StartupCamp is a collocated event at ITEXPO Miami that gives startup companies an opportunity to pitch their business model in five minutes for a chance to gain investors. This year, we heard pitches from Proteg-GO, an emergency service app; ThruView, a service designed to avoid truck rolls; VerbalizeIt, a human-powered translation service; and Flowthru, a WebRTC app to expand the reach of voice.
Flowthru has a vision for voice that takes the phone number to numerous different end-points. It’s a WebRTC-based app that transforms the phone company to “a voice company” by layering over a carrier network to provide this always-connected service.
WebRTC puts a media engine into the browser and enables individuals to communicate directly with servers, as opposed to requiring server-to-server interactions to enable communication.
For less than $1 a month, users can opt to have their phone number translate to multiple devices, including their tablets, browsers and smartphones. This simple-to-use and easy-to-integrate service hops on the WebRTC trend, which will enable people to communicate in real time without any plug-ins.
Omar Paul, creator of Flowthru, emphasized that the goal of the app is not to replace VoIP carriers or the phone, but to power them.
This year, there were two winners selected – one based on audience choice and one the judges panel chose, which included Craig Walker, CEO at Firespotter Labs, Jeff Uphues, VP of Cbeyond, Gerry Dehaven, senior partner at QAdvisors, and Michael Kenny from Symantec’s business development team.
The judges selected Thruview, enabling faster response for tech support to diagnose customer problems and avoid unnecessary truck rolls.
According to Anthony Guglielmo, CEO and architect of ThruView, $12 billion on truck rolls last year and 40 percent of them didn’t need to happen.
The audience selected VerbalizeIt, the mobile translation app that provides instant phone and Web-based access to human translators to facilitate global conversations. “VerbalizeIt is bucking the trend of inaccurate machine translation by shifting the focus back to the value of human communication,” the company said.
Previous StartupCamp presenters include Vsnap, LawLoop, Calltrunk, Townhall140, Twilio and RingDNA. The event takes place again this year at ITEXPO Las Vegas, happening at the end of August.
Edited by
Braden Becker
