Hotels by Day and Encore Alert win pitches at Alley Boost demo day

Why can’t you book a morning, midday or afternoon hotel stay? By making last-minute bookings possible, Hotels By Day won over other startup presentations at Alley Boost’s meetup last March 31 at Mercy College. AlleyBoost had two separate presentations with Encore Alert as the winner in the other room.

https://www.squadup.com/events/alley-boost-startup-pitch-night

Hotels by Day is unlocking latent intra-day inventory, giving premium business and leisure travelers the flexibility of short stays on demand. Intra-day inventory is unsold rooms from the night before it’s pooled with early checkouts, said to be a $19 billion market. Intraday stays are a minimum of 4 hours between 7 am and 7 pm.

With Airbnb turning business away from hotels, HotelsByDay is bringing business back to hotels. Who are these travelers? They’re business travelers and parents who want to want to have some free time from their kids on holiday. The site has reportedly received 30,000 visits in its first month with 70 hotels in 10 cities in its roster. It is looking to raise $3.6 million to scale the business.

Encore Alert identifies key mentions and trends from your brand’s social media and sends you proactive alerts with recommended actions. It reportedly processes 4 million tweets per using its proprietary algorithm.

It aims to become the next-generation of marketing automation, as it thinks alerts help marketers prioritize their time and highest impact opportunities. Clients include IDEO.

Back to the other room, Uptop presented its startups for renters to connect directly with each other. We take a small commission on each transaction. With site beta set to launch in a few days, it has reportedly raised $350,000 but is looking to raise $200,000 more for platforms. With no commission fee, it looks to offer advertisements.

How would you like your news to be more digestible? Sungmin Cho of Glance thinks people’s attention span is shorter these days, so he aims to create a site that summarizes it for you. “We turned them into flash cards, bite-sized facts and insights extracted from daily news stories.”

How will he do it? He reportedly developed a content extraction but it will still have a mix of algorithmic and manual editing. For revenue, he’s looking at sponsored content and SaaS API and CMS. He is raising $850,000.

One VC feedback addressed how it could be better off producing content for hedge fund companies instead of coming up with a consumer app, as 90 percent of any funds raised will only go to marketing.

The runner-up was Jack Lukic of Semantic UI, whose open source UI platform aims to help companies reduce the costs of development and simplify their front end codebase. Lukic was a front and software engineer at Quirky and is a consultant for Chris Hayes.

Semantic’s syntax is based on useful principles from natural language which allows for code that is human-readable, descriptive, and easy to maintain.

Semantic UI comes equipped with a comprehensive theming platform. Powered by 3,000+ underlying variables, and six levels of nested inheritance, front end designers can hone their brand’s visual identity once, then easily port their designs across disparate web products and brand channels.

Its catchy to call the Catzenpup wet food pet feeder the Keurig of pet feeders, but Garrett Wilson who demonstrated it said he is addressing the $4.7 billion USA wet food market. “It’s battery-operated because the UL Listing is expensive.”

For sports fanatics, Barnburner has come up the first location-based sports game. Key things it has on its sleeves: you create a team in under two minutes, earn rewards for points instead of gambling and join the game at any time. It’s currently in development.

Sim Gulati, co-founder & CEO and Bradley Feinstein, co-founder & President are behind Liquid Assets which has developed water- and stain-repellent natural fabrics. Claims to have proprietary hydrophobic nanotechnology implemented on cotton

“We want to work with retail and department stores. We’re going to do it with licensing, so we can be (on the) inside (track),” they said.

“With a scalable supply chain in place, we have opportunity to explore both B2C and B2B opportunities,” Gulati said. It is currently raising $1.5 million.

Ferdinand Piano of DocTourz is banking on the increase in medical tourism these past few years. For people who love to travel, finding a good physician can be hard. It hopes to become the match.com for your global physician search.

Piano said DocTourz is a portal for government to easily manage their cross border healthcare as it offers advanced search and filtering capabilities specifically designed for government buyers. Marc Doria, Lou Holder are part of the team with Narciso Reyes of Google Philippines one of its key advisers.