Welcome Batch 5: Meet the teams🚀

More than a hundred applications and it all comes down to nine teams. Our batch 5 is a new international mix: the startups come from Iceland, Germany, USA, UK and Austria. 🌏 Each one works with a trend: collaborative social stories, bots, group challenges, news verification, data visualization, listenable news, smart shopping, new work and content monetization.

Here are our batch 5 startups:

asap.industries (Germany): a SaaS model which helps companies to manage the constantly growing freelance workforce.

A freelancer database — is that like a LinkedIn or Xing for freelancers? Not at all. We offer a company-internal(!) database which collects all knowledge about freelancers from all departments and team members. Xing or Linkedin are more like a huge telephone book, while asap is the (nicely curated) contact list in your phone. And because asap is a cloud based (SSL2 secure of course) the information is available to all relevant team members. And ONLY for them.

• Contact Andre Hennen at welcome@asap.industries

Breaker (USA) An algorithm and search engine for breaking information, with tools to help identify the source and the veracity.

How does Breaker help media publishers in the fight against fake news? Breaker helps journalists beat fake news by giving them tools to measure, assess, and communicate with sources as important stories break. Our algorithm can identify relevant breaking information and indicate how trustworthy the information is based on semantic processing and social graphing.

• Contact Jeff Myers at jeff@breaker.news

Bricking News(UK): Compose your daily listenable news playlist

What makes Bricking different from podcasts and other apps for listening to news? In a podcast of average length you typically listen to one track for 20 mins. How many of those 20 mins do you actually listen to ? We let you put together many micro-podcasts of the average length of 3 mins. This in our opinion allows you to get more picky and precise about what to listen to. Plus, most audio services let you listen to one audio article at a time, without the possibility to create a playlist. We do that, and you can listen to them in human voice.

• Contact Davide Lovato at dav.lovato@gmail.com

Cutnut (Germany) Everyone’s memories together in one story

After Snapchat and Instagram, is Cutnut what’s next for Stories? Cutnut is first and foremost a tool for social story creation and as such we want to very clearly separate it from social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram, as we see Cutnut much more as a catalyst for easily creating stories together with friends, and then sharing these stories on the other platforms or directly via link.

• Contact Phillip Nette at p.nette@cutnut.net

iBot(Iceland): a Chatbot building software focused on ecommerce that helps online store owners build, host and deploy product-smart chatbot on Facebook Messenger.

You say you are part of the “chatbot revolution”. What is the unique characteristic that iBot brings to the movement? We make it super easy for ecommerce companies to build, host and launch an ecommerce chatbot on Messenger. Other chatbot builders are very general, so creating an ecommerce chatbot using their system is not straightforward. With iBot you can build an ecommerce chatbot in minutes.

• Contact Patrekur Magnusson at patrekur@ibot.is

Rawr (Austria) organizes the world’s opinion and makes it universally accessible and useful

You are fighting for new journalism, but no one in the team is actually a journalist. Where does the passion come from? We are not only fighting for new journalism — We are fighting for free speech, which affects everyone. Though we don’t have a journalist in the founding team we are getting much feedback from external journalists.

• Contact Tassia Breidenbrücker at tassia@rawr.at

Smob (Germany) The app to challenge your friends to share pictures everyday.

Sharing pictures everyday, isn’t that a bit exhausting? Not at all. Because our target audience is young people who have a lot of free time (after school and homework, for example). In their free time they watch videos — we want them to interact. We believe that people want to interact and the reason why they aren’t doing it is because they actually don’t have a platform to do so. Instagram and Snapchat? You need a lot of followers to have fun. Youtube? Videos are hard to edit. Facebook? Well, their parents are there. Smob is the place where they can spend their time on social media.

• Contact Nicolaj Grabert at nick@smobapp.com

Toby (Austria) A connected shopping assistant with artificial intelligence.

Why everyone needs a shopping list in their wishilist? Because you will always have everything you need and be more efficient in planning your shopping.

• Contact Danny Kleckers at danny@tobyapp.com

23° (Austria) Easily find reliable data in one place, already visualized and ready to use for all your publications.

What’s the story behind your startup name? Earth’s axial tilt on its way surrounding the sun is around 23°. Our planet is tilted! There is no alternative view, no need to adjust this. We realized that this metaphor is not just describing our mind set but is also our platform’s promise: we show things the way they actually are. We provide people with facts they can decide upon, not with alternative facts they can argue about.

• Contact Pia Stephan at pia.stephan@23degrees.io

And more…🚀

• Mark your calendars 📆 Our Demo Day will take place on December 14th in Hamburg
• Do you want to meet the teams or run pilots with them? Contact us.
• Batch 5 Roadshow🚗 We’ll be in Munich (September 5th) and Berlin (October 6th) with the teams. Media representatives and publishers: want meet us on the road? Let’s arrange a meeting.

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