One of Canada’s largest accelerators, Montreal-based FounderFuel, is gearing up for its Summer 2013 Demo Day during Startup Festival this year, and the list of 9 companies on display this time around includes some familiar faces, as well as some new players operating in a range of different verticals.
Here’s a list of the companies provided exclusively to TechCrunch ahead of the big event, along with brief bios for each to get you situated before Thursday’s big on-stage reveal:
Transit App: We’ve covered them before, and they’ve already been re-focusing their approach to providing iOS with much-needed local transit directions by making their app free. The Transit App figures prominently as a player in the vacuum left behind by Apple’s decision to get rid of Google Maps as the stock maps provider for iOS, and especially since its recent update, it occupies that role very nicely.
Groove: This is another company that’s been around, as a playlist generator for your existing iTunes library; think Songza, but with music you own instead of music you stream from the web. The startup also recently went free, but we’ll see if that’s enough to keep it relevant in a world where it’s competing with people who provide both the music and the curation.
LoginRadius: Social sign-on is the watchword of the day for user acquisition, and for providing companies with the valuable user data that they’re wanting from their registrations quickly and easily. LoginRadius provides easy social network registration buttons, from a wide variety of different providers, making it easy and cheap for web-based companies to give their users options when it comes to registration.
Provender: Locavores are paying premiums for restaurants that source their ingredients locally, and Provender is a startup that wants to connect farms with chefs for restaurant success. Provender is more than just a marketplace, however, and helps chefs work together with farmers to tell a food story, from seed to plate.
CrowdMedia: Publications like the Chicago Sun-Times are ditching their entire photography departments, which is somewhat crazy, and is lampooned on this tumblr. But the reality is that crowdsourced photos and video are essential to modern media coverage, and that’s what CrowdMedia aims to capitalize on with its curated marketplace.
SwiftIdentity: Another startup dealing with online sign-in, but this time providing two factor authentication to everyone who wants it. It’s a startup for startups, and any online company that wants to give its users peace of mind, and its launch is timed perfectly, given a rash of network hacks and security scares.
Instagrad: It’s the Instagram for college bank accounts! Well, not really; it’s more like a friend-and-family Kickstarter for college savings, which helps you start collecting contributions for your child’s education early via social networks. And why not leverage social to take some of the pressure of education costs, which are likely going nowhere but up?
Dashbook: A feed-based dashboard on your mobile device for… well, for everything. This grabs info from various sources, including RSS, Google Analytics, Twitter, calendars, email and more to give you a combined feed of everything you care about at once, in real-time. It even intelligently flags issues, like broken feed elements, apparent website downtime, or even not having uploaded a Twitter avatar in a list of issues.
Now In Store: If Provender is a dating site for farmers and restaurateurs, then Now In Store is a matchmaking service for retailers and independent fashion designers. Creators have options like Etsy for direct selling, but local creators helping local businesses is mutually beneficial, and that’s what this startup wants to facilitate.
FounderFuel has a good track record in its two years of existence, with 80 percent of its graduating companies still at work today. The accelerator offers $50,000 in startup capital to its cohort companies (along with a $400,000 value in additional services and access to mentors, it says), with the opportunity to get a $150,000 convertible note from BDC Venture Capital at Demo Day. I’ll be there Thursday to cover the event in person, and will report back on which of these companies stand the best chance of becoming something big.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/k_fY5LSTkjQ/
No comments:
Post a Comment