Venturism

Trip Splitter: Your New Best Friend for Group Travel

Traveling with friends can be a rewarding experience. You get to share the adventure with them, create long-lasting memories, and best of all: you get to split the costs associated with travel with those friends. The latter tends to be both a benefit for your wallet but a burden, logistically speaking. I know that I have often ended up being the friend who fronts the cost of a trip and having to wait for my friends to reimburse me. 

Enter Trip Splitter, a new mobile app that allows users to book travel arrangements through its interface and determine how the total cost will be split. In doing so, it alleviates the headaches associated with trying to book travel among friends. Often one of the biggest hassles can be booking a flight with a friend and being in that frantic hurry to ensure that you are able to book seats next to one another. With Trip Splitter, that is no longer an issue because the tickets are booked together in one payment after being split on the app. 

We live in a decade of digital collaboration. It is promising to see new apps like this one that aim to solve simple, yet frustrating problems by creating innovative platforms on which users can collaborate, share, and dissolve frustration. 

Powerful Gestures: WiSee aims to transform daily functions

As a kid I remember vividly one of the first infomercials that caught my eye. It was a way for you to turn your household lights on and off with just the clap of your hands. The Clapper was a very futuristic technology during the nineties because it transformed the way we thought about performing simple tasks. We no longer had to physically touch buttons or flip switches in order to control things. The Clapper was patented exactly twenty years and one month ago today. In the two decades since the product first began to be sold, we've seen sound operated devices become much more easy to use with voice recognition softwares. 

WiSee looks at passive device control from an entirely new perspective. It aims to allow its users to perform tasks with simple gestures. While gesture-based operational software already exists, the innovation of WiSee is that these gestures can be done anywhere within range of the user's Wifi signal. This is because the gestures are recognized by the unique manner in which they interrupt the Wifi signal. These unique interruptions are recognized and taught to perform the tasks which are assigned to them.

The University of Washington students that developed this technology--Qifan Pu, Sidhant Gupta, Shyam Gollakota, Shwetak Patel--describe the main factor which separates their product from similar devices such as Wii, Kinect, and MYO as being its lack of a user interface. Without having to have an operating system that monitors the user's motion in a specified location, the product allows for maximum accessibility. 

We all are familiar with Facebook and chances are, you probably use it pretty regularly. I certainly do. The company is constantly looking for new opportunities to help its users connect with others. Today, it launched its new service called Pipe, which will allow users to send files up to 1GB in size through its new web app. 

The app will allow users to drag and drop files they wish to send to their friends, who either receive it immediately or retrieve it later from their 'locker.' The files are sent through a peer to peer network which is established between both users. Files don't pass through Facebook, the company says, but transferred from computer to computer without the use of a server.

The best part? It's free! But what would you expect from a service that is competing with pre-existing giants such as Dropbox and Google Drive, both of which are offered free to users as well.

Private, On-Demand Rooms without the Hotel Hassle

Ever wish you could have a place to get away from work and just relax? Or maybe a private location that you could meet with clients without having to pay rent? Your dream might soon become a reality. Breather is a startup that provides its clients with a private space on demand. The service, which will launch in NYC to those who request an invitation on their website. 

Similar to the model of ZipCar, Breather's clients will have the ability to use the private spaces for periods ranging anywhere from a half-hour to a full day. When clients arrive to the space, they will be able to enter the building using a virtual key that is unique to each user. Additionally, the company revealed to VentureBeat that their clients will have the option of a no-commitment rental or subscription-based rentals. 

Whistle Labs, Inc.