Cheers all around as the winners are announced at a previous innovators’ competition hosted by the Northern Virginia Technology Council. (Evy Mages/For The Washington Post)
Voting for week one is now closed.
For the third year running, Capital Business is teaming up with the Northern Virginia Technology Council to find promising product innovations.
Here’s how it works: We introduce you to a group of companies each week and you tell us which ideas have the most potential. The companies attracting the most votes in their category – consumer and enterprise (week 1), big data and analytics (week 2), cybersecurity and safety (week 3) and health and wearables (week 4) – get a leg up in a competitive review process chaired by a panel of judges selected by the Northern Virginia Technology Council.
This week, the competition focuses on the consumer and enterprise category. Here are this week’s contenders:
M&A Cloud Solution from Devensoft
Devensoft is a Chantilly-based company that has developed a software platform meant to help businesses manage the process of acquiring other companies. The company says its software streamlines what can be an expensive and organizationally challenging process by offering an alternative to an often dated and haphazard approach.
The company was founded in 2012 by three local technology executives who had handled mergers at previous companies, and who wanted a better way to run the process.
Lyterati from Entigence Corp.
Entigence’s name brings together the words “enterprise” and “intelligence,” something its product Lyterati tries to do in practice. At George Washington University, administrators use Lyterati to organize the academic history and other information about 1,500 faculty members. The university uses the service to draw connections across disparate corners of the university by matching common research interests, a process that is faster and easier with the software than by sorting through paper forms.
LiveSafe
Arlington-based LiveSafe has a mobile application that lets people report potentially dangerous incidents as they occur, so that tips can feed into a central system where safety managers can track incidents in real time. Some of LiveSafe’s business customers use it to track workplace incidents, allowing them to act proactively to keep potential problems from growing larger. Clients in the NFL, NBA and MLB use it to track safety developments at large-scale sports events.
The company’s co-founders were inspired by personal experience: Founder Kristina Anderson is a survivor of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings and co-founder Shy Pahlevani survived a violent robbery.
mHelpDesk
Fairfax-based mHelpDesk sells a cloud-based software platform meant to help businesses organize work orders, invoices and other day-to-day information. It also lets managers track staff schedules to alert and dispatch employees to projects outside the office, and it works across employees’ mobile devices as well as their computers. The company first started offering the platform in 2007 and said it has individual 12,000 customers.
TalkLocal
TalkLocal is a College Park-based start-up that connects people to plumbers, electricians and other household service providers through a voice-recognition app. When customers tell the app what they need, TalkLocal’s software scans the voice file for keywords. It then matches those keywords against a database of 20,000 service vendors; plumbers, handymen, even lawyers.
TalkLocal was founded in 2012 by brothers Gurpreet and Manpreet Singh. The pair have raised about $4 million from investors to build and scale their product.
Voting is now closed for week one.