Startups Look to Shine at SXSW 2013 Interactive

I stopped by the SXSW Accelerator session on Social Technologies to hear the pitches from entrepreneurs on their new offerings in hopes to get attention and funding. It was presided over by quite a number of judges from various top name VC firms such as KPCB, SV Angel, Austin Ventures, Google, Greylock Partners, etc., as well as industry notables such as Bob Metcalfe, and Richard Garriott.

There was quite an initial list for this category and others, but this was the final round so there were only three remaining: Koozoo, a real-time webcam sharing site; Plotter, a build-and-share-your-own web maps app; and Yabbly, a shopping and Q&A site that matches people directly for results. It shouldn’t be surprising that these are all designed for the smartphone.

Koozoo ( is attempting something that is very difficult to scale: how can you get large numbers of people to see video as it is occurring in real-time remotely? It’s much simpler when it is one-to-one real-time video a la Facetime or VSee. It is also easier when it is multi-point with a small group a la Google Hangout or Skype. But streaming live video from potentially millions of sources to millions of viewers can be quite challenging.

What would be a use of this? A restaurant and bar owner shares their a-fixed webcam view of their bar to their fans and frequenters. A pet store shares live video of fluffy puppies available for adoption, playing. A company shares a live video of their latest networking event. However, a warning was that people abuse this to intentionally try to trap the video hosts into litigation, or abuse the feeds in other ways. There is potential but also usage rather than technical challenges. With $2.5M in seed funding from VCs, NEA and Tugboat Ventures, it is certainly well off at the start.

Plotter ( allows anyone to create their own favorite maps of ideas and information to share with friends. Rather than directions or search that you might get on Bing or Google Maps, it allows someone to create, say their own personal list of top restaurants in a city complete with information and identification they have selected, and then share it with friends.

A convention bureau for example may make a selection of maps for different categories of sights in a city (e.g., one for foodies, one for cyclists, another for bird-watching spots, etc.) A large company could create a map of all its sites in a city or multiple cities with detailed information. Map apps always find a use although the question remains is this startup novel enough among the choices and big competitors out there.

Yabbly ( is another shopping site that aims to out do the recommendation sites like Amazon,, or, by specializing in getting personalized answers to your questions. It has the capability of Q&A but rather than general answers for everyone, it aims to get specialized answers for each individual query. That is well and good, and does require smarter recommendation systems, but is quite at the mercy of needing a sizeable membership to be able to get any kind of answer on any kind of product to anyone.

Float4 Interactive (, an agency from Quebec, was showing on the trade show floor how they can turn any large screen into a multi-touch interactive system. Their show floor example transformed a video wall made from a stackable set of Christie MicroTiles into a nice interactive display that people could touch and play with. The system according to their technical person is based on a sweeping laser unit place at the top, and interaction software. It can support a screen up to 20m (over 60ft) wide.

The video wall is simply a set of display units or computer screens that can been tied together into a single large screen. The interaction comes from when you touch the surface, which breaks the line of sight of the laser and is recognized as a touch just as if you might touch the trackpad on an Apple Macbook. Similarly, it can track many touches at the same time. What it does with the multi-touches is up to the application showing on the screen itself. Such a system could be used as an interactive collaborative wall in a meeting room, or even a large information kiosk.

How big will these startups hit? Will they become a “Hundred-bagger” (return of 100x investment)? Well, that is a question that mostly VCs care about. Founders shouldn’t fall prey to that. With the insane billion dollar valuations of some startups today, it may well be possible, but that is plain bubble-speak.  However, I do wish them good success. Do a good job as well as you can and focus on delighting your customers always.

