relays the data by Bluetooth to a smart device. Musicians would wear the headset while practicing a piece, which the smart device also records.
Founder Sara Corry said NeuroPractice’s software identifies when a musician is mentally stumbling over a part of the score and alerts him or her to the problem. A musician can then go back and try to master that piece of the composition.
Corry said her product could lead to a more efficient way to teach music performance that is less frustrating for students.
“Instead of playing something over and over and over again, the program will tell you, ‘Hey, you’re messing up in this one second here and this one second here and this one second here.’ So the student only has to practice those three seconds, as opposed to an entire 36-minute concerto. They’re getting a more individualized focus,” Corry said.
Finishing out of the top three were wAkeio and Agribotix.
wAkeio is developing a “social alarm clock” app for mobile devices. The app would let users wake up to videos messages from friends and families, inspirational videos, or their favorite clips.
The team said it surveyed more than 100 people and found that not only were people using the alarm function on their smartphones to wake up, they immediately began using it.
“People are checking their phones between 0 and 10 minutes into their mornings. They’re going to social media, checking their e-mail, checking the weather,” co-founder Deana Rhodes said.
The surveys also showed people wanted to start the day on a positive note.
“People want to wake up to good messages, they don’t just want to wake up to social media platforms they just scroll through or an e-mail that has some bad news, possibly,” she said.
Agribotix’s pitch was that they’re “bringing Old MacDonald into the 21st Century through the use of low-cost, commodity drones that gather data for agriculture to increase profits,” advisor and investor Wayne Greenberg said.
The company plans to build cheap, autonomous drones that take high-resolution images of farmland that farmers could use to identify problems like which parts of their fields need more fertilizer.
The Agribotix team said its drones and software have the potential to save farmers millions of dollars on products like fertilizer and could deliver more timely data at a fraction of the cost of the satellite data that farmers currently rely on.
