Pitch Party is an event held annually by the Wilson Center to celebrate the successes of local entrepreneurs. The main event is the “pitches” portion of the night where carefully selected entrepreneurs pitch their ideas in an attempt to attract outside investment. This year we happy to say that two of the entrepreneurs Push works with have been selected to pitch their app! We are extremely proud to have helped local entrepreneurs succeed in the burgeoning app market, and it’s a testament to their drive and ambition to have reached such lofty heights already.
Skill Shark
SkillShark is an app specifically targeted at amateur sports evaluations. When building a team, you want the most skilled team you can find, but need balance across multiple metrics, positions, and categories. To achieve this, you need to hold multiple camps to evaluate each player on these metrics, aggregate those scores, and pore over the results to formulate your best team. This takes a lot of paperwork, a lot of manual analysis, and ultimately a lot of time.
SkillShark is built to improve this team selection process. SkillShark has evaluation templates for many sports by including hockey, softball, soccer, baseball, and basketball, but one of its key benefits is the ability to create a custom sport evaluation. If the default template for hockey doesn’t cover your needs, or you need to evaluate a cricket team, you can create a custom evaluation with the metrics and positions specific to your situation.
Once you have selected or created your evaluation template, evaluators use the app to record metrics for each player, which get submitted to the web dashboard. Via this dashboard, administrators can then analyze the result, generate reports, and ultimately choose the best team based on quantitative metrics and not just the eyeball test.
We have heard from some of the managers who have used the app already, and one of them said that it reduced what used to be a 3-day process where evaluators sequestered themselves in a hotel room down to a matter of hours. That’s quite an efficiency gain!
For more information about Skill Shark, visit http://www.skillshark.net/
Ora
Ora is an app that hasn’t even launched yet, but has already saved a life. Ora is an emergency alert system targeted at seniors, though it could be used by anybody who has a medical condition and is living on their own.
The benefits that Ora provides over traditional medic alert systems is the use of a “support network”, the removal of a need for a call center, and the fashionable design of the actual device.
Ora uses a support network called your “loved ones”. A senior can add as many loved ones as desired to their network, and if they ever have an emergency situation, those people will be alerted of the situation via the app.
If nobody in the support network is able to respond, the app will automatically escalate to calling 911 for the senior. The system handles this process automatically, all the senior has to do is press a button and wait for help to arrive.
One of the downsides of standard medic alert systems is they use bracelets or tags that make it easily identifiable, so seniors often feel exposed when wearing them. They aren’t pretty and they send a signal that this person is vulnerable. Ora improves on this by embedding the device in jewelry such as necklaces that people can wear as a fashion piece. They can actually be proud to wear the device!
And since this device communicates with a smartphone via Bluetooth, it means that anywhere the senior goes, they are protected. They aren’t confined to their home, an can continue to have a mobile, productive life while feeling secure, knowing that help is always just a button press away.
To learn more about Ora, visit https://www.myora.ca/