We are on week six of Profiles and Founders: Where Are They Now? As I mentioned in Parts I, II, III, IV, and V, I’ve been contributing to Forbes for two and half years and have had the opportunity to profile great companies and interview some interesting founders. Every once in a while a reader follows up via email asking how a company is doing. I thought it would be neat to do a “where are they now?” series to check in on all the companies profiled in my column. This is the sixth of seven weeks of five company catch-ups. This week we check in with Bodbot, emPOWERED, 1 Second Everyday, Tag, and Medisas.
BodBot
On January 2nd, 2014, I wrote about a startup called BodBot, a popular free personal trainer, strength coach, and performance specialist app. At the time of writing the original post, BodBot had 300k users. They recently passed the half-a-million user mark: people who hail from nearly every country in the world, from the UK to Angola to Nepal. Additionally, they just released the software’s integration with wearable devices, so if you have a Jawbone UP or FitBit, BodBot will use your wearable’s data in BodBot’s recommendations, making use of what is otherwise just data/numbers that you would have to make sense of on your own. For example, your device tells BodBot your sleep behavior; if BodBot determines your sleep to be insufficient, it will make your workout easier to limit injury and it will pull back your carb intake because you'll have a poor insulin response. BodBot is already working toward the next generation of wearable devices, including the
emPowered
On January 30th, 2014, I wrote about a New York-based startup called emPOWERED, a line of tech-enabled fashionable bags. Within 48 hours of writing about them, emPOWERED sold out of their product. And sales have shown no signs of slowing down. Their customer base has expanded internationally with emPOWERED shipping to over 20 countries. Additionally, emPOWERED was accepted into the DENYC fashion accelerator class of 2014 recognizing it’s position as one of the top emerging fashion lines in NYC.
On the product front, the company has introduced two new styles: the large leather tote and, more recently, the wristlet. They’ve also reworked the technology side of the bags making them even more powerful which leads to more charges for your phone. They are currently in the process of developing designer collaborations and bringing on new factories to further scale operations to meet the incredible demand.
1 Second Everyday
On March 20th, 2014, I wrote about a startup called 1 Second Everyday. The concept was simple: every day record one second of video – something that is supposed to help you remember that day. After the year you make a 365 second clip out of it. Since I wrote about 1 Second Everyday a couple of months ago, Jon Favreau’s (Iron Man, Elf) latest film Chef heavily features
Tag
On April 3rd, 2014, I wrote about a startup called Tag, an app that lets you privately share your location with friends. There have been a couple updates for Tag since the article. First, the team there, tested Tag in a college market at Penn State and it saw a big user jump, with over 100 new users signing up daily without any marketing spend. It was all viral by word of mouth. Students are using Tag at Penn State to meet up since it's more private when you want to share a location than Facebook or Instagram. Snapchat doesn't allow location sharing at all. So when you want to tell a few friends where you are, where you're going, or to see who is close by Tag works great.
Tag has spent all summer selecting student ambassadors at other colleges across the nation, and over the course of the fall they will be rolling out Tag to their schools.
In addition to the success on college campuses, Tag was hard at work over the summer rebuilding the app on the backend to be much faster, and streamlining the design to be a lot simpler to use. The update is available in the app store now for iOS, and they are still working on launching Android soon.
Medisas
On April 24th, 2014, I wrote about a startup called Medisas, a company saving lives by providing a cloud-based tool that allows doctors and nurses to safely transfer patient care between shifts, a process known as the ‘handoff’. Since writing about them Medisas has been getting more hospitals up and running. They are taking a more comprehensive approach to solving workflow issues in hospitals - things that affect patient care and hospital efficiency. Medisas is still hyper-focused on helping hospitals eliminate paper from their workflow, which can get lost or misplaced - exposing private patient information.
