Angelcube pitch night, Aug 12th 2013

I love pitch events, I love hearing ideas good and bad and watching people’s passion in what they do… This will be the first I attempt to summarise and my first attempt at live blogging, of sorts.

Angelcube is a ‘long’ established Australian startup incubator offering mentorships, networks and funding for aspiring startups. It already feels a bit like the Australian (Melbourne?) startup scene  is on the verge of jumping the shark if it hasn’t already, but still, no harm in people trying.

OutTrippin
Opening introductions contains the sentence, “It’s like 99designs for travel”… Oh dear. Experts get to pitch you ideas around your next trip for $79, including travel tips, logistics. It’s aimed particularly (for now) at Honeymooners and FIFA travellers. Experts are chose from a selection of existing well know travel bloggers, 189 on board right now. Sounds interesting, not sure if i’d have a use for it really, my travel plans (based upon booking a trip right now) are usually drawn from necessity, cost and practicality, not recommendations completely.
battletrip.co

C8Apps
Somehow merging sports fantasy sports and casual gaming mechanisms into mobile apps. I’m no expert in this field, but surely there must have been a lot of competition in this field? It seems way too obvious, computer games in this field have existed for years, it would have seemed an obvious move to mobile. Also, not sure if I missed something, but not entirely sure how they are making the money they claim to be making.
c8apps.com

OziRig
Providing camera support equipment (tripods, foleys, audio etc) at a far cheaper rate by removing distribution, retail etc. It kind of feels like they’re just ripping off designs and remaking it, cutting out R&D. Not a new idea of course, but feels kind of dirty and maybe watch out for calls from legal departments…
ozirig.com.au

CoinJar
Coinjar is a bit coin wallet, something that could do with somewhat of an overhaul in terms of user experience to take it into the masses. It involves two products, one to pay for BitCoins, one to spend them, all of them in a friendly professional looking user experience. All of the products will be accessible through APIs, so also offering a development platform. They also offer an online payment method of acquiring BitCoins, which is not something i have seen offered before.
coinjar.io

etaskr
A crowdsourcing marketplace for tasks, but internally for enterprises and large businesses. Leveraging all those hidden skills within organisations that are often overlooked and not noticed. Seems like a great idea, but not something I’m likely to use any time soon, working for small organisations. There could also be some issues with cross departmental cost and profit centres.
etaskr.com

Tablo Publishing
A self publishing platform that handles publishing and distribution into stores. Speaking as an ex digital publisher, this is certainly a fantastic idea. It offers layout and typography tools. Not cheap, but posses an impressive feature list with a lot of promise. It will also allow for importing of existing titles created on other platforms.
tablo.com.au