Here at The Next Web, we like to bring you the newest, most exciting startups, but what about those that are yet to launch? We’ve teamed up with Beta List to bring you five startups that are yet to launch but have us excited about their potential.
Beta List is a site that helps you discover and get access to the latest Internet startups. We spoke to five of the startups they picked for glory in 2013 to find out what we can expect.
Human
Currently in closed beta testing
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We spoke to Human’s Renato Valdés Olmos.
What is Human?
“Human runs in the background of your phone and tracks all your activities automatically. Your walks, bike rides and runs show and add up to your weekly goal of active minutes. In the near future, Human will also detect stationary activities like sleeping, relaxing, exercising or working – but more importantly: Human will notify at the right moment with information that will help you make healthier decisions.
“Human has begun testing the first version of the app with a limited number of testers, and will continue to add new testers to each batch: you can sign up for the beta at human.co.”
Why it’s different to what’s already available
“With Human, there’s no need for additional hardware or “smart” pedometers. It lives on the device you always carry around with you. We track all your daily activity, and detect what has been a walk, a bikeride or a drive. Your activities are put in context of time and place, so you know how they influence each other. And since you’re continually in sync, Human can ping you with advice at the right time: we call this ‘casual health’. Human takes a holistic approach to tracking instead of just focusing on a single form of exercise.”
Who’s behind it?
“Human was founded by Renato Valdes Olmos (of Cardcloud) and Paul Veugen (of Usabilla), and is based in San Francisco via Amsterdam.”
➤ Human
SoundGap
Plans to launch in spring 2013
We spoke to SoundGap’s Alexander Varney.
What is SoundGap?
“SoundGap is a personal music notification service that notifies you when new music from your favourite artists and bands become available on Spotify and Rdio. We began building SoundGap out of a personal need for a service like this, because we were tired of missing new releases from bands and artists we like. With the rise of online streaming services, such as Spotify and Rdio, keeping track of releases is becoming increasingly harder. We needed a simple service that could do this and as we found no other service that did exactly this, we set out to build it ourselves.
“SoundGap is based on your personal taste profile, that is created when you sign up. When you create a profile you are asked to input all your favourite bands and artists (or optionally import them automatically from Last.fm) and SoundGap then sends a notification whenever one of these bands or artists release new music on Spotify or Rdio. In this way all notifications from SoundGap will always be relevant to you.”
Why it’s different to what’s already available
“Rdio and Spotify are both planning on rolling out their own notification services. We know it can be hard to compete against integrated features, but we think that it’s really important for a feature like this to be independent. In this way our users, besides receiving notifications, can compare music streaming services to each other and find out which service that carries most releases from artists and bands they like and know where the releases become available first.
“The people that would use SoundGap are probably already keeping themselves updated on their favourite artists through music media outlets, publications and blogs, which can take a lot of time if you like a lot of music. We’re different in terms of distributing this information. Instead of users having to seek out this information, we deliver it directly – and always of high relevance.”
Who’s behind it?
“We’re a small team consisting of two persons. We’re based in Copenhagen, Denmark. We have a great interest in the intersection where music meets web/tech and how these benefit from each other. In the past we created and ran a popular music blog for 3 years, which was also where we started working together. We both have a background in design. Rasmus Kjær is our developer and has a background as a digital designer turned Ruby on Rails developer. Alexander Varney oversees design and has a background in design, business and innovation.”
➤ SoundGap
Bondsy
Launching soon
We spoke to Bondsy’s Diego Zambrano.
What Bondsy does
“Bondsy is a fun way to sell, give, or trade anything with friends and friends of friends.”
Why it’s different to what’s already available
“Only people connected to you can see your things. You can price things as you want – $20, bacon, free, a hug, or anything else. Posting can take as little as 10 seconds.
“It looks good, feels good, and is made for real people.”
Who’s behind it?
“Diego Zambrano is a Brazilian designer who worked as a creative director in advertising for almost 10 years at companies including Ogilvy NY, R/GA NY and Saatchi Brazil.
“Bondsy is lovingly made in Brooklyn, NY.”
➤ Bondsy
Evomail
Launching soon
We spoke to Evomail’s Jared Erondu.
What is Evomail?
“Evomail is modern mobile email.
“We’re tackling email one use case at a time, paying particular attention to problems in the mobile email experience. Those include volume, management and action times. Guided by pillar philosophies of being beautiful, frictionless and simple, we’re driving towards evolving the way you use email on the go.
“Email is stale. We’re moving it forward through innovation across all mail clients and server implementations – with or without their help.”
Why it’s different to what’s already available
“Evomail will provide an outstanding user experience, that begins on iPad, where our primary goal is creating a beautiful product that is simple to use and helps people get through their daily barrage of email. Mail.app is stale. Other iPad mail clients? Almost nonexistent. We’re not just building a solid application, we’re also focusing on moving the protocol that delivers mail forward.”
Who’s behind it?
“I (@erondu, designer) am the co-founder of The Industry, a design focused news entity covering startups and people. I’m also an advisor to6Wunderkinder and Advise.me. Jonathan George (@jdg, engineer) was the Founder of Boxcar (instant notifications for iOS) before it was acquired in July 2012. David McGraw (@xmcgraw, engineer) is the founder of Moonlit Technology Solutions (iOS consulting) and iGotIt Games (game development).
“Jon and David are located in Wichita KS. I’m located in Baltimore, MD.”
➤ Evomail
Tray
Currently in private beta, launching in 2013
We spoke to Tray’s Rich Waldon.
What is Tray?
“Tray brings context to your communication, we connect your inbox to the web services you use every day, automating common tasks, providing analytics and suggesting better ways to deal with your email flow.
“We learn from your email habits, the data in the services you use and the context around you to suggest rules to save time and better manage the resources you have to hand.”
Why it’s different to what’s already available
“Our platform is completely customisable, we don’t carry out actions that you havent authorised in the first place. We provide the ability for our users to completely customise how Tray works for them. A lot of services that deal with communication provide single feature sets or black box automation – for us the power to build this around your current workflow is crucial.”
Who’s behind it?
“The founding team are 3 friends that have been working together for the last few years. Myself (Rich) and Ali (CTO) have known each other for around 8 years. Ali has a masters in Computer Science from Southampton University, he went on to work in research with Tim Berners Lee’s Web Science Initiative (between Southampton and MIT). His research was based around semantics and analysing multiple data sources and big data sets.
“Dominic setup his first company whilst at Bath University studying Economics, a student booking portal which had some early success and set him on the startup route. Finally after university I’ve worked within startups for the last 5 years, whilst working on hack projects with Ali.
“We are based between London and SF having just completed Angelpad.”
➤ Tray
Image credit: Thinkstock
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