Ever wanted to learn code, but were intimidated by the process or thought it was just plain impossible? Well, One Month Rails is here to help!

How it Works: One Month Rails is an online resource that makes it quick, simple, and enjoyable to learn how to code. The Founder, Mattan Griffel, has made it his personal mission to teach people with no coding experience. The class is meant to be easy to follow for total beginners, but if you do get stuck, Mattan will personally respond to any of his student’s questions. For only $49 you can enroll today and turn your ideas into a reality, so check it out!

Potential Brand Soulmates: Universities, High Schools, Boys and Girls Club

Follow Them: @onemonthrails

  Do you have old films lying around your attic or packed away in boxes, neglected for years because you don’t know what to do with them? Kinograph is your affordable solution that helps save these cultural memories with a DIY film scanner.

How it works: Kinograph is an open source solution for digitizing 35, 16, and 8mm films. The philosophy behind the company is that cultural memory should not be dependent on money or technology. Libraries, museums, and private collections all hold countless films and often cannot afford to digitize them. Kinograph makes digitizing films an affordable option. The Kinograph platform consists of a machine for image capture and software tools for image processing and optical sound extraction, all open source.

Potential Brand Soulmates: Canon, National Geographic, Museums

Check Them Out: http://kinograph.cc

Contact: [email protected]

  Maxwell Health is new solution for health care for your business. Their purpose is to change the culture of health in our country by empowering people to be healthier and smarter in how they spend their health care dollars.

How It Works: Maxwell Health redefines health care for businesses with a tech platform and service experience that dramatically simplifies benefits, reduces insurance costs, and improves employee health. You enroll easily with a private insurance and benefits exchange, enabling traditional employer-sponsored and defined contribution setup. You can track engagement and spending with a powerful dashboard that includes census management and payroll. There is also a mobile app for your team to access their health information, wellness program, and concierge service on the go.

Potential Brand Soulmates: Nike, Aetna, Subway, Whole Foods

Follow Them: maxwellhealth

Check Them Out: www.maxwellhealth.com

  You will never again fail to bring an umbrella to work and get stuck scrambling to get home in the pouring rain. How? Enter, Poncho. Poncho is a personalized weather service that is tailored for your daily routine. Poncho explains the weather in plain, clear English — just like weather forecasters used to do. But, this time, it’s personal, local and timely.

How it works: Instead of providing you with more data and visualizations to interpret, it gets to know you — when you wake up, how you commute to work, if you have pets to walk — and then gives you personalized advice.  There’s no app to install or update, no graphs to interpret.  Poncho will tell you just what you need to know to get your day started, and nothing more.

Potential Brand Soulmates: CitiBikes, Halls, Advil, The North Face, Petco, Coppertone

Follow Them: @poncho_ny

Sign Up:  Tryponcho.com

The event kicked off with a last minute visit from Jack Hidary, technology entrepreneur and candidate for Mayor of New York City. We sat back in anticipation to hear from a selective group of Brazilian tech startups specially chosen by VentureOutNY to pitch for the NYC audience. After each pitch, startups received constructive feedback from an esteemed panel of angel investors and venture capitalists featuring David Teten, Partner at FF Venture Capital; Veronika Sonsev, Co-Founder of Women Innovate Mobile and CEO of inSparq; and Ross Goldstein, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Gotham Ventures.

We enjoyed hearing from all the startups, DujourApp, FitX, PinMyPet, GeoSpace, Near Bytes, Futcup, Qualita, Flex in Fit, and WeDemand. See below for a quick recap of our two favorite startups of the night! Be sure to follow us @evol8tion and keep up with our live tweets from industry events.

Near Bytes developed a new way to communicate using a proximity technology based on sound with features similar to NFC (Near Field Communication) that can be used on a majority of the handsets in market today.  The data is encoded in sound and can be sent from one device to another even when both are offline, without using any other feature, such as GPS, Bluetooth, etc. CPG companies are always looking for ways to create interactive mobile experiences with consumers in-store—we think this a cool angle!

Check them out at www.nearbytes.com.

WeDemandis a social platform to crowdfund and promote concerts. Their groundbreaking format gets fans directly involved in the process of making a concert happen. They have already successfully crowdfunded 48 concerts for such groups as Vampire Weekend, LCD Soundsystem, The Kills, Chromeo, Warpaint, and many other big names and indie acts.  They haven’t partnered with any brands yet, but we’d love to see what an integration would look like!

Check them out at http://www.wedemand.com or on Twitter @WeDemand.

Great job to all the startups who presented at The Brazilian and thank you VentureOutNY for an interesting and fun event at an awesome venue!   

Here is a quick recap of who was there! Be sure to follow us @evol8tion and keep up with our live tweets from industry events.

Empowers banks and financial institutions to leverage mobile telephony and collective user intelligence to fight fraud, reduce call center costs, and engage customers.  

Recognized by the Canadian digital media network as one of the top three Globalizer’s for 2013, Zighra is actively pursuing strategic alliances with industry leading companies and mobile banking platform providers.

Visit www.zighra.com

  Uses visual search technology to give online shoppers a tool that allows them to find retailers for items discovered in images online.          

Hovr.it is transforming the online shopping journey by converting inspiration into context. They have created a plug-in that allows users to mouse over images to get more product info and find other options like it.

Visit www.hovr.it

Making socks that start businesses. Proceeds from their colorful and bold socks are loaned through Kiva to fund entrepreneurs in developing countries.       

They were fueled in their idea by the Tom’s One-to-One model focusing on sustainable social good, but wanted to create an even greater extension of this. So, instead of just giving away socks, they donate a percentage of profits to help entrepreneurs with revolving loans in developing nations get their own business off the ground.

Visit www.coleandparker.co

  An HTML5 publishing platform that automatically transforms online content, such as RSS feeds and social content, into interactive, cleanly designed web apps for tablet web browsers.

It’s a great tool for publishers and brands to easily converge online content into beautiful and interactive mobile experiences.   

Visit www.pressly.com 

  A music messaging app based on the idea that music can be an awesome way to communicate with friends. You can send your friends songs and then personalize your message with videos, photos, and dancing emojis.  It’s like Snapchat for music!

Rithm is the only one of its kind. The app is powered by Spotify and other APIs, allowing users to send songs without cost.

Visit www.getrithm.me 

From the startup side, we listened to some great discussion about Quirky’s partnership with GE and the importance of remaining true to your startup’s core value and mission when partnering with brands. From a brand perspective, Evol8tion client, Mondelez International, discussed the importance of finding new business that creates disruptive opportunities. They look for companies that they can bring to scale to work with their brand. Such partnerships create win – win opportunities for the startup and the brand. A startup’s innovative culture knows how to fail fast, fail often, but also to learn quickly from these challenges, brings a whole new way of inventing and thinking to the brand culture, ultimately “disrupting” their normal way of doing things, while pumping in new perspective and thought.

So what were the most important take-aways for you startups?

How do you get brands attention?

The brands on the panel responded that it ultimately depends on the brand and what their needs are. What does your startup do and is it relevant to that brand? The fit, and the people who are on the team are also very important. You have to be able to work together, communicate effectively and understand each other.

Connections are important:

Brands use CrunchBase. Make sure brands can find you, that your profiles are updated and that you are reachable.

Most importantly of all, DO THE WORK. Research, understand the ins and outs of the brand, and be relentless. When you email brands, be smart, be well-informed, and be prepared.

Length is the death of an email. Be clear on what is in it for them and give them a clear roadmap of why they will benefit from partnering with your company.

Thank you General Assembly and Advertising Age for a really interesting and fun event!

Rosie aims to transform the over $550 billion a year industry for groceries and household goods by using predictive analytics, customized on an individual user basis. As you interact with her more, she learns more about you and your consumer patterns. They have built a patent pending algorithm, RARE, or the Rosie App Recommendation Engine, which not only covers recurring purchases by providing a tool to help remember what you are running out, but she has the intelligence to understand what products you like, recommend new ones based on your previous purchases and others like you, and offer to buy these products for you from the lowest cost provider in your area. As COO and Co-Founder, Jon Ambrose, explains, “We’re not trying to simply put the grocery store online. We’re integrating intelligence into every aspect of our application, and that allows us to provide a better and more enjoyable customer experience at every step.”

On July 7th, Rosie officially relaunched in Ithaca at P&G Fresh. To date,Rosie has had almost 2,500 signups - with an average basket size is up 2–3X regular sales, likely attributed to their curated “Dynamic Aisle” functionality- an innovative way to allow users to search and aggregate products based on categories (BBQ, Breakfast, etc.), vs. regular grocery aisles.  The first store was so thrilled with the results – they’ve already approved expansion plans to additional stores this fall.  To add to Rosie’s rollout, there are plans to add 5 more stores in upstate New York (2 in Syracuse, 2 in Ithaca, 1 in Lansing, NY), and are currently in advanced discussions with 213 stores in the Midwest and 90 stores in NY and Vermont.

As CEO Nick Nickitas said, “Improving the grocery shopping experience took so much more than just the removal of clutter and distractions—it’s about bringing order to complexity. Rosie is the fastest and most convenient way to shop for groceries in your community.”  Rosie is a convenience tool for consumers, but it also empowers local retailers to compete with big chains.  Technology is constantly innovating and improving and along with it, disrupting the shopping experience.  Smaller grocery stores can take advantage of using the Rosie platform – attracting a tech savvy, likely younger consumer base appreciative of having a task proactively checked off their to do list.

During his talk, Paul described his vision for the future of retail and what the store of the future would look like. He sees there being three essential rules of retail:

1) Be unique.

2) Be an experience and focus on every inch of your store.

3) Be open: wherever your consumer wants to purchase your products, be available in that space or in that medium.

What does a smart store look like? It brings the social into the store in a user-friendly way that engages with the consumer. It has virtual shopping assistants, shelves will take their own inventory, and technology will keep the right inventory in stock to make shopping more relevant, but also keeping from ever losing a sale for not having a certain size or inventory in stock. The moment you walk into this so-called “smart-store” it will greet you and know who you are, what you like, what you've purchased in the past, know what you want to purchase, etc. The entire store and shopping experience will utilize new technology and machine intelligence to be as relevant, engaging, helpful and efficient as possible.

So as a retailer, what do you do now? A couple pieces of advice from Paul are to move technology into the marketing department, because tech is too important to be left in the hands of the engineers. He emphasized that retailers must understand the technological behavior of your customers, how customers use technology, and how technology is replacing their shopping experience. Second, embrace the idea of user experience. It is not consumer as consumer, but consumer as a producer who is continually producing (social media, content creation, etc.). Focus on behaviors and their personal media as opposed to mass media in order to drive conversion and retention. Third, leverage the recommendations of others: think in terms of context instead of reach. Let’s transition from the 20th century marketing model to the 21st century experience model!