There will be 11 startups on stage at Techstars Cloud demo day today in San Antonio, Texas. Companies come from Austin and San Antonio, or as far as Dublin and Taiwan. Here’s who we’re watching.
Techstars Cloud started in 2012, as the Boulder, Colo.-based chain of startup accelerator programs opened its first outpost in Texas (one year ahead of Techstars Austin). It’s Startup Week this week in San Antonio, so the timing of their fourth Techstars Cloud demo day seems right.
Last November, Techstars Cloud announced the 11 teams that would be participating in this year’s program. Here are 3 we’ll be keeping an eye on.
Slash Sensei: San Antonio Startup Slash Sensei lets you crash servers all over the place. Then all you need to do is press a button to repair them. Well, kind of. The company is a hands-on training platform that shakes up the typical IT pro training and brings it all online in an unlimited access, self-paced training system. It’s for anyone looking to sharpen their IT game or develop a new skill set, costs $129/year and promises your money back if you don’t think it works.
Popily: Popily wants to unleash the inner data scientist in all of us. The Austin company has created a platform that allows users to drop in data tables and Popily creates graphs that users can then manipulate to find the most interesting parts of their data. We know that data scientists have better work-life balances than just about everyone, so maybe you could outsource that to Popily and call yourself a data scientist.
ilos: Coming out of St. Paul, Minnesota, the ilos platform gives users the ability to take video screenshots and share them via shortlinks. Taking it to the next level, you can launch the recorder directly from a browser or desktop and ilos gives you unlimited cloud storage for your videos. Co-founder Peter Fares built the first video recording app for Android so you know they’ve got some chops.
You can watch the livestream of their event right here, once it starts.
And, not to give the other Techstars Cloud 2016 startups short shrift (because what do we know, after all), here’s what you can expect to see from the other eight:
Clyp: The Austin-based company Clyp takes audio files and creates shortlinks to access them. In an coming-of-age story suitable for Austin, the idea came from one of the cofounders attempting to send a guitar riff to a friend but couldn’t find a way. So, they invented Clyp. In Clyp, users can upload up to an hourlong mp3, and developers can add Clyp’s open API into their website. And no, you can’t upload licensed music to Clyp.
HelpSocial: Former customer service reps at Rackspace set out to create a better way to address customer issues on social media. Seeing that companies utilized social media primarily for marketing, HelpSocial was founded to leverage that content and interaction into customer service. While Facebook has kept WhatsApp free in order for companies to interact with customers, HelpSocial could leverage their platform to interact through the messaging service.
HuBoard: HuBoard is a platform for project management for GitHub issues. It integrates with Slack and Hipchat, and the company, based in Austin, includes Mozilla, Microsoft and Adobe as customers. Not something that everyone would use everyday but for developers it’s a great way to work through dev issues remotely. No longer do your scrums have to be in one location, HuBoard lets you tackle projects effectively over the interwebs.
Imagenii: Imagenii is based in Malaga Spain and takes online images and puts them on steroids. The platform can identify images, perform a visual search and even create tags for the image. The platform also enables users to store hosted images with backups that aren’t stored locally, eliminating problems when linked images changes. It’s got some serious potential as far as augmented reality or e-commerce, but when I put in a picture of a cantaloupe, it totally whiffed, saying it was a sea urchin. Granted I found a picture of a whole cantaloupe, and it did a little better at identifying Jordan 11’s.
Joicaster: Joicaster takes a video recording and streams it across multiple platforms so that way when you get the triple snipe kill Pwnage on Halo 3, you can just set it and forget it. Targeting the burgeoning gaming segment, Joicaster is an Orlando company that takes the tedious process of posting a video to multiple platforms. You can upload videos to Roku, Twitch, LiveLeak and a number of other platforms all at once, that way you’re getting as much exposure for your Rocket League skillz as possible.
Jumble: Hailing from Dublin, Jumble is an email encryption company that works on multiple devices. A big opportunity for industries that transmit sensitive information like healthcare and government, Jumble allows companies to implement encryption via a monthly service with ease. Integrating into gmail, individuals can send encrypted messages for free while Jumble sets the business version at $10 per month featuring two-factor authentication.
Thalonet: Thalonet, also known as Haste, is an internet optimization performance that boosts connection speeds by reducing ping and establishing redundant connections. It looks like the Atlanta company is targeting professional gaming, a new and growing segment of users in need of reliable, fast internet.
UX Testing: Coming all the way from Taipei City, Taiwan, UX Testing does exactly what the company describes. UX Testing tracks user interaction with apps and records users’ faces in order to see what in an apps UX is good or bad. Now I personally wouldn’t want my app to be watching me, but it’s really important to designers to see how users react with their products and this gives it a pretty clear picture (no pun intended) of how users are engaging.
