Last night the Chicago chapter of Mobile Monday hosted their inaugural mobile pitch challenge at Morningstar, Inc. During the challenge five local mobile startups pitched to an audience full of mobile heavyweights, developers and app enthusiasts. Mobile Mondays invited three judges to the pitch who were tasked with leading the Q&A and picking a winner. Last night's judges were Gary Slack, the chairman of Slack and Company, Dave Hoover, the co-founder of Mobile Makers Academy, and Doejo’s very own Phil Tadros.
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Here are last night's winning pitches.
Arc Mobile
Spolier alert: The winning pitch of the night was Arc Mobile, a mobile payment solution that was created when CEO Tyler Mendoza took a step back and began looking at the process of mobile payments as a whole. After realizing that mobile payments are only part of the solution he set out to create a product specifically targeted towards the service sector, like restaurants. Arc Mobile allows users to pull the bill directly from the merchant to their phone, enabling them to split the check by number of diners, percent or item with no additional hardware on the merchant side. Arc Mobile is not just focused on providing an easier payment solution: they also want to help restaurants verify problems and fix them before the consumer goes home. “The future is everything around mobile payments,” Mendoza said.
Curve
Second place went to Curve, a mobile app aiming to streamline the complex, outdated and unfriendly design of digital calendars. Completely visual and simple to use, Curve works with existing calendars such as Outlook, Google and Yahoo, among others. Curve is a “visual time machine that graphically represents life events,” said Peter Jameson, CEO of Curve. More than just logistics, Curve allows users to share data, helping them stay synchronized and connected. Curve can also be used as a crowd-sourcing platform to gather photos, video and attendance from events, thereby helping users visualize their memories.
