StartX, the Stanford-funded and affiliated incubator, just held the first demo day at its new Palo Alto-based office space. In an hour, 12 startups pitched their wares to investors and the press, showing products and services that range from a dating service for Chinese ex-pats to zoom lenses for next-gen smartphones.
In no particular order, these are the four startups that made our ears perk up during their presentations:
Nearpod – A mobile platform for teachers to use in the classroom. Rather than require teachers to mash a bunch of tools together to work with their school’s IT setup, Nearpod makes it easy to distribute presentations to whatever platforms students happen to have available. The startup notes that more than 2,000+ presentations are available on the platform, and teachers are already using it to show them to more than 5,000,000 students.
Gridspace – Captures business voice communication, transcribes with high fidelity, and pulls out important facts. For anyone who has seen Google Voice try to transcribe voicemail, this will be extremely impressive to pull off at the scale where large enterprises can trust it for keeping records.
PicnicHealth – Fixing medical records for cancer patients: Give them your doctors’ names, they collect records, organize and clean it up into a timeline, and handle keeping that day up to date for each physician. Starting with cancer patients, of which there are 14 million in the United States, the company is hoping to push medical records from simply being digitized on each doctor’s computer to actually being accessible for those who need to see them when it matters.
Eko Devices – Captures stethoscope readings as audio data that can be stored and sent between physicians. They’ve even created an add-on for traditional stethoscopes that allows doctors to make their analog devices capable of sending data.