See also Launch Festival Day One and Launch Festival Day Two.

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

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

Abra

Overall Winner

Peer to peer transactions via mobile devices, demonstrated using USD. Their innovation is “crowdsourced(?)” tellers that process the deposits/withdrawals from/to cash. Anyone can register as a teller and perform the to/from cash transaction in the local denomination. This could work well. Security for tellers is obviously a concern, but they explained that most tellers are people that have to deal with cash transactions (eg. a 7-eleven is a good fit).

Website: https://www.goabra.com/

DataNovo

Patent analysis and analytics, analytics supporting patent strategy, analytics on the patent lawyers and judges I think it’s great, but it’s targeted towards lawyers. Would be interesting if it was free and open, or very cheap so every startup had this in their arsenal.

48 hour hackathon finalists

These were all surprisingly good.

Etch

Money transfer via iWatch. using pattern to establish identity/authenticity

Orbit

Demonstrated provision of an iOS development environment very quickly. High school team.

Kikr

Gamification of action sports via motion trackign sensors and video. Great concept, lots of work to go

The Interview Club

Real time video interview with real time coding via an expert. Get an expert to interview and test programming candidates.

PreHire

Hackathon Winner

Job simulation for pre-employment interview processes. Used Google web to speech API to demonstrate their effectiveness handling a call and metrics from the test. Good product.

PreHire and Abra were popular with the judges.

Rocketbook

A pre-printed paper note book that allows very fast scanning via mobile (because of the layout of indicators on the page). The real innovation was that the book can be erased by microwaving it, allowing reuse up to ~20 times. I like this, as my main reason for not using similar easy-to-scan books is they’re too expensive.

OneDrop

Best Design Winner

They’ve designed a new glucose monitor (fashion focused) and accompanying app. The meter is bluetooth and syncs with the app. Users can manually enter too. The app helps understand patterns between readings and food/drink consumption. Some social components mixed in… It’s pretty a good app agnostic of the source of the BSL source.

AutoLotto

Fast way to buy lotto tickets on phone, and schedule auto payments. Simple interface. Load the app via credit card and can cash out (somehow?) Can set up pools quickly. Not sure how they not break terms of service for Lotto?

HandUp This was an alumni update that won best social impact last year.

Demo pit - 1 min pitches

MixMatch

Demo Pit Winner

Cool, going back to the 90’s visibal basic in emails, this actually allows interactive widgets in email in a (presumably) secure way and presumably only email.
The email author must use a plugin to compose while in Gmail. It then embed emails friendly html (for gmail).

Cloudponics

Grow, water dose and harvest plants automatically. The $1000 unit suites plants that are worth growing yourself.

First Derm

Gets a dermatologist to check photo taken on app. I recall a similar app was banned recently that claimed to do diagnosis automatically. This one sends photos out to real experts on-demand.

Neuro:On

Sleep monitor using a mask over eyes. Much better accuracy than a band.

THEIA

3D property visualisation. I stopped taking notes.

MixMax, OneDrop very popular with the judges. Autolotto interesting if it’s legal.