This is part 2 of our two-part introduction to our Cal Hacks Fellowship teams. Like we included in our previous post, Cal Hacks Fellowship is a 12-week idea accelerator program for some of the most promising ideas from Cal Hacks’s fall hackathon. Our goal is to help hackers take their ideas beyond the hackathon, to help grow them into startups, nonprofit ventures, and successful side projects. This year, we worked with 10 of the top teams from Cal Hacks 5.0. Here is a glimpse at some of our teams that you’ll hear from at our Fellowship Demo Day.
FitPic
An image-based fitness tracking app.
The fitness tracking industry is expected to reach a total market value of $62.128 million by 2023. But, there’s one problem — today’s fitness trackers only measure the inputs into your body (calories etc.), not the outputs. No one cares about calories; we want to know how our bodies are changing. So, why don’t we track body progress directly? FitPic is the first image-based fitness tracker to help you track how your body is improving and actually changing over time. From a picture, it uses machine learning to help you visualize your muscle gains and body fat losses and help you find the best fitness and diet routines for you to achieve your goals. Moving forward, FitPic wants to become the first all-in-one solution for personal training and nutrition.
If you’d like to learn more about FitPic, check out their website!
Firesight
Making emergencies safer with better information.
Firesight lies within the security and smart home industry. Here, the video surveillance market cap is expected to be $68.3 billion by 2023, with home security cameras comprising $9.3 billion. Firesight identified the lack of information available about victim’s locations in the case of emergencies or disasters. When firefighters and first responders arrive at the scene, they don’t know where victims are and must analyze the situation, which wastes precious time in life and death situations. Firesight uses machine vision to keep track of the number of people in the spaces within a building. By combining this information with a floorplan of the building, they create a real-time map of where people are. This information can then be accessed by first responders and security. Moving forward, they aim to finish building an MVP, and find first potential customers. They will begin by targeting high-density living spaces, such as dorms and apartments.
Spave
Helping dining places predict production quantity.
Spave’s waste recovery technology is highly relevant in today’s world where 84.3% of unused leftover food in restaurants lands up in trash cans. This not only poses an environmental threat but also leads to resource wastage and high costs for the dining industry. Spave helps dining settings optimize cost and resource usage. A simple data logger and analysis application, it works on a regression model where restaurants’ data on daily production and leftovers is modelled to provide production insights. With its easy-to-use nature, cost-effectiveness, and personalized results, Spave is the cutting-edge solution for today’s dining industry. Looking forward, Rajavi and Richa (founders at Spave) are working in close coordination with sustainability groups and student leaders at Indiana University, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, and UC Davis to help deploy this technology in their respective dining facilities. The team is also deploying the product for a one-month trial in few Santa Cruz restaurants
Phytal
Predicting Plant Health. Simply and Straightaway.
The tomato is the second-most cultivated plant in the world. Over 200 pests and diseases cause losses in the production of tomatoes, resulting in millions of acres wasted. There are no current solutions that give real-time diagnoses of the health of crops. That’s where Phytal comes in. With Phytal, you can sense early indications of these problems significantly before the tomatoes start dying. Using their sensor with bio-engineered yeast, Phytal is able to tell how tomatoes are doing in real-time, just like your body knows when you are sick. Moving forward, Phytal plans on extending their biosensing platform to a variety of other crops and increase the precision of our biosensors to detect much more specific problems. But beyond that, their vision is to develop Big Data for the Environment, to allow climate scientists to have vast, accurate, and real-time data on the health of the Earth’s ecosystems. They envision a world where the health of the planet is as predictable as yours.
Periodic
A subscription service for feminine hygiene products with a focus on empowering low-income women.
Two-thirds of poor US women can’t afford menstrual products. Periodic is trying to solve this problem with a “buy a box, donate a box” framework. They are a subscription service that tailors to women who want a more convenient way of acquiring feminine hygiene products, while also contributing to a good cause. Periodic specializes in personalized boxes filled with feminine hygiene products. For every box purchased, one gets donated to a woman in need. Periodic’s next steps include partnering with popular femme care brands like Tampax and Always. They would also like to partner with local women shelters to give our brand more credibility in the community.
If you’d like to get in touch with any of our companies, feel free to reach out to deevy@calhacks.io and he can set up an introduction.
See this story to learn more about Fellowship and previous teams, and the Cal Hacks website to learn more about our organization!
