Chicago’s Excelerate Labs held its annual demo day on Wednesday, trotting out the 10 fledgling companies that underwent its intensive accelerator program this summer. At the end of that program come $ 50,000 grants from Chicago’s New World Ventures as well as the chance to pitch their companies for 200 angel and early-stage venture capital investors from both the Midwest and other regions of the country.
While Excelerate focuses on Chicago-based startups this particular class had a much broader background with entrepreneurs temporarily relocating to the windy city from as far away from India and France. The graduates also spanned every corner of the technology map, from new e-commerce platforms and photo aggregation services to a company trying to teach computers to see as humans. While all 10 companies made an impression, here are the ones that grabbed my attention in particular:
Orbeus
It may seem like another Face.com competitor, Orbeus but it’s taking its image recognition software to another level, identifying context as well as people in digital photographs. Founded by a handful of MIT and Boston University scientists, Orbeus seeks to identify anything and everything in a photo or video from where it was shot to items within it.
“Computers can read like humans, but they can’t see like humans,” Orbeus CEO and co-founder Xing Meng said during his presentations. “We help computers see better than humans.”
So rather than just match names to faces, Orbeus can mine image for all kinds of information. By identifying the dishes in the Foodspotting pictures you take, it can tell that you’re a vegetarian and tell social networks to stop serving you up ads for steakhouses. It can identify how many times a particular logo shows up in the video frame of a sporting, helping marketers with strategic brand placement. It can determine from your Flickr photo stream whether you like to vacation on sandy beaches or in Vegas casinos.
Technology like this raises some big privacy concerns, as my colleague Derrick Harris has pointed out, but it can also turn digital images from random collections of pixels into data just as meaningful to machines as they are to people.
Lasso
This startup is delving into the crowded field of social planning and meet-up apps, populated by Facebook Events, Plancast, Saambaa and Giddyup, just to name a few. But Lasso co-founder Wes Dearborn said most of those apps are two rigid in structure. Lasso’s iPhone app switches the focus away from the event, location or time to the people itself.
Dearborn said the social planning tool millennials most commonly use to plan social outings is plain-old SMS, spawning massive chains of text messages. Lasso is building off the texting trend. Its app allows user to reach out to all or a select number of friends with a suggestion for an activity or gathering, something as simple as “let’s hang out on Friday.”
At any time, friends can suggest a specific time, location or activity using in-app planning tools, but those plans are subject to change at anytime depending on which way your circle is leaning. Rather than create an event-planning app, Lasso has created an app that facilitates casual social activities between friends, making logistics secondary.
Cureeo
Wine used to be the purview of the stuffy elite and viticuturally knowledgeable, but in the last 20 years it’s become accessible to the mass market. Cureeo wants to bring about that same transformation in the art world by combining an online gallery for selling art with an informational portal that translates the esoteric terminology of galleries into layman’s terms.
While the market for $ 2000 artworks may never scale down to the consumer masses, the vast majority of people with the means and inclination to collect don’t have the background or training to make purchasing decisions, Cureeo CEO Maida Swenson-Fortune said. “The general public feels that unless they have a friend in the industry they’ll be duped,” she said.
Cureeo isn’t just the wine industry as an example, it’s following the playbook of wine critic Robert Parker, who in his newsletter the Wine Advocate began using a 50-100 point scale to rate bottles of wine. Cureeo is developing a methodology that will assign ratings to its wares determined by how the market’s current valuation of the artist’s work and experts’ views on that value’s potential for appreciation.
Those scores will then been compared against the price of every painting, sculpture and photo sold on Cureeo’s website, generating a 50-100 point rating aimed at helping collectors get the most value from their investment. That may seem like it punishes the artists trying to maximize their sales on Cureeo’s site, but co-founder and head curator Stephanie Coate said the methodology would also benefit artists who often have no idea how to price their work.
Pictarine
Pictarine CEO Guillaume Martin was definitely the most entertaining presenter at Excelerate at the expense of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Martin’s premise was a simple one: Photos have become the currency of social media, expressing much more personality and depth of meaning than status updates or “likes” ever could. The problem is there is no single source from which we can view all of the photos you and your friends collect.
As the uber-social network, Facebook is aggregating photos from multiple photo networks such as Instagram, Flickr and even directly from your mobile phone, but it’s fallen flat in presenting those photos, opting instead for news feed clutter, Martin said. To put his way: “Mark is between your friends and you.”
Pictarine’s app – which the startup surprisingly chose to build for Android before the iPhone – is as simple as it’s the company’s premise. It creates a meta-social network aggregating your friends’ photo streams from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram.
WhimseyBox
Forget wine clubs and farm shares, WhimseyBox is delivering a monthly craft box to its subscribers for $ 25 a month, which they can use to make their own DIY creations. According to CEO and founder Alicia DiRago, crafting has become a $ 30 billion industry, but the primary supplier of craft supplies, Michael’s, doesn’t even have an e-commerce presence.
Whimseybox plans to fill that gap by creating an online community that will not only provide ideas and inspiration for the growing number of do-it-yourself crafters, but also sell the materials necessary to bring those ideas to life.
