November 2011 Technori pitch

Yesterday Technori hosted its November pitch event with 6 new startups: Grabio, Weatherist, DreamChamps, MentorMob, EditHuddle, and Restaurant Bucket List.

My quick first impressions of them are as follows:

Grabio (http://www.grabio.com/) – basically Craigslist combined with foursquare. Many people in the audience seemed concern about protecting their privacy when selling things using this app. The app doesn't show your exact location, but shows a pin on a map in your general area. I think the best feature of the app is that it can notify you if you’re ever close to someone selling something on your “wishlist.”

Weatherist.com (http://www.weatherist.com/) – claims to be one of the most accurate/probable sources for weather by tracking all the different weather forecasts in your city and using a proprietary calculation to average the most reliable forecasts for: high temperature, low temperature, chance of precipitation, and amount of precipitation. This seems like something I would use, especially if they come out with an iPhone app, since right now it's just web based. Right now, I check weather.com every morning, but I’m starting to use weatherist.com to compare and see how close the two sites are with their forecasts. The one big disadvantage is that weatherist.com doesn’t have an hourly forecast, which I care a lot about because during the week I’m usually only outside early in the morning and later in the evening during specific time periods and that’s when I would like to know how cold it will be or if it'll be raining around that time.

DreamChamps (http://dreamchamps.com/) – resource for recent grads and young professionals looking to join companies with strong cultures focused on the happiness of their employees. It basically lists companies that meet specific criteria that the founders think are important factors to consider in order to achieve happiness at work. The problem is that so far there are only a few companies listed and not many represented across a variety of industries. However, I did enjoy watching the demo video on their website and I would love to have all my friends find jobs that make them happy instead of settling for a job they don't like. I'm hoping they will be able to expand and spread the word on college campuses, but it will be hard to convince people to consider company culture over salary and compensation.

MentorMob (http://www.mentormob.com/) – think Khan Academy, but anyone can create lessons on any topic using any resource on the web. I love teaching myself new things and always have a running list of something new I want to learn how to do. I’ve already started going through the topics on the site and I've saved a few playlists I want to come back to. I can't speak to the quality of the playlists/lessons yet, but hopefully they are pretty reliable and helpful.

EditHuddle (http://edithuddle.com/) – a way for blog readers to point out errors or mistakes to the blog writers. The reader is able to notify the writer of the blog by sending them a message through the application in order to let them know that there might be an error. Even though I’m new to blog writing, I can see this as something that would be really helpful for blogs especially ones with lots of readers and those that aim to be a reliable news source. I’m actually going to look into including EditHuddle on my blog and I've signed up to receive a beta invite. Right now they are mainly on WordPress, but looking to expand to all types of blogs soon.

Restaurant Bucket List (http://www.restaurantbucketlist.com/) – this is a new facebook application that allows you to share the restaurants you want to check out with all your facebook friends, so that you can find out which of your friends also want to go to the same places. Most people I know keep a running list of the restaurants and bars that others recommend, so this app now allows you to share that list and find other friends who would want to go with you. I was really excited about the app after the pitch, but when I went on facebook to check it out, I was actually getting a lot of errors while I was trying to add restaurants to my "list." Granted the app just launched yesterday, it’s still a little frustrating that I’ve been having so many difficulties with it. Hopefully, they fix the bugs and more people I know start using the app, so that I can begin taking advantage of it. 

I'm already looking forward to the next event during the last week of January! It's worth looking into to see if there are any startup pitch events near you and find out when they take place because these are great opportunities to learn about the latest tech trends and meet innovative and passionate entrepreneurs.