Faced with 400+ startups squeezed into a narrow pier on the Hudson and guided by the official NYTD floor map conveniently organized around Family Guy characters–“am I near the Peter Griffin or James Woods booths?”–I set out on a very brief tour of yesterday’s New York Tech Day 2013.
As long time TvB readers know, we’re particularly partial to starutps that focus on the needs of small-medium biz. My first stop was at PricingEngine, which puts online advertising in reach of said SMBs. I met briefly with CTO Yagmur Coker who explained his clients were previously spending thousands of dollars on Google and Facebook ads with less than satisfactory results.
PricingEngine essentially provides a less nerdy front-end than, say AdWords, allowing business owners to quickly create the ad and set a budget. It automatically distributes the online box or banner through the all usual networks. The key differentiator is that PricingEngine’s daily reports let small restaurants, clothing stores, hair salons, etc. benchmark their online stats against competitors in their space–which is especially crucial for SMBs.
Next up was Vita.ai, a big data startup, one of the few I’ve come across in the NYC startup scene. Founder Marc Hadfield’s idea is to provide what could best be described as “big data in a box”. The Vital platform connects standard machine learning algorithms with your existing Hadoop backend. Result: big data analytics as a low-cost service. To learn more about the Vital APIs, click here.
On my way to the next booth on my somewhat random journey, I came upon Startup Threads, a business which provides corporate swag for startups. I’m reminded of the often told story that the ones who made the most money during the famous California Gold Rush were the hardware stores that sold all the equipment and t-shirts to the ’49-ers. History of course never repeats itself.
I passed by AptDeco which is an online marketplace of “curated” pre-owned furniture. The value prop here is that it’s easy to go out and buy a third-rate second-hand sofa. But as anyone who’s ever watched Market Warriors knows, to find the really good stuff requires lots of hard work That’s where the AptDeco folks come in: their QA team will reject anything that’s less than first-rate in their online marketplace. Great idea, and let’s hope they keep the quality high.
With time running out, I chatted briefly with Voxy about online language and then trekked to my final destination.
Pretty Padded Room provides on-line therapy and counseling at very affordable rates. I spoke with Padded Room’s calm, serene founder, Bea Arthur, who told me that legacy brick-and-mortar private therapy sessions in the NYC area can run well north of $200/hour. Her team of licensed therapists interact with patients through a “digital diary”– you rant, they comment– or through more direct video sessions. Padded Room’s $100/month plan gives you five journal consults and one live video session.
To paraphrase Woody Allen, non-virtual therapists may have to install salad bars to compete.