StartupCamp5 Offers Treasure-Trove of New Communications Ideas

StartupCamp5 at ITEXPO (News - Alert) this week once again gave startups a chance to pitch their business models to an audience of show attendees and a panel of industry experts.

The Thursday night event in Miami kicked off with a keynote by Sir Terry Matthews (News - Alert), who has created dozens of businesses that have had great success and made him a very rich man. Matthews’ model of building desired solutions for identified customers, hiring recent college grads on the cheap and offering them a stake in the action, and heading up his teams with a gray hair or two, he told the mostly middle-aged audience, has paid off again and again. And while margins for everyday consumer objects like scissors have grown remarkably thin, he added, the communications technology space continues to be a “jewel box,” offering a world of opportunity for entrepreneurs with useful ideas, good connections, and young energetic teams that are willing to work 24x7.

As for the startups making their pitches last night, only one of them was what most people would consider college-aged, but all of them were energetic, enthusiastic and appeared to have a good work ethic.

First to bat was CallTrunk’s Michael Dillhyon, founder and advisor of the London-based company that is a new entrant in the call recording business. Typically, we let voice “just go up in smoke,” he said. But CallTrunk aims to change that by delivering a cloud-based solution that makes it easy to capture voice on any device, store it anywhere (like Dropbox (News - Alert) or SugarCRM, for example), and enable users to discover where it is easily.

The company, whose revenue is currently $10,000 a month, launched the service in July. The applications for the service are broad, he indicated, including use by charities calling people for donations, human resource managers, lawyers, real estate offices, and seniors who are talking to pharmacists.

“If you deliver it the right way you get a lot of downward pressure on people adopting this,” he said.

The second startup of the night was from Townhall140’s Monica Liu, an undergrad at Harvard who founded a company that aims to connect people with movers and shakers in government. It’s a virtual platform that integrates video technology with real-time voting to bring constituents face-to-face with political types. Based on the open tok API, Liu said the multi-point video conferencing solution that allows users to submit questions and has various other features, offers an incredibly immersive experience.

Townhall140, which has been out for two months, is already in use at Harvard, and a few well-known online entities. They also are in talks with The White House. The end goal is to sell the solution to customers including media entities like CNN (as customers or as an exit strategy, according to Liu), organizations like the DNC, and/or specific political campaigns.

StartupCamp5 candidate three was Vernoa, for which Eric Klein, president and CTO, was the presenter. He talked about how cellular network congestion causes customer dissatisfaction. Vernoa’s solution to that problem is a downloadable dashboard that presents itself on an end user’s wireless device (like a smartphone) to inform that user on what times are good and not so good for downloads. The customer target is wireless service providers, he said, adding that more than 200 such entities have expressed interest in the solution.

Vernoa has relationships with Cisco (News - Alert), HP and Intel Capital Group; holds several patents; has several letters of intent; and is looking for $1 million to $1.5 million in funding.

LawLoop rounded out the evening’s quick-hit presentations. The company is pushing an online dashboard for lawyers that supports and manages e-mail and other communications, document management, financial management and more, and that can hook into firms’ existing accounting and other systems.

Olivier Taillieu, LawLoop’s co-CEO, said that the company currently has 250 users of the document management piece, and expects to introduce the rest of the solution in the second or third quarter.

As always, the judges and audience had a brief opportunity to grill the start-up presenters, and everybody was invited to vote via text. In the end, LawLoop won by a nose over Townhall140.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, happening NOW in Miami, FL. ITEXPO offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO registration click here.

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