13 Awesome Startups We Met At The Next Web 2017

#1. Hu:toma — Build your own deep-learning chatbot

I AI chatbot stanno arrivando.

Or are they? 🙄

It’s been about a year since the AI chatbot hype reached its peak at Facebook’s developer conference.

Where you at Google, Facebook and Apple? 🔍

questa GIF epica è stata creata con Guggy (see #13)

A quanto pare la creazione, la scoperta e la monetizzazione di chatbot intelligenti non è esattamente una passeggiata. Soprattutto per i nullatenenti come il sottoscritto. Come funzionano? Quanto sono affidabili?

👉 Not to mention: how the hell do I make one? 🤔

But what if it doesn’t have to be all that difficult?

Hu:toma vuole eliminare il vostro dolore e rimuovere queste barriere all'ingresso per le anime più semplici.

Imagine a place where everyone can build their very own chatbot. Everyone. That includes the I-don’t-know-how-the-fuck-to-code part of the world. That includes you and me.

Hu:toma wants to make building chatbots as easy as playing with Lego. How? By giving you pre-built bots to play around with. You can just handpick the functionalities you’re looking for and hook ‘m up with each other, into your own unique little bot 🤖.

Il vostro BB8. Uno che può prenotare riunioni, darvi indicazioni stradali e parlare con i vostri clienti. Forse a un certo punto vi porterà anche il caffè.

There’s more: deep learning means you can have your bot learn from data you already have in emails, your CRM or chat channels. No need to build conversation trees yourself.

A un certo punto la costruzione di siti web sembrava difficile come la creazione di chatbot oggi. Hu:toma vuole essere per la creazione di chatbot quello che WordPress è per i siti web: altamente personalizzabile e facilissimo per tutti.

Oh, and if you’re one of those crazy people who can actually code chatbots: Hu:toma is the place where you’ll make money 🤑.

#2. Reclutatore — Turbocharge your hiring process

Reclutatore is some of the most impressive piece of HR tech I’ve seen so far.

Hiring the right people is as tough as it is crucial to the good fortune of your business. This is especially true if you’re a startup and need to scale up your team while still thin in resources. One wrong hire can kill your vibe.

Recruitee offre tutto ciò che serve per creare il processo di assunzione perfetto per la vostra azienda. Copre ogni fase del processo:

• ha messo in piedi una bellissima sezione di lavoro sul suo sito web
• diffondere rapidamente gli annunci di lavoro sulle principali job board e su quelle di nicchia
• reperire candidati da tutto il web
• tracciare e gestire i candidati (hanno una pipeline!)
• metriche e analisi potenti per imparare e ottimizzare

Easy and impressive. Truly 👌.

It’s not just the pipeline that made us think of our own software.

Walking up to Recruitee’s booth for a moment we thought they were demo’ing Salesflare. These guys are totally on the same page as us when it comes to UI design. Their software looks superb.

E sentite questa: esiste da appena tre anni e conta già tra i suoi clienti Hotjar, Greenpeace, VICE e Growth Tribe. Oltre a circa altri 2000.

#3. Spencer — All your workplace tools in one app

There’s an app for that!

Well yeah, there’s an app for everything, right? 🙄

Apps are the backbones of today’s enterprises. CRM, ERP and HR tools are key for day-to-day business surviving and thriving.

But they have become so big and omnipresent that they’re now undermining employee engagement and productivity rather than empowering it.

As an employee you’re basically spending your days on hopping from tool to tool, keeping up with the fast flow of information and processes they drive, all in different flows and UIs.

Questi strumenti dovrebbero incrementare la produttività e snellire i processi fino a raggiungere un'efficienza simile a quella delle macchine, ma i dipendenti finiscono per lavorare per le app invece che per il contrario.

In comes Spencer — the virtual employee that keeps up with the enterprise app ecosystem and integrates everything into one single mobile app.

Questo piccolo gioiello consente di effettuare operazioni come l'invio di ordini di acquisto, la richiesta di ferie, la visualizzazione dei numeri di vendita, la prenotazione di sale riunioni e l'invio di notizie aziendali. Tutto dallo stesso posto e dalla stessa interfaccia.

A mobile workplace assistant like Spencer allows employees to reclaim their productivity and creativity. They’ll be better at their jobs and they’ll smile more.

Just a couple of months in their existence, the guys from Spencer already managed to sign three of Belgium’s biggest companies: telecom giants Proximus and Telenet as well as the Dredging, Environmental and Marine Engineering Group, better known as DEME.

#4. Geekbot — Never fu*k up your standup again

La tipica giornata di lavoro dell'Salesflare inizia con una riunione di stand-up.

Each team member stands up (we don’t actually stand up — we should 🙄) and fills in the team on what the hell she/he’s been doing yesterday and what she/he’s planning to do today.

So we all know what the hell everyone is doing. Even if no one actually knows what she/he knows what the hell they’re doing 😜.

Facciamo riunioni in piedi per:

• share understanding of goals — as well as problems and improvements
• coordinare gli sforzi del team
• identificarsi come squadra

One of the main pains about standup meetings is that I often tend to forget what I did the day before. If only I’d have a little minion to keep track of that for me…

GeekBot 🤖 è uno Slackbot che fa il lavoro pesante di stand-up per voi. Ogni giorno, a un'ora prestabilita, chiederà ai membri del team in Slack:

• cosa hanno fatto ieri
• cosa vogliono ottenere oggi
• quali sono i maggiori ostacoli

Once you’re done, Geekbot will post the session to the broadcast channel.

👉 This brings transparency to the team’s efforts and empowers individual leadership as well as self-management.

You also get to dig back into standup archives to check up on what the team’s been doing over a longer time frame. This extends the value of standup meetings from just one day to longer time frames.

GeekBot è già utilizzato da aziende di spicco come Nike, Zappos, Salesforce, Sony, Shopify, AIG, Kissmetrics e altre ancora.

#5. Pluot. — Move over, Skype & Google Hangouts

Pluot. è una startup di videoconferenza appena uscita da Y Combinator.

Vi sento pensare.

Ma non solo un altro.

Pluot’s free version is unlike any other video call software I ever used in terms of audio/video quality, speed and convenience 😯.

👉 One link, one click, one second and you’re sitting in front of each other. No logins, no downloads.

You know when you accidentally switch to your phone’s front camera and all of a sudden you’re staring at your own stupid face? It’s that quick 👇.

Forget about Skype, Slack and Google Hangouts — these guys play in a different league. Sure, Slack is convenient but Pluot also has a Slack integration. It also links with Google Calendars and supports screen sharing.

Pluot. Pro è per le riunioni video a tutti gli effetti. È dotato di un'elegante videocamera e di un microfono per trasformare i televisori in potenti corazzate da conferenza. Perfetto per i team remoti e le aziende presenti in tutto il mondo.

#6. Social.co — Cut social media clutter for good

If you’re doing online marketing like I am, you know how much work it can be to keep up with all of your social media channels. I need about 10 minutes every day when I wake up just to read through my phone’s notifications.

There’s so much clutter. How do you break through the bullshit and stay top of mind with the people that really matter to you?

Disconnecting is not an option. Social media is where you do market research, it’s where you find leads, it’s where you nurture relationships and it’s where you connect with customers

You can’t afford to not show up every day.

For a while I’ve been thinking about ways to lessen the quantity of social media while upping quality and ROI.

Stavo controllando un nuovo carico di notifiche a TNW quando Omer viene da me e mi dice che risolverà i miei problemi con Social.co.

Sure, but… how? His pitch blew me away.

Okay dude… But how? 🤔

It’s quite simple. With Social.co you’ll only get the notifications that matter to you. It will bother you with nothing but notifications related to targeted accounts and keywords you select.

Notifications can be set to appear both immediately and periodically — whatever floats your boat. Minimum disturbance for maximum social impact on customer engagement, business relations and influencer marketing 😍.

Al momento Social.co funziona per Twitter e Instagram, Facebook sarà il prossimo.

La piattaforma è attualmente in fase alfa, il che significa un'enorme opportunità per voi. Iscriviti e aiuta questi ragazzi a perfezionare un prodotto di cui tanti marketer hanno bisogno.

#7. WordLift — Have AI take control of your content

I don’t particularly like SEO.

I prefer to write content for humans rather than for machines. Problem is, if you’re not pleasing the machine, your written-for-humans content may barely get noticed — no matter how awesome it is.

There’s no way around SEO. We all need to suck up and do it.

WordLift vuole togliervi questo peso dalle mani.

Vi presentiamo un plugin per WordPress dotato di intelligenza artificiale che vi aiuterà a incrementare il traffico organico trasformando i vostri articoli in gemme adatte alle macchine, ai crawler di ricerca, ai chatbot e agli assistenti personali come Google Assistant, Siri e Alexa.

The idea is that you can just focus on writing epic content while WordLift does the heavy SEO lifting for you 💪.

WordLift’s magic is driven by Natural Language Processing technology. It analyses articles and transforms text into metadata. That metadata will be automatically published and made available to web crawlers as Five-Star Linked Open Data. If you have no clue what that is, check it out — it’s pretty cool.

👉 This will get you a bunch of content-enriching opportunities like semantic content recommendations, automatic interlinking, data visualisations and free images.

So in a nutshell: WordLift will help you create content that both humans and machines love. Without you having to lift an extra finger 😎.

#8. Nota sul petto — The slow-messaging revolution

Remember the days when you got excited when seeing your phone flash and say ‘You have one new message’? 😍

Da allora le cose si sono accelerate. È arrivato Snapchat e la messaggistica è diventata veloce e senza significato. Certo, i messaggi che si autodistruggono sono divertenti da usare, ma alcune esperienze e alcune persone meritano più di cinque secondi.

Back when I was rocking a Nokia 3310, I kept a secret map of messages that were dear to me. I’d pop them up and read them again at the right time. Can you imagine doing that today?

I mean, do you actually remember what was on the last iMessage, WhatsApp Message, Slack Message, Facebook Message, LinkedIn Message, Twitter Message or Whatever Message you got? 🤔

Chestnote vuole riportare in auge la sensazione di calore che si provava ai tempi, facendo sì che i vostri messaggi siano di nuovo importanti.

Oltre al contenuto stesso (testo, foto o video), è possibile impostare il luogo e l'ora in cui il messaggio si rivelerà. La persona speciale a cui lo inviate potrà aprire il messaggio solo in quel luogo e a quell'ora, trasformandolo in un'esperienza che difficilmente dimenticherà.

It’s a great way to relive old memories that shaped connections with your loved ones. Imagine luring your loved one to the place you had your first date, have them open up a message saying ‘Look up’ and they see you descending from an air balloon with a ring ready to pop the question. (Yes, guilty of being a helpless romantic ✋)

Il chestnote non è solo per il romanticismo. Le aziende possono usarlo per coinvolgere e attivare i clienti. Proprio il mese scorso, Chestnote ha collaborato con il provider di rete belga Mobile Vikings per inviare gli utenti a caccia di premi speciali per Pasqua.

#9. Kontentino — When Buffer doesn’t cut it

Kontentino è uno strumento di gestione e programmazione dei social media.

Soooo, another Hootsuite or Buffer? 🤔

Not quite ☝️.

Kontentino si occupa di ottimizzare i flussi di lavoro della creatività e della produttività di più professionisti e team. Si concentra sulle grandi agenzie di social media e marketing piuttosto che sui soli freelance, sui piccoli team e sugli utenti personali che Hootsuite e Buffer stanno aiutando.

Here’s the problem: the bigger your agency and the bigger the clients you work for, the complexer it gets to collaborate on great content and plan distribution across the social media ecosystem.

For social media to pay off you have to get right the content, format, channel and timing just right — every time again.

Kontentino is designed to make social media content collaboration, planning and approval a piece of cake 🎂.

I creatori di contenuti possono allinearsi intorno a un calendario intuitivo e interattivo, visualizzare in anteprima i post in tutti i formati possibili per i social media e inviarli a un flusso di lavoro di approvazione che include anche il cliente.

👉 Everyone knows at all times what the team is doing and only content everyone approves gets through.

Grandi marchi come Adidas, SAB Miller, Pernot Ricard e Absolut Vodka si affidano già a Kontentino per le loro strategie sui social media.

If you want to dig deeper, Kontentino’s blog has two neat posts where they break down the exact differences between them and both Hootsuite and Buffer, with cases on where one of the two would be the better fit.

#10. AXSemantica — Self-writing content

Aspetta, cosa? Contenuti che si scrivono da soli?

👇 Behold our reaction when we walked by AXSemantics’ booth.

Salesflare is about automation. We want you to use a CRM you don’t have to waste time and energy on. Right now that means it fills out your address book, keeps track of all your contact’s interactions and tells you to follow up when you should. In the future there will be a lot more where that came from. How about self-writing emails? 😏

Hence our interest 😎.

AXSemantics automates content from sources of big data. You can plug it into your systems via REST-API or manually import with .XLS and .CSV. They also provide the possibility to enrich your data with data from partners.

Pensate ai sistemi di commercio, ai database di informazioni sui prodotti, alle piattaforme di business intelligence e simili. Tutti questi sistemi sono ricchi di dati preziosi che AXSemantics può trasformare in contenuti pronti per il sito.

Not sure if you’ll like the content that comes out? No worries, you can set your own wording, linguistic styles and story structures into rulesets to direct the content creation process. You stay in control.

E questo piccolo robot di testo parla ogni lingua del pianeta.

#11. YouTeam — Booking.com for IT outsourcing

Al giorno d'oggi tutti hanno bisogno di uno sviluppatore di software cazzuto.

If you’re ‘everyone’ you know how much of a pain in the ass it can be to find one, let alone a good one.

Currently, there’s about 5 (!) software jobs per available candidate.

That’s a huge problem and it only gets bigger for SMEs and startups. They have a hard time competing for the top dogs out there, leaving them to fight over the crumbs. Not exactly ideal when you’re fighting fierce battles to emerge in your market.

Wouldn’t it be great if a fresh load of experienced engineers would magically appear out of nowhere? 🤔

That’s what YouTeam is working on. Magic ✨. But not out of nowhere.

Turns out a lot great engineers working at software agencies are currently nowhere to be found on the job market while they could be. They could be because that these engineers are often underloaded at their agency and could work on other projects. The problem? They don’t want to freelance or change employer/location.

In effetti, l'inattività del personale tecnico è un problema tipico che si aggiunge a circa 10% di costi per le agenzie di software. Insieme ai bonus S&M e HR, questo può arrivare a un totale di 30% di spese generali.

YouTeam riunisce entrambi i lati dell'equazione, offrendo alle aziende l'opportunità di noleggiare ingegneri di prim'ordine da questo pool di agenzie software.

YouTeam si occupa anche dei rischi legati all'esternalizzazione dell'IT, come il pagamento e il deposito del codice, nonché la verifica indipendente delle competenze.

👉 All you have to do is handpick yourself the best engineer for your team.

YouTeam’s mission: to build the world’s biggest database of idle tech talent. Similar to what our customer Udacity does for tech alumni.

Rimanete sintonizzati per scoprire altre cose fantastiche come l'abbinamento candidato/lavoro guidato dall'intelligenza artificiale, i CV verificati in modo indipendente e le soluzioni per i rimborsi basati sulle prestazioni e altro ancora.

#12. Vainu — Big Data helping you find the best leads

Vainu is your best friend, your least paid employee and your competitor’s worst nightmare.

That’s some solid marketing copy right there 👌.

Question is: is it as awesome as it sounds? 🤔

Vainu doesn’t brew your beer, neither does it bring your coffee. What it does do is bring you leads. Not just any leads — qualified leads.

How? Data baby 😎.

Vainu uses intelligent data collection from millions of open and public data sources to identify prospecting signals. It’ll get you the best leads out of that data based on a set of parameters you set and tell you when the time is right to contact them.

Attualmente dispone di database di Stati Uniti, Finlandia, Svezia, Norvegia, Danimarca e Paesi Bassi da cui pescare i propri contatti. A quanto si dice, Danimarca, Irlanda e Australia sono in arrivo.

They’re already counting big fish like FedEx, DHL and Adecco among their happy customers.

#13. Guggy — Transform any text into epic GIFs

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I have the hots for animated GIFs.

Trovare la GIF perfetta per esprimere un sentimento può essere una rottura di scatole. GIPHY mi ha deluso in più di un'occasione quando ho cercato di trovare una GIF che corrispondesse all'atmosfera che volevo trasmettere nel mio post.

The Guggy-guys (read that out loud, it’s fun) told me their app could give me the perfect GIF for every combination of words I typed in.

Sempre la GIF perfetta a portata di mano.

Ero scettico, ma hanno dimostrato che mi sbagliavo. Guggy aggiunge automaticamente il vostro testo a una serie di GIF correlate e devo dire che fa un ottimo lavoro di ricerca.

Guggy ha bot per Viber, Slack, Messenger, iMessage e Telegram, nonché un'estensione per Chrome e un'API. Per saperne di più, visitate il sito guggy.com.

We tried to talk to all 262 startups at The Next Web but came short of that goal. Not every booth was manned at all times and there’s only so much time in a man’s life, let alone at a two-day conference.

If you were rocking TNW17 with your startup and you believe you should have made this list, please, oh please, let us know! 🤗