Ten Startups Debut At TechStars Demo Day

The idea is to build a social network of private equity and venture capital investors to share best practices and information. They also provide a deal-tracking dashboard to help manage the pipeline of investment deals in progress.

Their target audience has plenty of money and is willing to pay. They charge $3k per person with a minimum of $15K.

Occipital

Occipital- Photography has evolved over the years, but the ways we interact with digital photos are still decidedly primitive. Occipital is using artificial intelligence to organize your photo stream, enabling vivid recollection with groundbreaking visualizations.

They can stitch photos together into a panorama, automatically label and tag photos, and construct 3D scenes from your photos. They can zoom in, fly over, step inside buildings¿all based on simple photos stitched together into a 3D presentation. They find objects in your photos and link them to the same or similar objects in other photos and stitch them together. This is hard to explain with words, but the visual demo was amazing.

BuyPlayWin

BuyPlayWin.com- Combines online shopping with tournament games. Buy products, play games, win a refund for the product. Every shopper gets a chance to win full refunds for everything they purchase by playing fun games against other shoppers. For example, buy a $120 college text book. Compete with six other people who are also buying the book. Win the game and you get the book for free. They use the profit margin in the product to pay for the winners purchase. If a product has a 33% profit margin they need three players to break even. With 10 purchasers they make a very nice profit. They are seeking $400K in seed funding.

Foodzie

Foodzie- An online marketplace where consumers can discover and buy food directly from small artisan producers. The Foodzie technology makes it simple for small producers to sell their products online and aggregate all these products within a marketplace that makes it easy for "foodies" to discover the very best food. They focus on gourmet foods and organic health foods. These are high-end and high-margin products. Foodzie takes a 20% commission on every sale. Traditional retailers take 50% margin, while a distributor takes another 10%. The food supplier only ends up with 40%. So, with Foodzie the producers get to keep 80% of each sale. They are seeking $350K in seed funding.

Travelfli

Travelfli-Helps frequent flyers maximize the full potential of their loyalty programs and discover the value in this hidden currency. They help users manage their award programs in one centralized and secure place, find ways to get free travel using their miles, and book award travel online. TravelFli allows you to aggregate frequent flyer miles and hotel points from family members and keep track of all the various rewards programs. They help you keep track of when miles expire, or when there are special promotional programs for your miles.

There are over 120M people in frequent flyer programs, and trillions of frequent flyer miles that never get used. There are 17M elite flyers that account for 43% of all flights. These elite flyers are a very lucrative market for airlines, hotels, rental car agencies, etc.

Business model; commissions on all sales. Advertising - CPMs for travel are very high. They will also sell aggregate data on flights, hotels, and car rentals. They are seeking $500K in seed funding.

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