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1871 Innovation Summit

The following fantastic startups pitched at the 1871 Innovation Summit hosted by Microsoft on April 26th.

 

Startup

Problem this startup address

The startups solution

Contact

Approved Contracts

Problem: Imagine you want to schedule meetings with customers, partners, and suppliers, and they are all on different email systems. Even if they are all on Office 365, there isn’t a great solution. This is such a time-consuming problem.

Solution: Approved Contact’s Azure based system, let’s you schedule meeting across different email systems (Exchange, Office 365, Lotus Note, Gmail, …) as well as by text and IVR. Save minutes a day, and hours a month with Approved Contact.

https://approvedcontact.com/

Booked Out

Problem: Imagine you want to have brand ambassadors (e.g. freelancers) representing your brand at every NBA game on a particular day. That would mean many agencies across many cities and nearly 1,000 contractors and who even knows if the talent showed up on time or at all?

Solution: Booked Out’s Azure solution is a two-sided exchange that allows freelancers (e.g. brand ambassadors) to be sourced and selected and allows corporations to find, validate attendance and pay freelancers.

https://bookedout.com/

 

Baloonr

Problem: Brainstorming is believed to be well understood, but the latest research indicates we often do brainstorming in ways that create biases, excludes the quiet, but smart and leads to much fewer ideas than are possible. Additionally, brainstorming with remote participants just doesn’t work well.

Solution: Baloonr is a brainstorming platform that allows participants to start by brainstorming alone, allows ideas to gain the wisdom of the crowd as it moves through Baloonr anonymously and allows participants to add to (e.g. improve) the ideas of others. Research indicates these factors dramatically improvement the quantity and quality of ideas.

https://baloonr.com/

Concept Drop

Problem: You are building a presentation, one pagers, or RFP response, and you are spending inordinate amounts of time following your companies style guide trying to make things look right rather than doing the other critical elements of your job.

Solution: Concept Drop allows you to send your PowerPoint or Word document (via Office 365 app) to their system. Their algorithm allows Concept Drop to find a great designer that is an expert in graphics design for the type of document that you are creating. You get on-demand graphics design service, and your documents (and you and your company) have never looked better.

https://conceptdrop.com/

Galvanize Labs

Problem: Research shows that you have to reach students in middle school to get them interested and engaged in STEM, otherwise, it is too late. Research also shows the game based learning via interactive games can be effective. But how can you take basic computer ideas like memory, CPU, disk and make them into a game?

Solution: Galvanize Labs Game suite named Take Charge takes basic computer literacy to a new level by making learning a fun game with the only accredited game in the world. Galvanize Labs is a startup and game studio that can help take any STEM topic and turn it into an engaging game.

https://galvanizelabs.com/