and a lot of access to storage like Apple, Amazon, Google. What's your thinking you know a year out when they start to announce some of their kind of all you can eat access, services, how will you compete when there may be a lot of price sensitivity in the market.so you know all focus is on stores. That's the only thing that we do, and we have laser focus on providing a phenomenal product for our consumers. So, we don't have any other ancillary things that we're focused on, it's really creating compelling product that's in the storage space. So, if Apple were to enter into the market, we welcome the competition.
But we know for sure that it will only work within the Apple ecosystem. Right? And we are a cross platform solution that works across PCs, MacIntoshes, even Linux computers, which I actually have a Linux desktop. So, we are trying to help alleviate the pressures of storage because we're all undergoing phenomenal growth with the amount of data that we save.
Joshua.
So, can you stream two movies that aren't cached?
Absolutely, if you have the bandwidth to support it.
So that's the problem, right? When you're on a thin pipe like your phone, or whatever, right? Or you're traveling, if you have this laptop with a too small hard drive, that cache thrash is going to kill you, right? Well, so we've been really intelligent about what we save in cache, but what we want to do is, make sure that what you're asking for is already in the cache.
So, we're going to try to get it before you ask for it. But most people actually over estimate the size of the data that they actually have. You probably have about 25 gigabytes of unique data across you know as an individual. Now most of the files are small. Most of them are pictures. The larger files are actually video which stream very well.
So we've done a lot of market research we've determined that most of the files that aren't cached, usually they're small, and if they're not small they can't be streamed, because they're music, they're files that are much larger that stream OK. Any last [xx]?
Since we have just a couple of seconds, a follow-up question, may be, how does this work with, you know, Dustin talked about some of the application he uses, for the normal person who, let's say who's got iTunes, you know 20 or 30 gig. Yep. So all of this stuff is streamed. it's cached in on your service.
Yep.
iTunes has all these, at least for now, limitations, it can only access a certain number of computers. How do you handle all of that in terms of people accessing their content from any device? So each user has own specific account, and they can access it wherever they want to. Now of course the system has a sharing capability built in, so i can share things personally with you.
but I can't like, post a link out on the Internet, and you know just broadcast it out to everyone. It's more of a peer to peer type share. sharing situation. But we're having a lot of conversations with consumers and what we're trying to figure out is what do people want, right? Do they want to be able to do that?
And as they give us feedback we'll make changes but today, it's a peer to peer thing, well it's actually not peer to peer, but i can share things directly with you. Great job. Thank you. On that note, Bit casa every one. Okay, so we've come to The last start up in this session, the last start up moving the web forward.
Please welcome to the stage from Ever pics Pierre [xx] and Olivia Uniqueness? [sp] Kenesaw [sp?] What a [xx]. Hi, everyone
Back on stage. Please welcome to the stage from CakeHealth, Rebecca Woodcock and Andy Brett from CakeHealth. Thank you, thank you Paul. I'm Rebbecca and this Andy and we are CakeHealth. The best free way to manage all of your health care expenses. Now healthcare is a mess. The only thing worse then getting poked and prodded by your doctor is dealing with all this paperwork.
First, you get these non-bills from your insurance company and then the hospital will send you a separate bill for every service. Which turns into overdue bills because you don't even know what you're supposed to pay. This thing sure isn't going to help you. Your benefits package, do you even know where you put it?
And why does all of this stuff make us feel so dumb? Well CakeHealth, is the first service to piece all of these documents together, effortlessly. When you to CakeHealth, just tell us your health insurance company, and enter your log in information and CakeHealth can pull all your information In minutes.
And CakeHealth is compatible with all the top health insurance companies so over a hundred fifty million people can sign up for our service today. This will take you to our main feature "Insights into your health-care spending", and here we have the all American Draper family. They can see their out of pocket costs versus what the insurance has picked up.
They can also track progress. As far as their deductibles and it looks like their about $700 dollars away from meeting theirs. That's when their insurance actually kicks in. There's a quick reference for office co-pays for the next visit, and CakeHealth can automatically set up reminders for you in 3 different categories So the first is every day items, like prescriptions, so Betty never forgets Bobby's inhaler.
There are benefits you may not even know about. Or you forgot about them. I mean, how many of us have forgotten our teeth cleaning already this year? And then there's preventive care services such as a prostate exam. Nobody else is telling you to get this and it's covered, so you should do it. You can also add your dental, your vision, your flex spending accounts.
But if you want to dive deeper into your coverage, jargon free, go to the benefits tab. This is where you will see what your responsibility is, before you get a surprise in the mail. This will update when you meet your deductibles. So you always know what your coverage is at any given time. Now let's take a moment to talk about security.
We take this very seriously.AllYour information is fully encrypted and we never share it outside of our closed environment. So this is our first feature. The insight-- Into your health care spending, but this is just the insurance out of the picture. What about all of these medical bills? How do you know what you're supposed to pay?
Well, this brings us to our second key feature. Let CakeHealth reconcile these bills with your insurance statements. By just taking a picture, you can send this to docs@cakehealth.com or you can download our free Iphone app. Included and CakeHealth can read this image, sync it back to your account, and match it with your insurance statement.
So we can tell you: did the insurance cover it? Should they have? Do you need to go back and negotiate or do you want to pay for this right now? Now this iPhone app also replaces your health insurance card. So if you're skiing in Tahoe and you go to the emergency room because you did some stunt, you'll have all your information handy, and then when you get the bill you can sync it back to your account.
So that's feature number 2. CakeHealth is the first platform that can sync your bills with your insurance statements and it's mobile. So all of this feeds into our third feature, which is the first ever recommendation engine for health plans, the CakeHealth plan matcher. Now CakeHealth looks at your actual usage and cost and can help you select a plan during open enrollment or, if you're self-employed, CakeHealth can filter the over 13,000 plans down to the ones that fit you and your family the best.
Now here, if we look at this plan, we can show you the minimum amount that you would spend, the maximum amount that you would spend, and the most likely amount that you would spend on this plan and you can apply for it. So a recommendation engine of this caliber could not exist if we didn't have both the medical bills and your insurance statements.
And because we have both we get your full financial picture and can make very personalized recommendations. So that's our third feature, the first ever recommendation engine for health plans based on your actual usage and cost so you can save money. So now you don't have to deal with all this paperwork.
You can let CakeHealth do all the heavy lifting. We'll give you instant insights, we'll reconcile your bills and your non-bills and make personalized recommendations for you. And that's just a piece of Cake. We're just getting started, so sign up it's free.
I was watching and thinking Mad Men reference, M.G.'s gonna love that and then there's a quote from M.G. at the end saying how much he loves it.
Excellent.
Okay. Who wants to jump in? CakeHealth. Brad?
I'm a huge fan. I think they saved the best for last. This is the best presentation, I think the most viable business, the biggest market. I think this is meant for this space. It's a disaster currently. I try not to deal with it when I get those things in the mail. I have no idea what they say. I don't know what they do.
I love it.
Thank you.
Have you raised money?
Tony?
We have no announcements to make as of yet, but we can talk after.
Code for something.
For all you journalists that's a scoop.
Yeah.
Everything Brad said. Thanks for taking all the sound bites. Anybody else feel cheated? I love this, I think it's really brilliant, it's needed, all this stuff is really a pain in the ass. How difficult is it for me to upload all my information, right? I mean, this model seems to work really well if I invest a lot of energy, just like MITT.
invest a lot of energy into the inputs.
And so what's your user experience like on that?
Well, we work very hard to reduce the amount That the user would have when signing up. So initially all you would need is just your log in information. entry, we pull in all of that. We've essentially built the technology on the back end to go in and pull your data, no matter what format we find it in.
And so there is no manual entry whats so ever. I think your going to need workaround around that. Just my log in information. Everybody got their log in information? Like whoa, where's my log in information?
Well, you mean If you give me some nuggets up front in the user experience which can get so granular to my needs because you don't have my log in information is enough temptation for me to come back. Our ux on this product is going to be seriously mission critical.
And that was something we heard from a lot of people, that oh, I don't have this or my insurance provider doesn't offer this kind of portal and that's why we built, you know these other ways to get us the information, either emailing us the documents or uploading via mobile. Yeah.
That's excellent.
Yes.
Cause this is about on-boarding quickly.
Yes.
Getting that information in and then getting me seduced just like Mitch did.
Right.
Most of our early.
And your content strategy for getting this word out, very important. Just like we did.
Agreed.
Yeah, like, I love the business, I think the business is great. I wonder how you're gonna scale it. You know, how do you get people on board beyond the first group are sort of the early adopters that are hungry. How do you get those to join the tribe? And it's very methodic right? Something's had to happen for you to wanna, then go do it.
So, how do you scale that?
Okay. So, I'll answer this question in 2 different ways. One ties back to Tony's question. How do you get beyond the early adopters who already have their log in, and most of them do. That ties into what Andy was mentioning. Any of these documents that we showed you, whether it's your HR benefits summery, or your, your EOB's, your your non-bills or your bills can be sent to docs@cakehealth.com.
So those who aren't that tech savvy, they can just forward an email, scan it, or take a picture. And that's how we get that audience. So, to scale, getting the word out and getting people to even know about us. So, there is a direct Consumer play, but we're also looking at a number of partnerships, employers being one of them.
of us because, we streamline the communication of their benefits to their employees, we give them real time updates that, they're not always on top of, and We can help them select plans during open enrollment. So it doesn't matter if it's those 13,000 plans that we funnel through our recommendation engine or those four plans that your employer might have for you.
We can still help with that decision, and so, employers are very, we're working with a number of them for distribution.
Yeah, I buy, I do buy that. I think it'll sell. It's a great business.
Thanks you.
Thanks.
Any last questions, comments or concerns? Feels like you love it.
Yeah, love it.
Clean sweep.
Thank you.
Okay, so I've been handed. note to say, we've got a 5 minute break now. I'm told to tell you not to go far. Frankly, you can go as far as you like, but you have to be back in 5 minutes. The audience choice voting closes also in five minutes. Go to the URL
That's the tech crunch disrupt battlefield. Are we ready to move on? Are you guys? They seem ready. Alright, well in that case please, yeah, so I'm gonna try to be as much of a dick as I can on time because last year it got a bit messy and people got too long and too short. demos do overrun I will cut you off, but if they overrun a bit I'll cut your question and hopefully it'll be fair to everyone, so.
I appreciate the musical introduction. Yea, that was your intro, yea, so it's all you now. Please welcome to the stage, from Farm Ego, Benzie Ronan and Josie Pick Hi. Yesterday I went to the farmers market and I got this fresh basket of produce. It was locally grown. It Organic. I bought it straight from the farmer and it was harvested about 24 hours ago.
Now, but I had to go on a Sunday 9 and 12. Now this bag of produce I got just down the street from where I live at a supermarket, so very convenient. A bit cheaper. But it was sitting on the shelf for up to about 2 weeks. It was grown with chemical, pesticides and fertilizers. And some of the produce actually came from different countries.
Now, what if we could get this fresh organic, great produce at the affordability and convenience of the supermarket? That was the inspiration behind Farmigo. Now, already today we have farms that are going direct to the consumer in programs that are called CSAs or Community Supported Agriculture. But they don't scale and they're a bit fragmented.
Starting today Farmigo is launching a marketplace. Now what we're doing is we're taking the traditional supply chain and we're collapsing it. We're removing the warehouse and the supermarket. This basically creates a direct relationship between you the consumer, and the grower. The next thing we do, is we have convenient pick-up locations so that the food comes to you so that it's convenient.
And then using group buying mechanics and subscription pricing we're able to decrease the price so it's more affordable for you. Let's take a look. So, we're at farmigo.com the marketplace and for this scenario gonna assume that I live and work in Mountain View. So we're gonna look for those convenient pick up locations.
Now you'll see here there's 53 locations these are live locations today. There's over fifteen hundred available locations in the system already. I'm going to filter this by fruits, veggies, let's do meat and eggs. So I've narrowed down some of the pick up locations based on my preferences. And then let's take a look at the list.
You can see one of them is Stevenson School, that 's where my kids go, so that would be easy to pick up my produce from there. We've also got evolution trainers, which is a gym. So, I work out twice a week, that would be a convenient place. And in this case, I'm also an employee of google, so I'm going to select that one, since why not have it come to my work place environment.
Now what we are going to see here is basically a brochure of of the pick up location at Google. You'll see that there are three producers here that deliver to this pick up location. Let's take a look at the first one. Here we can kind of browse a catalog of the different food items that this producer delivers to this location.
Now you'll notice that these are subscriptions the basis. So you're basically committing to a longer term relationship with each producer. That enables some predictability and stability in the food chain Now let's go over, you'll see, to Half Moon Bay fishermen. So these are the fishermen in Half Moon Bay that are catching the fish and delivering to you a fillet.
Now What you'll see here on the activation goal, is we're using group buying mechanics, so the producers actually said that there's a minimum number of people that need to sign up before they start making the delivering here. Here we're using group buying mechanics so that all the members of this pick-up location have a shared interest to start reaching out to members in their community and get them to join.
basically removing the marketing effort and making it community based on that location instead of having it, the expenses of the supply chain. So We can also see that we are providing basically social networking tools to the community. So that they can reach out whether it's Twitter, Facebook or email.
Now already we have over 40,000 families that are delivering their produce weekly through the system. Farmigo receives a transaction fee on each payment in the system. Now so far we discussed the consumer side. In order for this alternative supply chain to come together it's really the supply side that needs to match the demand.
Right? The inventory needs to match Let's take a look at what provides each producer on the network. So now we are looking at the web based solution that we give each producer on the network. Let's take a look at the dashboard, you'll see. So the system tracks, this is a web-based system and you're now looking the producer perspective, it tracks everything from harvest, packing, delivery and all the transactions taking place.
Let's take a look at another module, let's take a look at the round module. So now we're looking again from that one producer, this is all the information they need to know where they need to deliver, how much they need to pack and at what times it needs to be distributed. So let's summarize so far.
One. That's So one, we talked about collapsing the food chain, right? We're basically removing the retailer and the warehouse and By doing that, what we're doing is creating this direct relationship between you the consumer and the producer of your food. That increases profitability for the producer and decreases the cost for you.
The second thing that we're doing is making sure it's convenient. So the produce needs to come to you. We make very convenient pick-up locations available for you. And the third is using subscription pricing and group buying to decrease the price. Now, we all live in an era where the biggest changes on the planet are around ordinary individuals.
You are the biggest contributor to change right now on the planet. Now giving you the tools, so that each one of can take an active role in creating an alternative food system in our regional communities. So join one of the existing 1500 pick up locations at Farmigo.com. If there's not one available that's convenient, start your own.
Become a local hero take-- an active role. We expect there to be tens of thousands of these pick-up locations that sprout up across the country. We'll make the first 100 Tech Crunch viewers that new pick-up location Farmigo will give them a years worth of free produce. Now, join us. Help us grow a more sustainable food system That's better for the planet and better for you, thank you.
Well I'm a for an animated cartoon apple. I don't know about you. Who wants to go, Tony let's start with you first this time.
I'll go first. So, I love the vision of this but the challenge I have These type of models are around how do you get the scale? The margin structures are unbelievably thin right in the grocery space. And people will drive, as you know, very far out their. way to save 25 cents on an item. So, how does this work in terms of your margin structure?
And secondly, what's the role of community organizers and people on the ground to actually, to make these, facilitate this hand-off and distribution of the goods? Cause that's a big pain point here.
Okay, so one is scale.
Yeah.
Right. And the other one is how we kind of self organize the community.
Sure.
Right.
Yeah.
So, we're already seeing that from a scale perspective in forty thousand people or families, which is more like a hundred thousand individuals, are receiving their produce today. We're a young start up, right. We have only been around for two years. So we're basically multiplying by four times each year the number of people that are coming on board.
Farmers today, they get 20 percent on what you buy through a super market. Through this model they're getting 80 cents on the dollar that you're paying. So for the farms it's much more profitable, right? Now the question is how we actually increase that demand. Now it has to be community based, right.
We're not.
Well, actually my question versus your margin structure. You have to be operating on razor-thin margins.
Farmigo's is kind of the open table of this model. We're enabling you, the consumer, to go in and we're aggregating all of the different farms. And on the other side, we're providing a management system for each producer. We're a high-tech company. Our margins are similar to high-tech companies. We're taking a transaction fee of what's coming through the system.
So, from Farmigo's perspective, I think we're doing pretty well.
Wendy? We should try and have a second question.
I love the vision. Support that. I was thinking open table as the metaphor, so that made me feel like I'm with you on this. It seems to me it's understanding the roll-out and the amount of investment you have to make to work with the suppliers versus get the consumers ready to consume. And I think that's going to be tricky, just in term of resource allocation.
So these sales to the producers themselves are all done over the phone. We're able to close a sale in one hour. And then we have a team, we have a team, you know, we've invested in user experience.
So you don't have to go out and work it?
Oh no, no. We're not going, we're not.
So it's inside?
All telesales going out into farms and then from a demand perspective, you know, we're absolutely gonna be focusing on marketing that's community based. So you see that there's a video clip on our site now that you can see, you know, that's going to go viral. Where gonna kinda use the meet up, that's the other metaphor I would use because each one of these are kind of like mini meet ups, right?
And you need Get Satisfaction. I had to say that. I'm sorry.
No we are using Get Satisfaction.
There is an interest there.
I know, sorry.
But good plug.
I stand corrected.
Brad?
I was very impressed with the website and the analytics to the growers etc. very cool. I am impressed with how many distribution sites you guys have already. I think the thing that would give me pause is, for so many people the habitual behavior is I go to the grocery store. It may not be as good, but it's pretty good, and there is an old saying that in order to change consumer behavior you have to have an order of magnitude improvement in the experience.
So I would say I come away from this thinking this is pretty cool. I'm not totally convinced that it's a 10x improvement in a consumer experience to get them to really change behavior. I hope you guys succeed.
I guess to that, two years ago we were all saying Airbnb, no one's going to want to stay at somebody's house, right.
Yeah.
We all are traditionalists, we go with hotels. And that's taken off like wild fire. We're seeing the same thing happen here. I mean the community is kind of rising to the occasion. They want to do the right thing. The timing, if you look what's happening around recipes, the number of recipe sites that are coming out.
The foodies, the environmentalists. Actually on that side we are seeing a lot of grassroots movements that we think are gonna fuel this.
Steven?
So I actually, you know, after the last music there, I should say, for the last year I've been trying to do this stuff. Wholeshare in New York came out, it does the exact same thing. And I've tried it. It's really hard. It's very complicated because you have to figure out what farmers are going to be where, when for what pick ups.
This isn't easy stuff. So you're essentially trying to assume that desire for a better lifestyle outweighs lazy, and I don't know if that's true. People like to pick what they're going to eat, they like to see it before they get it. When you do these CSAs they've got tons of problems. You've layered on complexity on complexity with the Groupon buying, and the, like if it's such a discount because you're going directly, shouldn't it just be cheap all the time?
Like it just feels like there's so much you've thrown in here. If I'm signing up for this I've got to figure out the location. I've got to figure out what I'm gonna get cause I don't have the pricing, I don't know what's gonna be where. I have to go find different locations to pick different types of food up.
It just seems a lot more complex.
So you as the user find one location, right? For that location we give you basically an online catalog. You're able to see exactly what the pricing is and what you are going to be getting. As far as adoption, we have existing pick up sites, right? So lets say Google. We saw the number of people that were joining a CSA there, and then we saw the number of people who actually joined this program.
It's orders of magnitude higher. We have three different producers that are delivering there and we now have hundreds of people at Google that are signing up for this and receiving their produce weekly. Meat, fish, vegetables, you name it, right? We have locations at Facebook, Twitter, You know different locations are now coming to us saying we want to start this as a benefit to our employees.
It's different from Oshow. Oshow is actually going through. Distributors and they are having the actual coordinator do a lot of organizing. We have a lot of that logistics happening at the producer. Actually we have stickers that get on each item. Comes to your location it's already packed for you.
Okay we're out of time, but give one more round of applause for Farmigo. Just got confused because the time was starting to go up, and I didn't really know what that meant. So lets ready for the next startup. Stephen, are those the same shoes you were wearing? disrupt New York. I remembering admiring your shoes, I think.
No, I just, I'm not going to hold them up for people. But, they are kinda cool, they got a
What is I guess session four of the start-up battlefield. Two more sessions after this I think, or one more session we want.
I have no idea at this point. Okay. Are you ready?
Cool. Ok. Please welcome to the stage from Prizm, Steve Russell and Ron Palmeri.
Vision maybe the way we most profoundly experienced and come to understand the world, it's why we share photos and keep nearly two billion camera phones in our collective pockets. It's also why we dot urban landscapes with so many video cameras. There are nearly forty million of out there today.
For the most part these cameras exist to help someone somewhere understand their particular corner of the world. Yet hidden within all that video is the means for the rest of us to Explore and come to understand the places that we care about and that's where we come in. We're Prism Skylabs and we bring physical spaces online.
Our free cloud service helps businesses use their existing video infrastructure to see, understand and share their real world places in ways that are beautiful, informative, and perhaps most importantly, protect their customers' privacy. It's our goal to transform the world's $100 billion-plus investment in camera networks over the past decade into a platform for online to offline commerce, that creates new revenue streams for businesses, and new opportunities to engage and serve their customers.
A business or place simply downloads a free piece of software that automatically scans their local network for camera sources, other video sources, and then without disturbing any existing software or equipment, links that to our cloud infrastructure. Instead of streaming high bandwidth video, however, we fuse images into something more powerful and more informative.
storyboard or summaries that have visual treatments and filters design to showcase a place without distracting from privacy. We then automate how these real time views are then syndicated out to the business, the websites businesses are already using, from their Yelp page to their Twitter, to their Facebook, to their website and more.
Forever changing the way we all explore place. With me here on stage is my partner and cofounder, Ron Palmeri, perhaps, most known to all of you for his role in starting Google Voice. As well as Open DNS and Scout Labs, the first social media analytics company. Also here working the technology.
Can I switch to this?
Also here working the technology front stage and back are two other cofounders and innovators, Doug Johnston and Mike Fogel, excuse me guys.
My name's Steve Russell. I'm the CEO of Prism Sky Labs. I spent a number of years building companies in both the consumer and enterprise video space. I have about a dozen video related patents. Back in the day designed some of the first internet broadcasts as well as built one of the early online video sharing websites .
Most recently, I founded a company called 3VR, which is today the leading provider of video intelligence and search for the enterprise. So how do we do what we do? At a high level we combine streams of noisy, washed out, grainy video into gorgeous photo like images using a variety of techniques that are designed to enhance resolution, dynamic range and just overall image quality.
This is similar to the way your iPhone builds a better picture from a serious of exposures, or the way some advance telescopes will actually pull beautiful details from the night sky, we also preprocessed foreground activity in motion so we can create privacy conscious silhouettes that can give you a sense of what's actually happening within a place without actually revealing identity or too much information, and we can also use this data to build other visualizations that are very useful to understanding what's going on in a place.
This point of all this video condensation to reduce the data footprint of the video by over a hundred times, while still preserving it's informational content. So this is similar to the way a voicemail transcript often lets you understand a voicemail message without actually having to listen to it.
So too our video transcripts can actually take the place of watching video feeds in many instances. So if we can switch to a live demo, Ron's going to take us through an example of this at one of Prism's customers that many of you in the audience will know pretty well. Ivor Bradley owns a coffee shop in San Francisco called The Creamery.
He's an interesting guy. He was classically trained at the Four Seasons, and is an avid adopter of new technology from foursquare, to Yelp, to Google Places, and so on. And like most businesses in San Francisco, he has some surveillance cameras. But also like most businesses, these cameras are of little use to him and of no use to his customers.
Because of privacy concerns he would never, ever put Protective video out on the internet. But our software and service can actually create specifically tailored views of a space that is comfortable sharing. Views that preserve a real time notion of what's going on while still protecting privacy. We can then in real time automatically syndicate these views out not only to Iver's web pages but all the social media sites that he's already using.
So when Iver's customers go to those sites for any reason from, you know, getting directions to getting reviewers, instead of being confronted with a well, you know, a stale image of a place they actually get a real time window into what's going on right now. So all of you can actually if you're online can go and check this out right now while Ron is walking you through a few of these examples in popping up what's going on the Facebook, Twitter and Yelp pages today.
Iver can also do some things in reverse and see how social media information is actually affecting his real business. How things like social media buzz, yelp ratings, and Group on promotions. How that's contributing Actual in store activity as well as sales. So, we give him the tools to aggregate to visualize and understand this kind of data.
All right, thanks Ron. We'll go back to the presentation. All right, well until this week, Prison Sky Labs has been very secretive, operating in stealth, working directly with our customers to test and deploy the service. But today we're happy to make two announcements, the first is we've closed over a million dollars in seed financing led by a great group of investors that includes Ron Conway, Yuri Milner and Eric Schmidt.
We're also proud to be first investment of the crunch fund, as Mike Garrington leaked last week, and there are a number of other valley CEO investors from Garrett Camp, CEO of Stumble upon Aaron Patzer, CEO of Mint Dave Ulevitch, CEO of Open DNS as well as Brad of AOL. We're also announcing here today that we're opening up our beta program If you've got a place that you think deserves exploration, you can simply go to Prism/beta and sign up.
That's pri.sm/beta. We'd love to hear from you. And not just coffee shops and restaurants, but all businesses great and small from the largest retailers without thousands of sights, to your local laundromat. We think Prizm Skylabs will forever change the way we all explore the places that we care about, and discover new once.
Thank you all very much.
That's Prizm Skylabs. I was just about to say that was pretty fucking cool and you went, oh investment for the crunch fund. I have no opinion. I have no opinion.
I hope that doesn't disqualify us.
So who wants to jump in? I guess John.
Ya, I think it's a huge opportunity, timing is great, connectivity, connected cameras and you are solving a fundamental problem slash challenge for video which is privacy in public places so you know I'm bullish on it. Obviously the video you know some bias but I think you guys have an awesome opportunity.
Hilary? Cool. Ya I think this is really cool. I think that the most interesting part of this is seeing what you've done around privacy and also being able to, well first how long would that guy in the chair have to set their before he would show?
In a particular, you know, well, it depends on settings, but maybe a half hour or more, an hour? They're typically moving around so they disappear and continue to blend back into the background model. Other views are looking out there that just obfuscate everything and of course, it doesn't really matter with a particular video treatment.
They're never really seen in a way that identifies them.
And if people wanted to use this data for other things, like you can sort of spot the inefficiencies in the space by where they start to heat up and get too crowded?
Ya, absolutely. Cool. Ya, I got where on that side of the business where for the business owner it's going to make sense looking at maps and trends of when people come in. That all makes sense to me. What I didn't understand is. the consumer play. I mean, I just don't really care about seeing blurry photos of, like, people kind of moving around.
I don't think that's a better experience, like, what is the play there that. What are we looking at that makes it better then just a traditional webcam outside of just blurring the privacy?
Well, I mean privacy is a big reason this kind of video content isn't available. Also just fundamental problems of video itself. It's kind of tough to stream and get video to all these people, especially on mobile devices where you want to do a quick view. But a lot of the trends that are moving, that are emerging in social media right now is that people you know really have a sense of immediacy and gratification.
They like, sort of, questions answered and often video is a great way to answer those questions. And when those individuals are going to Yelp to look at, what a review is of a place, they might never go back to Yelp ever again, knowing it's a good place. It's in their neighborhood, it's getting great reviews and great ratings.
But if they can actually see a real-time window into that space, and it helps them understand now is a great time to go, that's a really added resource that's going to keep them back coming again and again and again. In a lot of ways, that competes somewhat with somebody like Open Table is doing.
Or a lot of times, I'll use Open Table for last-minute reservations so I'll know I'm guaranteed a table when I'm having a lunch or a dinner. There are so many more restaurants and venues out there than are currently listed on OpenTable, however. And we think that's a lot of the service we can provide.
So the priority use case for you then is letting consumers know that a place isn't going to be busy before they get there. I think it's a big part of it, I think there's sort of two halves to the equation. One is, really, for business owners we're letting them see, understand and share their places.
For them sharing is a merchandising activity. It's not been a traditional use for cameras. You know, my place is beautiful. It's not busy right now. It's really busy right now. All those things are, you know, things that businesses want to communicate. And they frankly spend thousands upon thousands of dollars producing videos and photography of their space.
So if we're able to help them to do that with their existing infrastructure, and add this sort of real time benefit to consumers, all the better. Down the way, this is really an incredible set of information that hasn't existed before, I mean I don't think we know how big this gets, once you're going to accumulate this unique kind of information.
It really could change the way we interact with a lot of our favorite places.
George ?
Awesome demo on the video side. I love what you're doing. It's a great idea. The only question I got is, how do you connect the inputs that could drive traffic, like social media, different campaigns, deals, campaigns that they run with video? Because all those have different time lags associated with them.
Yeah, a lot of what we're trying to do is, first of all, when you link your accounts, like in the case with Instagram, you know, you say here's my Facebook, here's my Twitter. It's going to be as easy as linking that. All those, as the business owner, you actually get access to that activity data. A lot of it's just correlated on a timeline.
So you know, here's what's going on with Tweets, your check-ins and you can go back and look at these really cool, sort of condensed views, and correlate that back. We're also seeing a lot of interesting things like point of sale information. So being able to correlate it to data sources that are already there but putting it in the pocket of the business owner.
And then actually, Kevin, just to kind of be a little bit more on the consumer side. I think we've all gotten the sense of what Google Street View can do when you kind of look down the streets and really a lot of the concept is those are facades that you really can't see in to and a big part of what we're doing is really to allow users to kind of pass through that facade, see what the place looks like in a way that's really visually rich and hopefully even with some kind of cool navigations and things to see what we are gonna be doing, and give them a sense of what it looks like in real time.
So, it's the combination a visually rich picture. It's not just a webcam, because actually there some people that have done that, and there's been very significant privacy concerns when you just throw a webcam, it's one thing. You stream has a phenomenal set of content, but you can't put that in a restaurant that you might want to go sit in.
It's just that architecture doesn't protect privacy sufficiently.
Ok, we're out of time big round of applause for Prizm. All right, we have, I have two quick announcements which sort of contradict each other, the first one
Awkward moment. We can't seem to plug that music. Okay, we'll do it without music? No music. Alright. I got a feeling that tonight's going to be a good night, that tonight's going gonna be a good night. That tonight's gonna be a good good night. Got a feeling, that's tonight's gonna be a good night.
That tonight's gonna be a good night. That tonight's be a good good night. OK stop. We all know how socializing in real life looks and feels like. And we know that that's not the way we socialize online today. Bet none of you ever told yourself, "I had a great night on Facebook last night And that's not so much because there's something wrong with you or him.
It's because the way social networks are built today, great as they are these simply do not provide those type of experiences. How can you compare this to this.
Yeah.
Shh, ah, what is it? I'm Jonathan the CEO of Shaker and And that's Alfred, another founder and CEO. And we want to present to you Shaker. With Shaker, for the first time, you'll be able to socialize online much like you do in real life.
OK Three weeks ago, Shaker launched a private beta in Tel Aviv. What we're going to do now is dive live to the site and start shaking Okay, start Shakers, the music thing here. so music is important for hangout experiences.
And start shaking. So, I'm dancing Okay, you recognize me? Of course you recognize me. This is me in blue. This is my profile picture on Facebook, hanging on top of my head. Now the People that you see here are real people, hanging out in real time, right now in Israel. It's 3am, so most of them are in their PJ's.
but they're dancing on the bar and listening to the same music. Who are they? The ones in blue and my favorite friends. The ones in yellow are friends of friends, and the rest are gray. People in Shaker act naturally--they walk around talk to other people and grab a seat by the bar. So, lets see who's here.
Yossi. Yossi is our co-founder. We can see here that he's dancing and talking with a girl. She's a friend of a friend. She's yellow. On Shaker, if I want to talk to someone, I have to come closer to approach him so he can see me. Let's try and do that, Andy. So the moment I join the chat, my new manifestation of a Facebook profile just walks there and joins them.
I'm in chat with Yossi and Christy. Now Christy, which is a friend of a friend, while I'm talking to her, I can check her out and see what do we have in common. I can open her profile and see. So, we have four things in common; We're friends with Yossi, our co-founder, that's cool. We're both fans of David Bowie, which is always cool, and we both attended Burning Man a week and a half ago.
So that's three conversation starters Even before I bought her a drink. Will she accept? Andy don't embarrass me. So, one thing you to understand. This girl, Christie[sp?], which I find lots of interest in, is not accessible for me on Facebook. The way social networks Built today. Those kinds of gathering, with relevant people cannot happen.
Let's see what else he's sharing. Profile pictures from Facebook. pictures, I can see some additional info that she is sharing. So, Christie[sp?], feels comfortable sharing some of her Facebook info with people in the room that are here right now. Well, let's have a walk here in the room and see what else is going on.
This is like wall, you can see it. This is the like wall. The like wall are the likes and interests of the people in the room projected on the wall for everyone another one to see together. I can click on one of the 'Likes' and see who likes it. So, for instance, click on one of them She was like a musician and I can see, call actually in route.
I can see what do I have in common from him? this is how I can actually get to know the people around me. Ladies and gentlemen, Shaker opened the private beta just three weeks ago in And it exploded. Tens of thousands of people are flooding Shaker as we speak. They love being able to do more than post and comment.
They love being able to have meaningful social relationships and experiences online. We have been waiting to share this with you for a long time. This is not a game, not even virtual. This is real life. The revolution of experience already begun. Shaker is much more than any specific hang-up. There's a platform of social experience layered on the top of existing social networks.
so obviously the people who are there and the type of venue will determine what kind of experience you're going to get. Imagine, for example, a sport bar, when you can root the team or talk smack. You can imagine Rhianna's fan page turns into a huge concert hall where all of her fans listen to the music.
If it works, and you can imagine Washington Square Park, where NYU freshmen can gather even before their orientation.
It is inconceivable that in the future, fun, casual experiences like those will occur in the physical world only. Some of them will occur online. It's time to bring the social networks to life. So you can log on now to www.atshaker.com And there are exclusive tickets there, for the first to arrive there.
And we're opening, for this special week, a venue for TechCrunch Disrupt, so the people here in the audience can join us, some of the readers. And if you didn't make it in, I see already people getting on it. If you didn't make it in stop by our booth to get a VIP ticket. Thank you. Shaker, everyone.
I have to say LinkedIn would be better if it was like that. That would be pretty cool. Alright, I don't know if the music's going to carry on, so let's, maybe we should all just, no Any questions? Anyone want to jump in? Sure, I have an extra judge just sitting at the end we got a new guy. I will come to you.
I think that there's are some interesting concepts here. It's clear you guys are trying to make the social experience even more. fun and richer. One of the questions in my mind is, you know, users only have so much time they can spend on various services so, what do you think you're really competing with for time, here?
I mean are you competing with dating services, is this a place to meet people that I don't really know? Or do you think that this--you're really, frankly looking to Compete with the time that people already spend on Facebook, and Twitter and LinkedIn and those sort of services? So, Shaker's suppose to be a platform, where you have able to have a venue, really create different experiences.
Different experiences will compete on different sets of time, different sets of people. The time that we're essentially competing with, is the time you spend anyway on Facebook, and the time you socialize on Facebook today, in manners that are not that natural, are not always fruitful. And that time, which is huge, you know that average for young people is almost two hours a day, that time is the time that we can get them on Shaker, at times when they want to socialize in a more casual and fun way.
So yeah, if it's a bar, then when we open the bar in Israel that you just saw, there are many, I wouldn't say dating because it's not dating sites, but it's a clear thing. You see a lot of flirting acts, people dancing on the bar and hooking up together in night.
Josh, I'm gonna bring in. I love the demo, it's as good a demo as I've seen here.
Thank you.
So, congratulations on, kinda, bringing those physical and online worlds together. So I've tried to build a synchronous business myself, and I know how hard it is. So do you also have an asynchronous model also will work in this world or does it have to be synchronous experience.
I must say that we did place our bets on the synchronous model, and I know that it might short in the time of people on the platform, that we are not experiencing that in Israel. We have great time on site--over I think 24 minutes now--which is great But there are not asynchronous natural social interactions.
Imagine that we have this room empty and then each time one of us would come and have his own Social experience, walk away, then another one come. So we're really trying to create that. And I think we have been able, you feel the energy here. we're willing to take the risk of, you know.
So what's the ratio of registered users to simultaneous?
The ratio of how many people? So, until now we've a few rooms, we were able to get, I think the most 1000 was something like that. 900?
We block it, you have to understand, we blocked invitations viable channels in Israel.
There is someone here to blame.
We're standing right now at more than 80,000 MAUs after only three and a half weeks once we blocked in So we're only allowing 540 people to be here at the same time. If you go to our fan you'll see that people are complaining that the bars are too crowded. obviously compare it to the ratio, the population in Israel.
It reminds me of a casual version of Second Life, except that it solves 2 problems that Second Life had. One is getting users. It was always very hard for to attract, and so if you're in Facebook -- and also I think it gives them something to do. People going to Second Life for the first time would spend a half an hour trying to figure it out, and then they wind up with some island with some trolls kicking them into the netherworld.
And this actually brings them with something to do. You know it also, it's like turntable, but you know, the party goes outside of just music. I think that's interesting.
Michael?
I mean I like what you're doing with, you're kinda adding more of the features trying to find out what you have in common with the person, I definitely think it's a more immerse social networking experience. The question I have for you is; you talk about bringing the physical world into the social network world, like, what are you doing that's kinda actually doing that's kinda actually doing that more than just, kind of, making it so that I have to invite other friends into a room?
Is there something that you're doing around the kind of location based services or things like that where, let's say we have fifty people right now they would all be in a room. Can you talk a little more about that?
Oh, certainly. So, location-based systems are not yet built into it, but what we're doing and you tapped into this when you talked about all those commonalities so we use algorithms to bring together people that are relevant to you, based on all those commonalities. So if it's your age group, or your location, or your Affects interest or your a radical place where you live or where you work so you can take this data.
All the data we have on Facebook of social connections. We use algorithms to decide who are the better people that you may want to spend it with. And we learn it, as people gather data.
OK, we're out of time so a big round of applause for Shaker.
Thank you, very much.
I feel like Shaker have discovered the Randomly placing supporters in the audience to cheer at optimal performance, so kudos Shaker. I kind of like the candles. I sort of want You should probably look
Thanks to those who remember why that is funny. Okay, so please welcome our first start up from TalkTwo. We've got Stewart Levinson and Riley Crane, big round of applause for that.
We all carry around these amazing devices and it's incredibly simple to communicate with our friends and our family. But when I want to communicate with the places around me, why is it so hard? I don't want to hunt through a little contact us page, and then call and press 1 and then 4 and then 6 just to be stuck on hold.
I just want to send a question and get on with my day. With Talk To, now you can. I'm Riley Crane And I'm Stewart Levinson, and we're the founders of talk to. TalkTo let's you text any local business as easily as you text your friends so that you can get text responses. And to show you how this works, Riley needs to set up an anniversary date, and he's going to do it in this six minute demo. He needs a restaurantfront .
He definitely needs some flowers, and he wants to book a room in a really nice hotel. So let's take a look. The difference is he's going to do this entirely with text messages. So as he sends this message to Zuni Cafe, Barbara's favorite, the first thing you notice is it looks very much like SMS.
There's nothing new to learn. Instead of typing in your friend's name, you type in the name of the business. You put in the message, "I want a table for two at eight and you send it. You get on with your day. Talkto literally lets you send a message to any local business, even if they've never heard of Talkto before.
So, he needs to get some flowers. He doesn't know the name of a florist. So, he's going to type in the category of "florist". It's going to do a search and, Kevin, could you choose one of them for us? He chooses one of the florists. We're going to send the message, "Can I pick up some roses at the end of the day when I'm leaving work?" Now Riley is going to stay on the screen for a minute so if messages are coming back we can see those when they come in.
And you're probably wondering what's happening to those messages. Talk Two learns how businesses want you to contact them. That florist, perhaps they want to get an SMS on a phone. Another business wants to receive an email. Another business is a sophisticated Twitter user and would rather receive direct messages in Twitter.
The point is, every local business is different, but you're the customer and your shouldn't have to care. You should be able to send one message and get on with your day. So I have already gotten a response back from Zooni Cafe, they say they have a table for two at six forty-five or nine, do you prefer up stairs or downstairs?
So I'm going to take table at nine upstairs.
If you send a message to a business that Talk To has not learned anything about yet we don't yet know how to send messages to them, Talk Two's call center will actually make a call on your behalf to the call center, get the answer for you, and will send it back to you as a text message good for your, but it is also really good for us, because what we do is we use that as an opportunity to learn more about that business so we automate that process going forward, we now know how they want to receive messages, and we can do it automatically without a call center in the middle.
Now I got another one back from the florist. The Rose Bowl florist has roses available. Would you like the roses in a vase or wrapped. Also would you like red roses or two toned rose with read and cream, I guess I'm going to take red roses.
So the idea here is to realize that some businesses are going to be fast and some are going to be slow. TalkTo is going to track this responsiveness and we're going to make it public. We want you to be able to make an informed decision when you go to by florist, which florist is likely to get back to you more quickly, based on how they responded to others before you.
So we like to do now is to get a room and a really nice hotel, and Barbara would like a room at the Taj Hampton place hotel in union square, beautiful hotel and so. what, in fact what Riley is doing at this point is searching for hotels so that we can tell you about two really interesting things here in our search.
He searched for Hotel Union Square San Francisco. And we see at the top that the Taj Campton Place Hotel is online, ready to chat with people that want to make reservations. You've seen in a buddy list, friends that are online but you haven't seen in normal search results, businesses that are online and ready to chat with you.
So that's one thing that's really powerful. The second thing is that when a business is online, it means that it's responsive to its customers, and so we move it to the top. It's like paid search except you don't have to pay for it. You just have to be responsive to your customers and you'll be rewarded for it.
So Riley's going to send a message that says, can I get a room... it is my anniversary and we would like to do something special. And while he's sending that, let's just take a minute to talk about how TalkTo is going to make money. We're going to offer a premium plan to businesses that want to do more than just have chat and offline notifications So there are premium and advanced features that we'll offer.
We're also going to offer a premium plan to consumers that would like the call center to always act as a personal assistant, making calls on their behalf. And third, it's kind of a natural opportunity for advertising and affiliate revenue. because the users of talk to are ready for business. Do you have this product in stock?
Can I get this repaired? Can I book this appointment? It's the right audience. We've got a response back from the Taj Campton Place Hotel, which is online live right now in Union Square if anyone wants to go over there. They wished us a happy anniversary, said they have a Campton suite available, another message just came in, would you also like to dine with us?
So I'm going to get back to them, but in the course of this demo I've managed to book a hotel, I've got flowers, and I've got restaraunt for tonight and I did it all with text messaging.
Our beta is officially open today. Our mission is simple.We want it to be as easy to text local businesses, as it is to text your friends. To our amazing team, thank you, so much and to Tech Crunch. Thank you.
I told to everyone.
Ok judges. George, do you want to kick off any questions? Comments?
Well, there's a couple of questions, one is large companies are likely to have automated systems to take input from customers, large companies like hotel chains. For simple requests I could see where this might get routed through an application through some kind of adapter. If I had some kind of complex request, isn't it easier for me to pick up the phone and call someone as opposed instead of having ten texts back and forth?
It, it, it could be and if you want to call we'll give you the number and you could always call. But I think TalkTo is built for people who think that sync through a contact page, and making a phone call, and pressing one and four and six and going through phone trees is painful and it's outdated They've realized that texting their friends is the way they want to communicate and when you send that first message to a hotel or to a shop to find out something and you get that message back, it's just delightful because you never had to make that phone call and so I think there's an opportunity there.
I like that, the intimacy aspect of that, of making the customer feel like they're engaged with someone. My question was really more about complex customer queries. But thank you.
Ok. Thank you. Kevin?
I love this idea. I think it's awesome. You know, it reminds me of what Uber has done for transportation, just made it so simple. It's like a single ush of a button it's done. I don't have to call the cab company and tell them where I live and all of those things. I just love the idea of being able to jump on and make a quick text and book something.
It makes complete sense. And I think the premium model of having a paid-for service that is kind of like an American Express card on crack makes sense to me. You know, you call American Express, you try to get a room or whatever and it's still a lot of hand-holding. that the fact that I can just text is so much more light weight.
Good job.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Hilary.
Yeah I really like this also. I really think it's awesome. But I was wondering I have two questions, actually. So do restaurants and other businesses show up in the listing?
I'm sorry?
You can't hear me?
Okay.
Come over here.
Do the restaurants and business show up in the listing like when you're just searching hotel union square. Do you have a data source for that or do you have to done business with them before?
Yeah, the fact is we're launching today with all businesses. So that we're not waiting for businesses to say, "We want to sign up with TalkTo." If you want to talk to our restaurant or a shop or a hotel they're there and we're ready.
Do you give them back any analytics on how often they showed up or anything like that?
Today? No. But that's definitely something that we've talked through with some of the other businesses, and their very interested so we're working with them on that.
Awesome.
John?
I like the idea because you're getting really close to the consumer. When you go to market you obviously can't focus on everything all want. So what vertical are you going to focus on? And then also businesses have so much metadata around their products and prices. And you want to display all that to the consumer so there's this specialized new item could exist.So you're going to start with florists or... you know, hotels or.
I think we're going to start with disrupting the way people communicate with businesses. We want them to stop making phone calls and going through being put on hold, and going through phone trees, and searching for email addresses. but to your point, we really want this to be about text. And I think there will be more advanced opportunities, but the first opportunity for us is completely simplify this so that the consumer can send one message and get on with their day.
Okay.
Any last thoughts from the judges?
Another question. Do you have anything in place to deal with dispute resolution where even with the best intentions there is some miscommunications and the consumer doesn't what they expected. I mean today we don't but again we're coming out of stealth right now. This is the first time we've ever said anything publicly about TalkTo and so in this early phase we've been focused on consumers.
And so now we're returning to phase two which is focusing on businesses and building up those tools that their going to need to handle these kinds of dispute resolutions. But at the end of the day you can communicate, you're sending a text, you can. There's all that right there.
Can talk to you provide my credit card credentials to the in business so that I can just release that, too.
So this is the one of the most requested things we've heard, is that, ok, you've enabled us to have this online chat. And we, and you've made it very easy. But that premium feature for consumers is not only the availability of the call center in the background, but it's being able to store your profiles to the that information is available to whatever business you choose to share it with.
Right, ya, awesome. It's not there, and we'll look at that for the premium plan.
Quick question, what's the technology used to route the message to the business? How do they receive it?
So, as mentioned in the talk. It's a python stack with all real time infrastructure. So everything is technically chat going into the system, so if the business is online, it's a real time chat. If they're not online, then Businesses told us that they prefer "route it to our Twitter account, route it to our email, route it to the phone in my pocket".
Then the phone gets brokered through us, to the business. The message gets brokered back to the consumer without ever sharing any details on either side.
And how about the first time a business has ever contacted inspected if they're not in you're database.
This is awesome. One of the best things, we believe, is that we have this database, but we want businesses to want those advanced features. And we're led to them by consumers. This is all about empowering consumers. They tell us which businesses which they want to communicate with. And if we haven't learned yet, how to communicate with them.
It gives us our in to the business to say, "How do you want to receive messages from your customers?" And once we do that we can start sending them copy of the conversation that you've been having with your customer, "Would you like to sign up"? So it's a loop to the business, and then for the business to sign up and then tell all of it's consumers that you can talk to us now, through TalkTo.
Ok, we're out of time so a big round of applause.
That was a positive shot. All the judges came to like it!
customer-friendly enterprise. Once we'll do the text warpower. Is it like the guys? Now that logo says one thing but the name says another but I'm going to go by that t-shirt and say: please welcome to the stage from Trello, Joel Spolsky.
Thank you. I'm Joel Spolsky. I'm the co-founder of software also stock exchange which I'm also the CEO and our Trello, we're launching it today, if you're with a laptop in your audience and you want to follow along, that's the URL: go to /trello. As a CEO of two companies kind of, I have found that the hardest thing is keeping track of what everybody's working on and if you ever had to coordinate teams working on multiple projects at the same time, others knowing where everyone is up to, is the hardest thing.
Whose doing what? Whose assigned to what. That's why we built Trello. So this is Trello. It's a bunch of lists. Each list has in it multiple cards. And each of those cards is a little project that somebody might be working on. In the top right hand corner, you have the members of this board to this little picture there for everybody that is participating in this board, and this particular board is a company called Artist Exploitation ink, and what they do is find bands, like young recording artists, garage artists on You Tube, audition them, and if they like them, they give them sort of a professional makeover, and exploitative recording contract.
So, when it finds a new band. It's real easy. You just go and click and add a new card thing in there. It's very easy. On the back of each card, click on sedate the lemur there. On the back of each card you've got room for all kinds of extra junk. So you can attach files, you can have conversations and in this case we've uploaded a YouTube video or link to a YouTube video, the band.
And there's also voting going on there on the back of the card, so it's a way of indicating which teams, which projects you support and so what we're going to do is we're going to take the top ranked bands that we found on YouTube and we're going to move them move them over to the audition column, which is sort of an indication that these guys are ready for an audition.
So, Justin, why don't you take over the top three over there? There you go. And then you can assign people to them, so for example, we're going to assign lean out to my little brother. We're going to assign Trello's Canadian girlfriend in Canada and then Justin can do the sedate the limer. I really like the sedate the limer band so why don't you, drag those up to the top so that everything has an order you can drag left to right, up, and down.
Those of you that are following along have noticed that this stuff is all being synchronized live over the internet to other web browsers, so that if we bring up another browser here. You can see the same thing and any changes that you make in that browser will instantly show up in every other browser that is open on that board, anywhere on the Internet.
Allright. So Justin has auditioned. He's decided that they are awesome and he's going to send that band over to the makeover department which consists of Michael and when Michael's ready to work on it, he'll just attach his picture to that as sort of a signal to us that he's working on that band. He's done a little mock up of what they should look like and he's going to attach a file of what that band should look like.
Oops, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sorry we are getting slow internet action here. Alright, let's do it in Safari. And he's gonna upload a picture of the band which then uploads and gets attached. There it is. Okay, so that's his artist's impression of the makeover we want to do. And the makeover department is done.
They send it over by dragging that card into the review process. I'm in charge of the reviews so he's going to assign a little picture of me that and what I want to do about this dance? Now I got 3 changes that I want to make before I'm going to sign a recording contract with this band. So Justin's going to add a checklist there of the three things I want to do.
Number one I feel like they are kind of boring looking. I want them to be more glam. So put that on the checklist. Number two, I want to somehow take find a way of taking advantage of the whole teenage girl attraction to were wolves and vampires because I feel like we can exploit that. Number three?
Anyone, anyone? Yes, more Cowbell. Correct. Having given a checklist of three things that I want to change about the band. I'm gonna take that card. We're gonna drop it back on the makeover department. The makeover team consists of Michael. He is going to go in there and attach his picture of the more glam version of the band.
That's uploaded and I like that, challenging Gene Simmons. Terrific. In terms of capitalizing done the whole Twilight thing. We're just gonna change the name of the band. We're not cynical at all. And the Cowbell we can add in post production. So that gets dragged over back into the review process and I review it and when it's all ready it goes into the final recording column where we're ready to record it, we're gonna attach John to that, he's our audio engineer and he's gonna work on that.
Now, everything you see here is completely configurable, so you can add, remove, and re-arrange lists at will. So if we start to have a problem discovering that the band here, the lead singer's voice is changing, we can make a column for that. We're going to have to wait a few months for that to shake out, out that over there, yes, and sort of leave him in puberty for a couple of months.
Great. Let me show you a couple of other example boards. I have a little bit of time just to show you some other examples of how you might use Trello. Are they're any VC's in the audience, anyone, anyone? No, they don't come to this kind of conference? This is a typical VC deal flow, so, we get ideas from Disrupt like commonator and stuff.
They come in on the left. They get reviewed by associates, and then they get reviewed by partners, and then they go to a full partner meeting, and then you either invest in them or you don't, typical example of how a team of six or seven people at a small VC firm might be keeping track of what start ups everybody is working on and where they're up to in the process this.
We've got another board here some where possibly, yes this administration project. This is assistant the real board, Kyle and George, who run system administration for Stack Exchange keeping track of stuff they want to work on so that we can watch it all. And that's basically it. This runs on and any form factor, we have a iPhone version.
We have this gigantic four screen plasma, that's the iPhone version. We have this gigantic four screen plasma monitor that we have built up on the wall at the stat exchange office that we use to keep track of projects that people are working on. And it all is sort of optimized for whatever screen size that it's not.
It's launching today and it's free.
That's Trello from Folk Creek Software.
I would have loved to have been in the meeting where you came up with all the names.
The everything bagels, that was funny.
That was my favorite. All right, Kevin, what.
You know, I love this. I think it's awesome. I like really light weight project management software. I think that this could work well in a small group of you know, even for our engineers that we have at Milk where you'd have, you know, a list of bugs that are open, a list of stuff that needs to be designed, UX stuff, coding stuff and then just have assigned people to each of those tasks.
I'd be really careful in just not adding a whole lot of, it seems like, there's a lot of features and a lot of stuff going on in some of those details pages. I think you are doing the right thing actually getting out there in the hands of real users to go find out what they actually want once real people start using it.
Ya.
But it looks great, this is something you could potentially charge a couple bucks a month, per seat, or whatever it may be for companies, and make some money as well. There's no reason why it can be completely free.
Part of the idea is that it is free actually even though we could probably charge for it? I think there'll be interesting things that we discover, when we have huge numbers of people using this? That might be slightly different business models other then just the free models, so may be just like a premium type thing.
And we are trying to make it the kind of thing that anybody would use to organize any kind of simple project. Not kind of like a heavy weight detail oriented Microsoft project.
Ya, I was almost thinking like, you know when you have work spaces in Photoshop, it's like for different user types, you know, software design kind of get a certain set of tools and functionality and layout than something that's planning for bands or whatever it may be. That's kind of it.
A good idea, ya.
George?
Joel, this is an awesome product demo.
Thanks.
I was really impressed. The initial pedestrian Yammer. So I really like a lot of what you are tapping into. A lot of Yammer's customers are down in the SMB space. In fact, all their early customers where we moved very quickly to enterprise which is where the revenue was. Where do you go for revenue?
Well, we were thinking plush toys, little birds like millions and millions of plush toys.
Can I get a plush toy?
Actually, the truth is that one of the things that I am a convert to is that, you know, one of my companies is funded by square and they like to talk about don't create any friction on the way to getting big. And then figure out later you can hard code a business model. And sohave all kinds of ideas and a lot of them are some of the things that Kevin was sort of suggesting there which is saying, you've got this as a basic model but somebody could build on top of that, a Lean Inventory System that taps into SAP and costs a million dollars.
So knowing our first goal is really to get it as ubiquitous as possible with little friction as possible? And then figure out what revenue opportunities develop in a world where there are a million people probably use something like this.
Great, I'm impressed. Hillary?
Ya, I mean we're still using sticky notes on a wall at think that something we definitely use but it looks like you're sort of, and you'll figure me for thinking like a programmer here, taking some of the better parts of the Agile programming methodology and applying them to anything.
Ya, we're really trying very hard to avoid this becoming just another programmer's tool. Whenever I've seen people, I mean, we have a product called fog bugs, which is bug tracking obviously and whenever I've seen the people with all the sticky notes on the boards there's always one sticky note that says fix bugs for version three and that's really the idea here This is sort of the meta big picture like, what are the three things that everyone's working on?
Not the eight million little details that you need to keep track off?
So does it have a API?
It will be and obviously the 2.0 will have gobs and gobs of interesting API's and plug in architectures and all that kind of stuff. Right now, it's just a sort of stand alone basically.
And out of curiosity what is it built on.
No, mostly back bone a lot of other, Mongo, all the cool things that all the cool kids use.
Chong.
I think there is a great opportunity to nail it. I have seen a few, you know, similar products that totally nail it. I'm curious in terms of driving adoption. Where will you initially focus? Are you gonna focus like Silicon Valley? Start ups to use it? Or VCs of just curious, where were you guys?
I'm not really sure we sort of made a deliberate decision with our first product ten years ago that we should optimize it for the software development process and that made it an awesome software development tool that's FogBugz. For this one I think our goal is really to try make it a much more horizontal thing.
I think we have the attention now, that we didn't have 10 years ago as a company, that we actually do have a chance to sort of shout about, this is a horizontal tool. You have word processors for when the words are next to each other, you have spreadsheets for when they're on a grid, and you have this, for when you have a list of lists that you want to share with people.
So we think this is almost a horizontal category. If I were an investor, and I were to ask an entrepeneur, what category are you going to go after, and what's your go-to-market strategy? And the entrepeneur said "We're going to be super horizontal. This is like Excel." I would laugh at them. But, that's my answer and I'm sticking to it, so feel free to laugh at me.
Anyone?
I won't laugh at you.
And they did. Twenty seconds, anyone? Final questions or comments? Big round of applause then for Trello. OK. We come to the last, but by no means least,
