The Full Run-Down On All 13 Startups At TechStars NYC Demo Day 2012

The TechStars NYC Demo Day went down this morning, and thirteen new companies have officially come to market, ranging from a Pinterest for places, a social wireless MVNO, and a mobile workforce communication product, to a social network for trades and transactions, a moving industry disruptor, and a leisure class aggregator.

Some are venturing into a brand new world, leveraging social media and our online identities to disrupt retail, consumer engagement with brands, and communication within workforces. Others are traveling back to the past, elbowing their way into traditional industries and trying to make a difference.

If you happened to miss our earlier coverage, here’s a rundown on the whole lot of them:


Lua is a project management and communication tool for any mobile workforce. It allows one-way and two-way messaging among the whole crew or specific groups and comes complete with read receipts and conference calling. Oh, and the service works on any phone, from iOS to Android to a flip phone, so no one gets left out.


Karma is introducing a brand new idea in the land of mobile: social bandwidth. Here’s how it works. You pay $69 for a 4G wireless hotspot. It’s pay-per-use, so each GB of data costs $15. You sign in to your Karma hotspot network with your Facebook ID, and along with a free 100mb you get for signing up, all of your data is attached to your Facebook. Then, anyone who tries to tap into your Karma hotspot through Facebook will net you an extra 100mb of free data. The more people who jump onto your network, the more free data you get.


At first glance, PopTip might seem like a fancy version of TwitPolls. But it’s actually quite different. PopTip lets you ask a question on Twitter with a cc/ #poptip and hashtagged potential answers, and you just sit back and relax as you watch the results flood in in real time. Even better, tweeters are free to misspell words to their little hearts desire, and if they forget a hashtag, PopTip picks it up anyways. Each results page then has detailed metrics on who’s answering what, and when.


We’ve seen a few curated shopping apps on the iPad, like Buyou, but none pull in recommendations from your friends like Pickie. Pickie has tons of categories for you to choose from as you embark on your mobile shopping adventure, letting you browse socially (looking at friend’s recommendations), view editorial pages, see trending products, and check out a full-fledged discover page.


10sheet is looking to disrupt an old, old industry: bookkeeping. With a solid mix of automation software and real-life bookkeeping services, 10sheet can get the job done much faster and for much less money than a traditional bookkeeper.


ConditionOne is a new iPad/iPhone video player brought straight to you from a professional war photographer turned Academy Award-nominated documentarian. The player doesn’t require any new hardware to shoot the film, but lets the viewer pan and tilt the iPad around to get a full 180-degree view.


Wander is the intersection of Pinterest and Yelp. It beautifies a list of places you’ve been or dream of visiting with tons of gorgeous templates. It also introduces a new form of internet language: the star mention (*mention). This way, users can not only browse vertically through a person’s Wanderlog, they can also search horizontally through a specific place’s wanderlog.


Classtivity aggregates all the leisure and fitness classes around you with filters for time, date, place, and price. You can even book some of the classes straight from Classtivity. For both the user and the venue, it’s a win-win.


Marquee is a simple web-based authoring tool that allows publishers to build beautiful pages with no coding experience whatsoever. Using drag-and-drop tools, Marquee integrates with the cloud to let you pull from your desktop, Dropbox, Soundcloud, Vimeo or Instagram, and publishes directly to Facebook or Twitter with your permission. Since the technology only captures a data representation of your page (rather than the data itself), it’s compatible across almost any publishing platform.


Bondsy is a new social network that makes simple transactions and trades really simple. In fact, it’s as easy as snapping a picture of your old TV with your phone and uploading it to Bondsy. From there, only your friends and friends of friends can see your goodies, allowing a level of discovery and trust into the experience.


Rewind.Me captures your entire digital history. Right now that means your Foursquare check-ins but eventually that will include all your likes, your Twitter hashtags, your Instagram mentions, and any other piece of your history that manifests itself in digital form. Using this data, Rewind can then help brands better target customers and offer loyal users rewards.


Moveline is David going up against the Goliath world of the moving industry. But remember, David won. The idea is that the moving industry currently takes a lot of time, energy and paper to give you a single quote. Moveline takes all of your inventory through FaceTime or through videos sent in on the Internet, and can offer you quotes from multiple companies to make sure you’re going with the right (and the cheapest) service.


SmallKnot harnesses the power of crowdsourcing and brings it back home. The service lets you invest small amounts into local businesses that you both frequent and care about. The business can then repay you in kind, costing them very little but likely gaining them even more loyalty from you.