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Atooma- Cool App – Crap Website

You can pitch your Startup, App or Hardware here

The Pitch

Startup Name * Atooma
What problem are you solving? A mobile or smart device manufacturer and a plethora of different players like Brand retailers will need to face a certain number of challenges in order to successfully enter the dimension of the Internet of Things with the goal of turning their product context-aware and reaching higher level customer engagement and retention:- Developing hardware – software integrations
This results in expenses on software engineering, design and of course, time.- Building ecosystems
Connecting the device to the internet is only step zero among the Internet of Things technology framework.- Creating compelling use cases.

To successfully market a product that features IoT functionalities such as connectivity or cross device interactions, a significant amount of data is required.- Be fast, be effective

All these milestones should be achieved within an effective go to market strategy, since the whole mobile and smart devices market is moving in the direction of Internet of Things, and this is the right time to evolve businesses implementing IoT to achieve new profitable goals.

What is your solution? Atooma is a powerful automation engine bringing a solution to manage the enormous amount of events occurring in a fully connected world. On one hand, the Atooma “left brain” act as a task automation layer across connected devices, meanwhile, Atooma “right brain” is able to read user’s pattern of usage for the same devices, and suggest compelling use cases for the end-user.

The mission of Atooma is to offer a key technology for device vendors that wants to enter the IoT ecosystem without shifting focus from their products, or having to re-engineer them.

Why is this a great opportunity? In 2020 connectivity will not be an option. Cisco reports that in 2008 the number of connected devices exceeded the number of people on Earth, while an analysis from Gartner tells us that in 5 years the market is expected to be crowded with 26 billion connected devices, without counting smartphones, tablets, and Pcs. Recent researches based on the current situation in 2014 shows that this number has managed to grow even further, forecasting 50 billion connected devices by 2020.
Thanks to this data we can assume that the Internet of Things is designed to evolve from a technology trend to a market standard.

Today more than 99 percent of “things” still lays unconnected, and this means there is a tremendous growth potential that will make networked connections more and more valuable, bringing together data from people (human to machine) and smart objects (machine to machine), and providing richer experiences thanks to context-aware ecosystems of devices connected to the cloud.

Target Market The customers we are addressing to are Brands and Device Manufacturers in the Mobile, Wearable, Automotive, Home Automation and Contextual Advertising verticals. We provide different SDKs to integrate existing products and systems with our IoT platform, enabling them to bring context-awareness to the end user.
How will you make money? Atooma follows a B2B2C business strategy that see involved consumer apps available on the main platforms (Android, iOS, Tizen) as a way to test the technology, the users interests and showcase to Partners.
The open source SDK for developers is free of charge and allow them to add their device’s or apps functionalities to our branded apps as a way to make them growing in terms of features and users.
Main revenue streams come from:
> Branded integration with Partners that pay set-up fees.
> Full power SDK and APIs White label integration with licensing fees for the Automation Engine
> APIs white label integration with licensing fees for the Suggestion Engine
Founders Names Fabrizio Cialdea, Gioia Pistola, Francesca Romano, Andrea Meriggioli
Website http://www.atooma.com
What type of funding has the company received Angels

Startup88 Verdict

Lovely looking website however this startup uses so many superlatives in every part of their site that I am not actually sure what they do.

Take the screenshot below. I challenge any of you to tell me what this means in real terms and functionality?

Atooma-Speak

The pitch supplied by the team is equally confusing.

It may be that the technology is amazing, they certainly claim to have a lot of big names on board and they received very positive press in 2012, but recently the only stories I can find are in Italian (the team originates in Rome).

Also I couldn’t find them in the App store but it turns out they haven’t released the iOS version as yet. I found this screenshot in the Google Play store and I think in one image explains more about what their App does than the multiple pages of drivel on their site.

Atooma - screenshot

Their Android app looks great, and frankly 5-10 screenshots of the functionality that this provides would probably have been a better way to describe what the company does on their home page than the existing marketing speak.

If customer acquisition is the key objective of this site, then the App should be front and Centre in the hero spot of the home page.

My verdict is that this probably is a cool app and by all accounts from earlier reviewers it is pretty smart, however it has been let down severely by the marketing team who have chosen buzzwords and marketingspeak presumably to impress the user but it has in fact left this reviewer confused and annoyed.

Atooma - screenshotMy feedback to the founders is, firstly it appears your marketing team has English as a second language, there are many phrases which don’t sound right, poor grammar and funny short sentences that don’t seem to fit. I would suggest hiring an expert in selling product online to rewrite/structure the site that has proven experience in US and Western markets.

Atooma - screenshotSecondly tell us about your product, stop trying to make it sound like some super big impressive fantastic massive all singing all dancing platform, the App itself sounds extremely cool and useful, none of what you express on website sounds as impressive as actually seeing a screenshot of the app and the functionality you can provide.

Navdy – Head up Display for your car

Who?

Navdy

What is it?

Navdy’s transparent Head-Up Display (HUD) projects information as if it’s floating six feet in front of you. In the car you already have. Using your smart phone.

Navdy2

Swipe left to answer a call, or right to dismiss an untimely notification. No more looking down to fumble with knobs, buttons or touch screens. Ask Navdy to “compose new tweet”, “write new text” or “call mom” using the voice commands you’re already familiar with – Google Voice or Siri.

Any notification on your phone (text, social, etc) can be displayed, read aloud or disabled entirely. Decide what you want to appear when. There are even parental controls to keep teenagers safe.

They are taking pre-orders at $299, probably a pretty good chance of them being delivered given the team that is working on it and their background through the Highway 1 incubator.

Navdy-Preorder

Navdy is based in the Mission District of San Francisco and was founded by entrepreneur Doug Simpson and serial inventor Karl Guttag, and is supported by a highly accomplished veteran team.

In 2013 Navdy went through the acclaimed Highway 1 Incubator program and continues to work closely with Highway 1’s parent, PCH International, whose world class supply chain and manufacturing capabilities are used by companies such as Apple, Beats, and Google.

Navdy-Prototyping

 

The Defender – Smart Personal Defence, Identification & Response – Cool #Startups

 

The Pitch

Defender-App

Startup Name Pangaea Services, Inc
What problem are you solving? We are solving a self-defense and security problem by combining identification, alert, and defense in one device.
What is your solution? The Defender is a smart personal protection device that combines a camera, flash, siren, and pepper spray. The Defender connects to an iOS or Android device and with one push of a button, we capture the photo of an attacker, spray them with pepper spray, attract attention with the small but mighty siren and flash, all while our 24/7 monitoring service is notified with the picture and your GPS location so safety help can be dispatched to your exact location.
Why is this a great opportunity? This is a great opportunity because college students face safety threats on campus, violent crimes occur ever 22 seconds in this country, and we go everywhere with our phones. These features have never before been combined into one device.
Target Market We are targeting 100 million women that carry smart phones every day, including college students!We have over 1000 email signups for our pre-order and we will be launching our crowdfunding campaign on July 22nd.
How will you make money? We plan to give away the hardware and we will make money through the $15/month monitoring service.
Founders Names Ryan McManus, Steven Allen
Website http://www.getthedefender.com
What type of funding has the company received Bootstrapped/self funded

 

Startup88 Verdict

I think its a great idea, I think its a real problem and a good solution to the problem.

I like the services revenue model, although I think it is probably a little pricy per month for your average student it will find a home in the wealthier campuses and neighbourhoods.

Using a piece of hardware to lock in annuity revenue is a great business model, assuming its useful and customers believe its really is protecting them, is probably pretty immune to customer churn due to the uniqueness of the hardware.

The Bill of Materials and build cost on something like this would probably run $40-60 depending on how much work is being offloaded to the Mobile App so payback would be in the vicinity of 6 months, assuming they can convince the user to sign on for a longer term agreement, they will have a nice annuity revenue stream.

I do have some concerns, perhaps there is no solution for some of them, perhaps their solution is better than no solution.

  • Its a concern that they are relying on the mobile phone app to do the transmitting, what happens if the battery is flat, probably would be better if the Defender had its own GPS and data chip in it, I understand this would be an additional cost but more failsafe
  • What happens if this doesn’t work, hate to think the additional risk the woman would be in if the pepper spray didn’t stop them
  • I would be concerned that the local police and ambulance might not be too keen about having a 3rd party involved.
  • What happens if they don’t respond?
  • There may be some jurisdictions where the pepper spray is illegal
  • Running a 24×7 Operations Centre is hard, everyone in emergency lines around the world has trouble keeping service levels and you must when you are providing this sort of service, so I think there is some operational risk there.
  • Would have been nice to see some prototype devices that prove its ready to build, it isnt clear how far along they are in the build process.

The Defender is launching a Crowdfunding campaign shortly, however no details were available at time of publication.