The TechCrunch Italy conference featured a startup competition to showcase a number of new, early stage startups emerging from the growing startup ecosystem. In partnership with media company Populis, the Maxxi Museum in Rome witnessed startups pitch for the chance to win €10,000 in cash and €40,000 worth of media exposure on Populis’s media platform.
Selected from more than 200 nominations by an advisory board of innovators, venture capitalists, journalists and well-known entrepreneurs of the digital landscape, there were eight finalists who pitched.
But of course in the end there can be only one winner.
And that was GiPStech. They also win a table at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in Berlin.
GiPStech has developed a very most advanced indoor positioning technology based on the world’s geo-magnetic field which, they say, is accurate, reliable and cheap. They plan to make this location data available to mobile app developers via an API based on a freemium mechanism.
This is a problem that literally hundreds of startups are trying to solve right now, and if it works as well as they say it does, this could even be a radical new technology for location – especially for indoor positioning which is a hot market right now.
Here are the other finalists:
Aenduo
“With the Aenduo device in home, a physician can offer remote monitoring services to their patients. At home, the patient can automatically send data from the meter that he already uses, without effort and without changing his habits. Doctors have easy access to the biometric data measured by the patients (pressure, blood glucose, …) and are informed automatically via customized alarms.”
Bauzaar
“Bauzaar is the Italian pet food and pet care e-commerce offering a unique Frequent Delivery Service that allows Pet Lovers to choose high quality products, select a delivery frequency and save money and time.”
BeMyEye
“BeMyEye is the innovative service for crowdsourcing store checks and mystery shopping. Thanks to a large and widespread network of on-demand workers using an iPhone app, BeMyEye can provide trustable observations in few days from thousands of locations in Italy.” This is crowd-sourcing the ability to check if marketing in-store and POS promotional campaigns are actually being implemented or not.
Fluentify
“Fluentify, a new way to connect language learners with carefully selected native speakers”. Not designed to compete with language learning sites, this is a language practising marketplace.
Sportboom
“Sportboom is an e-commerce website where you can find and buy every sport activity you may want to do.” You can find and pay in groups for sports.
Vivocha
“Vivocha.com is a cloud service that enables businesses to seamlessly communicate with prospects and customers right on the website, using any combination of VoIP, Video, chat, callbacks and collaboration tools.”
WIB
“WIB is the e-commerce enabled, smart vending machine that reinvents convenience shopping”
Pathflow
“In-store visual tracking to assertion best areas of shops and produce heat maps.” Claims to be better than Wifi.