A college senior. A corporate banker. A toy maker and a fashion marketer. Betabeat got a broad swath of applications for our first web series from young companies around the tri-state area and beyond. Some of them are following a passion they can’t ignore, keeping their day jobs just to feed their families. Others have decided the opportunity in front of them is too big, and decided to jump into entrepreneurship now, safety net be dammed.
After working on technical and strategic consulting projects in Spain, Latin America and Africa, Pau Sabria met his co-founders Jose de Cabo and Luis Sanz at Columbia University Business School. With shared backgrounds in engineering and sales, they decided to leverage the incubator program within the business school and tap into the booming tech scene in NY. The timing for Olapic coincided with the recent explosion in photo-sharing apps, helping them to catch the attention of brands and publishers worldwide. The company is a platform that helps brands crowdsource photos from live events to increase user engagement and generate content.
Kelsey Falter is a designer finishing up her last year of college at the University of Notre Dame. She grew up getting paid a penny for every brochure she folded in a dot-com startup household and began coding on MySpace pages for the Tribune Company while still in high school. As president of the largest student run organization at Notre Dame, Kelsey noticed the problems with getting comments or feedback on students' personal projects. Designing and building two site redesigns for a Notre Dame textbook company, leading a Fortune 200 website redesign, and co-leading a potential Coca-Cola Olympic creative campaign exposed her to the struggles and time-sensitive nature of getting feedback within organizations. She is now working on Markover, a new way for users to connect with online media and for publishers to understand and measure comments. In the summer of 2011, she was on the winning team for NYC Startup Weekend and placed top 10 for popularity in Node Knockout 2011.
Phani Nivarthi and Debasish Bera are the co-founder of Yumety, a social networking plaform for mind analysis where members share their wishes, desires, worries and dreams. "We developed this service entirely by ourselves, during our free time after work by sacrificing a lot of beers and holy drinks." Together the founding pair have more than 18 years of IT experience across 5 different industries, 8 different programing languages, 4 types of computers (PC, Severs, Mid-Range, Super-Computer) and lots and lots of bugs. Phani spent the last 6 years developing complex systems for healthcare, telecom and finance industry and has a keen interest in data mining and information extraction. But, something was missing. Phani holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Columbia University, New York where he specialized on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. He hails from Bangalore, India Debasish has spent the last 12 years working for some of the world's biggest banks across four different countries...and wondering where he was going wrong. While he has no formal education in computer sciene, he spent the last decade building back end systems and global trading platforms for Fortune 100 financial institutions.
Garren Givens is an entrepreneur and blogger, and holds a BA and MBA from Yale University. He is the co-founder and CEO of dibsie.com, an evolving online shopping catalog that studies your taste and uses machine learning and curation to offer personalized style recommendations. Working with his two co-founders, Dylan Fareed and Scott Poniewaz, Garren previously launched CampusDibs, the first daily deals site aimed at college students. The team is based in New York City.
Julie Fredrickson and Philip Bjerknes are the co-founders of PlayAPI, a platform that leverages real world data to power social and mobile gaming. It combines game mechanics, the social graph and public APIs to enable the creation of new products and experiences. The platform will serve major brands looking to create custom game experiences. Philip Leif Bjerknes is the Digital Director of ALLDAYEVERYDAY, a creative and digital agency with mass and boutique clients including Nike, Aldo, and The Standard Hotels. His past experience was as a Creative Technologist at Gucci and co-founder of the fashion blog network Coutorture, which was acquired in 2008 by Sugar Inc. Julie Fredrickson began her career with the launch of Coutorture Media. Post acquisition, Fredrickson became Sugar Inc’s Affiliate Network Manager where she oversaw the growth of Sugar’s syndication and distributed content partnerships across their online media, web publishing and social platforms. She has created digital strategies for Pepsi, Tropicana, SoBe, Patron and Equinox Fitness Clubs. Currently she serves as Ann Taylor’s Manager of Digital and Social Marketing where she oversees their online branding efforts.
Born and raised in NYC, Dan Tashman has been looking for pickup games his whole life. After 10 years in the toy industry, Dan founded Tomato Lightning in 2006 with the goal of combining mobile technology and established play patterns to promote an active, healthy lifestyle and help guide the teen away from the screen and back into the real world. Get-A-Game--a collaborative effort with the help of Brian Kachnowski, Mark Markarian, Bharath Iyengar and Josh Sax--is the company's first purely digital product. Dan's hero's include Han Solo, Charles Oakley, Ming Tsai and Jim Henson.
Ayo Omojola is co-founder and CEO of WanderPlayer, a startup that turns your smartphone into a mobile controller for browser-based games and websites. Ayo was previously involved as co-founder or advisor to several ventures in consumer web and mobile, including The Posterus Foundation, WokaBox, Juncanoo.com, Flicsy.com and SimpleEye. Ayo graduated with a Bachelor's and MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Gaurav Namit is co-founder and co-CTO of WanderPlayer. Gaurav was previously involved as a co-founder of Flicsy, and worked with Naxa Inc, Macy's and Fujitsu. Gaurav graduated with a Bachelor's and MS from Cooper Union. Femi Omojola is co-founder and co-CTO of WanderPlayer. Femi was previously involved as co-founder or early technical lead to several technology ventures including United Villages and VehicleSense, Soundtag, RadioSherpa Juncanoo, Flicsy and SimpleEye. Before that Femi spent time at Microsoft and the MIT Media Lab, and graduated with a Bachelors and M.S. from MIT.
Brothers Shom and Shu Chowdhury have created Salido, a point of sale system and a consumer-facing smartphone application. The point of sale system integrates reservations, inventory management, reporting, accounting and customer management for the retailer. The consumer-facing application enables users to interact with retailers by opening tabs, paying tabs, storing receipts, browsing reservation times, looking at products, and a myriad of other uses. Shom was formerly a Director with Navigant Consulting, Inc, where he built expertise in reporting, analysis and business process outsourcing. Since 1997 he has worked with some of the largest financial institutions, insurance companies, law firms, and manufacturing companies in the world. He graduated from Rutgers College with a BA in Economics. Shu has worked in finance, technology, retail and media with both mature companies and start-ups. Currently, Mr. Chowdhury owns and operates several businesses with his core focus being the design, development and adoption of Salido's point of service platform. He graduated with a B.S. in Finance and Information Systems from the Stern School of Business at New York University and received an M.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Dave (Debasish), so good to see you. Hope all is going well for you my friend. Thanks for curing my hands after cricket. Smokin Pete