From Monday to Wednesday in San Francisco, TechCrunch’s latest Disrupt Start-up Battlefield competition is showcasing entrepreneurs from 30 start-ups, all vying for a $50,000 prize by making six-minute-long pitches to a rotating panel of venture capitalists, tech influencers, angel investors and Silicon Valley players. Tuesday featured three more sessions of Start-up Battlefield, titled Customer-Friendly Enterprise, Local Networks and Increasing Understanding; here are the start-ups presented in session six: Increasing Understanding.
JiffPad has seen the high rate of iPad adoption by doctors around the world, and has built a tool for creating personalized digital medical media used to communicate more effectively and efficiently with patients. Doctors can create and customize “Jiff Talks” that utilize images, audio and video, written instructions and more to educate their patients on various illnesses. The Jiff Talk is then emailed to the patient as an archived source of information that can be accessed by any web-connected device, while public Jiff Talks utilize the same basic information-sharing platform to foster efficient, higher-level dialogue between doctors on a shared platform.
Vocre partnered with some of the biggest names in voice technology, Nuance (voice recognition) and iSpeech (text-to-voice capability), to create a translation app that provided one of the more impressive presentations of Battlefield. After typing in the native–to-translated information into the iPhone app and selecting the speakers’ genders, the app requires almost no interfacing save for motion-activated controls that take advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer and orientation: record, tilt the device to check the printed speech-to-text, rotate the phone towards the listener, and–boom–the translation comes out. Reverse the process and the translated response comes back to you the same way. Vocre positions its app as a way to have a real back-and-forth conversation with someone who speaks a totally different language (out of nine for now, including Spanish, Italian, and Chinese).
PlaySay looks to tap into what the company says is an $83 billion language-learning market by turning a heavily-trafficked social media addiction–that is, Facebook–into a learning tool. By using the PlaySay platform, functionalities within Facebook like creating a status update become intuitive language learning tools that use images (currently sourced from Flickr, but soon to incorporate a user’s actual FB pics) to help build visual sentence structures that convey the status update directly into a Facebook overlay. While novice users are guided through every aspect of the language portion, more regular users will be responsible for creating more and more of their own messages while still accessing tools that help them intuitively absorb grammar and vocabulary. PlaySay used Disrupt to announce their partnership with massive publishing house McGraw-Hill, which means their product will be able to be used as a stand-alone tool or as part of M-H’s suite of language-learning products.
GoInstant is a clever browser collaboration technology that allows users to surf the web together in real time, without the need to download software or a plugin. It works on any web-browsing device, be it Mac or PC, iOS or Android, and allows one user to suggest a URL to the other and from there co-browse the site in question–with full web page resolution to boot. GoInstant is an enterprise solution that’s easy to use and especially helpful for sales, customer service reps, project collaborators and anyone else who needs to make a presentation or point out certain aspects of a web page or product in real time.
Audience Choice: CardFlick allows users to create and, with the flick of a finger, share virtual business cards. The concept is simple and the execution beautiful: CardFlick has invested heavily in developing partnerships with designers to create rich and stunning card templates. Once a business card has been “flicked” to another iPhone user (use with Android-based devices is on the way) with the app, the information can be stored within the app itself, with live links for email, phone, and social networking profiles, or downloaded to a native address book application. If a user encounters someone without the app, the card can be emailed along with an invitation to join.
Read more about JiffPad.
Read more about Vocre.
Read more about PlaySay.
Read more about GoInstant.
Read more about CardFlick.
Watch today’s live stream of TechCrunch Disrupt.
