1DocWay
1DocWay, hails from St Louis, MO and will be offering up a video-chat based “Doctor’s office” with back-end automation. When you think about how many people can’t access doctors, not just in rural settings, but also the disabled, 1DocWay makes a lot of sense. Telemedicine technologies such as Cisco’s teleconference systems, have existed for a decade, but current options are expensive and aren’t scalable.
With broadband penetration hitting 71% of households in the US, the telemedicine industry is poised for its inevitable disruption according to CEO Samir Malik. 1DocWay has created a new place for care, an online doctor’s office where patients can video chat with their physicians and schedule appointments online. Patients benefit by being able to see the doctor from home and doctors benefit from new revenue and more flexibility in their schedules. Doctors can charge for video conferencing sessions, phone calls…not so much.
1DocWay will hit the psychiatry market first because it doesn’t involve things like taking blood pressure or testing reflexes. And, according to Malik, it’s completely reimbursable through Medicare, Medicaid, United, BlueCross, Oxford and Aetna. The company has 3 contracts already set up and is in talks to integrate with a 10 billion dollar health system in New York City. In the fall, 1DocWay will open up to all mental health professionals, and in 2012, it will open to all clinicians.
However, 1DocWay has competition on the horizon like Jay Parkinson’s HelloHealth as well as Skype. Although Malik says doctors complain about Skype being inefficient for scheduling appointments.
KeepIdeas
KeepIdeas, based in New York, NY, is like a social Dropbox or Evernote for specific verticals. KeepIdeas’ first vertical is KeepRecipes, which hosts over 10,000 recipes, pictures, and links for foodies, bloggers, caterers, moms, chefs and nutritionists. KeepRecipes lets you “keep your cookbook in the cloud” and share photos of “what’s cooking.”
I really dig this aspect of it. With Foodspotting, I find it awkward to pull out my phone at a fine dining restaurant, but I end up taking a lot of photos of the food I cook, because I’m most proud of it. KeepRecipes is a place where I can store those photos and share my creative recipes with others.
Co-founder and CEO Phil Michaelson says engaged members are already keeping 30,000 ideas including recipes, hotels, couches, homes and more with KeepIdeas. Michaelson was even featured in Cosmopolitan Magazine for his “ultimate beauty organizer built by a dude.”
The technology is based on clipping weblinks, snapping photos and communicating in realtime. Michaelson will monetize by driving sales to affiliates. So, being 100% focused on the recipe space right now means he’s going after the $7.5 billion annual food and cooking advertising market.
Michaelson, a Harvard Business School graduate has just signed the company’s first deal with the Harvard Common Press.
The team is raising a $500,000 seed round.
LearnBop
LearnBop CEO and co-founder Bharanidharan Rajakumar met Managing Director Mark Wachen while he was a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. Wachen says Rajakumar “did all the right things with the right frequency” when applying to the program.
The product is an education technology that enables experts to create educational content with hints and feedback messages that respond to student behaviors, as the experts themselves normally would. And it’s 90% less expensive to develop these kinds of one on one digital simulations than alternative solutions. So, increased learning gains and decreased costs? Some would call that a win-win. Current clients include Carnegie Mellon University and CUNY. While CMU is using the technology with students, CUNY will use it to train elementary math educators before they go into the field.
Rajakumar says these technologies are the wave of the future. He plans on monetizing through 3 different revenue streams: licensing for the technology charging per student fees, revenue sharing agreement with publishers, and an advertising supported subsection of the content will be available for free.
Re-Vinyl
Re-Vinyl, a Los Angeles, California based startup is mobile publishing for the entertainment industry. Its platform connects musicians and related brands to their fans to increase fan engagement and revenue opportunities. Within this context, Re-Vinyl’s platform is for musicians and related brands to tell and sell their story on their terms and includes a toolkit where fans can collaboratively remix, respond, and purchase musical content.
I came into DreamIt really early one day, like 7 AM, and the founder of DreamIt, Steve Welsch, was there with some potential partners all alone in the space.
I asked if I could sit down and listen and they let me and this is what I heard Steve say,
‘I see DreamIt as what a classroom should be. Rather than charge you $200,000 for four years, we give you the same quality of education for three months, plus practice, and pay you $25,000. I think that’s a pretty good deal.’
Hearing that really changed my way of thinking about the accelerator – it became a safe place to take risks and learn, collaborate and experiment rather than being afraid of failure, competition and theory before practice that I have been so accustomed to.
-CEO Michael Morgan
The Los Angeles based startup allows you to export the artist’s vinyl logo out to your social networks so everyone knows you’ve bought the product and love it. The team plans on shaking up the entire music industry. Check out Re-Vinyl CEO Michael Morgan’s rap to investors here.
The Re-Vinyl team with mentor Alex Taub of Aviary (with MJ’s Bad).
Pandaly
Pandaly, from Philadlephia, PA bills itself as “the fun way to find deals.” Specifically, it’s a voting and gaming solution for demand-driven deals. The platform lets you earn points to unlock features and get more discounts, get deal recommendations based on your preferences and share with friends and see what others are buying.
CEO Andrew Ward says the daily seal industry in early 2010 featured about 20 companies, and now there are over 600 just in the U.S. Ward projects that the daily deal market will be a $7 billion dollar industry by 2015. And while aggregator sites like 8Coupons, Yipit and Dealsurf help users deal with “daily deal fatigue” Pandaly will help users have fun too.
Pictour.us
Check out Pictour.us from Honduras! BetaBeat’s Adrianne Jeffries’ tells the story of Pictour’s pivot best: “…five founders… left their families back in Honduras to build a Facebook-integrated classroom management platform for teachers, Class.io. The site is slick and the idea seemed great. But after two months of DreamIt boot camp, which emphasizes market research, the founders decided there wasn’t enough need for it. So they decided to pivot…to a completely different industry: travel.”
“When we first got the idea for Pictour, we went out and bought a case of 36 beers and coded throughout the night. We got pretty drunk, but we got the first version of Pictour. The next morning we were like, ‘Look, we did all this.’ Probably the code was not very well because of the beer. But that was one of the greatest moments for us,” says CEO Alejandro Corpeño.
Now Pictour aims for a better way to document travel. It’s primarily a mobile app for enjoying photo tours and secondly, a platform so you can consume the content on web, mobile and tablets. The web app is the authoring tool for the photo tours. A vintage weekend in Williamsburg, Brooklyn? Yes, please. Or how about a tour of all the Venture Capital firms in New York? Very intriguing.
The Pictour team also applied to Y Combinator and i/o Ventures but was accepted into DreamIt specifically for its education product, because Startl was a partner for the program. Managing Partner Kerry Rupp says it’s absolutely fine that the team pivoted, because in the end what’s good for the company is all that matters.
After the team was accepted, everyone had to quit their full-time jobs in Honduras and move to New York. They are currently in the process of figuring out visas with lawyers to be able to remain in The Big Apple.
The team is raising a $350,000 seed round.
TakeTheInterview
After the demo presentations, you could feel the buzz in the air around TakeTheInterview‘s table. Investors whispered and fingers pointed towards Harvard Business School’s Danielle Weinblatt, CEO of the new cloud-based video interviewing platform for employers to more efficiently screen candidates. Weinblatt explains that an employer can login and create one interview for 50 candidates. Interview questions are emailed to all 50 candidates who will then use a webcam to record their answers and upload a video. The employer will have a dashboard interface to review all 50 responses without the hassle of scheduling individual times for interviews. If you’re a huge recruiting firm, it promises to be a huge time saver. The product will take the form of an embeddable button on the job posting site.
One of DreamIt’s star mentors Tiger 21 co-founder Richard Lavin, worked with TakeTheInterview throughout the program. In less than 30 days since launch, TTI has about 80 companies participating in its beta, including Deloitte and Bausch + Lomb. TakeTheInterview is raising $750,000 and already has $500,000 committed.
You’ll notice only 14 teams were mentioned above. The 15th, Prepfly (aka Admitly) didn’t present because they pivoted several times and have still not settled on a business model.
“When we look at a team’s application we ask ourselves two important questions, ‘Can they accomplish a meaningful market milestone within a 3 month period? And can we make a meaningful difference for them?’” says Wachen.
DreamIt Ventures has just accepted the teams for its Philadelphia class this fall, which presents to investors in December. It is the first fall program for DreamIt and because of the academic calendar, a fair share of students decided to drop out of school for it. One student even deferred his freshman year at Georgetown. “Ha, we aren’t going to be let on college campuses soon!” Wachen joked.
The next New York City DreamIt Ventures program will begin accepting applications at the end of this year for its summer 2012 program.
