Startup Battlefield At Disrupt: Day One, Session Two

You scream a lot or they don’t invite me next year.

Take it away.

Sure.
Hey everybody.
My name is Dorrie Monglick.
This is my cofounder Mike Lewis.
Together, with an incredible team
of engineers, we’ve built SpotOn.
SpotOn is the easiest way to go to new places with your friends.
Let me paint a familiar picture for you.
You’re going to a new place for
coffee with your friend and you want a place to go.

You have your favorite coffee
place, but you’re in the mood for something new.
So, you search away
on the internet and you try
to find a new place, but you
still end up at that same
old coffee shop And why does that happen?
It happens because we don’t
want to take the chance and try
to go to a new place, because we’re
not sure that we’re going to like the experience.

But, when we do take the
chance and the experience is amazing,
it ends up feeling great.
We know that.
We want you to feel great
all the time, want you to
experience the double rainbow all the time.
And that’s why we built Spoton.
Spoton cuts through the
noise by pulling in
your existing social network data from
Facebook and FourSquare, uses it
to build a profile of you
to give you personalized and actionable recommendations.

So, let’s jump into the iPhone application.

So right away,
you’ll see that my
top recommendations are loaded up on a map.
So all the places that
you’ll see are actually completely
personalized for me based
on where I’ve checked into on FourSquare and what I’ve rated.

So, on top
of the fact that these are completely applies for me.
These are different pins.
Mike will see different recommendations.
Every single place has a
social layer that pulls in
reasons why you should go check out a place.
So for example, seven of my friends have rated this place very highly.

These are my friends.
These are not random people.
These are not Yelp reviewers that I don’t care about.
For example, when I see
that my coffee-lover friend has rated
a place four out of four,
that means a lot more
to me than if a completely
random person had rated that place the same exact rating.

So pins are great, but pictures are even better.
So we built this gorgeous
pix view, so you can go
through these recommendations one at
a time, get a good sense of what the place is like.
This is really important to us.
We do not want you
to spend a lot of time, wasting,
trying to figure out where to go.

We want you to actually find
a place, so you’re enjoying… spend
more time actually enjoying the place with your friends.
So, say I want to go to this place, learn more about it.
Right away, I can see that it’s bookmarked.
I can share it with my friends.
If I want to see more information
about the place, I seepieces of information that actually matter.

I see that my friends have rated it highly.
See that my other friend has saved it.
I see who’s been there.
Spoton even tells me who I should go there with.
So, not only is it
telling me what places I should go,
but it also tells me who would else would enjoy this place with me.
Where does Spoton get all of this really interesting data?

We start by pulling in data
from Facebook and Four Square, that’s really just the beginning.
Within Spoton, we make
it really easy for our users
to give us a lot of their
preference data in a really fun and an engaging way.
For example, I pull your
Four Square check ins that you
haven’t had a chance yet to rate
on Spoton, and let you
rate them them really quickly and in a really fun way.

So if I love this
place, I can give it
a 4 out of 4 petal rating
and share it with my friends on Facebook and Twitter.
And I can go to the next place.
If I didn’t like a place
so much, I could give it
a 2 out of 4 petal rating and so on.
I’m going to go through these
places and rate them and
give Spoton a lot of information.

This is really cool for two reasons.
One, it helps Spoton make my
experience better, but more
interestingly, it actually helps
the experience of everybody else who uses Spoton.
Every piece of data that I
contribute to Spoton adds to
this entirely new layer of information that did not exist before.

And I can also see
what’s done in my activity
feed, see my friends are rating places and saving places.

So we take all this information.
What can Spoton do to take
this data and turn it
around to our users in an even more useful way?
Say you have a filters page.
Filters are usually pretty boring
in most other applications, but on
Spoton it’s actually pretty
cool, because we can do some pretty interesting things.

So with one touch of
a button, I can say
only show me places that at least one of my friends have been to.
Or only show me places that I’ve never been to.
I’m in the mood for something completely new.
But then Sporton knows where I like to go, knows where I’ve been before.
It can present this information back to me.

So we know where
you like to go, we know
where your friends like to go,
we know your how you’ve rated places, we know your bookmarks.
So we present this all
to you in a very simple but
very powerful way in a final search view.
So right away you have
access to your top recommendations,
your bookmarks, even places
your friends loveWith one tap of
a button, even the categories
that we present to you here,
are organized in a way that’s
completely personalized for you, and this is just the beginning.

Spoton is not about the recommendation.
It is about the end
experience of being at
that bar with your friends and having a good time.
So, if you think about other
really great recommendations services like
Netflix or Pandora, they ‘re
great because you enjoy the movies.
You enjoy the music.
You enjoy the end experience and that’s what we want to bring at Spoton.

To that end, we have a lot of interesting things in the pipeline.
For example, imagine you’re about to go out with your co-workers.
You have five people.
You add them to Spoton and out pops the group recommendation.
Or you see a new place, a new restaurant, you see that two of your friends have bookmarked it.

You can just make a plan, right then and there.
So in that way Spoton
is not at all about the recommendation,
it is only about the experience, and
it’s changing the way that friends come together in the physical world.
Thank you.

Alright .
So judges, who to way in first?
I’m going to start this with Chris.

Okay, well, it looks like a really cool app.

Thank you.

I guess My main question
would be at the location
based service space is pretty crowded right now.
What’s your plan for not
cutting out the noise and your marketing plan?

Sure.
So, this place is really hot.
We completely recognize that.
We’re actually trying to go way
past just the taking
your data and doing cool something with it.
We want to take it into making it into an entire experience.
Instead of just giving you a
recommendation, we want to help
facilitate you to actually go
to the place with your friends.

Beyond that, this new technology is really interesting.
And we’re getting data from a lot of
different sources as well as
making it really easy for you to
collect a lot of data on SpotOn
and then a recommender is pretty first class as well.

looks smart.
My question is the petals, what do they indicate.
I mean, how do the
petals correlate with SpotOn?

The petals are almost like stars, like the more traditional rating mechanism.
One petal if you don’t like it very much, and four petals means you loved it.
So, we actually test it a
lot The first time
a user sees it, it’s a little bit like, “What is this?”
’cause they’re used to seeing stars or a like or dislike button.

But we actually found that that
quick rate view is the most
addictive feature of our application,
and that on average users rate over
10 places each, so…

So,
Spoton, I like the name.
I think you’re going to
be…you ‘re going to be going up against Foursquare.
And as I look at some
of the features you have, they’re a
little bit better, but my feeling
is if you’re not…if you don’t
have 50% better features than Foursquare,
why would you use your app?
So if you can talk a little
bit about how you specifically are different than Foursquare.

Do you think you’re 50% better than Foursquare?

Yeah, this is my favorite question to answer.

Okay, well I didn’t even plan…you
didn’t plan it with me,
but that’s my question back to you, so…

Sure.
So, we love Foursquare.
That’s why we decided to take …start with Foursquare’s
data and try to do something interesting with it.
I use Foursquare a lot, I check in all the time.
Dennis actually uses a really
interesting example when he talks
about how other people try and do check-ins.
And he says that other people
just try to slap on check-ins
to their future set, and try to create something.

But the check-ins are the core of course.
That’s what makes it so great.
I’d actually think that’s very similar
to Spoton, and Correspond is
the recommendation experience, and having a friend go with you to these places.
And since we’re starting with that, as
opposed to the check-in or something else,
we can own that entire experience.

And also, Foursquare is just Foursquare.
As for the data, we’ll be pulling in data from Foursquare or from Facebook.
We’ll also be even be wanting
to pull in data from Hunch, from FoodSpotting
from anything that we can get
our hands on, pretty much, to build
an entirely immersive experience.

Yossi[sp?},
you convinced?

I would like to ask you
to tell me a little bit about yourself.

Sure.

How long you’re working on it, what you’ve done before.

Okay.

And who are your partners?

So I graduated from NYU in May.
Spoton actually started out
of an entrepreneurship class taught by
Lawrence Lennihan and I was
all set to work in finance
as a computer science major and then
I took this class and I
was like, oh, I can do
something else with my computer science
degree, and then I
quit my job, and starting working on this full-time, been working on it since then.

Mike is, my co-founder is
working on an event recommendation
engine before this actually, so
it’s very ideal that he’s our CTO.
And our team is also
a mix of other engineers
and product and design people.
They’re a pretty large team for being so young.

You know in this business, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.

Yeah, that’s true.

If you win it will be fine.
What will happen if it will not fly?
What will you do then?

I’ll try again.

Try again.
Okay, that’s a good answer.

So just so I understand.

She said she would try again if she fails.

This is a one man applause cue.
He gets applause for any statement on Earth.
It’s amazing.

Tell me were you’re happy with the level of applause?
The truth?

I think you guys could do a little bit better.

Yeah?

That just got weird very quickly.

So just so I understand
the use case, the plan is
for me to use SpotOn everyday
and I check in with it,
I rate with it and we’re
leveraging other networks But
this is the primary one, like I wouldn’t use Foursquare anymore.

Well, right now you can’t check in through Spoton.
That is the most highly requested feature, so we are thinking about.
We’ll probably we’ll do it, but Spoton
is “where should I go, what am
I in the mood for, who do I want to hang out with”?
All of the kind of, like, experience
questions when you are about to
hang out with your friends in a bar, or coffee shop, or restaurant.

Chris, you look far from convinced.

Oh, no, I think it’s very interesting, a cool app.
Sorry.
No, I think it’s a very cool app.
I worry just in general,
in the app space in
general, there’s just a ton of
stuff going on, and I
did my own analysis of the
top hundred iPhone apps
and, like, half of them like
bought their way to the top
through all these things, like, I forgot the name, Tipjoy, whatever.

I don’t know.
Like it’s just Tapjoy.
Like it’s a very, it’s just a very tough space.
A lot of noise, a lot of
aggressive tactics being employed, you know.

Yeah.

I don’t know.
So.

You have to thank you for
the encouragement Would any of you guys used this?
Is this something that you’re thinking?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it’s cool.
I mean.

Well, yeah, it’s cool, but would you use it?

Yeah, I would use it.

Okay, and you jump straight in, Sarah.
You would use it?

Yeah, I would use it, and I actually disagree a little bit with Chris.
I mean, we didn’t have any marketing budget when we launched Food Spotting.
We ‘ve done pretty well
in the location space, so I think you’ve got a good shot.

Thank you.

I’m challenged with what I’d
characterize as app overload, so
it’s just, there’s so many different apps.
I don’t know if you guys will be able to rise to the top.

You want to say any final driving words.

I maintain, as I always
maintain, that nobody knows anything
until they will
launch it and give it a little bit of time.
Nobody will know, and it
either may win or may not win.
If you don’t try, you don’t win.
That’s for sure.

Fine words.
Big round of applause then
for Spoton.

All right.
So, a strong start.
Positive, positive responses from the panel.
I now say we

Hello everyone.
We’re Sonar.
Thanks for having us.

Before I begin, take a look around the room.
Please, look at all the faces that surround you.
Somewhere, someone in this room has your next big deal.
Someone has the next great tech story.
Someone in this room has the
potential to be your next
co-founder or maybe even your future wife.

I’m Brett, this is actually
Ajay and we’re Sonar and
we’re here to help you make that connection.

I don’t know about you guys, but maybe
you’ve come to an amazing conference
like TechCrunch Disrupt full of
brilliant and beautiful people,
only to stand by the conference
bar eating peanuts, wondering who you should talk to next.

Or maybe you’ve gone
out to a bar, out to
meet people, to a crowded bar
and foundnd yourself obsessively checking your
texts, emails, and tweets, sent
by people thousands of miles away.
Or maybe, you just wanna
tell everyone tonight that you’re from
San Francisco, and you wanna
tell everyone that you’re here to
party tonight, or perhaps
just that you’re trying to hire ruby developers.

So have we, so has everyone, and that’s why we built Sonar.
The concept is absolutely simple.
Sonar is a mobile application that
uncovers the hidden connection that
you share with everyone else in this room.
Sound cool?
Let’s check it out.

So, you pop open Sonar and we give you a list of trending venues nearby.
All it takes is one click to
see how you are connected to everyone in that venue.
Where [xx] so let’s see who I should be talking to.
When you pop open the
app, Sonar scours the web
for people at this venue, then
aggregates and synthesizes publicly
available profile data, and then
sorts the room by who’s most relevant to you.

So, for me, the
most relevant person here is
Daniel Clauss, which is not suprising since I work with him.
But just below him is Fergus
Hurley, with whom I share a couple facebook friends.
Sounds pretty interesting, let’s check them out.
So, with one click, Sonar
gives me an instant overview of Fergus and how we’re connected.

I can instantly see that
we share a bunch of interests on
twitter and three Facebook friends.
Sonar also provides me with
a bio so I can
get a quick overview of what Fergus is up to.
He’s a mobile entrepreneur and a product designer.
Sounds like exactly the type of
person that I came to TechCrunch Disrupt to meet.

But first, let’s dig into our connections.
Voilà!
So this is kind of Sonar’s magic moment.
With one click, I can see
Fergus, who five seconds ago
was a complete stranger, that he’s friends with three of my good buddies.
Will Brestman was a friend-of-a-friend from college.
Kyle Daugherty I worked with
for three years out of school, banking.

And Trevor Owens who is
a MIU Tech head
mogul here in New York.
So I can already hear, maybe, the clocks turning in your head.
Which is like, wow, that’s amazing
and that’s cool and that would probably
work in most venues, but what
about in a gigantic place like TechCrunch Disrupt?
How am I actually going to find Fergus?

One of the best things
about Sonar is that you’re
never more than one click
away from a hyper-
targeted introduction to the person you want to meet.
“Fergus, what’s going on?
I used to work with Kyle and also TechCrunch.
Let’s connect.
Let’s hang out at the coffeebar when we’re done.”
So, to summarize, with my
first click, Sonar bottled the
thousands of connections that I
definitely would’ve missed in this
room and then rank order them for me by importance.

With my second click,
Sonar gave me an Instant
personalized overview of Fergus and how we’re connected.
And with my third click,
Sonar sent a personal hyper-targeted
message to someone in this
room with enough social proof
to get the conversation started, but
Sonar is not just a powerful
hyper-local social CRM tool
that is going to save you time and money.

We’ll do that, but it’s
much bigger than that.
Actually, our goal is to democratize the meet space.
So, if you look at all great
social web products, they give people a new medium of self expression.
So does Sonar, a hyper-local one.
So there’s myriad services elsewhere
that tell people elsewhere that you’re here.

But Sonar is laser-focused on
giving you a way to tell
people here that you’re here and this is what you’re about.
It’s a form of visual,
local self-expression that you
can use to share what you’re
proud of and what you’re looking
for with the people here.
So, I’ll leave you guys with this thought.

We share so much of ourselves online right now.
Why not use that information to connect with the person sitting next to us?
So many of you guys paid thousands
of dollars and flew thousands of
miles to come to this amazing conference
to meet that person, to make
that connection, to get that story, to get that deal.

Are you guys really going to leave that up to chance?
Download Sonar.
We can help.
Thanks a lot.

Sonar .
I like that.

Thanks, man.

That was good.

All right so…Yersi?

I like it and
I can see it can be very useful.
It’s like almost
local LinkedIn in a
sense, but more wide in the demography.

We think Sonar can have
lots of use cases from business to social.
It’s whatever data layer you want to put on top of it.
So we started with Foursquare, Facebook,
and Twitter for our Beta, but
you can imagine how cool this
is gonna get as we start to
add services, like LinkedIn Food Spotting, Last.FM,
Event Planning, Plancast, Meetup, etc.

It’s a premium business model
or how do you guys plan to make money?

So we know where
people are, who people are, where they are and what they’re talking about.
So, we think that we’re gonna
be in a nice place with all the data that we have.
But, if there’s one thing
sort of the social web has
taught us is that one thing people love is attention.
So, we’re actually kind
of interested to follow this concept of promoted people.

So, it’s a concept that
at any venue, you can
rise yourself to the top of the list.
Put me higher on the list.
Yes.
That’s an interesting model.
I mean, it works, if you’ve ever heard of Baidu.
It’s one of the biggest, fastest growing networks in the world.
it’s a dating service, and people pay for promotion.

It’s a common model with dating
and also it’s a common model
with professional services like LinkedIn.
So if you could imagine what
about the ability to send
a personal message to someone else in this room?

I mean, personally what I like
about this is that I understand that
if I’m the only person using Sonar it still works correct?
In other words, your product
has network effects, but it also
has what people call a
single player mode, in other words,
like because Josh Actor
great delicious always talks about
how the best products have single player mode.

They’re useful if you have one
user, but they also have
networking effects, sort of multi-player mode.
I understand that yours does and
that’s a really smart way to kind of getting it going.
We call it bootstrapping the single
player use case, and we do that with consumption.
The plan is to get people on board.

You guys can pull it out, download it right now.
It’s Sonar in the apps store
and get value out of it
and as more people get on it,
we want to use it,
people could use it as a
customizable platform to express
themselves and what they are looking for.
So, I like it a lot.
This is an app I’ve wanted for
a while, but there are probably going to be privacy concerns.

How are you addressing this?

Privacy, so Sonar only
uses publicly available profile information.
There’s nothing we’re using that
you have not already published on
the web, and we’re totally
fine if you want to yourself out of Sonar.
You’re absolutely fine to come
in and remove your profile,
but I think that, like
with all privacy things, you’ll realize
that people value it
this much, but when you show
them how much they have to gain
by projecting themselves, people will end up using this service.

Does that mean I have to opt in to opt out?

If you’re not publishing
yourself on the internet, you do not show up in Sonar.

Cool.

So you have check-in?
I saw a check-in button there.
So, are you guys building your
own kind of check-in database or are you using an API from somebody else.
I don’t know if you missed that part of the presentation.

We’re happily living on top
of these other platforms and,
you know, we’re using their
data, so we want to syndicate our data back to them.
We will have a Sonar check-in and
perhaps that will enable you
to share different types of
information than you are That we are sharing with Foursquare.
But, I think one of
the great things is that everyone is
trying to compete for the client,
right, to be the check-in app.

And, while we do think that our app.
First off, people are always curious and other people always want to know more.
Second off, we think
we do provide unique value that no one out there does.
But thirdly, we have notifications in our app.
So, let’s say there’s this cool app I heard of called Foodspotting.

And, let’s say you’re
at a restaurant and took a
picture of food right, but you
were signed in your Foodspotting
account to Sonar, you could
have basically we would
notice you checked in on
Foodspotting at a restaurant, we’d
get that, then we’d analyze
in the background if there
was anyone relevant to you at
that restaurant, maybe perhaps someone
that has the same taste as you in desserts.

And then, we would send you
a push notification being like, “Hey,
you might want to connect with
this person or ask them what dessert you should get.
But we don’t live or die by being a client.

No, that’s really smart, you should have access to our API.

I like that.

Food-Spotting is getting a lot of promotion on this stage.
People will identify the decision maker in the group.

We would also love to work with the Hunch API.

Alright, any final questions?

Yes, when did you start the development?

A little less than six months ago.

How many people?

Oh we’re but four.
I’m Brett, this is M.J.
Brent, our technical co-founder, is
busy coding away and when he is Somebody has to work.

Someone has to work.
We can’t all be socialites.

What have you done before?

Wow.

Next question.

No, I wouldn’t know the answer to
that, that was great, that was like, “Oh, I don’t want to really say.”

How about banking in it’s presentation.

Oh banking.

I grew up in
a small mid-Atlantic white-trash beach resort town.
I went to college in New Hampshire.
I banked.
I lived on a sailboat for seven months.
I came back and I started a band.
I went to Italy and lived on a Fulbright Scholarship for a year.
I came back, I spent six months disillusioned, wondering what I should do.

I went down to Austin, taught myself how to code Ruby.
That business failed.
I came back here, started a
mobile incubator, actually with Daniel
Klaus, and then this I’m
pulling out of the incubator and spinning off.

Wow.

Nice.

Nice.

Wow.

Well, and he’s way
more impressive than I am, so…

Well, we want to hear
what you do then, if that’s more impressive than that.
That’s, can we get him a microphone?

He ‘s got a mic.

Yeah, just talk.
Well, yeah, there you go.

I was born in Japan.
I’m Indian by descent.
I lived there 18 years.
I can speak 3 languages.
I went to NYU Stern and I studied finance and information systems.
I graduated from Stern and I worked at two banks.
I didn’t like working at the
banks and I just taught
myself how to code in IOS and
I found Brett.

And I’m here today happily coding away.

Nice.

Well that’s a lovely story.
And a perfect way to end, so a round of applause please for Sonar.

We’re done, thank you.
Thank you.

All right, I’m not even
sure if I’m allowed to say, “I like that” at the end of pitches.
I guess I’m supposed to be unbiased, but I do like that.
Yes, I also like Charisma and Spoton, for what it’s worth.
But I particularly like Sonar.