South Jersey Startup Roundup: Trion Interactive, SimplFit, and Talkr
Trion Interactive: Al Shermer, Vincenzo Penza, and Tom Kohler, of Trion Interactive (Voorhees), have come a long way since they originally started the business on a farm in Hammonton. Trion Interactive has created a digital platform that solves the problem of video and rich-media mobile advertising. The company works with all the verticals within publication websites to display interactive advertisements through the viewer’s phone or tablet Web browser.
The company began with a publisher-oriented technology, but has since evolved to reflect current trends, and is now fully focused on the latest mobile creative and video options. “With constant upgrades to technology and operating systems, it’s hard to make sure publishers stay ahead of the times. With one line of code, we can now solve most issues of view-ability and creative adaptation that we encounter on smartphones,” said CEO Al Shermer.
Trion Interactive has created a new product that gives new users a choice between managed or self-service media. The users can directly oversee the ads themselves through the technology. “We wanted to focus on the consumer experience for the advertising side. We want our customers to be able to identify and target their audiences in the most engaging formats with the highest view-ability scores.” said Shermer.
SimplFit: SimplFit is an online marketplace where fitness professionals connect with prospective clients through videos. After looking at Internet trends and noticing where the industry was headed, cofounders William Daniel Gizzi (Neptune) and Ian Nugent (Moorestown) decided that the best way to make people accountable for sticking to their fitness regimens was through video.
Early in their careers, Gizzi and Nugent were already heavily involved in the fitness world. The duo watched as their friends avoided fitness regimes by making excuses, such as not having enough time, money, or resources to learn how to work out properly. SimplFit solves that problem through a Web app that streams live videos from the SimplFit website.
The team at SimplFit is currently looking to recruit additional personal trainers and therapists to further test their app. The project has been self-financed so far, but the cofounders are currently in talks with an angel network regarding the possible funding of further development and marketing.
Talkr: If you could make the Mona Lisa talk, what would you want her to say? That was one of the questions Talkr cofounders Doug Perkowski and Jamie Redmond asked themselves when building their company. Based in Ocean Grove, Talkr was created to bring pictures to life.
The former video game developers spent over a year working on the technology behind Talkr, and they launched the product on the Apple App Store in September. The purpose of Talkr is to create engaging, fun, exciting and even viral content for use via social platforms and texting. The app uses advanced 3D technology and proprietary animation algorithms to zoom in on photos of peoples’ faces and give the images life by moving the lips and eyes. It works on pets and inanimate subjects as well.
“Unlike other apps that simply flap the lips, Talkr allows you to create truly realistic talking pictures,” said Perkowski.
“It integrates seamlessly with Apple’s text-to-speech voices in multiple languages, and allows you to simulate conversations between multiple pictures,” he added. “While Talkr is very good at creating silly videos, it has the potential to do much more.”
