There’s hope for the youth of today, and Canadians are a charming people. Those were two of the key takeaways from StartupCamp, an ITEXPO East co-located event that took place last night in a large and busy room at the convention center in Miami.
As in ITEXPOs past, StartupCamp was hosted by Larry Lisser, principal of Embrase Business Consulting, and featured a brief keynote followed by short presentations by a handful of startups, who were then judged on their abilities to communicate their business propositions.
The clear standout among the presenters was Michael Koetting, the young CEO of Hoot.Me LLC, which is based out of the University of Texas at Austin. Koetting actually opened his presentation by announcing that the first version of the Hoot App was officially launched at StartupCamp last night.
Hoot.Me is an application that enables students to get help on homework via Facebook through an app that includes multi-person video communications. There’s a free, P2P-based aspect of Hoot that enables students to work with their friends to solve a problem. But the company hopes to make money by charging students to access to paid tutors on the service. Koetting says Hoot.Me estimates the average cost of a session will be about $3.59 and that it only needs 1.4 percent of its sessions to be paid to subsidize the unpaid part.
For more about StartupCamp, and what charming Canadians had to do with it, look for my upcoming story on TMCnet.
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