By Pabla Ayala
Walking down TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley across the country in San Francisco, the odds of finding many Miami companies were slim, but low and behold we ran into some South Florida ex-pats and Miami startups.
Fernando
Cuscuela, CEO and founder of EveryPost of Venture Hive, was at his booth
and ready to pitch his app. EveryPost isn’t a new idea to the market, but they
have identified a problem that the current competitors have yet to solve in a
mobile first approach. With social media management tools currently available
like Social Sprout and Hootsuite, what makes EveryPost different is the ability
to format each message or post according to your audience. Fernando and his
team understand that your audience on Twitter is different from your audience
on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest, etc. and should be treated as such.
Cuscuela, originally from Argentina, explains, “We believe and we know
different social networks have different audiences and different capabilities,
and we allow you to customize the message for every single platform.” EveryPost
is currently available for free in the Apple App Store and for Android on Google Play for personal accounts.
As we
continued to make our way down Startup Alley we came across Kyle Killion, a
South Beach expat who moved out to San Francisco in 2008. After he and the
founding group of GeekSquad sold to Best Buy he made his way to South Beach
where he spent the better part of his 20s. His current venture, Flight with Friends, makes planning trips in large groups easy by cutting out
the annoying ‘reply all’ email chains that drive people crazy. “If you’re doing
a bachelor or bachelorette party in Vegas you can go onto the site, invite all
your friends and see the same flights and hotels at the best rates,” explains
Killion. On the platform users can post activities or make plans, like going to
a show or making reservations at a particular restaurant, and your travel
buddies can go in and vote up or vote down that activity. “We call the person
who starts the trip the hero, so the hero goes in and invites all the friends,”
says Killion. “If you have 6 different people coming in from six different
cities, we will show all those flight searches and all the hotels for
everybody. You can see if they have been voting, booking, and their flight
check-ins from your itinerary screen.” Flights with friends will essentially
become the outlet where you can create a group travel itinerary in a democratic
format, but as Killion warns sometimes the hero can quickly become the martyr,
just depends on your travel group’s dynamics.
When we
bumped into Jorge Miranda, cofounder and CTO of AddressGate he was eager to
shout, “I’m from your neighborbood, I’m from Coral Gables!” Seems only right
that he was eager to make a connection with his Miami neighbors, albeit
thousands of miles from home, because he has created an entire startup out of
the idea of getting to know and connecting entire neighborhoods. “We want to
bring community back,” explains Jorge. “We want to bring back the notion of
knowing your neighbors, who they are and connecting with them.” The platform
asks you to input your address and with Foursquare, Meetup and Google Maps
integration the platform shows you what is happening in your particular
neighborhood. “If you want to meet a neighbor you can click on the house, click
knock. We will send them a message through the platform and even send a
physical postcard through the mail.” Jorge explains how you can use the
platform to post news about your community, garage sales, special events, but
more importantly it allows your community to become more involved and alert for
suspicious activity by posting of neighborhood burglaries, lost and found pets
or people. The platform is available for free online with 500 populated
communities and growing in the short 3 weeks they have been live. Jorge is
eager for all of Miami to “Get to know your neighbors.”
Stay tuned for the Day 2 wrap up. All of these interviews and more from TechCrunch will be airing on the debut of The Lab Report on KlangBox.FM from The LAB Miami.
Follow our TechCrunch Disrupt adventures by following us on Twitter at @pfunkmedia, @pfunkFSU and @cfunk305 and be sure to watch the live stream presentations and Startup Battle pitches here http://ustre.am/jMF6.
Photos by Pabla Ayala.
Posted Sept. 10, 2013