#techfaster

   As more and more companies are moving toward video explainer videos, as a first means of contact with potential customers, many businesses are being left behind. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, if you want to hire a studio to create such a video, it can cost upwards of thousands of dollars. Further, to do the task yourself is quite complicated, and can be intimidating to someone with little to no video editing experience. We just came across one company that wants to make incredibly easy for companies to create their own videos: Videolean. We had a chance to ask the Videolean team a few questions about their new platform: Videolean What is Videolean? VideoLean is the platform where you can explain what’s your business about through template videos. No video-editing knowledge is required. Who is the target user? SME’s 1-5 employees who have never done a video before but are aware Youtube can be a great channel to get brand awareness. Web designers, community managers, freelances who have small clients who ask them for videos but do not have the video editing knowledge to make them on time or budget. Hosting companies who want to add video creation service to their portfolio and increase the average revenue per customers. Why did you build Videolean? Because businesses need videos to increase their visibility, SEO and conversion rates but they do not have the budget, time neither know-how to make them. We make video creation extremely easy, fast and affordable. Online video is a multi-billion dollar industry that never stops growing. How is your product different from what is currently available? We’ve been in the video industry since 10 years ago, working with clients of all sizes and developing the concept. We’re aware of the video creation pitfalls for anyone who is brand-new in this field and that’s why we give the best support customers have ever had (said by themselves), replying to the support tickets within 2 hours and calling them personally to solve any issues or just to know what do they think of our service. Tell us your founding story. Was there an “ah ha” moment? Videolean is a startup from Motion4Startups -creative agency that makes explanatory videos for online businesses- and Meideistudio -traditional advertisting video production company-. Creating videos is expensive and time consuming. In addition, most of business owners and marketers do not have the video editing knowledge neither the licensed software to make them. Videolean solves this problem designing pro-looking template videos that anyone can customize online without any video editing knowledge at all. As easy as typing texts, upload images and select a soundtrack. Best of all? It’s 100x more affordable than hiring a studio. Business owners, marketers, community managers, web designers, real state companies, ecommerce, and many more care a lot about our company because we make extremely easy, affordable and fast something that they’ve never had the chance to do before. Tell us about your founding team and their backgrounds. David Macías – CEO & Founder ; founded Motion4Startups and Meideistudio as well. Background in video production and advertising. David Guerra Terol – background in marketing. Joined as Business Developer UK for Motion4Startups and ended up co-founding Videolean as customer discovery and customer development responsible. What’s the next step? What are your short-term goals? Make templates more “customizable” (i.e. be able to change colors, fonts, length)

     Loopd is hard to explain in a few sentences. It is quite interesting but a bit complex. Right now, Loopd is a social discovery app, aimed at business professionals. However, they are in the middle of an Indiegogo campaign in which they are raising funds for a litany of new discover apps. Apps “targeting music festivals, sports games, restaurants, bars and smart homes, and for its developer platform. The apps address the challenge of detecting and exchanging data between nearby Smartphones and other connected devices on a one-to-one basis.” We had a chance to ask the Loopd Team about the product: Loopd  What is Loopd, and what do you guys do? Loopd is a Bluetooth LE contact exchange and social CRM platform that streamlines the interaction between business professionals. Loopd is a hyper-proximate application that enables business professionals to connect instantly with contacts within a few feet, message back and forth, add descriptive notes, create personalized contact lists, and easily export everything to Evernote and CRM systems. How is your product different from what is currently available? Loopd is an opt-in app used in face-to-face peer interactions at events. Other social discovery products work anonymously at long distances and scan mobile devices to find people Was there an “ah ha” moment? Loopd was inspired by a project at Draper University of Heroes: invent a better way to build and maintain relationships. This university and incubator in San Mateo, CA, was started by legendary VC Tim Draper. The emergence of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and the prevalence of smartphones encouraged us to reinvent this common human experience and make it even more simplistic. Within the first five minutes of the project, our team talked about how frustrating everyone felt it was to exchange business cards and otherwise collect professional contact information with context at networking events. We also agreed it was tough to build relationships with important people, and even tougher to sustain a high quality network over time. So we decided to focus first on releasing an app focused on business events that could change the way people approach professional networking. Tell us about your founding team and their backgrounds. Brian Friedman, CEO at Loopd He is currently pursuing his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering at Lehigh University, and is also the Main Organizer for the Bay Area Wearable Technology Startup Meetup. Sambhav Galada, Head Engineer at Loopd He is currently pursuing his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M. Sambhav has implemented and designed an ARM low power chip for wearable technology that enables users to get feedback on their personal fitness analytics. Allen Houng, Head Developer at Loopd He is currently pursuing his M.B.A. from National Taiwan University. Allen has been featured on TechCrunch and StartUp Weekend Blog for his startup called Drimmit, which he built by himself from the ground up full stack. What’s the next step? What are your short-term goals? Loopd Inc. has a new and novel Bluetooth contact exchange app for events. We are also in the midst of an Indiegogo crowd funding campaign to build the first Bluetooth P2P app library for music festivals, sporting games, bars and restaurants. We would like to thank the Loopd team for answering our questions. Check out GetLoopd.com and their Indiegogo campaign for more info.

Check out this awesome article on Project Wedge by TechFaster.

The other day, our co-founder and director, Elton Rivas, hung out with the guys over at TechFaster, a start-up blog out of Charleston, SC. He explained One Spark and what it means for the tech/start-up community.