Six emerging companies from across North Carolina – Charlotte, Wilmington, Cary, Kernersville, Raleigh – have been selected for the Startup Showcase at NCTA’s upcoming technology conference.

The firms will be featured at NCTA’s annual State of Technology event on May 4-5 in Durham.

Selected firms, with profile information provider by NCTA, are:

A2Z Technology Solutions, Inc. (Bizdial)

  • Web site: www.a2ztechnologysolutions.com (Kernersville, NC)

This company’s patent pending mobile product (Bizdial) allows businesses to provide positive, accurate, and consistent customer experience with their Interactive Voice Response system while reducing telecom and infrastructure charges, system outages, and increasing agent productivity.

Bizdial provides better customer experience while reducing call center operation costs. Bizdial is a mobile application that allows a user to easily and quickly navigate a phone tree associated with a business. The user is able to quickly enter required information in advance, visually navigate the phone tree system, and reach the intended information or department while not having to actively interact with the phone tree. Businesses can increase profits, reduce operation and labor costs, increase employee productivity while increasing customer satisfaction by implementing this innovation in their company.

Edquity

  • Web site: www.edquity.co (Charlotte, NC)

Edquity offers the first of its kind college financial planning and management app for high school and college students, supporting students through each and every financial decision on the long road to college graduation to help students realize a positive return on their college investment.

Edquity first helps students (1) evaluate the short- and long-term financial implications of different colleges of interest to ensure students consider only the universe of schools at which they’re likely to achieve financial success; (2) map out a financial plan at schools of interest to stave off possible financial pressure, inclusive of spending preferences, geographic cost of living, and weekly work obligations; and (3) ultimately navigate real-time financial decisions in college with our budgeting app.

Glance AI

  • Web site: www.glance.ai (Charlotte, NC)

Glance is building a web app to cut the time spent screening applicants and reduce hiring bias. Our product is unique as our system is powered by machine learning algorithms that adapt based on each customer’s hiring data. This allows us to be faster and more accurate than a team of recruiters.

The product hooks up to an applicant tracking system and pulls all the data a company has available. In doing so our algorithms update and adjust based on that companies hiring practices. After the model is trained we provide scoring objectively based on the candidates application. In doing so, we do not factor in name or school. This enables us to objectively rank all incoming talent and score them based on their potential with the employer. Our early customers are instantly shown the best talent without having to manually comb through all the applicants themselves.

Brilliant Sole

  • Web site: www.brilliantsole.com (Wilmington, NC)

Brilliant Sole is the most versatile, cost-efficient, and immersive VR & video game locomotion platform that enables users to control their first person movements with their feet. Our mobile app captures sensor data from our sensor embedded footwear prototypes, outputting as locomotion controls.

It’s widely acknowledged in the VR enthusiast community that current locomotion solutions are inadequate. Using sensor embedded footwear and an easy to use mobile app controller interface, Brilliant Sole has created a way for users to intuitively control the full range of locomotion with the best way we (most of us) know how, our feet. Brilliant Sole has patent pending software pattern recognition methods that enable users to move in all directions from both sitting and standing positions. We’ve even built in a screen panning method so users can sit on their couch while still controlling 360 degrees of movement. Our locomotion speed adjuster on the mobile app insures every user can customize to the speed that feels most natural to them with whatever VR & gaming system they’re currently using.

Roundtable Analytics

  • Web site: www.roundtableanalytics.com (Cary, NC)

Our predictive modeling technology enables anyone who understands emergency department operations and has a few minutes to consider alternative management scenarios by leveraging a customized simulation model of their department, with “Turbo Tax”- like guidance to leverage the powerful analytics.

Our product and service is tailored to each emergency department using routinely collected electronic health record data. In emergency departments where minutes count but patients often wait for hours, managers now have a technology they can use to prospectively consider numerous management alternatives and identify the changes needed to serve their patients and improve their department’s bottom line.

Vijilent

  • Web site: www.vijilent.com (Raleigh, NC)

Vijilent uses AI and NLP to deliver people insights on jurors, witnesses, or even judges for the legal industry. Our DataPortraits provide demographics, emotional intelligence and more in about 30 seconds. Our automated people search process saves lawyers time & money and helps them win cases.

Vijilent’s expertise is in (1) AI, particularly natural language processing and (2) the automation of data retrieval and archiving from online sources. For AI, we use a combination of our own algorithms, which are based on academic research of Dr. Garcia and others, and IBM-Watson for sentiment analysis and emotional intelligence. For data retrieval, we gather only publicly available data. One of our strengths is that we do not require the website address or login information from anyone we search. We can start with an email address and as long as data is public, we can find the site, scrape the data and download it into our analysis. Our expertise is in gathering social media data through our scraping techniques. Lawyer often need these insights as court admissible evidence or to prepare for a case. We speed the search process for them using AI.