Consumer Demos Session

Five of the best consumer companies are up for demo at Headstart 2009. The jury members of this leg of demos at Headstart 2009 were Vishwanathan Poosala of Alcatel-Lucent, Alok Mittal of Canaan Partners and Arvin Babu of Greylock Partners.

CashNXT Technologies: They demoed their P2P money transfer solution. You have to call 044-667-678-93 and enter your pin and then enter the amount. Place the mic of one one phone to the speaker of the other. The HF sounds enables the transaction, and it is DONE! 🙂 Both the phones would get a SMS to confirm the transaction. The same procedure can be used to enable at POS payment or at an ATM by simply using a mobile phone. Same procedure can be usedfor online payments using PC headphones and mic.

The major advantage of this technology is that this does not depend in anyway on any operator. High Pitch sound gets transferred from the phone to phone. But, alas, this solution is not in the market yet. They have tied up with 4 banks in Indian and 3 in Ghana. The good news is that they are looking for funding. VCs please note!

SnappyFingers: They demoed a search product in Q&A vertical. They are looking at building search engines in several verticals. They showed a live demo where an entire school project can be generated by a simple search at www.snappyfingers.com. The monetisation is through ad display on the search results. There are concerns on copyright protection. The interface is pretty clean with results very useful.

Verismo Networks: Redefining the home entertainment by powering internet videos directly to the TV. This one looks cool! They have created a box which is smaller than your hand. This device has a internet/WiFi port and other ports like HDMI other Analog ports to plug into your TV and USB ports to input and output the content. They have the necessary pacts with Google and others in place to source the content. Here we saw a very high definition video from a USB and diretly from YouTube! They also have an inbuilt search engine in place! BTW, this can play pictures and audio as well.

The product at SD is priced at just $99. When are you going to have your own VuNow?

Alertpedia: Husband Vishy Poosala introduced Dharini from NIT Warangal and Ruckus Univ. You specify what kind of alert and you would get the alert you want. It is kind of Google Alert with more sources and more possible ways like searching for house for rent or online classifieds. It would enable getting information ranging from Traffic or Earthquake or simply a web search. There are a host of ways in which all alerts can be managed and aggregated.

EnTrip: Travel information aggregation portal from Pune. Guess what, the parents of 3 co-founders belong to 6 different countries, which does not include India! No wonder these guys love traveling so much 🙂 The one thing that would hit you first when you open the website would be their clean interface. It is so slick that you would get to instantly fall in love with it. Don’t take my word for it. Try and you would know!

-Posted by Arpit