The idea behind SwitchPitch is to give startups a chance to flip the script by getting pitched to by some of the biggest corporations New York City had to offer. These corporations already have fully funded projects, but they are looking for delivery on a multitude of technical aspects. The event kicked off with a keynote speech by Gilt founder and chairman Kevin Ryan as he told startups to maintain focus, stick to the fundamentals, and not worry about an exit strategy. Then, the different corporations got to their pitches. To go along with their philosophy of making actionable connections, SwitchPitch launched their proposal platform on October 2. Through this platform, startups can review the pitches, apply for work, and submit their ideas for specific projects. SwitchPitch will hold their next major event in Los Angeles on December 6. The corporations and their projects pitched were:
AccuWeather – My AccuWeather: They are looking to hire a design partner with UX/Design experience across all mobile app platforms to design the My AccuWeather feature to learn your preferences and tell you the best times to get outside and perform your activities.Assurant – Online Collections: This project seeks to create a fair deal: for people in the collections process and provide them an online, private, and consumer friendly collections platform to resolve their debt situations.Assurant – Social Platform for Insurance: Harness social and crowdfunding sources to allow consumers to form their own insurance pools, invite colleagues, and contract directly back with the carriers for the things they need to protect in their lives.Assurant – Warranty Platform: A digital platform that acts as a single place to store and track all of a person’s purchases and associated warranties.Cooking Light – Recipe Controller: They are looking for a better interface that operates between their busy consumers and the 150,000 healthy recipes to reinforce health positive choices through different search, listing, and social functions.CPXi – Drupal & WordPress CMS Integration: bRealTime, the programmatic solutions division of CPXi is looking for a team to develop tools and integration services to allow CMS-enabled publishers to integrate with its ad serving technologies.CPXi – Web Crawlers: They want a team to build web crawlers to crawl, collect, and analyze web pages and sites for higher accuracy in performance prediction.Havas Worldwide – Brand Dashboard: An interactive dashboard that provides a snapshot of a brand’s health, enabling them to display a 360 degree view of that brand: perceptions online and offline, where it’s headed, and how to capitalize on it.HBO – Boxing Tech: They want help to tell the boxing story in a better way by improving the linear broadcast and helping the second stream experience.Meredith – Content Listening: They are looking for a simple way to automate the collection linking and visualization of a brand’s owned and earned content across the digital landscape.Daily News – Elevate Community: Establish a participatory community of Daily News readers by incentivizing positive engagement and the contribution of high quality content.Daily News – Intuitive Interactives: Develop a flexible tool to easily generate user friendly, interactive visualizations of large data sets to complement and enhance editorial content.Daily News – Predictive Intelligence: Create anticipatory tools that evaluate internal analytics, brand identity, user preferences, and online trends to inform editorial decision making.Pitney Bowes – Location Intelligence & Digital Security: Build a tool that allows small and medium business owners to create and view trade area for their business.Population Council – Research Project: Create a simple end-user friendly wizard app, either web based or Windows, which would permit research staff to create their own self report surveys to be used in their research projects.Sports Illustrated – The SI Vault: They are looking for a way to reinvigorate and extract value from the SI Vault, an archive of over 60 years’ worth of magazine covers, stories, photos, web, and video content.The Motley Fool – Fool Vault: Create a digital library that allows members to share and exchange spreadsheets and other resources to increase member engagement and retention.TRA – Research & Analytics: Synchronize display and controls between video and graphs to help generate data input for 30 minute segments of TV as it relates to consumer brand purchases.
