DreamIT Archive

Sleep.FM was one of the companies presenting today at the DreamIT Funding Day in Philadelphia. Sleep.FM says they are the "social alarm clock" and they basically provide a new wakeup call. I’ve had the opportunity to meet founder Ryan Spahn at several events and he really believes in the Sleep.FM concept.

So many of the reviews and comments I read say that Sleep.FM can’t and will never work. Yet in his presentation today, Ryan showed a video of a man serving in the military in Iraq. The alarm clock went off and his daughter sang to him – when you see this use case, it starts to make more sense.

Sleep.FM wakeup calls can be sent through your computer or to your cell phone. Ryan also announced that you can get weather or traffic information as your wakeup message as well. They are working on offering flight information as well which is pretty slick – if your flight is delayed, Sleep.FM tells you.

They are currently seeking $200k for technology development and business development. The Sleep.FM revenue model includes selling 5 second highly targeted ad space, premium application offerings, and banner ads. I’d suggest staying away from the ads in the wake-up calls and looking at sponsored wake-up calls. For example, a Hannah Montana wakeup call that provides a different message each day. These sponsored wake-up calls could help sell Sleep.FM in the general marketplace as well.

Tapinko is one of the startups to come out of the DreamIT startup incubator. Tapinko President Peter Groverman opened the presentation by explaining that there’s currently no place to purchase multiple offline ads (e.g. to purchase in every newspaper in Philly). My initial thought was that Google provides this type of offline newspaper ad buying already.

Peter took us through his presentation and overall I was very impressed with the service. Basically the Tapinko service is an outsourced offline ad management application. The service makes it easy for offline media to sell ads online. Tapinko only charges a transaction fee when sellers make a purchase which basically leaves no reason for media companies not to try it. The service can work with any offline advertising including outdoor advertising (i.e. billboards).

They are currently working with a variety of college daily newspapers in the Northeast with a 3-5 year plan to move into local publications and magazines. A 3-5 year plan is way too long – by then Google will own the space and/or the space will transform yet again. If they want to own this space, they need to buildout the "mall" of offline advertising options and sign-on as many partners as possible.

Today I spent time at the DreamIT Ventures Funding Day in Philadelphia. The first company was Vuzit presented by founder Brent Matzelle. Vuzit is an online document viewer similar to Docstoc and Scribd. Vuzit can protect documents by preventing unauthorized copy and download functions. Vuzit appears to be focused on the enterprise business market.

Vuzit is currently serving 1,000 users and over 12,000 document requests per day. To-date the company has raised $350,000. Brent showed a slide of the competition and only included enterprise level applications — Docstoc/Scribd weren’t even mentioned.

During the Q&A, I asked about the comparison between Vuzit and Docstoc/Scribd. Brent replied that Docstoc/Scribd are about public sharing and Vuzit is about privacy and protection. He went on to say that the other companies have very basic features. This was a bit shocking considering all three companies basically offer the exact same product. A good slide for Brent to add would be a comparison of the three services – for example, Vuzit focuses on enterprise customers while Docstoc focuses on their public-facing repository.