Punch! Launches A Platf...

It’s a familiar story in the tech world: A company wants to build a consumer product, finds that the necessary tools aren’t available, creates its own tools, then realizes it has created a broader platform. David Bennahum offers some examples: Zip2 . Vignette . TypePad . And yes, his startup Punch! , where Bennahum is co-founder and CEO, and which is launching its publishing platform at Disrupt. Earlier this year, I wrote about the launch of the Punch! app , which offers current event themed games, usually with a satirical bent. (Or, as Bennahum describes it, “culturally relevant content that could only exist on a tablet.”) Some of the early games included one where players choose the wardrobe of then-presidential candidate Rick Santorum, and a general pop culture quiz with challenges like ranking Farrelly Bros. movies based on box office success. Behind the scenes, Bennahum says the challenge was to add content in a timely manner, so that it was “topical and relevant” — relatively easy for a newspapers or magazines that are only uploading new articles and other content, but harder for Punch!, which doesn’t create articles but rather “mini apps.” To introduce new content at the right pace, Punch needed to cut down on the development time, and it needed to avoid triggering the App Store review process whenever it added a new game. So that’s what the Punch! publishing platform does. It offers a content management system where companies can create apps without writing any code in Objective C. Like Punch! itself, these apps shouldn’t just offer a tablet-optimized version of a printed product, but instead include interactivity and gaming. It includes templates for content types like maps, “drag to fill,” and games and quizzes. And Bennahum says that by “creating an environment that sends scripts to effectively render these app-like experiences,” publishers can introduce mini apps without adding code, which means that once they get the initial approval from Apple, they don’t need to wait on further approval for every new piece of content. The Punch! platform will allow publishers and other media companies to pay Punch to license the technology and, optionally, to provide additional services to help get them get started. As for the Punch! app itself, Bennahum says it has now seen 35,000 user sessions. The next challenge is getting on a more regular publishing schedule, which should hopefully happen in the next few weeks. You can read more about the publishing system here . Disrupt Q&A Q: What existing tools is this replacing? A: To create app-like experiences, most publishers are hiring app development studios. Or they’re using tools that are replicating the print experience. Q: Tell us more about the pricing. A: $15,000 license for the year, versus $150,000 on average for app development. Q: Who are the ideal clients? A: Media/entertainment companies that have already experimented with tablets and been frustrated with what’s available. Also, brands that want to engage their audiences. Punch! could also partner with companies to create new publications. Q: What about distribution and discovery tools are you offering? A: None yet. This is probably for customers who are already engaging an audience on another medium.

The Power Of Disrupt: g...

Incident took the stage this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC and debuted the gTar. It’s safe to say that they are already a major contender for the Disrupt Cup. The startup wowed the crowd with their iPhone-powered teaching guitar . The judges loved it. The crowd loved it. And most importantly, fans turned to the startup’s Kickstarter campaign where funding took off like a rocket. Prior to hitting the stage, the gTar had raised just a touch above $10,000. Now, almost exactly two hours after their Disrupt debut, their Kickstarter funding (a.k.a. pre-orders) is north of $42,000 and rising fast. The gTar seems to hit home with most people who see the demo. It promises to take away the massive learning curve associated with playing guitar. With a progressive learning mode, the gTar essentially reinvents guitar lessons. Besides that, experienced players can rock out to the gTar’s synthesized instruments or simply play around with its LED fretboard. There is a real chance that a hardware startup will win Disrupt NYC this year and that’s very exciting.

UberConference Aims To ...

We all hate conference calls — having to dial in, manually enter a room code and sometimes having to enter a passcode on top of that. Once you’ve actually logged in, there’s a whole lot of talking on top of one another, and a lot of re-introducing yourself so that everyone knows who’s talking at any given time. UberConference , which was created by Firespotter Labs and is being launched as part of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt, hopes to fix all that by providing a visual interface to all others on the call. Audio conferencing is not just a pain in the ass, but it’s also a huge business — a $3 billion business — that’s mostly controlled by big telco providers, such as AT&T and Verizon. By providing an easy-to-use alternative, UberConference hopes to disrupt the existing market . Rather than entering in a whole bunch of dial-in codes to gain access to a conference, users will be sent an email and text message asking them to join. To log in, they need only dial the conference number, and will be automatically authenticated based on the number that they’re calling from. They can also choose to have the service dial them at the time the conference call is scheduled to start. UberConference will let you check out details of everyone who is on the call, through a web browser or iOS app, and will highlight who is talking at any given time. The service provides management tools for the call organizer, which allows him or her to add, drop, or mute callers. While UberConference might not be able to fix the sound quality of calls, it can give users more control to silence disruptive users, Firespotter CEO Craig Walker said during the Q&A section of the Startup Battlefield presentation. It will also provide everyone detailed information about all attendees, such as their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter info. The Firespotter team hopes to offer UberConference under a freemium model, in which the underlying service will be free, but some advanced features will be available to those who wish to pay for them. That will include the ability to pay for a number, larger conference sizes or maybe transcription. Even with those paid features, UberConference plans to charge significantly less than existing service providers.

Incident Launches The g...

The gTar by Incident is disruption defined. It takes the guitar, an instrument with a steep learning curve, and adds a bit of digital wizardry in the form of an embedded iPhone to make learning dramatically easier. The company brags that their modern take on the guitar allows for three levels of difficulty, rather than the traditional single really difficult one. But thanks to the iPhone and a clever app, this $450 electronic guitar essentially teaches users the ins and outs of the instrument. The startup recently turned to Kickstarter to raise $100,000. However today they gave the crowd at Disrupt a musical treat — a demonstration at Startup Alley. And the device seemed to work as advertised. After docking an iPhone in the guitar’s body and loading the app, the neck comes alive with a series of interactive LEDs along the fretboard. In Easy Mode, these lights illuminate in sequence with the teaching app, showing the user which string to play. Medium takes it up a level by forcing the player to use the frets and the strings. However, the gTar’s Smart Play function only plays the correct string. Thanks to sensors rather than traditional pickups, the guitar will only play the appropriate string. But, as the user improves, the guitar does away with some of the nanny features, allowing the user to have, for better or worse, full access to the guitar’s musical capabilities. The Free Play mode allows for even more options, letting the player turn the guitar into a wide-range of instruments thanks to its iPhone core. The gTar seems to have all the right goods to disrupt a space as old as string instruments. This could be the high of Disrupt NYC talking, but it feels as if this could be, or perhaps lead to, the guitars for the Guitar Hero generation. Disrupt Q&A q: From a user perspective, will gTar players be competent at playing the guitar or is this a way for people to fulfill a guitar fantasy? Or is this an actual learning tool so they can pick up a guitar and jam solo? a: On one hand, yes this teaches people the fundamentals on how to play the guitar. These are real strings. They take the same amount of pressure. On the other hand — and I get this all the time — does this actually teach people to play the guitar? That usually comes from people who don’t know how to play. But yes, this teaches people how to play the guitar. q: How do you handle pace and rhythm? a: The app does move with the tempo of the song accurately. We were playing with some display techniques to show people. We are going with an MVP solution. The capabilities of the technology is a lot larger than we can demo. q: From a song library perspective, can you create a song from my iPhone or is it limited to your library? a: Our content platform is developed on a platform we built and we deliver songs directly from our crowd — kind of seamlessly so that the user doesn’t really see it. The platform doesn’t take the songs from iTunes; that’s definitely not a trivial problem. We have first parties to help get songs onto the platform. It takes about 30 minutes per song. q: Is there a speaker built-in? a: So you can either use the iPhone’s speaker and thanks to a cavity in the body under the pickup, it amplifies the sound a bit. we are going to be providing a headphone adapter. But you can pop it into a Marshall amp. q: Can you say how much it costs wholesale? a: We’re going to be releasing through Kickstarter. We’re going to release at $450. The way we’ve structured our cost of goods, we’re working with a manufacturing partner in China, who are a really great group of people. Out of the last six months, I’ve been there three. We’ve spent the last 3 months with them. We are building it clean and lean. What Kickstarter really helps us do is to ascertain how many people want to buy it. And for a hardware business that’s very important for us to know.

Koemei Is Out To Transc...

Lord knows there is a lot of online video out there these days, but only a tiny proportion of it has been transcribed (less than 1% according to some estimates). Searching the mountains of video generated by businesses, governments and educational institutions for the valuable information within is almost impossible because the words hidden in the audio are invisible to search. Waiting for it is not just the world, but the many people who can’t access that video because of their disabilities. Transcription unlocks the gold-dust buried in them there video hills. This would involve transcription on a vast scale, but this is exactly the problem Koemei aims to tackle. It’s a SAAS platform for speech recognition in video. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt it announced it has completed an integration with YouTube’s API in preparation for a potential launch. It also announced the successful completion of its first pilot with the University of Geneva and IMD Business School. Simple video lectures can be uploaded, translated, linked to and visible on other platforms like YouTube. Users get to see an interface where they can go through the lecture and check the transcription. Based out of Martigny, Switzerland and with offices in San Francisco, Koemei is a startup leveraging years of academic research. It was spun out of the Swiss Institute of Technology (Idiap institute), which worked with Sheffield University and Edinburgh University on a seven year EU-funded project (which has about $30 million spent on it already). Koemei acquired all the IP under a transfer agreement, has a patent pending and now plans to use its platform to transcribe video content on a super-scale. The problem they are out to solve is obvious. Manual transcription is expensive (as much as $5 per minute). They claim to reduce the cost down to $0.09 a minute. The startup estimates the market for video transcription is around $16 billion annually, given that there are around 120,000 people doing this work in the U.S. alone. It anticipates there will be a 21% year on year growth in the business. The market for corporate and educational video is clearly the most lucrative here. Koemei claims its automated transcription program works better than current systems from the likes of Nuance , because it not only transcribes the video’s soundtrack into words, but also produces an interface for humans to check the transcription. This can be open to the public or closed off for designated users. In other words, it ends up being like a crowdsourced effort to check an AI’s transcription, making it far more accurate than AI alone. An hour audio takes an hour to transcribe, claims the startup. The transcriptions can be pushed to YouTube, Vimeo etc and you get the first 10 hours of transcription free, just in case you need convincing that it works. Of course the technology needn’t just work for the likes of YouTube. There is also videoconferencing, telepresence, web collaboration, group meetings, classroom lectures, webcast; the list goes on. So far they’ve done a pilot rollout with some university partners which has brought in some revenues and proved the model. Next up will be more partners, plus an enterprise solution they want to offer to the likes of Vimeo, Brightcove, and Kaltura among others. On the horizon, their potential competition is Nuance, Google (Google Voice) and solutions like Amazon Mechanical Turk. This is not exactly a weak opposition, but they reckon they can beat all comers. They claim Nuance has issues with long conversations; Google Voice is low quality and closed for other platforms; and mechanical turk solutions involving people are pricey – and may even be customers for Koemei in the end. The startup predicts it could have $44.9 million in sales by 2014, with a potential exit to any number of players including, not unexpectedly, most of their opposition. Backed with Angel funding, they’re now raising a $1.5 million Series A round, following a commitment from a European early-stage VC. The team is led by Temitope Ola, formerly of Silicon Graphics, and comprises three others, most of whom worked on the platform during its academic development.