Day Two – Wednesday – May 9th, 2012
11:30-12:30 pm
Startup Launch Pad
Business Track (Great America J – First Floor)
The AR Startup launchpad – provides a stage for promising AR startups seriously looking for funding to pitch their company, business model and products in front of a panel that consists of VCs and entrepreneurs.
Panel: consists of the esteem judges: Jay Wright (Qualcomm), David Blumberg (Blumberg Capital), DiAnn Eisnor (Chairman of Waze), Sunil Nagaraj (Bessemer Ventures)
The panel will ask questions, provide advice, and determine the winner (to be announced at event wrap up)
Prize: To be announced.
Pitching startups:
Build AR
After winning the “Most promising new technology” award at the #tech23 startup competition (video), winning the first AR award at the #mobies and attracting a high profile deal group through Sydney Angels we’re now on track for significant revenue growth in 2012. We’ve attracted a great Board of Advisors, found our product/market fit and are steadily growing sales across our key target market segments. Our next goal is to complete an “A Round” before the end of 2012, so now is the time for investors to get in on the ground floor of the wordpress for AR.
AugmenteDev
Jean-François Chianetta, Founder
AugmenteDev is laser focused on making augmented reality useful for everyone, to go beyond the gimmick and the wow effect. To succeed in this endeavor, we pick fields that could benefit from augmented reality, we create a product and a workflow around an usage and sell it. Our first product is targeted to art vendors and poster printers. By putting a button on their websites they allow customers to use a tablet or a smartphone to visualize the product on their walls, in real size. This simple concept remove the doubts that someone can have when buying a piece of art online. It also avoids the need to measure or draw something on the wall to get a sense of how it will look when hanged there. By tackling those small steps, product after product, we hope to create a real value from augmented reality.
Catchoom
Catchoom is a spin-off of Telefonica Digital (Product Development & Innovation unit) incorporated in November 2011. Our Cloud-friendly visual recognition solution has been benchmarked as providing top matching rates and the fastest response times in the market. Backed by the international research community, our technology is in the hands of more than 2 million users worldwide through the Mobile Augmented Reality apps of our partners. Among them are Layar and Metaio.
Our goal is to enable the most natural user interaction with real world objects to access digital information. Catchoom Visual Recognition Technology aims at becoming the industry standard for object recognition.
Our solution is designed for applications that need to search through a database of images. The query is obtained just by pointing at real world objects with the user’s mobile camera. Our target markets are application developers and integrators whose customers or clients have this need. Although we have a horizontal market approach, we provide specific tools for game developers. Linking real-world branded objects and game dynamics introduces a new revenue stream for in-game advertising.
3R Studio
Piotr Koźniewski, Chief Conceptual Officer
3R Studio is a group of professionals and visionaries who are researching, developing and exploring what’s between augmented reality and rendering technologies – schemes of multidimensional interactions, creative ideas and practical benefits – mostly innovative.
Augaroo
Justin Langseth, CEO
Tatiana Langseth, Creative Director
ARBall is a new Augmented Reality soccer game and treasure hunt app for iPhones. Launched on the App Store in February 2012, ARBall was recently selected by Apple as a Featured App in the UK App Store.
ARBall allows users to create and play with augmented reality objects called ARBalls. ARBalls can named, decorated with a custom design, and placed into the real world. The ARBalls can either roam the Earth being kicked from person to person in your Facebook friend network, or they can be tied to a specific location as a virtual Geocache. ARBalls can contain contents, such as pictures, and in the future other types of items such as coupons, marketing offers, or virtual currency. They can be tied together to form Treasure Hunts, where one ARBall provides clues to finding the next. An exciting aspect of ARBall is multi-player real-time Soccer Game Mode, where teams of players can play virtual soccer using an ARBall in the real world. After setting goal positions, players can kick their ARBalls by running into them with their phone. The direction and speed the ARBalls fly at is determined by the speed and angle of the player’s phone at the point they kick the ARBall. Special patent-pending real-time server push technology keeps the views of all players in synch with sub second latency, to allow for a realistic and fun experience. ARBall can be played both outdoors and indoors. Outdoor mode is based on GPS and inertial factors, and indoor mode is based on pedometer/compass dead reckoning from a known starting location. This allows for realistic multi-player real-time indoors play. By the time of the ARE conference, ARBall will contain even more new cool features, including virtual quests, additional game mechanics, and an array of virtual items to put in the ARBalls. We also plan to enhance the ARBall platform to support other types of virtual items and experiences, and may open the platform for other developers to use as well.