One of the highlights of last year’s IoT Evolution Expo was the AT&T (News - Alert) Fast Pitch competition, which brought together some of the best and brightest minds in IoT development to pitch their ideas head-to-head for a shot at $10,000 in funding for their idea and a tablet.
Well, the AT&T Fast Pitch competition is back again this year and it looks like the competition is going to be just as hot as ever. Like last year, there will be two winners. This year, however, one will get $5,000 and one will get a $10,000 grand prize.
One of the winners last year was two-man team Zachary Stovall and Kyle Cornelius, co-founders of Storific, the victorious idea they pitched last year. Storific was a free mobile phone app that helped users order and pay for food at restaurants without waiting in line, and let the participating businesses better plan for high volume times of day.
Since then, and partly thanks to Fast Pitch funding, the business has grown considerably. We spoke to Stovall to catch up with him and find out what the company has been up to in the last year.
“Winning validated a lot of our ideas for us,” he said. “We had some great news exposure and we ended up making a deal to get our system fully integrated into the biggest POS systems in the country thanks to that exposure.”
He said that now his client just makes sure restaurants train their staffers to use the Storific program as part of its regular POS trainings, streamlining the process and making mass market adoption much easier. Since that deal was signed, Storific has continued building partnerships to grow the business into even more markets.
“The Expo was a great place for networking and meeting the key technology people we needed to get to know,” Stovall said. “We’re always trying to keep growing.”
If you think that your idea is good enough to take on all comers in this year’s AT&T Fast Pitch competition, click here and sign up. And if you’re just looking for the best new ideas in IoT development, register now to be at the IoT Evolution Expo, from August 17 to 20 at Caesars in Las Vegas, and get exclusive access to the competitors.
See you in Sin City.