i/o Ventures, the incubator and co-working space located in San Francisco’s Mission District, just held the demo day for its latest batch of startups. All of them have been working out of the i/o offices for the past three months, and have also received a $25,000 investment.
It’s pretty hard to judge someone based on a short presentation, but if nothing else, all of the ideas sound pretty cool or at least interesting, and there’s a nice mix of consumer and business products. Here’s the list of companies:
Avenue — A tool for managing the landlord-tenant relationship. It creates a single location online where landlords can review applications, run credit checks, and collect rent. At the same time, applicants have control over the process, so they’re not sharing any information that they’re not ready to share, and a landlord won’t accidentally run a bunch of credit checks on them at once (apparently that happened to someone on the Avenue team). Co-founder Gino Zahnd previously led the UX teams at Kosmix, Flickr, and elsewhere. (The service is currently in private beta testing.)
ApptheGame — A personalized stream for sports fans, allowing them to check-in to live sporting events, whether they’re at the stadium, the bar, or at home. The app then allows them to interact with other fans and also delivers customized content. Sports teams, in turn, can offer rewards for loyal fans — the company says two professional teams have already signed up.
Appsperse — Helps mobile app publishers calculate the return on investment of their user acquisition campaigns, broken down by different marketing channels. Co-founder Hugo Troche says this is something that’s easily done on the Web, but it’s a big challenge on mobile — and he cited his own experience as an app developer, as well as testimonials from others like Lumosity, to back up his case. “If Google has taught us anything, it’s that if you provide advertisers with transparency and accountability the advertiser base grows,” Troche says. (In private beta.)
Onefeat — An app that gamifies life. Users earn points by accomplishing different missions in the app, posting pictures, and getting positive votes from other users. You can tag other people in a photo to give them points too. In one mission, a Onefeat co-founder even got on his knees and proposed to Google’s Marissa Mayer at a tech conference. (She said no.) Ultimately, co-founder Souheil Medaghri says he wants to create a new kind of star — “the heroes of everyday life” who “shine through awesomeness”.
vid.io — Co-founder Rob Sandie was previously CEO of Viddler, which helps publishers distribute their own video content outside of YouTube. Viddler is a profitable, multi-million dollar business, he says, but ultimately fighting against YouTube is a “losing proposition” — it’s just going to keep growing. So Sandie and his team have created a “HootSuite for YouTube,” allowing companies to manage their presence on the video supersite. They can manage multiple channels, create team logins, schedule publishing times, and more.