Putting the Cafe Meeting in a Browser -- Looking at FreshTag, a BizSpark Member Company
Guest blog post by Prateek Gupta, founder of FreshTag, an app that connects multiple people by entering hashtags or clicking a link.
FreshTag was founded at a San Francisco hackathon in June 2012. Co-founder Ben Denial and I attended it to work on a simple idea to connect people on browser-based video platforms in the most efficient and simple way. We teamed up with engineers Jon Bardin & Cody Byrnes to win 2nd place after 18 hours of constant work to develop the first prototype. We launched in Demo Fall Conference 2012 with a full scholarship and valuation of $1.5 million.
The FreshTag team using FreshTag... Meta
FreshTag connects multiple accounts, and this is kind of how it works. Lets say we get together, so we create Freshtag.me/PrateekDougMeeting. We take the real-life "Starbucks meeting" concept online, and make it literally the easiest way to bring friends/family/biz-partners face-2-face without downloading a client software or plugin, opening a login account, dealing with username & password, exchanging usernames and adding/friending contacts to video chat. The problem we are solving with FreshTag is lifting the barriers of video conferencing. Think about video chatting with your grandma without any technical irritations.
It's like meet me at FreshTag.Me/UniqueKeyword at 2PM.
Our vision is it keep our product simple and user-friendly to consumers for a beautiful experience.
From a business point of view, FreshTag is in talks with several universities to solve the problem of faculty office hours, team meetings, group study & on-campus broadcasting.
A. Every green sheet will have a unique link (Stanford.edu/Spr13Bus1ASec1) where a professor will be hosting office hours virtually. These days, students are not leveraging office hours because classes are on Mon and Wed, and professor holds office hours on Thursday, students are either busy at work or are in another class. We make it more flexible and keeping it virtual to fit the schedule of students.
B. There is always something happening on college/university campus, but as a student, parent, alumni; I am not physically there to be involved.
Imagine: Stanford.edu/Live
This is the place where a university will be broadcasting their events like speeches, seminars, sports etc. Technically, FreshTag is very flexible and can be implement on an existing tech-ecosystems.
Currently, we are working very hard to bring FreshTag on mobile as well. You can come chat with us on our Facebook page, if you have any questions. Or leave me some questions in the comment section here.