Post by SF New Tech.
Our friend of SF New Tech, David Spark, interviews some of our SF New Tech startup peeps on – What is your top tips for Productivity? See what they say.
David’s original article is here.
Have you ever had that moment where you wished you could un-send a text?
Of course you have, you live in the 21st century and own a smart phone like any other well adjust person who isn’t stuck under a rock or an Ostridge with its head in the sand.
With all the technological advancements in the world today, you’d think that the auto correct feature on smart phones would be, well, smart or at least a bit more intuitive. We’ve all sent a text (or nine) that we didn’t proof read first before sending that may or may not have ended us up in a awkward situation. If that wasn’t true we wouldn’t have funny things to post on Facebook like the ever popular blog “Damn You Auto correct”.
Ionnis, co-founder of Fleksy, a new iOS app solves this major problem and flaw of smart type technology. Frustrated with smart phone typing errors from typing on a glass keyboard and the sub par auto corrections, Ionnis and his partner, Kostas set out to create a app to make sure that nobody ever has this problem again.
Fleksy, a product of Syntellia was based off of the following idea:
When typing with a physical keyboard you don’t spend much time looking at the keys if at all. More time is spent looking at the screen to see what you typed. Now what if you were blind? It would be impossible to type out anything  correctly. Ionnis and Kostas thought if they could create a keyboard app that a blind person could use successfully, anyone could use it. That’s the idea that set the benchmark for Fleksy.
Eighteen months ago is when they started to develop such an app. Version one was released about six weeks ago to blind people only via the iOS “voice over” function. One week ago Fleksy was released to all iOS users to try for free. Use the full version of Fleksy to text and tweet or copy and paste into emails.
Currently Fleksy is iOS only, however they are working with cell phone manufacturers to have it built into keyboards on future devices. So, sadly for now all you Android and Windows phone users will have to wait.
 CrowdFlower, a leader in crowdsourcing microtasks, has created a new way to moderate images: RTFM (Real Time Foto Moderator). While it’s not quite the normal acronym that is associated with these letters (Read The F*ing Manual) it’s still rather amusing. RTFM is a crowdsourced photo moderation service provided by CrowdFlower.
The way it works is simple:
Send in your images
1. Send CrowdFlower the URL of an image via an HTTP request to their API.
Images go out to the crowd
2. RTFM sends images to CrowdFlower’s online global labor pool of more than 3.5 million workers. Moderators use an Image Wall interface that lets them efficiently screen images at scale.
Get results back
3. RTFM sends back results via web hook with an average turnaround time under 15 minutes. Each result is calculated based on the input of multiple trusted moderators.
RTFM is the first of many crowdsourcing web apps to come from CrowdFlower, a SF-based tech company founded in 2008. Since then, CrowdFlower has moderated close to 50 million photos.
Moderating photos, especially those from big social networks or sites, takes time and lots of resources. CrowdFlower recognized an opportunity to create a more efficient way to moderate these images by leveraging the crowd, and specifically targeted small app developers, community managers and/or anyone with a user base and a photo upload feature. The result was faster, more accurate and cost effective solutions.
RTFM pricing is structured on a per-image basis, however the first 500 images are FREE! Depending on which service plan you sign up for, images cost between $0.008-$0.02 per image.
Some of CrowdFlower’s clients, use RTFM to moderate 100% of photo content on their site, while others simply use it to get through the “night shift’ when their internal moderation employees go home. Some companies use it for a “first pass” scenario: anything that gets flagged on their site goes through RTFM. Then the real employees from company “X” review problematic images and decide on a course of action. This allows companies to minimize delays for photo moderation while keeping user experience positive.
And now a word from our sponsor:
Do you use crowdsourcing? Want to learn more about it? Wonder if it can help your business?
Then CrowdConf 2012 is a must attend conference for you.
CrowdConf 2012 will held on Tuesday, October 23 at Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, CA. Tickets are now available at www.CrowdConf12.eventbrite.com
Learn how businesses use crowdsourcing to make Big Data bite-sized, fund and launch ideas, complete tasks big and small, design content and marketing materials that get noticed, and get ahead of the competition.
Editors Note: For being a SFNT loyalist we want to give you a 25% discount to CrowdConf 2012 by using this code: FRIENDS25
Also, if you want to get in for free, you’ll have to make an extra effort on sharing this blog post in your social networks and don’t forget to mention SFNT, CrowdFlower and of course CrowdConf. The most creative tweets, posts, etc., get the free goodies. Make sure to tweet us (@SFNEWTECH), me (@JMOTA3), Â and CrowdFlower (@CrowdFlower) so we can keep track of the most creative posts.
photo by Adolfo Foronda
Happy 4th everyone! All the videos from our June 20 event are now posted. See the great presentations from Reddit, Waze, Crowdflower, Factoid Games, iBroadcast.tv, Zero1 and more here.
Travelling by car these days can be a bit much to deal with because everyone is always on the go (traffic) and gas prices aren’t quite so friendly on your pocketbook. Waze, a very intuitive, free app for your smartphone (iOS and Android) helps you get from point A to B in several different ways.
First and foremost, Waze has always been saving you time by being a fun, community-based GPS traffic and navigation app. Currently, with its latest update (3.2), you’re now able to save money by making it easy to save on gas, and who doesn’t want that? Waze helps you find the cheapist gas around you, or along your route. It also has specials at select gas stations. Simply redeem your digital coupon when you arive at the participation station and save. All the pricing, much like everything at Waze is updated by you, the community.
Another new feature is adding a stop along your “route”. You can choose through multiple “Search by Category” features. This feature is kind of like Foursquare’s explore option that they just added, however you get realtime ETA to both your stop and final destination.
Download your free app today and start saving time and money in the coolest waze possible.
Another amazing SF New Tech in the books. There were free tacos, a packed house with hundreds of great connections being made. Along with the usual amount of triple digit connections, came the cards, oh lord, the stacks of cards. We love meeting you all, and your cards are great, we just don’t like the amount of time it takes to log all that info associated with them. Not to mention all the trees (“Mommy what are trees?â€) it takes to make said products.
Enter CardFlick, a SF New Tech vet that solves the above mentioned headache/conundrum. “CardFlick is a team of Designers/Hackers/hustlers who believe in the power of design”.  Currently, Cardflick is only available in the ever so popular iOS format (Android coming soon, shhh), and with it, you can create a beautiful digital business card from your Instagram and Facebook photos with their freshly released “InstaCardsâ€.
The InstaCards feature is great in that in just a few simple steps (background, design, colors, image, and info), you will have successfully created a personal business card for you to share or “Flick†with all your connections, regardless if they are CardFlick users or not (more on this a bit) . Once you get to this point, “Flicking†is, well, just what it sounds like. You Flick your card out into the room and anyone in the area who has the app can see and receive it. Now however, you can flick your card to specific users in the room, you know, just in case you don’t want everyone around to have all your info.
Of course, CardFlick works best if both parties have the app, which is currently free (during beta only). And if you flick your card, it instantly shows up on our phone. There have been several other apps that share info, BUMP would be the only one worth mentioning, but what makes CardFlick better is the ease of use. It’s just so simple to create amazing, free, cards to exchange on the spot. Also, there are plenty of great themes, and plenty more on the way.
Now, for all the people out there who don’t want to join another site/service amongst the endless sea that are already out there, don’t worry, we can still take your card and flick ours straight to your email if you prefer. Either way, when next we meet, “Lets Flick”.
As we gear up for what is going to be the 4th SF New Tech Japan Night on April 25th, one of the Japan Night alums caught the eye of many at SxSW. What Americans think of Japanese culture is quite interesting. From Sumo wrestlers, Sony Playstations and Samurais, our view of the Japanese come from books, games and movies.
So, on flip side, it is interesting to see how the Japanese App makers want to market themselves here in the US.
AT&T, a Friend of SF New Tech, and the global nonprofit One Economy recently launched Applications for Good, a unique contest that challenges developers to design public-purpose mobile applications to help low-income users improve their lives. AT&T and One Economy are offering a total of $50,000 in prizes to software developers who design applications in the following categories: Jobs, Health, Education and Banking. The contest began on March 14 and will run through May 16, 2011. Enter the contest and view more details at www.applicationsforgood.org.
Photo Courtesy of Julie Blaustein
Our friends @ btrax posted a Part 2 summary of our Social Data Revolution’s panel’s discussion on how to design ways of interacting with people and how to construct metrics for using social data. Read it here http://ht.ly/46xue
Photo courtesy of Julie Blaustein
On Wednesday night, we had a different kind of event which brought our “crib” out of our “start-up” comfort zone to the delight of our 300 loyal SF New Tech fans in the audience. Andreas Weigend moderated a panel discussion about an interesting inflection point in our web world – the Social Data Revolution. Our friends @ btrax in a Part 1 summary of the captured some of the magic around the panel’s discussion on how to design ways of interacting with people and how to construct metrics for using social data. Read it here http://ht.ly/43vOS
Want an easy way to jazz up your blog or just repost interesting web content? That’s what serial entrepreneur John Pettitt and partner Tim McElreavy desired too, so they went out and created curate.us – a means for copying rich media, repositioning or “clipping” it, adding visually appealing highlights like stickies to draw attention and then re-posting it elsewhere, all the while tracking where it goes along the way.
The kicker is that Curate.Us helps you reposition and customize text or graphics, then tracks the re-post, using their own analytics to see click through, content reuse and where exactly that re-posted graphics is used. Because all clips are fully attributed, according to Pettitt, “it drives traffic back to the sourced graphic or text”, which can be a blog or web site, graphic or rich text or HTML.
Co-Founder John Pettitt presents Curate.Us at 10Nov2010 SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
On the flip side, though Curate.Us regenerates a page every time you look at it, it will never clip anything copy protected, a confidence booster for any company who values their personal data and content.
For those curious about the technology, Pettitt offered that, “It’s hosted on EC2 runs ubuntu using lighttpd, mysql, php, gearman and uses memcache for caching.”
What’s Next for Curate.Us? Deliver more technology in the future that Pettitt promised will be, “something disruptive that builds on this technology”.
About Curate.Us
Website: Curate.Us
Twitter: @CurateUs
Blog: http://curate.us/curate/blog
Co-Founder: John Pettitt @jpp123
Co-Founder: Tim McElreavy @FreeRangeTim
Dark Overlady of Engineering Kate McKinley @sigkate
Community Czarina Tia Marie @tia_marie
If you feel overwhelmed by content overload – and who doesn’t these days – Sameer Yami’s WikiSeer might just be the solution you need.
According to co-founder Yami,
WikiSeer siphons through textual content, figures out what’s most important, presents it to you succinctly, and then as a bonus, allows you to share it with friends.
That’s after all the genesis of creating the product, frustration while browsing massive amounts of data
Think of it as Cliff Notes for web content. Yami noted, “you can find book abstracts everywhere, but there was nothing even close for web pages on the net”, thus WikiSeer was born.
Sameer Yami presenting WikiSeer at 10Nov2010 SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
Using sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) and several patented techniques, WikiSeer culls the results and sends them back to you, a natural time saver for any reader. WikiSeer is content neutral. It can provide a synopsis of the most relevant sentences of any page, whether you’re seeking the best dishes at a restaurant listed on Yelp, or reading a lengthy book and just want the essence of the content. It can do so using graphics or text as a foundation for that input.
“We built WikiSeer to find the most informative content in any English text”, explained Yami.
Wanna try it? Take the website – http://WikiSeer.com/ – for a test ride. You can also summarize any webpage without leaving the site using the Firefox Addon or the Chrome Addon.
Check it out and let them know what you think!
About WikiSeer
Website: http://WikiSeer.com/
Twitter: @Wikiseer
Co-Founder: Sameer Yami
Co-Founder: Sanika Shirwadkar
Contact: Via the Contact Page.
Feedback: Click here to give feedback about your experience.

While the rest of the world depends on electronic communiqués, the medical industry lags behind, given, according to Michael Kleiman, VP Product Management at OneMedical,
90% of providers don’t accept emails, but OneMedical does.
Given creating a positive user experience is a mantra for all startups, that is the essence of OneMedical’s value proposition. And they know they’re on the right track as they continually expand, while just taking off.
Michael Klieman presents One Medical at SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
The cost? The member based service costs $149 per year. For that fee, if you have insurance they will bill insurance for you, if you don’t have insurance they will offer you a discounted rate for service. “Both ways, it’s a good way to stay on top of your health,” insisted Kleiman.
OneMedical’s iPhone app works in tandem with their website, delivering a spectrum of help: answers to simple medical questions;Â physician referrals for personal consultation;Â guidelines for handling billing questions; access your health records and renew prescriptions.
OneMedical’s free iPhone app walks you through a series of question to identify the nature and details of your issue.At one end of the spectrum, if the issue can be handled by the patient accessing information on their own (eg: by onemedical providing links to you) the quick answer is in hand. At the other end of the spectrum, if you have an urgent issue, they’ll ease the process by calling the provider to arrange an immediate office or emergency visit.
With 6 offices in SF, 2 in NY and huge demand to continually expand, it’s clear the service fills a void.
Whether you have insurance, or not, this could be the wave of the future for medical care.
Want to see for yourself? Next office opens Nov. 30th 2010, at 201 Spear Street, and SFNewTech fans are invited to the open house event 5:30 – 7:30 PM where wine and cheese will be served, for health purposes only, of course!
Michael Klieman presents the One Medical iPhone App (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
About One Medical
Website: www.onemedical.com
San Francisco Website: www.onemedical.com/sf
Founder: Tom X. Lee
Vice President, Product Management: Michael Kleiman
Twitter: @onemedical
Facebook: One-Medical-Group
Contact Email: admin @ onemedical.com
OneMedical Mobile App: www.onemedical.com/mobile
While in high school, Andrew Sutherland needed help studying French vocabulary, so he created electronic flashcards for his own use. Soon, word about Quizlet caught on in a so called flash, which is one reason their user base doubled every year since inception.
With 1 million registered users and about 3 million visitors a month, it’s a concept whose time has come.
Quizlet works like paper index cards, one side for questions, flip side for answers. Users can generate their own flash card content, or use those developed by others on the site, as you can opt for private or public cards. With topics ranging from languages to math, science and history, Quizlet instantly provides access to a wealth of learning material.
Product Manager Phil Freo Presenting Quizlet at SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
In various modes, Quizlet combines a spectrum of proven techniques with technology to ensure “lessons are learned”, by: shuffling incorrectly answered cards back to you until you get the answer right; true and false cards; and repetitive testing, ensuring you type an answer that you either don’t know or get wrong, again increasing sticking power.
More fun learning games available: matching words and graphics; terms and definitions; and a “Space Race” game, where terms fly across the screen as you try to fill in the definition before the terms fly off the screen’s edge.
Quizlet is a free service, but for just $10 a year, you can even upload your own graphics to enhance the flashcards.
Quizlet’s goal ? According to product manager Phil Freo
We want Quizlet to be recognized as the best place on line to learn or study
With an API for the iphone, 15 apps pull content in to Quizlet. Next up: they’re creating Quizlet groups so you can invite your friends to learn with you.
Product Manager Phil Freo answers questions about Quizlet at SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Shiva Manjunath)
About Quizlet
Website: http://quizlet.com
Blog: http://quizlet.com/blog/
Twitter: @quizlet
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/quizlet
Contactl: info @ quizlet.com
Founder: Andrew Sutherland
CEO: Dave Margulius
Product Manager & Developer : Phil Freo , Twitter @philfreo
If you own a company or e-commerce website, the Video Genie platform will help you capture and broadcast customer testimonial videos on the web. It is real people talking about your brand in a genuine (un-scripted) way, so you can imagine the effect it could have on other potential customers!
Justin Nassiri (founder) and Katiya (with co-founder Rob Starling in the audience), presented the Video Genie platform that, in Justin’s own words, was
Word of mouth marketing on Steroids.
Using local San Fransisco based product company DefaultCase (who make cases for iPhones) Justin showed everyone how customers or fans can quickly record a video testimonial by visiting the product/service website (even from their iphones and other mobile devices). By forcing recording time limits and other configurable constraints on the customer, you end up getting short, crisp, interesting (and hence useful) video testimonials.
The management dashboard of Video Genie notifies you as and when new videos start coming in. You can then review the video, make sure it matches your brand and then post it to your website.
Justin Nassiri and Katiya presenting Video Genie at SFNewTech
Video Genie also gives you a lot of analytics insight, including the ability to see which videos are driving conversions, which ones are more effective in engaging other viewers and going viral etc. You can then promote just those videos to create an even bigger viral sharing effect and dramatically increase your brand reach in a brand safe way.
Another neat feature is that the individual customers can be notified that their video testimonial is featured on the company’s website. They get a link to their video, which they are very likely to forward to their friends and family, thus increasing the sharing and marketing of the brand in a very social way!
About Video Genie
Justin started VideoGenie while at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His co-founder is Rob Starling. Video Genie received funding from Eric Schmidt (Google) in 2009. The service was one of the 20 companies that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in May, by which time Video Genie was already profitable.
website: videogenie.com
twitter: @video_genie
facebook: www.facebook.com/videogenie
contact email: accounts @ videogenie.com
If you own a company or e-commerce website, the Video Genie platform will help you capture and broadcast customer testimonial videos on the web. It is real people talking about your brand in a genuine (un-scripted) way, so you can imagine the effect it could have on other potential customers!
Justin Nassiri (founder) and Katiya (with co-founder Rob Starling in the audience), presented the Video Genie platform that, in Justin’s own words, was
Word of mouth marketing on Steroids.
Using local San Fransisco based product company DefaultCase (who make cases for iPhones) Justin showed everyone how customers or fans can quickly record a video testimonial by visiting the product/service website (even from their iphones and other mobile devices). By forcing recording time limits and other configurable constraints on the customer, you end up getting short, crisp, interesting (and hence useful) video testimonials.
The management dashboard of Video Genie notifies you as and when new videos start coming in. You can then review the video, make sure it matches your brand and then post it to your website.
Justin Nassiri and Katiya presenting Video Genie at SFNewTech
Video Genie also gives you a lot of analytics insight, including the ability to see which videos are driving conversions, which ones are more effective in engaging other viewers and going viral etc. You can then promote just those videos to create an even bigger viral sharing effect and dramatically increase your brand reach in a brand safe way.
Another neat feature is that the individual customers can be notified that their video testimonial is featured on the company’s website. They get a link to their video, which they are very likely to forward to their friends and family, thus increasing the sharing and marketing of the brand in a very social way!
About Video Genie
Justin started VideoGenie while at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His co-founder is Rob Starling. Video Genie received funding from Eric Schmidt (Google) in 2009. The service was one of the 20 companies that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in May, by which time Video Genie was already profitable.
website: videogenie.com
twitter: @video_genie
facebook: www.facebook.com/videogenie
contact email: accounts @ videogenie.com
Benjamin Berube of D2Soft Technologies presented nimbb, a fast and easy webcam video recorder for websites at the Oct 20th SFNewTech event. The idea for nimbb was born when Benjamin was working on a web project that needed to capture video using a webcam. He quickly found out that there was no easy solution to do this. So he started working on a video widget that he could reuse in other projects, and that’s how nimbb was created.
Benjamin Berube showing off nimbb on SFNewTech
nimbb is a video recording service for websites. Benjamin said that there were already big names like McGraw-Hill, BBC, Cirque du Soleil, WPP and webs.com using the nimbb service. The French Government also started using it recently to get video feedback from users.
Benjamin then proceeded to show a demo of recording video from his laptop webcam by visiting nimbb.com and clicking the record button. He said how nimbb is all about simplicity with only 2 buttons (record and save). Actually it is 3 buttons (there is a play button in the middle, to review the video you just recorded) but you get the point.
Once you record the video, you can click play to review it and re-record if necessary. When you are satisfied with the recording, you can click the save button. At that point, you will get a video url (web address) to share with others.. You can also get video embed codes to post the video to a blog or on other websites. This is all for the individual users.
On top of this, nimbb has a commercial API (application programming interface) that large corporations and website owners can tap into, to integrate the nimbb player as well as the nimbb web service into their website or online service.
Benjamin also showed everyone a live example of a website using the nimbb player and recorder on their website via the API feature and webservice subscription model.
Pricing?
The first 30 seconds of video recording on nimbb are free. But the videos get deleted after a month. Cost for the paid service is based on a subscription plan. The current rates are listed on nimbb.com in the pricing / subscriptions page.
Company Info and Links
Company: D2Soft Technologies Inc.
Company Twitter: @d2soft
Founder: Benjamin Berube
Founder Bio: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/benjaminberube
Founder Blog: http://blog.d2soft.com
Product: nimbb webcam video recorder
Product Contact: http://nimbb.com/Help/
Product Twitter : @nimbb
Business, Investor Contact: benjamin @ d2soft.com
San Francisco based AdRoll is on an ambitious plan – to make really sophisticated display advertising campaigns available to smaller companies that had previously only been available to large brands and agencies with deep pockets.Search is getting tougher and tougher to make work. It’s very competitive and large brands come in and buy up all the high value keywords. If AdRoll pulls this off, they would’ve essentially succeeded in leveling the playing field for aspiring brands and start ups of all sizes.
Adam Berke presenting AdRoll display ads retargeting platform at SFNewTech
Adam Berke, co-founder and VP of Business Development, presented AdRoll at the Oct 20th 2010 SFNewTech event. Adam said that AdRoll got started in 2007 and their goal in starting AdRoll was to make display advertising easy and effective for brands of all sizes. This involved creating solutions for small and medium sized business such as ecommerce brands, start ups, niche, and local business. These companies have not historically used display advertising because they lacked the proper tools to generate the ROI they require with sufficient control and transparency. And when you talk about ROI positive and display advertising, the 1st place to start at is retargeting.
What is retargeting?
Imagine a potential customer has visited your online shopping or e-commerce site a while back, performed some actions on your site, and then got distracted or went off to do comparison shopping. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could “recapture” that lost customer? This is what retargeting is all about. AdRoll places a piece of code on the site, cookie people on the site and based on where they go on the site, adroll can display relevant ads on the other sites that the visitor is going to, in an effort to recapture that customer / sale.
Adam then proceeded with his demo, in which he showed everyone how to set up a retargeting campaign using the AdRoll display advertising platform, and how to measure the results. Starting with valuation (for traffic, demographics etc) of a demo site selling e-commerce products, he showed how AdRoll gives you an approximate ROI estimate for your campaign as well as a daily recommended budget for the campaign. Adam also showed how you can add segments to your campaign to target very specific type of customers. For example, people who are shopping for shoes, vs people shopping for pants.
The adroll dashboard is very much like search analytics dashboards and provides a lot of visibility and transparency into your retargetting campaign. AdRoll also offers a 2 week free trial for new customers.
Competition?
Backstage, we spoke to the AdRoll founding team about other players in the retargeting space, and how similar or different AdRoll’s service was. This was what they had to say.
AdRoll Team: Fetchback was the first mover in the retargeting space. As a first mover, they went with what was quickest to market, which is a service model for larger budgets. If you go to their site, you’ll notice there’s no way to launch a campaign or to get started in any way without requesting contact from a salesperson.
Because we want to service any size budget, we focused on building a scalable technology platform. This includes self-service options, transparent reporting, and the ability for marketers to manage their own campaigns much in the way they manage their SEM campaigns. We do this through automated integrations with our ad inventory sources and optimization algorithms that do a lot of complex stuff behind the scenes. That way we, don’t need to have people doing manual work, so they can focus on helping our customers with stuff machines can’t do (campaign strategy, etc), even if the customer’s budget is on the smaller side of spectrum.
Also, of course Google is making a major push into display advertising. However, since this is for your own benefit, I assume you’ll want to do better than the generic “can’t Google just do this” question one can ask any web start up.
Under the Hood – Technologies Used.
AdRoll has server over 3.5 million (and counting) ad impressions since inception! They’ve been able to accomplish this enterprise level service that scales nicely, in part due to the technologies they use to power their service. This includes a 100% geo-distributed cloud based infrastructure, geo-distributed serverside cookie store built in Cassandra, Ad servers written in Erlang and Python stack starring Pylons (web framework) and SQLAlchemy.
About AdRoll. Company and Contact Info
Aaron Bell – Co-Founder/CEO. LinkedIn
Adam Berke – Founding Team/VP of Business Development. LinkedIn. Twitter @adamberke
Peter Krivkovich – Founding Team/VP of Sales. LinkedIn.
AdRoll Display Advertising Platform
website: www.adroll.com
twitter: @adroll
contact email: info @ adroll.com
contact form: http://www.adroll.com/company/contact
[ Update: Sunil loves SFNewTech fans so much, he has promised to give away free promo code for the EasySign App to the first 5 readers who email contact @ easysignmobile.com with the subject line: “SFNewTech” ! Go for it! ]
Sunil Patro started off his demo with a question “How many of you have signed atleast 1 document in the last 2 months.” When almost everyone raised their hands to indicate a yes, Sunil declared “So, I am at the right place.”. He then proceeded to introduce Easy Sign – an iphone, iPad app that makes signing of all kinds of documents quick, easy, digital and green.
Sunil started off by saying how in the summer of 2009, he received a job offer while vacationing at the beaches in Riviera Maya, Mexico. He thought “How awesome would it be, to be able to sign these documents on my smartphone and avoid all the hassle and wastage of printing and faxing documents?”. The idea for EasySign app was born right there. From that point on, Sunil decided to put all his efforts to creating this paper-free, signature on-the-go solution.
Sunil did a full end to end demo in which he started with an agreement documents, applied his signature from the app, added the date and got an email with the signed document from the easy sign app.
Sunil Patro showing off the EasySign iPhone / iPad app on Stage.
EasySign was officially launched in the apple app store in August of 2010. It was a dream come true for Sunil, because the launch happened while Sunil was hanging out on a beautiful beach, and so was the original idea – conceived at another beach earlier.
Sunil believes it’s a sign of destiny.
Since it’s launch, the App has been receiving great reviews from its users who use it for both business and personal documents. The Company’s mission is to make the best product available in the market to sign all types of documents using any mobile device, thus providing a quick and convenient paper-free solution in any setting from anywhere and at anytime.
Competition?
Zosh, Sign It! and Signmypad (iPad only) are some apps that provide services similar to what Easy Sign provides. However, according to Sunil, some of these apps only support PDF documents while others are buggy and crash a lot, making them unreliable.
As for his app, in Sunil’s own words..
EasySign does exactly what it promises!
Sign Documents from your iPhone/iPad Using the EasySign App
Under the hood
Technologies used to power the EasySign service (on the server side) include AWS EC2 (cloud server), Windows Server Infrastructure and PDF tools.
Company and Contact Info
website: www.easysignmobile.com
twitter: @easysignmobile
facebook: facebook.com/easysignmobile
contact email: contact @ easysignmobile.com
Michael Kelly – Consumer Communications Manager for American Licorice Company presented RedVines’ World Of Sharing at the 20 Oct 2010 SFNewTech event.
Michael Kelly Presenting The RedVines World Of Sharing
American Licorice Company was founded almost a century ago in 1914, opening up shop in San Francisco in 1920. Michael said that while the process of making RedVines hasn’t changed much in decades, the way they market them to consumers has. As consumers shift their attention online and away from traditional media, American Licorice has had to learn the ropes of the social web and get engaged in the online conversation.
The Red Vines ‘World of Sharing‘ is the latest in a series of engagements seeking to build awareness about the brand outside or their core Western markets and generate some very positive social chatter about the brand online.
Michael then visited the redvines world of sharing facebook page which leads into the website, and demostrated the process of adding a vine by posting a positive message on the website. Each message grows a 1 mile long virtual redvine around the globe. Their goal is to get to 24,000 redvines to wrap the globe completely. As the vine goes around the world, it will award users 240 4 lb. jars of Red Vines Licorice, 24 Prize packs with Red Vines Candy and Gear, and one grand prize of $5,000 to be used for a trip around the world.
Wrap the redvine on the globe and win a free trip around the world!
Michael said monetization wasn’t their goal with this campaign. RedVines put on their “startup hat” here to figure out how to guide the people (/consumers) through the process of growing the virtual vine. Austin Harrison & Jesse Nicely at Dentsu America are the agency partners who helped create and design the RedVines World Of Sharing social campaign.
Competition?
Backstage Michael told us about RedVines’ competition and how in this niche, there isn’t really much of brand wars going on because of consumer brand loyalty.
Michael: Twizzlers, made by Hershey’s is the primary competition for Red Vines. There is a distinct regional split between Red Vines Territory West of the Rockies and Twizzler Territory East of the Rockies. People are very passionate when it comes to candy and licorice lovers especially are known to be very brand loyal. Every day we see the great licorice debate play out on Twitter and Facebook where people discuss which team they’re on. Regardless of which brand they like, we all win as the conversation pushes the entire licorice category forward.
Links, Contact Info?
RedVines
RedVines World Of Sharing (look for World of Sharing tab)
Twitter: @RedVines
Blog: crazydelicious
Michael : Mkelly @ amerlic.com
My Gengo was founded based on needs its founders saw as a gaping hole in the translation business: too expensive and too slow. So they did what entrepreneurs do: they solved the problem by filling that void.
Mygengo.com founders Robert Laing and Matthew Romaine knew the need was there for a consumer service, “big project management and set up fees just don’t work for every day content translation”. Plus, Laing added, machine translations were fast but not useful for business applications and to get access to freelancers and agencies, the cost was prohibitive. Gengo means language in Japanese.
At My Gengo, you have access to a wealth of certified talent who must pass a quality test (of 11,000 applicants, 1200 passed their competency test). As a result, you get accurate translations for 5 cents a word, about 70% less than standard translation services, translators get flexible hours plus a reliable income.
And My Gengo stands by their work, “We’re so confident, we offer a full refund if customers aren’t happy”. That’s led to 80% referrals, 40% repeat customers and doubling of volume each quarter.
It works like this: you post your job at My Gengo, their certified translators will pick jobs they feel most confident completing. Translation requests range from the simple, like a Tweet, to more complex documents.
Their second product, launched Q1 2010, is an API that can be plugged into a site so that users don’t need to go to My Gengo to get access to their services. Currently API partners are Magento (ecommerce site) and Movable (the most used publishing system in Japan, often used for blogs).
Having received seed funding, My Gengo is now moving to their next stage of funding.
“Think of it as a way to say hi,” that’s how Founder, Project Lead & Programmer Takuro Yoshida describes his newly launched social communications site called Drrop. Takuro Yoshida co-founded Drrop with Hiro Kobayashi in September 2010 (barely a month ago!)
Focusing on the need to basically filter or screen people trying to friend you on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Yoshida believes Drrop is a way to offer more control and privacy to social media users.
Drrop - A Unique Social Network with Filters
Why does he consider Drrop more private?
“You can’t see the user’s profile unless you reply to the person’s first Drrop note to you, and if you decide to not reply, you just use a feature called “wipe” to rid your screen of the person’s comments and they are gone forever.
The biggest differentiator? According to Yoshida it’s that you see each person’s comments, one by one, and 24 hours after it’s posted, it’s not visible any more!
Coopa, a product with a name derived from cooperation, launched the same day it presented at SF New Tech.
At the first ever Japan Night event (brought to you by SFNewTech and btrax), Coopa was presented by Tsutomu Sasaki, President & Yashuhiro Yamada (Cloud Solutions).
Coopa is a enterprise level, business application development tool for building cloud-based applications, running on mobile devices.
The company provides an application engine for enterprises developing using HTML5 or JavaScript. With Coopa, companies create customized applications using a framework library of native/hybrid type applications.
Coopa / yubizo - Enterprise iPhone / iPad App Development Engine
Showing its versatility, Coopa supports creating business applications on iphones for enterprise level applications and for Google’s Android environment.
Their applications integrate smoothly within a Google environment, as they run on top of Google apps. Sasaki noted they believe they are one of few companies developing enterprise level applications for the Google apps platform. To ensure consistency, they are a Google certified partner.
Coopa, a product with a name derived from cooperation, launched the same day it presented at SF New Tech.
At the first ever Japan Night event (brought to you by SFNewTech and btrax), Coopa was presented by Tsutomu Sasaki, President & Yashuhiro Yamada (Cloud Solutions).
Coopa is a enterprise level, business application development tool for building cloud-based applications, running on mobile devices.
The company provides an application engine for enterprises developing using HTML5 or JavaScript. With Coopa, companies create customized applications using a framework library of native/hybrid type applications.
Coopa / yubizo - Enterprise iPhone / iPad App Development Engine
Showing its versatility, Coopa supports creating business applications on iphones for enterprise level applications and for Google’s Android environment.
Their applications integrate smoothly within a Google environment, as they run on top of Google apps. Sasaki noted they believe they are one of few companies developing enterprise level applications for the Google apps platform. To ensure consistency, they are a Google certified partner.
GazoPa is a search engine using graphics (i.e. images), instead of text, for search input. Why is that useful? Because, as Hideki Kobayashi, GazoPa’s Project Leader pointed out, “Keywords are insufficient for accurate image searches”, GazoPa delivers more precisely because it uses shapes and colors to deliver comparable results to whatever you’re literally looking at and for. GazoPa is a start-up project within Hitachi.
Using GazoPa, upload any image, and GazoPa’s engine searches through a database of more than 80 million archived images, delivering you the closest images to your graphical query.
Kobayashi, noted its particular usefulness for consumer comparison shopping, especially when it comes to fashion. Simply plug in a graphical image of the high-end item you’re looking for, GazoPa scours the internet, showing similar, less pricey, items. Think of it as similar to sites like kayak.com for travel, in its quest for lower priced, similar items based on images as input.
GazoPa’s goal is to provide the service to consumers, ecommerce sites and photo sites. Given they’ve indexed more images than any competitor, yet can deliver quicker than any similar products, they’re proud of their technology.
In the past 6 months alone, they’ve moved from 30K to 70K visitors a month. Given their style search capability was launched 2 months ago, Kobayashi is now betting on traffic increasing and declared that they’re ready for it!
The Lang-8 dilemma
Your president was erected twice
Say what?!
Highlighting the applicability of his language-correcting site in every day written exchanges, founder Yangyang Xi pointed to the above sentence as needing a slight adjustment to convey its intended meaning. So with a quick switch of the letter “r” in erected to “l”, mission accomplished.
Xi is banking on corrections that simple, to those even more complex involving grammatical changes, as the intended end result of users of Lang-8.
Lang-8 is a vertical social networking site that offers a service to its users: the common interest of meeting new people along with helping these new acquaintances improve their language skills (or you can look at it as improving language skills and meeting new people in the process).
You register at the site, select your native language in the drop down menu (on the registration page), then post the entry that you want corrected. A native speaker then interacts with you, correcting your writing on-line. It’s that easy!
Xi points out, it’s not intended to replace full translation services, simply a means for a slight course correction in language skills. Lang-8 now covers the written word, with plans to offer pronunciation help in the future.
With users from 200 countries, representing 80 languages, you’re sure to find someone out there who can help set you linguistically straight, and that’s very, I mean, really gr8!
Spysee is a person search engine that uses semantic web technology to collect and deliver search results about people, similar to how traditional search engines deliver results on keywords and search terms.
According to the W3 Consortium, semantic web technology is “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines,†meaning it makes the data more readable by computers by further filtering the information. As such, it minimizes the need for humans to decide the data’s relevance, the computer figures it out for you based on your input.
At our first ever Japan Night (in collaboration with btrax), CTO Tomobe Hironori explained how Spysee’s search engine crawls the web to extract data from pages, then extracts specific details such as personal data, rich media like images and videos , links that are related to the person and finally organizes it and delivers it to the user in a nicely organized visual search results page.
Asked about generating revenue, Hironori said “we plan to embed advertising as our primary modelâ€. Though free now, in the future, varied levels of subscription services might be among their offerings.
Hironori said Spysee’s first customers have been sales teams, focused on finding the “right†prospects, adding, “Human search is one part of the search, but we use keyword extraction, image and movie retrievals to find unexpected informationâ€.
Spysee search results are presented visually to the user, a feature he noted is particularly useful in cultures where graphics are important, in countries like his native Japan for example.
Just this year, Spysee has seen a 23% increase in use. Considering that the site is only accessible in Japan, they’re pleased with these results and look forward to consistent growth.

Editor’s Note: This SFNewTech demo-highlights post is from our July 20th 2010 Event. Please bear with us while we play “catch up” on our shiny new blog 
CEO JR Johnson described Lunch.com as “like Yelp or Trip Advisor, where the common bond is your common interest”. It’s a members-driven site that facilitates building communities of like minded passionate people to share and discover relevant knowledge and opinion. Using what they call their “Similarity Network“, they match you to other users whose interests most closely align with yours, sharing your likes, dislikes, and interests.
At the July 20th SFNewTech event, Johnson guided the audience through steps on building a community on the site.
Lunch.com CEO JR Johnson at SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Matt Silvey)
Using the “What’s hot?” now feature, which highlights the site’s most active section, Johnson found a book community of about 1000 people centered around a passion for books, to be the site’s hottest community at that moment. This was followed by a quick walk-through on how to register, create new interest areas and build the knowledge based communities at the center of Lunch.com‘s user model. He highlighted the point based reward system, where users can create a badge representative of their community passion, with criteria on how members earn the badge. For example, in the book community, a user could earn the badge after having read a specified number of books.
Lunch.com has an ad-network based business model for generating revenue. Johnson noted the key to success is “generating relevant content, quality content, which drives people to search for the site.†And he should know a little about success. Before starting Lunch.com, J.R. was founder and CEO of VirtualTourist.com and OneTime. Under his leadership, VirtualTourist.com grew to a one million+ site and earned honors from a range of media including Time magazine, Newsweek, and Travel+Leisure magazine and more. The three-time entrepreneur sold VirtualTourist.com to Expedia in 2008.
Editor’s Note: This SFNewTech demo-highlights post is from our July 20th 2010 Event. Please bear with us while we play “catch up” on our shiny new blog
CEO JR Johnson described Lunch.com as “like Yelp or Trip Advisor, where the common bond is your common interest”. It’s a members-driven site that facilitates building communities of like minded passionate people to share and discover relevant knowledge and opinion. Using what they call their “Similarity Network“, they match you to other users whose interests most closely align with yours, sharing your likes, dislikes, and interests.
At the July 20th SFNewTech event, Johnson guided the audience through steps on building a community on the site.
Lunch.com CEO JR Johnson at SFNewTech (Photo Credit: Matt Silvey)
Using the “What’s hot?” now feature, which highlights the site’s most active section, Johnson found a book community of about 1000 people centered around a passion for books, to be the site’s hottest community at that moment. This was followed by a quick walk-through on how to register, create new interest areas and build the knowledge based communities at the center of Lunch.com‘s user model. He highlighted the point based reward system, where users can create a badge representative of their community passion, with criteria on how members earn the badge. For example, in the book community, a user could earn the badge after having read a specified number of books.
Lunch.com has an ad-network based business model for generating revenue. Johnson noted the key to success is “generating relevant content, quality content, which drives people to search for the site.†And he should know a little about success. Before starting Lunch.com, J.R. was founder and CEO of VirtualTourist.com and OneTime. Under his leadership, VirtualTourist.com grew to a one million+ site and earned honors from a range of media including Time magazine, Newsweek, and Travel+Leisure magazine and more. The three-time entrepreneur sold VirtualTourist.com to Expedia in 2008.
Editor’s Note:This SFNewTech demo-highlights post is from our July 20th 2010 Event. Please bear with us while we play “catch up” on our shiny new blog 🙂
Search engines, social networks and online discussion forums represent much of what’s good about the internet, while trolls and online predators who stalk and prey on innocent victims with tremendous ease represent the potential bad.
A quick online search shows that online predators are steadily on the rise. So much so, that Dateline NBC’s Chris Hansen devoted an entire show to baiting and arresting online predators in his shockingly disturbing, yet wildly popular “To Catch A Predator†T.V show.
So how can website owners, online social networks and discussion forums control this problem? Crisp – founded in 2005 by Adam Hildreth – has built a sophisticated and effective system just for that.
Crisp CTO Peter Maude came on stage at our July 20th SFNewTech event and presented their service. Using their proprietary behavior pattern tracking technology, Crisp collects pattern information that makes a site safe, thereby protecting a company’s brand (think Disney, which caters to kids). Crisp detects behaviors, then profiles and auto-manage users to keep them safe online with its unique, purpose-built systems for MMOs (Massive Multiplayer Online games), virtual worlds and social networks. Yes, that’s a mouthful, but that’s what’s needed to catch these ever evolving predators!
CTO Peter Maude's demo of Crisp at SFNewTech
Maude showed us how Crisp uses specific word and phrase filters, generated by customer request, to detect patterns of abuse across every user profile on that customer’s site. If Crisp detects an abusive or spamming pattern, their system instantly blocks that abusive user’s typed entries (in say a chat room or discussion forum) thereby saving other users from the nuisance of universal web abuse. In the case of minors, it prevents the ‘grooming’ of children by online predators by analyzing behavior patterns using syntax and language style, thereby protecting children and minors online before the predators can make a connection.
And Crisp does all this in real time, with a response turnaround of about 100 miliseconds! Maude demonstrated this using a simulator on his laptop where he entered a chat room and typed abusive keywords and phrases and showed how the Crisp system intercepted and blocked those messages, and the abusive user, in real time.
Maude noted, “many web sites need to censure based on a multitude of what they consider to be their own threat vectors” and that is exactly what Crisp delivers.
Editor’s Note:This SFNewTech demo-highlights post is from our July 20th 2010 Event. Please bear with us while we play “catch up” on our shiny new blog 🙂
Search engines, social networks and online discussion forums represent much of what’s good about the internet, while trolls and online predators who stalk and prey on innocent victims with tremendous ease represent the potential bad.
A quick online search shows that online predators are steadily on the rise. So much so, that Dateline NBC’s Chris Hansen devoted an entire show to baiting and arresting online predators in his shockingly disturbing, yet wildly popular “To Catch A Predator†T.V show.
So how can website owners, online social networks and discussion forums control this problem? Crisp – founded in 2005 by Adam Hildreth – has built a sophisticated and effective system just for that.
Crisp CTO Peter Maude came on stage at our July 20th SFNewTech event and presented their service. Using their proprietary behavior pattern tracking technology, Crisp collects pattern information that makes a site safe, thereby protecting a company’s brand (think Disney, which caters to kids). Crisp detects behaviors, then profiles and auto-manage users to keep them safe online with its unique, purpose-built systems for MMOs (Massive Multiplayer Online games), virtual worlds and social networks. Yes, that’s a mouthful, but that’s what’s needed to catch these ever evolving predators!
CTO Peter Maude's demo of Crisp at SFNewTech
Maude showed us how Crisp uses specific word and phrase filters, generated by customer request, to detect patterns of abuse across every user profile on that customer’s site. If Crisp detects an abusive or spamming pattern, their system instantly blocks that abusive user’s typed entries (in say a chat room or discussion forum) thereby saving other users from the nuisance of universal web abuse. In the case of minors, it prevents the ‘grooming’ of children by online predators by analyzing behavior patterns using syntax and language style, thereby protecting children and minors online before the predators can make a connection.
And Crisp does all this in real time, with a response turnaround of about 100 miliseconds! Maude demonstrated this using a simulator on his laptop where he entered a chat room and typed abusive keywords and phrases and showed how the Crisp system intercepted and blocked those messages, and the abusive user, in real time.
Maude noted, “many web sites need to censure based on a multitude of what they consider to be their own threat vectors” and that is exactly what Crisp delivers.