The Top 8 Startups From Y Combinator’s Summer ’13 Demo Day

Convenience tech, developer assistance, and services for senior citizens were the big trends amongst the 45 startups that pitched on the record today at Y Combinator‘s Summer 2013 Demo Day. After conferring with 25 of the most prolific venture capitalists and huddling the TechCrunch team, we’ve picked the eight startups we believe have the most promise.

We got more consensus than usual that these eight startups are special. They could make us healthier, safer, and richer, while helping businesses with efficiency. Though mobile is still a focus for YC companies, financial services were popular this season, and there were plenty of “Uber for X” startups on stage.

You can read our write-ups of all 45 startups that pitched in Batch 1, Batch 2, and Batch 3 today. Most were polished, and showed off big ideas or smart business modela. Here are our highlights, in unranked order:

SPOONROCKET – ON-DEMAND ORGANIC MEAL DELIVERY

SpoonRocket’s Demo Day pitch was filled with hype like “Fast Food 2.0″ and “Uber for food”, but their early data backs up those claims. The company cooks and delivers meat and vegetarian organic meals for $6 each, in supposedly as little as 10 minutes. By cooking just two different meals a day in bulk, it can pass on savings to customers, and in-car heaters keep food warm. SpoonRocket says it already has a $2 million a year run rate and is growing 112% per week. In its first market, Berkeley, California, it says it does more deliveries per day than GrubHub does in a month, and the local college students aren’t even there yet. It plans to expand to urban centers across the country, though less dense area may be tricky. SpoonRocket wants to make the world eat cheaper, faster, and healthier.

Check out our earlier coverage of SpoonRocket here.

PANORAMA EDUCATION: SCHOOL SURVEYS

Panorama has a big ambition: To bring data analytics to every school in the United States, by powering polls of students, teachers, and parents and logging and analyzing the results.

The startup started small, as a side project for Panorama Education’s three co-founders during their junior year at Yale, helping out school districts in the New Haven region with data analysis. By the time the founders graduated this past May, Panorama had evolved into a much bigger entity, having earned more than $500,000 in revenue. And the growth keeps coming — more than 3,600 schools nationwide are now paying customers of Panorama Education, and the company is profitable. Going forward, Panorama endeavors to power “a national dataset that every school will use to improve its performance.”

Check out even more coverage on Panorama Education here.

AMULYTE: THE MODERN LIFE ALERT

Amulyte is targeting the 20 million senior citizens in the United States, providing a pendant and online portal that tracks their movements to provide help in case they fall. The pendant connects to cellular networks and has GPS, Wi-Fi and an accelerometer to detect falls. If a senior falls, it will alert contacts immediately and keep track of any movement.

The pendant sells for $149 and the service is $29 a month to provide a little peace of mind to seniors and their families. The company is working with a retirement home on a test of the service and to get it deployed in the market, but it sees a $10 billion market opportunity just in the U.S. alone.

Check out our earlier coverage of Amulyte here.

BUTTERCOIN: FAST AND LEGAL BITCOIN EXCHANGE

Sending money across international borders is a huge $500 billion a year remittance industry characterized by exorbitant fees.

Buttercoin aims to disrupt it by letting you send money quickly, inexpensively, and legally via bitcoin. The company says its technology lets it send bitcoins 200,000 times faster than its competitors, and the whole thing is legal thanks to partnerships with licensed financial service providers in each country.

Buttercoin has found a way to transfer money at no cost to itself, and only charges a small fee to competitors when customers convert money into or out of bitcoin. By drastically reducing the fees people pay to send money home or transfer it around the world, Buttercoin is trying to become the default for international remittance. While it sounds complicated, we’re told Buttercoin is the real deal.

Check out our deeper write-up of Buttercoin here.

TRUE LINK: CREDIT CARDS FOR OLD PEOPLE

True Link Financial is building a “safe” credit card for cognitively impaired senior citizens who might not have the ability to see through scams or recognize when people are trying to take advantage of them.

They give out credit cards to the elderly and route all transactions in the Visa network through their own servers, where they double-check the transactions to see if they’re reasonable (like spending a few dollars at an ice cream parlor) or to see if they’re from known scams. The company says credit card companies make $1.9 billion a year from this demographic.

Check out more coverage of True Link right here.

EASYPOST: SIMPLIFIED SHIPPING

It’s a big hassle for technologically savvy businesses to integrate with antiquated shipping services like UPS, USPS, and FedEx. EasyPost removes the friction by sitting between developers and the shippers, and offering a RESTful JSON API to connect them. This lets developers access the best shipping rates, tracking information and more. It charges $0.05 per shipping label, and is aiming to take a nice cut of the $26 billion shipping industry. It’s been growing 179 percent month over month, has handled 70,000 shipments, and raised $850,000 from investors, including SV Angel. It’s facing competitors like Postmaster and ShipHawk, but hopes to win the market by specializing in top-notch support so businesses always know where their shipments are.

Check out our earlier coverage of EasyPost here.

STANDARD TREASURY: API FOR COMMERCIAL BANKS

Standard Treasury is working on APIs for commercial banking that help ease transactions like transfers. They’re currently in negotiations with 16 banks, including three of the five largest ones in the country. Those contracts could be worth anywhere from roughly $2 million to more than $15 million and they have potential banking clients asking for APIs down the line that tap into mobile and core banking.

Check out our earlier coverage of Standard Treasury here.

7 CUPS OF TEA: LISTENER MARKETPLACE

Everyone has a time in their lives when they just need to talk about their troubles — when they’re going through a divorce, an illness in the family, issues with anxiety, and the like. There are typically two options for them: Family and friends, which is free but often comes with baggage; or therapy, which is expensive and often intimidating. 7 Cups of Tea aims to situate itself in the middle of those two options, with an online marketplace that connects people anonymously with trained “active listeners” that provide an empathetic ear for free or a voluntary fee or “tip.” 7 Cups, which takes a 40 percent commission on all transactions, has seen solid growth since it launched eight weeks ago: It now has 160 active listeners on its platform and is now fielding more than 1,800 call and chat requests per week.

Check out our earlier coverage of 7 Cups  here.

Congratulations to all the startups who sprinted through these last few months to prepare for today
.

New ventures in Asia

 Dtrack | Vietnam

Vietnam’s Dtrack is a startup that brings international tracking software to online publishers and advertisers, which allows them to track conversion rates, metrics, click rates, and more.

RideTracker Lipa

RideTracker Lipa is an idea that would help commuters know the available public transportation options in specific areas, and give information on which areas people ride them to get to their destination. It will generate a possible travel plan for a destination, and an estimated fare for the journey. The idea is that this will run on smartphones that have GPS capabilities. Apart from that, the app will also display jeepney routes and terminals in the Philippine cities, and a capability to send feedbacks about ride and traffic conditions to traffic authorities.

Bayanihan

A web-mobile application, Bayanihan lets users respond or report disasters near their vicinity. Responses will be coordinated through the appropriate central station” (usually the local government disaster office), and will be live-fed to users’ phones wherein volunteers can take immediate action. Who are the volunteers? It can be anyone, as long as they have the application installed.

Cleverly Designed Bracelets To Help Mothers Remember Their Kids' Vaccine

The clinic issued paper reminders, but the mothers lost them, or couldn't read. Braun therefore thought of an alternative: a bracelet that would alert the mothers every time they needed to come down from the mountain. "It came into my head, and I just sketched it out one day and showed it to some nurses," she says. "They were so excited, because they knew it would make their lives easier."

When Braun got back to the U.S. (she was a student at Cornell at the time), she created a silicon band printed with numbers (for months) and symbols (representing the type of vaccines needed). The bracelet lays out the full 20-jab schedule mothers need to follow for the first four years of their kids' lives. Every time they visit, nurses punch through the symbol, recording that dose.

Last November, the Gates Foundation gave Braun a $100,000 grant to pilot the idea further. About 100 mothers in Peru, and 50 in Ecuador, are now using the system. "They're always looking for ways to improve the vaccine delivery system," Braun says of the Gates Foundation. "This is about getting the users to come in on time, and effect the whole supply chain, and make that a little bit smoother."

If the pilot is successful, Braun will apply for a phase 2 grant worth another $1 million. That would allow her to invest in more pilots (she is keen to try it in Africa) and develop more bracelet sizes. The current version is one-size only, and too small for some older babies with thicker wrists and ankles.

Braun is also interested in talking to pharmaceutical groups about public-private partnerships, seeing that as a way to reach scale quickly. Either way, she sees the bracelet as a simple and cheap way to get more kids vaccinated.

Glympse: Safely share your location by sending a link

Glympse is the easiest way to safely share your location with someone in real time. No sign-up needed and no new social network to manage. Recipients receive a link allowing them to view your ETA and location in real-time for the length of time you choose.
When the timer on your Glympse expires, your location is no longer visible. Best of all, recipients do not need any special software to view a Glympse. Send a Glympse via SMS, email, Facebook or Twitter, and recipients can view it using any web-enabled device. You can also send a Glympse to your Evernote account to save that journey.

-- Awards & Press --
* "[Glympse] is one of those apps that's ingenious in its simplicity, insanely handy to have around, and just a little bit fun to boot." -CNET Reviews
* "Glympse: The Coolest Thing Your Smartphone Can Do" -Fast Company
* Named one of "15 Best Mobile Apps of 2011" -Mashable

How a 12 year old learned to code and build apps

  Ethan learned to code “in about two to three months” on Codecademy during summer vacation between fifth and sixth grade, getting schooled in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and more. Then he put his skills to use with PhoneGap, a framework for building cross-platform mobile apps for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone with web technologies.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/14/this-12-year-old-kid-learned-to-code-on-codecademy-built-5-apps-and-is-speaking-at-sxsw/#tUSy7dXCjKJAxRou.99 

How to make money selling a free product

How does Red Hat make more than $1 billion every year selling free software? As you can probably imagine, I get asked this question a lot. I believe it comes down to two things: we’ve figured out how to harness the power of the open source development model while adding unique value enterprises need. We bring the best ideas from the tens of thousands of open source projects to our customers -- which include 90+ percent of the Fortune 500 companies. We “harden” successful community projects, and create technologies that businesses and governments feel secure using. Even though the core components of our technologies are free, Red Hat makes these technologies stable, secure and supported for business use.

But, if you’ve never participated in an open source project or explored an open source community, it can be difficult to conceptualize what it is. So, let’s start with the basics. The open source world is really all about participation--inspiring others to participate in projects and to help find the best solutions.

Whether in the US or abroad, most everyone is familiar with AmericanIdol. While not an open source project or community, AmericanIdol is a good example of the power of participation, and how understanding this power and providing value can be profitable. AmericanIdol has perfected the art of inspiring millions of people to work together toward one end goal--and the show has made millions. So, how do you get people to participate in something for free and make money from it?

1. There has to be a compelling reason that generates participation.

AmericanIdol is more than just a big talent show. It unites people around a common goal and has in turn changed the way the music industry sources new artists. It puts the work of finding talent in the hands of music fans. And it works because the premise is fun and interesting: why let behind-the-scenes music industry ‘hit-makers’ choose the next star when you can do it yourself?

The same can be said of the open source community. Participants in open source decided they wanted a hand in the technology being created. They didn’t want to trust all of the work to the engineers sitting behind the walls of proprietary software companies.

Whether your business is to look for the next breakout pop star or to write software that runs nuclear submarines, if you can create a compelling reason for people to participate, they will.

2. Find a way to generate value...for all parties involved.

The contestants, who want publicity and a chance at a record deal, voluntarily perform for free. AmericanIdol profits from the participation itself. If viewers want to vote on their favorite, they have to tune into the show to see the performances. AmericanIdol makes money from the millions of dollars on advertising and commercials that run throughout the show. All parties in this model find value in participating.

The same could be said for Red Hat. Like American Idol contestants, most open source contributors do so voluntarily. They’re participating because they believe in a larger mission--that technology should be open and shareable. Businesses use open source technologies to tackle their IT challenges because these technologies are agile and flexible. However, businesses want to have confidence that the technology they run is secure and works properly. Red Hat adds value by providing businesses with stable, supported solutions that are dependable and reliable. That is how Red Hat is able to make money selling a free product. All parties find value.

3. Participation results in more than just a win-or-lose proposition.

One of the interesting things about AmericanIdol is that you can come in second or third, but still win. Second- and third-place winners have sold millions of records. If you have talent and appeal to enough viewers, you will sell the music you release.

The same can be said of open source. There are tens of thousands of viable open source projects today, with hundreds of thousands of people contributing code. Not all of these projects will roll up into a standalone software offering, but elements of these projects can be found throughout open source solutions, including Red Hat’s. Participants in open source projects know their code may not show up in a commercial-grade product. But regardless, their code has helped influence the direction of projects, and, ultimately, the face of future technologies.

However, a word of warning. While American Idol has been largely successful, it has hit a bumpy road lately. Viewership has declined and judges are leaving. This speaks to the fragility of participation. It doesn’t matter if it’s an open source project or American Idol; just because people have participated in the past, doesn’t mean they will participate in the future. Engagement has to continue to be stoked and nurtured for participation to be sustained.

While not everyone is faced with the unique challenge of selling a free product, most businesses want to increase participation--be it with customers, partners or with their own associates. If you want to encourage participation, ask yourself these questions:

1. Is there a compelling reason for people to contribute and participate?

2. Does your business model offer opportunities for engagement?

3. Do all participants find value in contributing?

If you can answer those questions with a “yes,” you could be on the right track to fostering participation. Ultimately, I believe that business models that harness the power of participation will do well in this information-rich economy.

How SaaS is triggering the rise of mid-market companies

This is a guest post by Robert Abbott, general partner at Norwest Venture Partners.

The mid-market — companies with 50 to 2,000 employees — is a sleeping giant about to be energized by productivity-boosting software-as-a-service (SaaS). There are huge opportunities for innovative software vendors who can build agile SaaS solutions designed from the ground up for a mobile, social workforce.

The mid-market is still extremely fragmented, served by a multitude of highly specific software solutions for certain business types. For example, there are hundreds of different software solutions designed just for physician groups. Additionally, many vendors in this mid-market segment target specific geographic regions due to the complexity of their solutions and limited sales resources.

In the mid-market, traditional software requires significant capital and operational expenditures in order to install and manage those solutions. This client-server model is crumbling as an increasingly app-savvy workforce armed with ever more powerful smartphones creates a “BYOA” (bring-your-own-application) IT culture.

This BYOA paradigm is a natural extension of the BYOD phenomenon that has brought handheld devices into businesses through the back door. It is no more welcome by IT departments, and even less desirable. The combination of mobile technologies and cloud-based infrastructure is producing a highly individualistic and even anarchic environment with major implications for both customers and software developers. Smaller businesses should find it easier to embrace and harness this anarchy than their larger enterprise counterparts who still have large IT hierarchies struggling for control.

SaaS: native vs. retrofitted

Startup software vendors can take advantage of new technology and infrastructure better than decade-old vendors in this new reality. They have an immense advantage over established players struggling to adapt legacy web 1.0 products to the new paradigm.

As Salesforce approaches its 15th birthday, the SaaS market it pioneered so disruptively is itself feeling disrupted. How businesses view and adopt technology is changing along with how vendors go to market as upstarts like Blue Jeans Network and Xero insinuate themselves into territory previously claimed by the likes of Cisco and Intuit. [Disclosure: Blue Jeans Network is an Norwest Venture Partners portfolio company.]

These newcomers are ushering in a new class of applications inspired by smart mobile devices. Today’s knowledge workers want to use smartphones and tablets to access enterprise data — whether or not their companies have the appropriate policies and security measures in place. The amount of information now available to mobile knowledge workers in real time is staggering, and this is changing the speed at which businesses can react.

Mid-market poised for SaaS migration

Mid-market companies are poised to benefit disproportionately from this trend. By discarding expensive and inaccessible computing infrastructures for cloud-based solutions, they can achieve a much higher level of business process automation for the same or even less IT investment. Risk management is easier, too, with cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions.

Businesses implementing these next-generation SaaS applications report major benefits, including:

• Highly flexible and customizable — adapting readily to changing business practices
• Very scalable — expanding easily to accommodate growth
• More intuitive — end users can do things that used to require a programmer
• Consolidates information — providing more visibility across the business
• Streamlines business processes — freeing up employees and resources
• Enhances communication — more collaboration internally among employees and externally with partners

But perhaps the most powerful capability stems from keeping real-time information at the fingertips of mobile workers. Equipped with this knowledge, they can answer questions on the spot and make decisions faster. An executive in a meeting with a key client can send follow-ups to employees back at the office who can be acting on them before the meeting ends.

Shaking up the software business

This offloading of infrastructure into the cloud similarly frees up software vendors to focus more on the actual business needs of their customers. They are able to automate higher levels of business complexities while not having to focus on the underlying hardware technology.

The SaaS paradigm also reduces the cost of selling to mid-size businesses.

Since products are web-based, they can easily be demonstrated remotely. In addition, search engine and social technologies make it much easier for customers to find software vendors. These inbound tactics combine synergistically with outbound e-mail and telemarketing campaigns, eliminating the need to send a salesperson to each company.

Wrap up

Small and medium-size businesses are the economy’s biggest growth engine, and they stand to benefit disproportionately from this new generation of SaaS offerings. The fragmented mid-market in particular has been struggling well behind the IT curve as it labors under the burden of infrastructure-heavy niche applications or lack of general IT resources.

New cloud-based solutions designed for a mobile and social workforce can lower the cost of IT dramatically and enable a whole new level of efficiency for mid-market businesses. This in turn can give a disproportionate boost to economic growth — and provide an enormous opportunity to nimble and innovative software startups.

Robert Abbott is general partner of Norwest Venture Partners. He is focused on a wide variety of investment categories, including mobile, cloud, and IT infrastructure. His current investments and board seats include Act-On Software, ClariPhy, ClearDATA, Elemental, mBlox and Zenverge. Robert has nine years of operational experience in various roles, from engineering to marketing and product management. Before joining NVP, he was at Silicon Graphics. Prior to Silicon Graphics, he worked at IBM-ROLM Systems.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/16/how-saas-is-triggering-the-rise-of-mid-market-companies/#GZ9otozI5yUVvijB.99 

Search Listings of Venture Capital Firms

Raising capital is an important step to the success of your startup. The right venture capital firm can supply your company advice and mentorship in addition to funding. The VC industry can be competitive, so it's important research the right firm for your business. Consider the firm's location, industry expertise, investment range and investment stage before deciding if it's a good fit.

Below is a listing of the top VC firms for early-stage investments from data-comparison site Find the Best. You can also compare information on more than 900 listed venture capital firms and find more information on how to raise money for your startup below.

Cloud Service Architecture Will Power New Era Of Intelligent, Automated Applications

The new way of the world for most web software development is the assembly of applications from cloud-based APIs. Developers are saving loads of time by pulling in various cloud services and focusing their attention on the novel business logic of their solutions.
Hundreds of new APIs are sprouting up monthly, as tracked on ProgrammableWeb. And as the very existence of a website dedicated to tracking APIs implies, application assembly has fundamentally changed software development. Yet as monumental as that is, it’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to realizing the potential of a cloud service-based architecture. Distributing the logic within an application across numerous centralized cloud services will enable more automated, intelligent applications. And the timing couldn’t be better.
Interestingly, this separation is similar to how software defined networking (SDN) splits the components of a network into a “control” plane and “data” plane to enable more automated, intelligent networks. Just as an SDN controller can analyze data from the various nodes in a network and automatically change the behavior of a network to improve performance or security, a cloud service can analyze data across all the applications it powers and make changes to the applications to improve their behavior or performance.
In fact, a deeper look at SDN offers important clues about the benefits a decoupled architecture can provide for cloud applications. The control plane in SDN contains the intelligence responsible for defining the behavior of the network (the “rules”) while the data plane moves packets within the network according to these rules (the “processing”). Separating the “rules” of how network packets should be processed from the actual processing allows the feedback loop of measure, analyze, and modify that is critical for enabling automated, intelligent networks.
Cloud application architecture does bear some resemblance to SDN, where a centralized intelligent element (a cloud service) often plays the role of analyzing data from across numerous end nodes (in this case application instances) and modifying the behavior of those end nodes. Most startups haven’t exploited this because they have been able to deliver so much value to customers by simply offering a service or application with a modern web-based delivery model. That in and of itself adds enough of a value proposition to get off the ground.
However, as they mature, more and more of these companies will deploy intelligence and automation in their service. This will enable them to use the SDN qualities of their architecture to analyze data from all the applications powered by these services and then modify the application to improve performance or change the behavior of these applications.
One area already leveraging the intelligence enabled by a disaggregated architecture to provide a leap forward in value delivered to customers is security, where large-scale correlation analyses, machine learning, and other big-data techniques are utilized to determine if a threat is present. If a threat is detected, the data is shared across the network, alerting people of the threat. This is an intelligent cloud service at its best.

When I meet with startups offering cloud-based services, the discussion often leads to the tremendous value of the data they are gathering from all the applications that implement their service. But in order to benefit from this data, machine learning heuristics and other advanced analysis techniques will need to be applied so that action can be taken in real time to modify these applications. Centralized, intelligent cloud services will improve the functionality or performance of applications automatically based on the data they are seeing — not unlike Amazon making recommendations for you based on past purchases or ad-tech companies optimize retargeting. While a majority of cloud services startups today are creating a lot of value simply by delivering their service as an easy-to-use API, intelligence and automation is where the next large opportunity lies.

5 tips for social media marketers who want to reach millennials

Millennials are picky when it comes to brand advertising in social networks. But here’s how overcome the ad nausea on Facebook:

1. Understand what millennials want

Gripe all you want about the narcissism of Millennials but recognize that many do have a deep yearning to be valued and influential. These aspirations often stem from unselfish goals, passionate causes and high expectations. If you assume that Millennials are simply entitled and egocentric, your social media will turn them off.

Instead, ask yourself how your social media might give Millennials a chance to be valued and respected with their audiences. When you share exclusive and exciting content and opportunities, and a Millennial shares it, that person gains credibility within his or her network because friends enjoy that post and remember who shared it. Your brand wins and your advocate wins.

2. Remember, millennials are merciless

Conversely, Millennials will be merciless with companies that fail to meet these high expectations. False promises, cheesiness and poor research will get skewered because Millennials also win social points for pointing out dishonesty and absurdity.

3. Help millennials achieve their goals

Your product or service might help people achieve their goals, but they don’t need you to tell them that. A smartphone salesman doesn’t have to tell a tech-savvy high school grad that a device has Bluetooth 4.0 and a 16 megapixel camera. Let Millennials discover your product and its features on their own.

Instead of selling to your brand advocates, educate them, excite them and inspire them—show them how they can achieve their goals with or without your product. The smartphone salesmen should be discussing the best Bluetooth headphones or photo editing apps. Demonstrate thought leadership and empathy for your customers to power advocates.

4. Engage intelligently

Nothing disenchants Millennials more than stupidity. Say something dumb, inaccurate, deceitful or offensive and you shoot revenue in the foot.

Before posting, ask yourself, “Would a Millennial be grateful if someone shared this post?” The answer should always be yes.

Post comments, pose questions and share content that you might discuss at a casual work event or a nice dinner out with friends. Assume that your audience is as smart, thoughtful, fun and interesting as your closest friends, family members and co-workers.

5. The conversation goes both ways

Millennials want to be part of the dialogue. They want their voice heard and pictures used. So leverage this. Polls and contests give followers a chance to be part of action. Polls with controversial questions are addictive because people with a strong opinion want it heard.

If your notion of dialogue is your post anchored with a click-to-purchase button, you’re missing the value of social media. If you’re doing a great job, your audience will produce the bulk of sharing and the most engaging content on your social page.

 

AchieveMint Gives You Cash for Doing Healthy Activities

A startup has designed a platform that aggregates data from select fitness, health and social networking apps you're already using and rewards you with points for healthy behavior.

San Francisco-based AchieveMint currently integrates with platforms like Twitter, Facebook,Foursquare, Meetup, RunKeeper, MapMyFitness and Fitbit. Go for a run, tweet something "healthy," check-in to a health food store or do anything vaguely related to health that's tracked and you'll be rewarded with points on the free service. Once you achieve enough points, you can convert them into merchandise or cash. One thousand points is equivalent to $1.

Even checking in on Foursquare if you go to church or when you visit a beach could earn points.

"We sort of looked at the world and went: okay, if we take a totally non-judgmental view of the planet, what would we consider good?" CEO Mikki Nasch told Mashable. "Let's not judge what we think is right. Let's just go [with] what everybody thinks is right and add all of those as activities that can be registered that would be considered either healthy or good for wellness in general."

With this broad, egalitarian approach to health, Nasch says AchieveMint is really looking at four quadrants: mindfulness, soulfulness, fitness and nutrition.

"We don't think that health is just fitness or just diet," she said. "[We] sort of look at health as a much more holistic thing."

AchieveMint is also a community-driven platform, since Nasch said users can share data and get insights back to help manage fitness goals or chronic conditions.

If you crowdsource a huge amount of information about behaviors, effectively the crowd itself becomes the instructor, the coach — to help me help myself," Nasch said.

The startup, which launched to the public in January, already has about 82,000 users from all over the United States. Nasch hopes with the right amount of data and influence, AchieveMint could even convince people to do something as simple as take the stairs over the elevator.

"You're sort of trying to take the health process — which is really a background process, it's not something we think of everyday — and just occasionally bring it to the foreground so that people are little more conscious about their health and well-being and just reminded to do something good for themselves every single day," she said.

Where Does the Reward Money Come From?

AchieveMint's rewards sound appealing from the consumer standpoint; but how can giving away cash be sustainable for a young company? Nasch told Mashable that since this health data they're gathering hasn't really existed before in aggregate, AchieveMint can sell the aggregate data.

Sponsors — think sports teams and corporations — who want to motivate people to be healthy can fund some of the rewards, too.

AchieveMint previously partnered with the Brooklyn Nets basketball team to encourage users in Brooklyn and 75 miles around it to earn special rewards, such as VIP tickets to the draft or signed merchandise.

Nasch, who has a background in marketing, said throughout her career she has used data in marketing campaigns.

"What I realized is that we've spent an inordinate amount of science and technology on convincing people to buy consumer goods they don't necessarily need or aren't necessarily good for them. And we've spent absolutely no time and energy on trying to convince people to do what's good for them," she said.

Trying AchieveMint Out

I signed up for AchieveMint and linked my own Twitter, Facebook and RunKeeper accounts to the platform.

In the last couple weeks, I've earned points 248 points from my Twitter activity and 66 points for a haphazard two-mile jog with RunKeeper. Rewards for my running made sense, but I wasn't sure why most of my Tweets earned me healthy points. Most of my tweets were not about anything particularly healthy (like this). I reached out to AchieveMint on Thursday and they said it was a "bug that has recently been fixed."

For someone like me who opts not to regularly use geolocation apps, like Foursquare, I wish I could have manually added details about my daily life. But understandably, verifying whether users do what they actually say could open up a whole new can of worms. I also hope AchieveMint starts to partner with more and more apps, like Nike+ — my personal go-to running app. But from my limited time with the platform, I'm impressed by its premise; and as CEO Nasch indicated, these incentives might get some of us more motivated to get active and live a more healthy life.

Gamification and congestion

Congestion is a common problem in services. A large number of customers put demands on the system all at the same time and delays ensue. A few weeks ago we posted about GymFlow, an app that tries to address congestion at health clubs by providing better information. GymFlow doesn’t tell you can’t go to the gym at 5:30. It just points out that the gym is going to be a whole lot less crowded if you got 3:30.

Now the Wall Street Journal has an article on a different way to ease congestion by relying on games and lotteries (Gaming the System to Beat Rush-Hour Traffic, Aug 1). It reports on the work of Balaji Prabhakar, a Stanford Computer Science professor, who has tested out various systems to get commuters to tweak their travel habits. 

Here is a summary of one of Prabhakar’s at his place of employ.

His team recently brought the technique home with a federally funded experiment to help Stanford keep its promise to Santa Clara County to alleviate rush-hour traffic. The 3,900 participants—a significant share of the relevant pool of 8,000 parking-permit holders—installed devices on their cars (soon to be replaced with a smartphone app) and got points for arriving and leaving an hour before or after the rush hour.

The popularity of the Chutes & Ladders-like game stunned Stanford’s director of parking and transportation, Brodie Hamilton. He doubted people would take the time to spin the electronic dice to play it, and insisted that Mr. Prabhakar include an auto-play feature. But, Mr. Hamilton says, “I have people on my staff who play it regularly. People are really into it. Balaji was right!”

About 15% of the trips taken by participants have shifted away from rush hour. Students tend to come and leave later; staff tend to come and leave earlier. Smartphones make all this easier to implement: A new mobile app tracks bikers and walkers and gives them points, too.

Those who commuted off-peak got points to play in the on-line game with a chance to win cash. We are not exactly talking a year’s tuition here. The program’s website touts “random cash rewards from $2 to $50.”

So one way of looking at these programs is to say that they are peak load pricing schemes. If you are willing to travel at some non-peak time, you get a discount. In a case like Stanford in which there is no explicit toll, that discount becomes an outright reward. The twist is that the rewards are random. On average, everyone gets a positive reward. In reality, a lot of people get nothing while one person wins $50.

One might argue that these program are a way to take advantage of people. They are inducing commuters to incur a cost to adjust their schedules for little or no return. However, they are not forcing anyone to participate and these game schemes are less coercive than raising the peak price for everyone. For example, a public transit system might impose a rush hour premium in order to shift some demand to earlier times. But how big does that premium have to be to sway the behavior of a lot of people and what happens to those who cannot adjust their schedule? The article reports that Seattle’s transit system impose a 75¢ premium for travel between 6:00 and 9:00 in the morning. That amounts to less than $200 per year. I have to think that all but the most price sensitive/budget conscious just ignore the fee. But even the cost conscious might be forced to suck it up and pay. If a parent can’t leave the house until the youngest is off to school, leaving before 6:00 is not an option. Implementing peak load pricing is then limited by the political reality that a premium high enough to really sway behavior may be impossible to implement. This gamification approach can scout the negative impact of a high peak price while (apparently) still roping in enough commuters to make a difference.

The one question I have on this is how long the effect lasts. By design a lot of people ain’t going to win much. So what is the incentive to stick with the game over time? Making it easy to participate (e.g., Stanford’s auto play feature) will help, but I have to think that this is out-of-sight out-of-mind and all but a die-hard few stop carrying about the program.