Montreal’s reelyActive Wins Startup World Competition | Becomes ‘World’s Best Startup’
The Internet of Things, a movement to connect the physical and digital worlds to provide humans with an easier user interface for real-world life is becoming more real everyday, just before our eyes.
According to Cisco the number of connected “things” will balloon to 50 billion by 2020. 2020 seems like a decade away into space, however Motreal-based reelyActive, the winner os Startup World Competition, is doing just this.
Hyperlocal context
ReelyActive enables hyperlocal context discovery (a way to model the physical world at a given instant in time) on any device via a webpage and uses just a simple but clever piece of hardware connected to the cloud. Its novel radio hardware provides a cost-effective, plug-and-play means to identify and locate wireless devices. The startups software associates the identified people and “things” with their existing online data.
The Montreal-based startup beat 15 entrepreneurs from Europe, Africa, North/South America to emerge top at the competition held at Parisoma co-working space. The Startup World Competition promotes startups and entrepreneurship globally and was founded last year by Silicon Valley’s Hermione Way and Erick Davidson.
Internet of things
Belated to be the ‘world’s best startup’ reelyActive’s CEO Jeffrey Dungen and CTO Pier-Olivier Genest say reelyActive’s name stems from the fact that their radio sensors interconnect to form a ‘reel’ which listens for nearby devices that ‘actively’ identify themselves using radio transmissions. The reel can simultaneously support a variety of protocols such as Bluetooth Low Energy, supported by the latest smartphones, wearables and tracking devices such as Tile, as well as reelyActive’s own proprietary radio protocol.
The reels colelcted data which is then processed either by reelyActive’s cloud or a local server, where all relevant information is provided by an API. This allows developers to build their own apps, which currently enable streamlined parking experiences, home and office environments that respond to the presence of their occupants, and analytics for people and things moving through a space.
Virtual footprint
According to the founders, technology can increasingly make sense of one’s virtual footprint on the Internet: website visits, social media trends among otehrs, but it typically lags sorely behind at understanding context in the real world. That’s where they come in.
reelyActive technology captures real-time snapshots of people, places and things at meaningful points of interest. They call this hyperlocal context. reelyActive’s crowdsourced infrastructure identifies virtually any wireless device resulting into a digital representation of the people and things at points of interest which allows the occupants of a space to communicate and collaborate via the web.
Though they are not the first one’s to do this, there fascinating technology is worth celebrating.
Hermione Way, who’s found a way to buy bitcoin in the UK safely, as well as co-founder of Startup World said, “It’s fitting that reelyActive won the competition as our world becomes increasingly connected via the Internet and the barriers to entry are broken down.”
The next billion dollar startup
“We live in a time where building technology startups is truly a global story, all you need is a laptop and a wifi connection and there’s no reason why you can’t build the next Facebook or Google. The next billion dollar startup could well come from Africa or the Middle East,” she added.
reelyActive’s team had an innovative idea with a global impact, and scalability said the judges who included Johnny Diggz Developer Evangelist at Tropo, Lea Bajc Investment Director of Northzone, Wayne Sutton of PitchTio and Noah Doyle Managing Director at Javelin Partners.
The best mobile startup went to Geddit, most innovative startup went to New York’s Placemeter, while the best enterprise startup went to Mexico City’s Modebo and most human impact startup Vancouver’s Change Heroes.
