Today’s Startup: Winston

Today’s internet startup Winston is a smart digital voice that gives you information direct from your smartphone. It is a personal assistant like Siri, but unlike Siri, Winston doesn’t listen. He just talks. Where Siri lacks in personality the Winston founders have spent a lot of time making their app polite. They gave Winston a British man’s voice, like the butler many people dream of having.

Winston, at the moment only available on iOS, sucks down your social feeds and networks, cuts the content to size, and then reads you the news, saving you from the work of physically reading a single thing.

Winston can decipher disjointed tweets. It can tell if your friends broke up with someone, or someone passed away by reading Facebook status messages. The app is programmed to identify feelings while scanning for the latest, relevant news. It sorts every bit of content it receives through semantic analysis, and it pays attention to the content you interact with. Basically, it’s always getting smarter.

Winston was build by Reactor Labs and they have plans to eventually allow Winston to access your daily agenda and add voice commands, both of which will make Winston not only sound like a bultler but also make it act even more like a loyal butler.

I’ve tested Winston with my dutch Facebook and Twitter accounts and though the names of my friends do sound a bit funny in Winston’s accent, the semantic analysis is spot on every single time. It would be great if it came available in more languages and on more platforms. But for now I can already say that I like waking up with Winston at my side.

Winston (Winston Network Inc) was founded by Aaron Ting and Jarod Steward and holds office in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Today’s Startup: Front Flip

Today’s internet startup Front Flip is the next generation of loyalty marketing. Front Flip is not just another punch card on a mobile app. Instead, it helps businesses to create profitable, long-term relationships with their customers through fun experiences, instant promotions, rich customer analytics and targeted mobile campaigns.

As a store owner you can delight your customers and keep them coming back for more. You can give your guests the chance to win instant prizes every time they visit, and send them targeted mobile offers to drive them back to your locations more frequently.

With Front Flip you can capture new customers in your loyalty program using social promotions, digital ads, direct mail, email and much more. You can easily put together an integrated marketing campaign for your business, complete with design services and reporting.

The platform provides customer insights like you’ve never seen before. Understand your guests by visit frequency, gender, age, location, day part, offer redemptions, social activity and more. The online and email reporting puts actionable customer data at your fingertips.

For the customers it is just simple. They can look for the Front Flip code at their favorite places, scan it with the Front Flip mobile app to unlock a Digital Scratch Card as the secret to instant savings. Scratching the received card can unlock a prize like a 1/2 price appetizer, a free lunch or whatever you have in store for you loyalty program. A customer can also join a store’s Front Flip program. With these programs you can send your customer gifts in the mobile app to thank them for being a loyal customer.

Front Flip was founded in 2011 by Sean Beckner and Matthew Beckner and holds office in Leawood, Kansas, USA.

Today’s Startup: LazyPub

Today’s internet startup LazyPub is a low cost solution that allows anyone to easily publish your PDF, EPUB or HTML publications on mobile and tablet devices. Whether you are publishing ebooks, a magazine, a catalogue or a brochure in a regular basis LazyPub can help you reach a large audience. In app purchases are implemented and additionally if you are offerring subscriptions to your readers you can use LazyPub’s Newsstand application. Currently only iOS is supported but soon more mobile and tablet platforms will be added.

The iOS app is the front end of LazyPub service where readers can download free or paid publications in PDF, HTML or EPUB formats while it supports in app purchases and subscriptions. Users can read publications, add bookmarks or share what they are reading on Facebook and twitter.

In the back end, there is a content system for publishers, allowing them to manage publications, add new ones and have access to detailed statistics and insights about their readers reading habits. Publishers can even use the backend to add interactive elements to any page of a PDF publication without having any programming skills. Supported interactions include YouTube videos, Vimeo videos, .mp3 files, image galleries and web links.

Why using an app like LazyPub?
A recent study by Pew Research Center found that nearly a quarter of Americans regularly get their news from a mobile device (smartphone or tablet). Not only that, those using mobile devices for news consume more content and return to the news site or app more frequently than they do on computers. The Apple App Store is capitalizing on this new consumer trend, by organizing the world’s digital news into a virtual newsstand. 

Over the past five years, Apple has built an audience with the sales of over 316 million iOS devices, more than all the Macs sold in 28 years of Apple business. Consequently, the iOS Newsstand has seen an impressive revenue growth of 407 percent since it launched. It’s clear that Apple’s user-centric and simple approach to design is making it easier for readers to reach into their virtual wallets and pay for content.

But another big reason is that LazyPub makes cloud publishing very easy.

LazyPub was founded by Antonis Frigas in september 2012 and holds office in Athens, Greece.

Today’s Startup: Tykoon

Today’s internet startup Tykoon is a great financial education tool for kids and their parents, empowering kids to develop stronger financial values with real money and real-life experiences – all under the safe and watchful eye of their parents. 

Tykoon lets parents implement money management via chores, jobs, allowance, spending and giving. Kids can earn money through jobs, chores, and gifts, save based on goals, spend in a kid safe environment powered by Amazon.com and give to charities via the platform. Tykoons vison is to build a MoneySmart world. With MoneySmart Tykoon means:

• Earning with a purpose - Tykoon inspires kids to earn with a purpose and take pride in work well done. Earning is not an end - it’s the output of them trying to do their best.
• Saving for something big - When you set up your family’s profile on Tykoon, you and your child will determine how much of their earnings should go towards saving. This is different for every family and can change over time. Based on your needs and goals.
• Giving to make a difference - Tykoon enables a platform for kids to give to others. Giving is about making an impact on others lives and we want to empower our kids to realize these experiences.
• Spending is the reward for hard work - Kids do their best to earn, give, and save for their future. There’s a time and place to spend too.

When it come to earning, Tykoons intuitive interface you can assign your kids various tasks, give your kids an allowance as a way for them to earn money and begin their journey toward becoming a Tykoon and managing the tasks. The parent dashboard allows you to view and approve all your of kids tasks in a single place and on any device.

In order to save Tykoon allocates earnings to the savings category easily and establishes a mind set for savings. In addition to putting away some of their earnings, your kids can also set up and save for a big or long-term goal. This can be an item that they want to purchase, a family vacation or trip or a savings goal for college or education.

With Tykoon, kids discover and learn about dozens of age appropriate charities and also share these interest with their family and friends. The people from Tykoon review every charity before making it available on our platform and we give you controls on what categories your kids can access. It’s a simple start that can lead to a lifetime of community involvement and giving back by making a difference.

And last but not least, on Tykoon your kids can purchase their favorite products which are delivered right to your door by Amazon. Every product in the Tykoon store is reviewed by its staff so it is kid safe. You can be assured that your kids will not be exposed to inappropriate products as they are shopping. In addition, you can control the product categories that your kids can see. Don’t want video games? No problem. The choice is yours.

Tykoon was founded by Doug Lebda and Mark Bruinooge in 2011.

Today’s Startup: Instabridge

Today’s internet startup Instabridge is a really groundbreaking and simple way to use and share Wi-Fi. It deals with the annoying problem of getting WiFi passwords at e.g. a friends place. You simply log into your Facebook account and Instabridge automatically sets up your phone to use WiFi when visiting the homes of your Facebook friends.

Instead having to go into settings, choosing a network and finding the password (typically forgotten or hidden under a router) all you need to do is log on with your Facebook account and Instabridge automatically configures your phone to use Wi-Fi when you’re home at any of your friends on Facebook. To add a network you need to connect to it and then input the password to confirm that it’s yours.

The people at Instabridge take security and privacy very seriously. It is designed around the idea that you should have full control over who you share your Wi-Fi network with. They will never share access to your router without your consent. Normally when someone wants to use your Wi-Fi, you have to show them the password. And once you have shown it to them, you can never take it back. With Instabridge you just allow them access by friending them. They can then connect to your Wi-Fi network without ever seeing the password. If you want to stop giving them access, you can just unfriend them.

You can really say the Instabridge is unlocking the world of Wi-Fi. It is building the world’s largest Wi-Fi network built on the social graph. Instabridge was founded in 2012 by Niklas Agevik and holds office in Stockholm, Sweden.

Today’s Startup: Memoto

Today’s internet startup Memoto is an amazing project that logs every 30 seconds of your life. The Memoto camera is a tiny camera and GPS that you clip on and wear. It’s an entirely new kind of digital camera with no controls. Instead, it automatically takes photos as you go. The Memoto app then seamlessly and effortlessly organizes them for you.

The camera has no buttons. As long as you wear the camera, it is constantly taking pictures. It takes two geotagged photos a minute with recorded orientation so that the app can show them upright no matter how you are wearing the camera. And it’s weather protected, so you don’t have to worry about it in inclement weather.

The camera and the app work together to give you pictures of every single moment of your life, complete with information on when you took it and where you were. This means that you can revisit any moment of your past.

The camera’s batteries won’t need to be recharged until after approximately 2 days of use. To recharge the camera’s batteries, you connect the camera to your computer; at the same time the photos are automatically uploaded to Memoto’s servers. There are no buttons to press. You just wear the camera, then charge it and wear it again.

With this many pictures captured and stored every day, it’s crucial that you can easily browse among the best and most meaningful ones. The app Memoto is building for iPhone and Android organizes the photos to work as a photographic memory even after many years. The way this works is that the photos are organized into groups of ‘moments’ on a timeline.

On the timeline, you’re presented with keyframes (about 30 per day) each representing one moment. You can tap a moment to relive it in a stop-motion like video of all the pictures in that moment. The image analysis and organization is made out of the images’ metadata, such as time, place and light. This enables you to not only browse your life the way you remember it, but to search for specific events of your life.

Memoto was founded in 2012 by Martin Källström and holds office in Sweden.

Today’s Startup: CloudWork

Today’s internet startup Cloudwork integrates your favorite business apps to make them work harder. In fact it is an integration as a service platform that allows anyone to build connections between business and social media apps. Cloudwork connects your apps en programs in a very easy way, there are no programming skills!

Their cloud integration platform will initialy connect over 25 popular cloud business apps, including Google Apps, Salesforce, Zendesk, Twitter, Zoho, Highrise, Capsule CRM, Twilio, MailChimp and many more.

Connecting these applications, CloudWork enables you to automate key business processes in the cloud. Whether you run a business, work as a freelancer, are a salesperson, a support rep or manage social media, you will love the way it integrates your favorite web services.

As said, using CloudWork is very simple and does not require any programming knowledge. It takes four easy steps to get started:

1. Choose an app or use case
2. Configure the integration to your need
3. Authorize CloudWork to access your apps
4. Manage your integrations from an intuitive dashboard

CloudWork offers a steadily growing catalogue of pre-built connections and use cases for the most important business and social media apps. They make your apps talk to each other via their APIs and all their integrations are tried and tested to work out of the gate.

CloudWork was launched in 2012 and is currently in Beta. It is a product of Nubera eBusiness, was founded by Christophe Primault and Manuel Jaffrin and holds office in Spain.

Today’s Startup: Soragora

Today’s internet startup Soragora is a technology platform that enables game developers to build real-time, multiplayer mobile games very easily. The platform takes out the complexity of networking games, so that developers can focus on the part that really matters: the gameplay.

Synchronous game development is hard. Soragora makes it a no-brainer. You could build a mobile game really fast without worrying about the backend. Soragora understands that real-time gaming is not just real-time messaging for games. the library syncs right in with most game engines, so you can get started in minutes!

• You can Seamlessly integrate both constant synchronization and event-driven patterns
• Easily add smooth interpolation and client-side prediction
• Use their flexible authoritative servers with built-in lag compensation
• Automatically match players and dynamically create game rooms and lobbies

With Soragora there is no server setup necessary. You can deploy in seconds without running your own servers or databases.

• Simply start coding and let the platform worry about the hosting
• Quickly setup a flexible authoritative server architecture and let the platform be your entire stack
• Scale as your game grows and never lose users again

Whether you’re building a simple puzzle game or a multiplayer tower defense, Soragora is there to help. Their service is optimized for 3G and 4G performance. You can utilize the cutting edge in game-centric networking to minimize dropped players and shaky connections. Dynamically adjust update frequency based on clients’ load, delta encode data to minimize bandwidth load and inimize latency by adding server localization.

Soragora was founded in 2012 by Neil Sharma and holds office in Delaware, USA.

Today’s Startup: ArtKive

Today’s internet startup Artkive is the easiest and fastest way to chronologically store, share and print your child’s artwork or schoolwork. Children’s artwork are beautiful projects that are fun to admire, display, and share. That is, until the next piece of art is created, knocking the previous masterpieces off the fridge or bulletin board. Before long, parents are faced with a conundrum: throw away their child’s art? Or store it in the basement or attic in hopes of someday creating a scrapbook showcasing each piece.

Now Artkive has come with a great solution for these issues, by offering a clutter-free way to save and enjoy your child’s artwork. How is this different than other photo apps that you are probably using. Well it’s different in a couple of different ways:

• Images that you’re saving of your child’s artwork are important so do you really want them mixed in with the hundreds or thousands of other pictures you take?
• It attaches a ‘plaque’ at the bottom of each image that shows which child created the artwork, what grade they are/were in, the date created and a title of course.
• It’s does the work of turning your child’s artwork into a book. It will be almost as easy as pushing a button.

Artkive was developed by Jedd Gold in order to solve a problem faced by nearly every parent with young kids: what to do with the mountains of art projects piling up at home?

‘My daughters were the inspiration for Artkive. There was a never-ending amount of artwork they’d create and we’d feel guilty about throwing it away. The art we did keep, was sitting in a box in the garage, never to be seen again. With Artkive, we get rid of the clutter. Having it all turned into a book means we can now appreciate and remember their work and they are so proud to see their art in print.’

A desired improvement for the app would be the addition of image editing capabilities. If you want to to rotate of crop the image, you’ll will need to use an other app. Just that could be barrier to use to app more frequently.

Artkive was founded in 2012. Jedd Gold previously was the co-founder and president of an education company, has held senior executive positions in the entertainment and interactive industries and received his MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Business.

Today’s Startup: HelloSign

Today’s internet startup HelloSign is a free and legally binding digital signature service. The manifesto of HelloSign is simple. Everyone, everywhere, should use digital signatures. And, they should be free.

HelloSign created a free document signing system that is that is consistent with The United States, European and Canada passed laws, that are stipulating that electronic signatures are legally binding. HelloSign wants to make signing a document as simple as possible. Doing that is also keeps track of the documents you sign. Centralizing the signing processes allows companies to have one place where documents are signed and stored. This can help companies manage contracts, for instance, on one platform.

HelloSign integrates with Dropbox, Box and PaperlessPipeline. People who sign up for HelloSign will get 25 gigabytes of free storage at Box and will get three months free PaperlessPipeline membership.

Sometime soon HelloSign will release it API to let you add digital signing to your website, app or system. With the API you can integrate legally binding e-signatures into your websites or your company processes. But also build HelloSign into your document workflows, from the simple to the incredibly complex. The REST-based API will be lightweight and straightforward.

All the current services, including the API, of HelloSign are and will always be free. In the near future they will be launching paid features, which cover more complex work flows.

HelloSign was founded by Joseph Walla and Neal O’Mara and holds office in San Francisco, USA.