The 15 Startups That La...

Disrupt NYC day two has just wrapped up. During the conference today, Michael Arrington demanded to know from Ron Conway when he was going to run for Mayor of San Francisco (he kept saying he would “never” ), our very own Josh Constine grilled Tim Armstrong with questions about AOL, layoffs, which publication he likes more: Huffington Post or TechCrunch (he said “both”), and we watched 15 more amazing startups battle it out for the ultimate Disrupt prize — the Disrupt Cup and $50,000. Starting tomorrow at 3:30pm ET we will have our Startup Battlefield Disrupt finals. Yesterday, we wrote detailed articles with pictures and pitches from all of the startups who presented . Below are the ones who were featured today. Out of these 30 companies, both from yesterday and today, five will be chosen to fight it out for the ultimate prize. We will have an all-star panel of judges tomorrow for the finals and things will probably get intense; people always get a little crazy at the finals, but as you can imagine, it’s a blast to watch. So, take your time in reviewing all of the stellar startups below. Compared to the brilliant ones yesterday , which startup do you think will make it to the finals? Going further, any guesses on who you think will win it all? Tune in tomorrow for the results! Session 4: Disrupting Local SpotlessCity SpotlessCity helps local dry cleaners connect with customers in a brand new way and lets people finally get their clothes cleaned in the same convenient way they already handle all of their other chores – online. Mirth Mirth is a principled objection to the frenzy of details. It’s a card-linked loyalty experience for the regulars of business with character. SnipSnap SnipSnap is the first mobile application to let you scan, save, and redeem printed coupons on your smartphone. It was featured by Apple on the App Store front page and rose to a top-50 ranking after going live. Centzy Compare services in your area by price, rating, hours, and more. We use paid crowdsourcing to gather comprehensive data from every local business, including the 75% of them that don’t post their information anywhere else online. Cardify Unlock VIP rewards and perks at your favorite places when you pay with a credit card that’s connected to Cardify…. throw away your punch cards and keep that phone in your pocket. Session 5: Disrupting Collaboration Vinlymint Vinlymint is a real-time creation web application that easily fits into your existing production methods, allows you to store and manage projects from a single place and collaborate with anyone, anytime and anywhere. Postwire Postwire enables you to make a private webpage for each client. You can collect videos, photos, web links, and documents and share them on each client’s private page. Sunglass Sunglass is a cloud-based platform that enables designers to collaboratively build tomorrow’s products, buildings and cities, democratizing access to 3D content across formats. Talkdesk Talkdesk allows any company to create a call center in 5 minutes – all in the browser. Apptegic Apptegic helps online businesses keep and up-sell their existing customers. Use Apptegic’s online service to understand each of your customer’s visit patterns, actions, and business metrics and to respond appropriately in real-time. Session 6: Disrupting Identity Networks Hmmm Hmmm empowers you to express and share your life without inhibitions. You can tailor your online-identity like you do in the real-world, as you interact and selectively share with people from every walk of life. Social Stock Social Stock is a stock market of places and people, where every place and person has a stock price based on their social interactions and enables trading social shares in places and people. About Last Night About Last Night is your social network for nightlife. It’s about the party last night, the concert last night, or the date last night. Do you want to know where the hot party is happening, where your friends are, or what is happening at your favorite hangout? Do you want to know who is performing at your favorite club, or learn about special deals and offers? Are you visiting from out-of-town and want to know where to go? About Last Night is for you. Hownow Hownow is a mobile app that allows users to post geo-fenced messages in order to have semi-anonymous, locally relevant conversations. Buyou (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner) Buyou is a free online mall that aggregates various brands into one beautiful, easy to use interface. And while it’s great that the app begins learning your taste through your likes and dislikes, it’s even better that it relays that information back to its brand partners. This means that a retailer like Express will begin to learn the clothes you like and more asily target clothing you may enjoy to you. All in all, it was a very fun day. And will be even more fun tomorrow. See you then.

About Last Night Wants ...

They say that all work and no play makes for some dull boys, and I think brothers Darren and Derek Dodge certainly seem to agree with that sentiment. The two of them have just launched a new iPhone app called About Last Night here on our Disrupt stage that aims to connect fans of the nightlife and help them find the best parties, clubs, concerts, and games every night. “We like to think of ourselves as a social network completely geared around nightlife,” Darren told me. About Last Night is a simple service to get started with — after logging in with their Facebook credentials, users can share photos and videos of where they are, tag their Facebook friends, and upvote the events they attend if they’re particularly good. Images of events and venues that are especially well-rated are pushed to the top of the app’s main activity feed and can even garner bronze, silver, and gold medals to highlight just how good a time everyone is having. Those posts can be set to private if users want to keep some parts of their night hush-hush, but they generally don’t last too long anyway. In a bid to make sure users come back again and again, those posts will disappear after 48 hours. Users can navigate through the app by swiping left and right from the main landing page — they’ll always be just a swipe or two away from listings of nearby events, friend activity, and locations that they’ve chosen to follow. Tapping an icon on the top left causes the entire panel to slide to the right, revealing a control panel a la the Facebook iOS app from which users can search for their friends on ALN. With all the location posting, About Last Night sounds a bit reminiscent of Foursquare. Indeed, the brothers Dodge told me that Foursquare got people into the rhythm of checking in, a behavior they’re clearly keen to harness. Still, their unwavering focus on the nightlife also means that their audience of potential users are avowed fans of finding things to do into the wee hours of the morning, an audience that they believe plenty of brands are itching to reach. While the brothers are all about making sure you get to have a good time — the idea struck them while enjoying the heady party scene in college, after all — they also want brands and venues to be able to connect directly with their users. “Brands spend billions of dollars yearly on the nightlife,” Darren noted to me. “But they’ve had no other way to reach these people other than advertising.” Then plan to do this by giving them the ability to create sponsored and contextual posts to be injected into the streams of users who follow specific brands or venues. Those venues will also be able to offer discounts and deals a la Groupon to lure people through their doors. But that will all come in time, and they tell me that they don’t plan to monetize the service yet — they’re planning to flip that switch within the next few months. Disrupt Q&A Q: How big a market can this address? What are the demographics? A: Nightlife is huge, we think that college kids we be heavy users, but anyone who goes out often will benefit. Q: Do you have a sense of the scale needed to attract national brands A: We’re already talking to big brands — Sam Adams for one. Q: How you brands know when to send out deals? A: Will be able to detect when a user is actually at the location, businesses will create their targeted posts from a web front-end. Q: How will heavy partiers remember to set their sensitive posts to private? A: There’s a rocker directly in the Post page that’s pretty hard to miss.

ooVoo Rolls Out Video C...

Consumer video chat provider ooVoo , which has more than 46 million users worldwide, is rolling out new applications that will make its service even more attractive. And the service, which is popular among kids and young adults, will remain free on all those platforms, with monetization provided primarily through advertising served up to web users. ooVoo allows customers to create chat rooms with up to 12 participants which can be accessed through a number of different platforms and devices. The new iPad and Facebook apps come on top of apps for the iPhone, Android, Web, and PC applications that consumers can use to chat with their friends. Although up to 12 participants can join ooVoo chats, the new iPad app, available today, provides up to four simultaneous HD video chat streams to users. And with the Facebook app, the already social app will make it easier for users to find friends and to connect via video chat. In addition to sharing video chats on Facebook, ooVoo users can send invitations via email or by texting an ooVoo call link. In an ooVoo video chat through the company’s new iPad app, CEO Yuval Baharav told me that its young user base frequently uses the app for ambient communications, basically leaving their video chat windows open for hours. The average users watches about 200 minutes of video chat sessions per month. Users frequently use ooVoo as a way to remotely collaborate on music and other projects, and many record those sessions and upload them to YouTube or share them on Tumblr. As a result, ooVoo has added a free video record feature that they can use, taking the friction out of this popular usage of the app.

Stevie Turns Your Socia...

We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn’t work work, but it’s not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV. That’s where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it’s a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV. Co-founder and Chief Creative Technologist Gil Rimon argues that this is the right way to do “social TV.” Apps like GetGlue, which offer check ins and other social interactions around existing TV content, aren’t a good fit for how people watch TV now, because they ignore its essentially passive nature. Stevie takes the opposite tack — instead of trying to encourage new types of behavior, it’s introducing new content into the traditional couch potato experience. Rimon compares the app to Pandora. In the same way that Pandora learns your musical tastes and preferences, automatically delivering music that’s tailored to your tastes, Stevie uses something that the team calls “The Stevie Factor” to look at your social data (such as Facebook Likes) and automatically stitch together the videos and other content that you’ll probably enjoy. When Rimon demonstrated Stevie for me, I was particularly impressed by the look and feel. Granted, I don’t watch much TV aside from Game of Thrones and Doctor Who , but the video content struck me as quite bubbly and polished, especially for something that was being algorithmically assembled on-the-fly. Rimon’s experience in TV writing, editing, and presenting probably helps with that. I expect Stevie will become even more appealing when it’s available on connected TV devices. The company has raised $300,000 in angel funding from investors including Jeff Pulver and Gigi Levy, and it’s participating in the Microsoft Accelerator for Azure program in Tel Aviv. Oh, and if you’re interested in couples who run startups, here’s another one — Rimon is married to his co-founder and CEO Yael Givon. You can visit the Stevie website here , download the iPhone app here , and download the Android app here . (Again, the apps aren’t standalone experiences, but remote controls for watching on the browser.) Disrupt Q&A Q: How do you connect the Internet to the TC? A: We’re not delivering hardware — it’s a web-based experience, with more devices (starting with iPad) coming soon. Q: Who is your competition? A: No direct competition, though of course there are other video discovery companies. But they’re not replicating the TV experience. The real competitor might be old-fashioned TV channels. Q: Why hasn’t connected TV taken off? A: That’s changing — see, for example, the growth of Apple TV.

David Karp: Tumblr’s Re...

In a fireside chat with MG Siegler at TechCrunch Disrupt Monday, Tumblr founder David Karp described how his company thinks differently about advertising than Facebook or Google, and how they hope to make it less distracting and more meaningful to users. In short, it’s all about telling stories. Karp said that for Tumblr, the stuff that appears in the main feed is pretty sacred, as it’s all content that users have chosen to subscribe to. Instead of inserting branded content into the stream in the same way that companies like Twitter are beginning to do, Tumblr has instead reserved the right-side column for content that users may not have seen. But the differences go deeper than that — Karp wants brands and marketers to use Tumblr as a way to tell stories that they can’t otherwise tell on other social networks or with search ads. “The new revenue model we recently put in place is built around creative brand advertising, which is something that Facebook and Google don’t support,” Karp said. Rather than a/b testing a blue link to try to find the most effective direct response ad, Karp wants brands to use Tumblr to tell stories that create intent on the part of consumers — which is the type of advertising that they want to see anyway. Also, while much of the available ad space being sold by other Internet companies goes to big brands, Karp sees an opportunity to make inventory available to individual users, who could use the space more effectively, and who might not annoy their friends in the way that brand advertising might. “We want to make some real estate available not just to big brands, but to carve it out for people that are already a part of the network,” Karp said. “It’s problematic when that American Express post shows up in your feed, but it’s different when it’s one of your friends.” In addition to talking about the new revenue products, Karp described the organizational transition which recently took place and enabled long-time Tumblr president John Maloney to resign. Tumblr has grown from 15 employees to more than 105 since the beginning of last year. A lot of those hires were made to add senior executives to the staff who could oversee various different parts of the organization. Not only did that allow Maloney to step down, but it also meant that Karp hasn’t really written any code over the last six months. Karp said it took a while for him to embrace the change, but now he’s able to dream stuff up, whiteboard it, and a team of engineers who were “worlds more brilliant than [he] ever was can build it.”