Zazu

We began in December of 2009 to create a technology like Jarvis, the Artificially Intelligent robotic character in the movie Iron Man. Our goal was to create a technology that proactively “connected the dots” with our personal cloud. Think of a proactive version of Siri with Greplin like integration. Today our cloud data is sophisticated enough for a technology to proactively see conditions we should be aware of but its fragmented nature makes it hard to enact this.

For the past two years there were a number of challenges we faced when trying to build our vision which ultimately led to this decision. With the new year upon us, we’ve decided it’s time to move on to newer opportunities.

Traction on our idea was different from traction on the product

The vision of what we were creating had always received attention from the media and industry which pushed us further. A technology that intelligently speaks to a user with knowledge of every aspect of their digital life is a dream for many; the releases of technologies with similar interactions (Qwiki and Siri) only helped validate that we weren’t absolutely crazy. Our first product Zazu Alarm used voice to present users with relevant information at the start of their day. Many of you know of this product as the “Smartest Damn Alarm Clock” which when partnered to our vision yielded impressive partnerships and collaborations with Samsung, PepsiCo and Breville.

Such strong marketing and partnerships were too early for our products.

Fragmentation issues on Android caused our technology to break down quite often which made it incredibly difficult to retain users while word was spreading about what we were building. We didn’t have the resources to fix these issues so we built new functionalities to try and further the product as best we could. (Note: this wasn’t the best idea) Our aim was to shift the product’s informative experience from mornings to include afternoons, eventually becoming persistent throughout the day. But as we added new ideas like Google integration for calendars, we ended up losing product focus, often confusing our users who rightfully asked “Why does my alarm need a login?”

Alarms and Siri The markets were moving too fast for our team with the resources we had. While our original product differentiated itself as a smart alarm clock, there were certainly other alarms apps out there we had to compete with for the organic downloads we were seeking. In addition to this, the “personal assistant” phrase that was best fit to our core vision was being thrown around more times that we can count.

Many have asked how we were affected by the introduction of Siri to the market. It was a good thing to have happened – users are being exposed to the idea of a consumer facing technology with “intelligence”, only on Apple’s marketing dime. What differentiated us from Siri was the proactive nature of the technology we were building. Siri is a technology you must command, but we foresaw the need for a technology to proactively yell at us when things were changing. Siri understands what you are asking, but not what you need to know. Our cloud-data is sophisticated enough to allow technology to see conditions we should be aware of; speak up accordingly. Siri could surely become this one day soon, but there is a world outside of Apple that can only be served by a device and data agnostic solution. Technology today can proactively tell you if you’re running late due to traffic or if your 3 p.m. meeting attendee just emailed you something important. This can only be done by a cloud based solution that can monitor the disparate data sources that provide such a holistic view. Individual alerts like push notifications aren’t enough as they aren’t presented based on contextual importance.

Where’s the money?

Our hypothesis was that users would pay for a technology that proactively informed them of changes to their life indicated by digital data. Such a service would have been offered in the form of a subscription, much like, but far cheaper than employing a personal administrator to man your communications, transit and personal information.

We were focusing on abstract ideas which we believed would change how users interacted with technology. The products we built didn’t gain enough traction for investors to believe in our team and our bootstrapping couldn’t build the technology to grow organically from revenue. We have met with 60+ investors ranging from angels to institutional investors. While we had attracted a team and built multiple products and partnered with Fortune 500 companies, investors always needed to see more user traction on our ideas and without outside funding we could not deliver this. It was a vision that required a great deal of resources and it’s arguable that we dreamt too big.

To greener pastures In light of the challenges we faced, we still delivered over 38,000 voice interactions to our users. We had the opportunity to build an incredibly cool technology that many are still waiting for. With PepsiCo and Quaker we proved that contextual brand interactions were 8 times more effective than advertisements from CPG’s – and our work was a finalist for the 2011 MITX Integration of Mobile award. Our work with Breville proved that connected devices today, such as a coffee maker, can function autonomously based on digital data like morning alarms on a smartphone. Finally our work with Samsung showed the promise for such a technology to truly personalize the interactions a person has with their devices.

In the process of building our company, we had a number of other accomplishments that we are really proud of

We built and managed Android, iPhone and Blackberry client applications. 

The company was a finalist in MassChallenge, the 2011 MITX Interactive Awards and a winner of the PepsiCo10.

We were fully sponsored to attend TechCrunch Disrupt, Launch.is, DEMO SV and AdTech:NYC

We had incredible coverage in NYTimes, WSJ, Venturebeat, GigaOm, Yahoo and more

We attracted MIT Media Lab talent on management team and advisory board 

We’re looking forward to our next endeavors where we can apply what we’ve learned about building a team, developing consumer products, marketing new ideas, creating partnerships and pushing the envelope with what technology can do. A sincere thanks to everyone who helped us throughout our journey working on Zazu, including all our team members, advisory board, partners, mentors, connectors, friends and families who supported us in creating this technology and making the impact that we did. If we can leave you with any advice, it would be to remain “Relentlessly Resourceful”, it’s something that helped us row upstream and is a mindset that got us as far as we did.

On a final note, keep in touch with us! We’ll be around town and eager to help others with what we’ve learned. You can find Marc here, Andy here, and me here.

Till next time,

Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster once gave a talk in which my biggest take away was to “Be Present”. We took this to heart in attending conferences like Disrupt, Launch and DEMO and have gotten our team access to resources that have rocketed the company forward. We wrote this post to share our experiences, both good and bad with each of these major new technology conferences. We’ve been lucky to have had the opportunity to get in front of people at a bunch of different conferences and share what we’re building. We have not paid to attend any of these events as we’ve always been sponsored. Something we’ve discovered is there are always subsidized or waived fees for everything you do as a startup, you can also always volunteer for a free ticket.  By my count, we’ve saved over $25k being sponsored to all these conferences. In May of 2010 we attended TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC, in February of 2011 we attended Launch, and in September of 2011 we attended DEMO. These conferences were amazing opportunities to share what we were working on with many early adopters, beta users, technologists, press, mentors, and investors. Many of the contacts we’ve met at conferences have provided invaluable feedback that has shaped Zazu into what it is today and have also led to major connections. While we were only chosen to go on stage at DEMO, we still took up the opportunity to pitch thousands of people at Launch and Disrupt -- conferences like these make meeting new people like shooting fish in a barrel. We attended the first TCDisrupt in NYC to a huge crowd, the biggest we’ve seen at any conference. Most of the companies there were heavily focused on consumer web/mobile technology and a majority of the attendees were early adopters. We saw a lot of Press at Disrupt but mixed into the crowd were a lot of smaller bloggers and journalists. Being in NYC there were a lot of attendees from the media industry, definitely great for if you have a media focused element to your company. If you’re not selected to go on stage, it’s a great opportunity to get a Startup Alley cocktail table for $2k to get in front of the attendees who lounge around outside the main hall. Be sure to hustle though, it’s fairly easy to disappear into the crowd and not be noticed. Following the trend of “firsts” we had a table outside the main hall at the first Launch.is conference run by Jason Calacanis. There was a pretty decent showing, though not as big as the other conferences and since the building was quite large, the crowd was pretty spread out. There were fewer investors than what I had seen at Disrupt and DEMO and the startup founders there were all fairly mellow. Overall, there was far more love for the startups at Launch, Calacanis sat down and coached each of the teams who were presenting; I think that’s a great mentoring opportunity. I didn’t hear of anything like this going on at Disrupt or DEMO. Demo was in the heart of Silicon Valley and going on it’s 13th year! There were quite a few more enterprise related technologies being presented here and an audience that was clearly looking for such technologies. There were many technologists in the crowd, though most were a bit older than what we’ve seen at Disrupt or Launch where jeans and a t-shirt were appropriate attire. The event was very well planned and executed, but they’ve been doing this for years. Compared to other conferences, there were no “side-dishes”, each company was there to present on stage and the DEMO team definitely worked to get us as much attention as possible. The press folks we saw here were more interested in staying and chatting, not something we’ve seen at most other events. From a partnership perspective, there were many more business development folks from many of the SV companies looking for new technologies and ways to partner up. Major Complaints DISRUPT: Disrupt was definitely a “cool-kids” conference, while I made some great connections, it was clearly all koolaid. There were also too many companies at Disrupt between the Disruptors who presented on stage to the 30+ startup alley exhibitors. If you can’t hustle, don’t bother going to Disrupt. LAUNCH: I don’t have many complaints about Launch, the folks who ran it were awesome, schedule was great and the crowd was good. Room for improvement but I think they’ll do great if they keep it going in future years.

DEMO: All attendees and demonstrators were ordered to leave upon the two-hour mark of the pavilion sessions. While I can see why they want to keep the area secure, we had the lights turned out on us and were approached by members of staff asking us to leave. At one point, a very well respected and highly interested investor was interrupted asked to leave the premises. That’s not conducive to a good pavilion environment.

* calculated based on published rates

In summary, if you’re looking for press, go to DEMO, if you’re looking for a good time, go to Disrupt, and if you’re looking for beta testers, go to Launch. Give us a shout if you have any specific questions or are thinking about attending one of these conferences!

The team at Launch

At TechCrunch Disrupt

10 things Zazu can do to improve your mornings!

Zazu has evolved from its launch as an alarm clock with a voice. Today Zazu gives a user access to a variety of information that helps them get through their day. Here’s the low-down on a few ways to make Zazu work for you!

Still groggy from the morning? Shut off the alarm and listen to Zazu, by pressing play at the bottom of the home screen, while shaving or on your way to work.

Poor Fido! Tasks you don’t want to forget, lest your carpets need to be replaced anyways, put a note into an alarm and have the voice of Zazu remind you to walk the dog!

Oh, what to wear?! Zazu shows you current and forecasted weather to figure out how to battle the elements of your day! Cold, hot or rainy, you’re prepared.

Quickie or breakfast? Whatever they call it these days, know if you’ve got time. Keeping a location in your calendar events lets Zazu calculate the estimated time of arrival to your next meeting.

In the car and on the run? Stop googling and copy-pasting locations into your maps app. Hit the Location icon next to an appointment to have maps with directions launch for you!

Brazillian Wax? For the deal addict in you, Zazu shows daily deals which are closest to where you are.

Hate the gloomy news? Listen to customized headlines from the feed of your choice by putting in a custom RSS Feed to The Onion!

OMG I have to tell you… See something you want to share? Tap the Email Icon to email it off to a friend or tap the people icon to share it through Facebook and Twitter.

Heading home? It’s been a long day, the last thing you want to do is sit in traffic. Tap any of your appointments to take a quick peek at traffic in your immediate area.

Not a fan of Zazu’s robotic cousin? Fear not, we found a prettier one you can now upgrade to in the settings menu!

Ringing in our 7th week here on the West Coast this year, the Zazu crew is prepping for an exciting presentation this week at the 2011 Fall DEMO conference on Wednesday.

We're looking forward to sharing some of our most recent work done in the digitally connected space and are very excited to share how we're helping users make better use of their personal information on stage.

Our demo time slot is at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday the 14th, be sure to tune into the DEMO live stream at www.demo.com.

In the meanwhile, here's a preview to our first day here setting up. You can find a quick video we shot while we were going through our rehearsal earlier this morning as well.

Zazu started as a fairly balanced team with both developer and business oriented founders. But as we began to bring on more team members, all of them ended up being developers, rightfully so, as we were still in the product construction phase. In our journey through the last year, we’ve learned a lot while creating different products, networking, and exploring innovative marketing methods. We’ve compiled it all down into the few things we learned that we hope can help others working on early stage technology startups. From the business and operations perspective

You’ll never have all the right resources; it’s all about how you get your team to push through with what you’ve got. Be relentlessly resourceful (www.paulgraham.com/essays/relres.html)

Don’t drink the koolaid. Know what's happening around you, but focus on what’s important to you and your company.

Set expectations for yourself and your team. In the end, nothing counts unless the job gets done and your team knows what must be done.

Strike while the iron is hot. When you get press, planned or unplanned, it creates expectations among the audience. Be ready to capitalize off of this in any way you can, even if your product isn't ready.

Partner up. We partnered with PepsiCo and their brands; this subsequently opened up quite a few new opportunities, even the chance to wake up Enrique Iglesias in one of his new music videos.

From the technology and development perspective

It's useful to think about scaling, but you really shouldn't worry about it in the early days. Just get your product to prove it's worth, only once you've shown that people care (or don't care) should you worry that your servers wont explode when that evil last user

Don't spend all of your time trying to fit all of that cool new hotness into your project; nobody cares if your technology is built on top of Web Scale Databases or Javacript-Backed Servers -- just friggin' build it.

   Having built our apps in-house, we've found:

Testing is a good thing, brownie points if you can formally prove something but formal proofs are a pain in the tuchus. (There's nothing wrong with manual testing, but automated tests definitely are much better to create team confidence)

Monitor all the things! Have a process monitor set up on your machines. Do it now. You don't want to be stuck at a bar or on a boat in SF Bay, trying to ssh into your servers from your iPhone to restart a process; this actually happened to Marc (what a dolt :-P ).

Never say never -- don't say "I can't" but when in doubt, remember not to underestimate the power of self-imposed deadlines. You're already insane enough to want to start something for yourself, you'll never know what magic you can come up with until you try.

We’re excited to announce that Zazu Mornings is now available on the Apple AppStore! Zazu now provides integrated access to your personal information on any major smartphone device. The technology integrates a user’s calendars, local weather, deals, personalized news, and custom internet content. The recently launched applications include the original Zazu Alarm functionality and a newly released human voice developed by our team over the past few months.

Zazu is the only technology across Android, Apple, and Blackberry (oh yes, we’re there too!) that can visually and verbally bring you information from your personal data sources to help you make informed decisions.

We live in a world where people are dependent on unintelligent smartphone applications to navigate to different sources of information; anyone who has opened three apps to see what’s in store for their day has experienced this insanity. Zazu’s technology enables your information to interact, like your calendar and location, creating personalized content like the directions and traffic to your next meeting. Zazu also enables intelligent content sharing, like drafting up an email for you to notify meeting attendees if you’ll be running late.

Smartphones should be smarter. We’re building technology that enables your personal information to work together. Zazu’s technology brings important media and content to the forefront of the digital overload we face today and focuses on deepening the interaction between our digital information. It’s time to think less and do more.

We’ve been incredibly lucky to have a diverse team of interns and employees working on Zazu. This year however, we’ve been even more fortunate to grow with talented and vested team members.

We’re excited to announce that we’re bringing on one of our strongest supporters, Dr. Pascal Chesnais, as Chief Scientist. You may be wondering why a mobile startup needs a Chief Scientist, but a quick gander and Pascal’s experienced background at MIT, Message Machines, Orange Labs, and France Telecom shows his incredible fit with the vision we’re bringing to fruition.

On joining Zazu, Pascal notes --

"As people are becoming more reliant on mobile devices to manage personal information and media, simple and intuitive interfaces are needed. Zazu is doing just that with their context-aware mobile application bridging together personal information and dynamic content. I am delighted to be at Zazu to guide the development next generation of highly personalized mobile applications and services"

Pascal leads talented research teams in creating prototypes of innovative services and applications and is guiding the development of innovative media consumption models and IP strategy at Zazu. Dr. Chesnais is also currently a visiting Scientist with the MIT Mobile Experience Lab. Previously, he was the Senior Research Director at Orange Labs Boston. There he helped create and staff the France Telecom Research and Development Boston lab, which focused on developing new mobile and internet technologies involving multimodal haptics, electronic publishing, and location based applications and services. Pascal was also the co-founder of Message Machines, which was later acquired by NMS Communications. Pascal holds a Masters and PhD from MIT Media Laboratory. Pascal hails from France and has three wonderful daughters.

So we spent a few days this past week at the first Launch event at the San Francisco Design Center. Courtesy of Jason Calacanis, we got a sponsored table in response to Marc's comments on HN. We were looking forward to showing off the first versions of our new iPhone application and chatting more with the startup community while there.

It was an awesome event to meet new startup founders and a great place to demo. We even had the chance to pitch Rob Scoble in addition to some pretty interesting ventures like

Imaginary Feet - they've got some awesome gaming apps

Device Knit - Helps you get your gadgets to work together

Lawpivot - They're a Quora for private Legal advice

Audioo - Our good friends from over at TechCrunch Disrupt back in May

We got a lot of great buzz around our table and had a bunch of people play around with the upcoming iPhone version of Zazu! People loved the green grass or the ipad shirts (perfect for this sort of conference) A big thanks to Joseph Young of SyteShirt for sponsoring our shirts!

A special congratulations goes to our Boston neighbor Brian Krejcarek of GreenGoose who raised a round on stage from Jay Levy and a few other investors. There was an awesome writeup in the Telegraph about the Valley and fund raising scene here in CA and a special mention of yours truly!

The event was a great kickoff to our trip out to the valley. We'll be hanging out for a few weeks taking meetings and meeting with other awesome start up folks. Give us a holler if you want to meet up!

Wow, things are flying by at an incredible pace, it's a shame we haven't been able to update you guys more often but we've been focusing on improving the android application and rolling out an iPhone version for those of you who worship the Apple god.

The great news is that we've been invited to Launch.is! We'll be in SF starting the 21st, hit us up if you're interested in hanging out while we're there!

We're often times asked why we chose Android as the first platform to launch Zazu on. There were a number of reasons that can be summarized quite easily:

Android was easier to program for. When we started out back in December, iPhone was inherently incapable of running a simple non-invasive app like an alarm clock. Android on the other hand came preset with an alarm content provider.

Back in December, we were all still looking at what was the calm before the storm of Android adoption. Many of the users we wanted feedback from were still young, male, gadgetry loving early adopters. The openness of the Android platform also made it simpler to distribute the app in a private beta as well.

As we worked away over summer, we kept hearing the buzz that Android was growing and nipping away at the heals of iPhone, BB and even the global giant Symbian. It was definitely a great encouragement. I wont go into crazy numbers, but what was most important was that 1 in 3 smart phones being sold in the US was an Android and Gartner published yesterday that 25.5% of the global smart phone market share is now dominated by Android. You can find all of it here: http://bit.ly/9qEC29 and it's becoming obvious now that we continuously hear the Android SMS alert in the cubes around us in MassChallenge.

Looking back, we're happy to have chosen Android as the first market to launch in, our beta testers were awesome, and we got support from the Google team in Boston which Apple wouldn't have thought twice about saying no to us.

So we owe you a fair explanation, and that is that we're too busy. Yup, that's all we've got for you...