See also Launch Festival Day One

These are my rough notes on the Day Two pitches at the Launch Festival 2015.

Unfortunately I missed the final batch of pitches so this list is incomplete today.

Opinions are my own, ill-informed and probably ignorant.

BenchMade Modern

Modular sofa furniture custom (configured) design, delivered in 24 hours in LA. Built to order using a line of 7 people with a capacity of ~10 per week (but scalable). It’s cool, pretty high risk and probably way ahead of the curve. I probably wouldn’t use it myself today unless the sofa’s were amazing, but it’s good that they’re learning how to design processes and retail for made-to-order furniture.

Assist

Real-time recommendations from local experts for restaurants. (and other categories?) They say search is like a conversation and demo’d finding some suggestions and booking within messaging. Messaging is the future of search, they say, as People are better than Algorithms. Like Yahoo once thought? Very well delivered pitch.

Highly

Annotation of websites, collaborative / social. In Safari, it’s integrated into the share panel in iOS which is great. ie. highly some text on any webpage in safari and add it to your highlights list Looks very, very polished and great design. I’d use it (but not pay for it).

Captiv8

Social media metrics across all networks targeting high social-worth individuals. Intelligent Curation of posts based on most successful content Facilitates cross-communication with other social leaders Facilitates communication with brands to monitize social network

Fiskkit

Social Impact Award

“Crowdsourced fact checking of news articles” Website annotation (fisking) Tagging of comments. Analytics of the tagging on the article Conversation within structured data How does it work with publishers (needs to feed their engagement, not take it)

Captiv8, BenchMade, Fiskkit were popular with judges

REscour

Best B2B Winner

Market intelligence and decision engine for commercial real estate Like zillow for commercial property with analytics They have analysed every commercial property across the US Impressive product, must be 2.0 (1.5M seed)

Rally

Organize tonight. Friends indicate availability for tonight. Agree location / plans (Exactly like the Tonight app in Sydney) Share photos, Find each other. Tracks your location and photos across the night so you can see them in context the day after - this is pretty novel.

WhereIGo

Aggregate content of where friends go Share/aggregate places to go Sponsored lists/follow others lists Find places to go from your friends/experts

Crowdcast

Makes it simpler to start a video cast, have a Q&A (with timestamp videos) and run polls during the event. You can also find virtual “conferences” / search Uses google hangout embedded in their page Very good use of google hangouts actually. There’s definitely a business model and strong use case here (unless google wrap hangouts with free conferencing/collaboration tools)

Crowdcast and REscour were popular with the judges. Both seem very strong.

I missed the presentations for the other pitches. These were: Minbox, Glimpse, Nova, Whever and Givme

See next Launch Festival Day Three