Zaptap in online contest hoping for chance to pitch its app product to Silicon Valley giants

By Polly Leger – Telegraph Jounal | link to original article

Fredericton startup Zaptap is the only New Brunswick firm in the running for a chance to pitch to Silicon Valley heavyweights at an entrepreneurial conference in Vancouver this August.

Yan Simard, CEO of Zaptap, holds up his cellphone along with a sample of the company’s new product Tuesday afternoon at his home in Fredericton.
Zaptap, formerly airMe and Triptic, has an app to make shopping « more intelligent. » Shoppers can tap their smartphone on a special tag to pull up information, including reviews and tutorials, on the product they’re looking at.

In March the year-old company walked away with $70,000 in equity investment and in-kind services after winning runner-up at the Breakthru awards, New Brunswick’s biennial entrepreneurial competition.

Now, Zaptap is competing for another prize: the chance to pitch its product to web company giants at an web-based startup conference in Vancouver, GROW 2011.

The app-maker is the only New Brunswick company in the running of « launch@GROW, » an online contest where hopefuls post videos detailing their products and the public is asked to vote on their favourites.

The 25 companies to receive the most votes will move on to the semi-finals, where judges with experience with blue-chip organizations, like Yahoo and the Canadian Innovation Exchange, decide which 15 companies will head to Vancouver for the Aug. 17 conference.

Yan Simard, founder and CEO of Zaptap, said his product has what it takes to make it to British Columbia.

« At this point I think we have very good chances of making it to the next round, » he said. On Wednesday, his company was in 16th place.

Zaptap’s strategy is geared toward companies, Simard said. Users must simply own a next-generation smartphone with near field communication, with no downloading or pay wall required.

By tapping on a special sticker, consumers can pull up a profile on whatever they’re browsing, Simard said. Profiles can contain « anything that can be supported on a web format, » from reviews to videos, he said.

« It can be anything that retail companies think is relevant to consumers, » he said, such as coupons for a reward for scanning, web tutorials or wine-tasting pairings.

Getting to meet investors at GROW 2011 would be a major boost for the company, which has a core staff of three.

« For a New Brunswick company it’s pretty hard to get that kind of visibility on the West Coast, » Simard said.

Now in its second year, the GROW conference highlights some of Canada’s « most exciting » startups, said Melissa Burnell of Dealmaker Media in San Francisco, one of the companies behind the conference.

« It’s like American Idol for next-generation entrepreneurs, » said Debbie Landa, CEO of Dealmaker Media.

The winning 15 entrepreneurs of the online contest will have a chance to set up booths and demonstrate their products to 600 attendees, including judges and industry elite, Landa said.

The top prize is a chance for four winners to give a live product pitch on stage.

With speakers from Google, Microsoft, Facebook and LinkedIn milling about the conference, entrepreneurs from across the country will be hoping to make an impression.

Entries for the launch@growth contest can be viewed at www.launchatgrow.strutta.com. Voting ends July 16.