Evomote - Rediscover the TV. Your TV sidekick. BuddyTV - Watch TV Shows, Episode Recaps, Cast Photos, Spoilers. Evomote Hopes to Improve TV Content Discoverability. Evomote is a Spanish startup that hopes to transform your smartphone into a personalized TV guide, and its pitch during the Wayra Madrid Demo Day earlier this week was very well received.
This was a good example of how much startups can change during an acceleration program – for the better. When we first listened to Evomote’s pitch last February, the company’s main focus was to develop a new control system for televisions. While it hasn’t entirely disappeared from its product, it is now focusing much more heavily on content discoverability. According to its CEO, Alberto Soria López, what happened is that its team realized that it could add much more value as a recommendation engine than as a pure TV remote. Discovering content we like is difficult; we may have hundreds of channels, but always end up watching the same ones, or not knowing what to choose. As you can see above, Evomote will now be competing with companies such as BuddyTV and Zeebox, among others. . ➤ Evomote. Tweek. Tweek Launches its Social TV Discovery iPad App. The Next Web is out and about at London Web Summit today, where we’ve already looked at the future of mobile, social and local business, whilst Uber has announced it will be launching in London in time for the Olympics and Jolicloud rolled out a new beta service to help people make sense of their personal cloud.
We also managed to catch up with a berlin-based startup called Tweek, that has just launched a neat new social TV recommendation app for the UK and German markets. The iPad-only app is essentially a ‘layer’ that pulls together live and video-on-demand (Vod) film and TV content, recommended by a user’s social networks. Now by social networks, I of course mean Facebook, which is required to connect with the app when you first sign-up.
Users can also create their own channel, letting other users “tune in”. It’s important to note that Tweek doesn’t host content, but rather connects up with third parties such as YouTube, Netflix and iTunes. . ➤ Tweek. The Challenge for Apps on TV: Turning "Me" into "We" There’s a big difference between a smartphone and a TV.
As developers increasingly look to the opportunities of TV, they will have to shift their focus from thinking about a personal experience to a communal one – and I can’t wait to see what they come up with. The transition to a more ‘app-centric’ approach to TV seems inevitable - Google is courting TV-focused developers, Apple is said to be launching a TV SDK at WWDC next week, Opera and Samsung have TV app stores, and there are bound to be many more opportunities to get apps onto our TVs in the future. While startups well versed in desktop, mobile or Web app development may be tempted to make that leap to the largest screen in the house, developing for TV presents unique challenges that will require some serious thought. Unlike your smartphone, tablet or laptop, a TV is first and foremost a communal device.
We like to huddle around it in groups of family or friends after a hard day’s work. Can we make the personal communal?