Disney Accelerator Class of 2015 - My Picks (& Pics of Mentor Open House)

 

Disney's highly visible tech accelerator -- appropriately named simply the "Disney Accelerator" -- hosted its open house yesterday for Mentors (am proud to be one of them) to meet the incoming Class of 2015.  10 innovative start-ups hand-picked by the Mouse House -- ranging from robotics (Open Bionics enables amputees to use 3D printing to create affordable bionic hands ... how cool is that?), to artificial intelligence (Imperson enables fans to have conversations with their favorite movie and TV characters, or any character period).  (That's me to the left with long-time friend Marc Zachary, a VP of Disney Interactive.)

Given my increasingly immersive focus, my two stand-outs were:

(1) EMOTIV -- a bioinformatics company that uses EEGs to track mental performance, monitor emotions (including stress levels), and control virtual and physical objects with thoughts (that's me to the right demo-ing with CEO Dr. Geoffrey Mackellar).  Imagine the possibilities here?  Massive.  Not only the obvious (such as focus group testing for media companies), but also much wider applications like overall health and wellness (once again, monitoring stress levels as one example); and

(2) Littlstar -- a VR company that aggregates leading virtual reality content with its device-agnostic discovery and distribution platform (think of it kind of like being a "YouTube for VR").  I spent time with CEO Ben Nunez to learn how he plans to compete with YouTube, among others in the burgeoning space.  Others certainly believe in his vision apart from Disney, since Littlstar just recently demo'd at Bertelsmann Digital Media Investment's (BDMI's) Media Summit in NYC a few weeks back.