Two Wilmington ventures will be among six early-stage companies presenting as part of Friday’s 2015 State of Technology conference hosted by the N.C. Technology Association.

Both SpeedFaces and Waterplay USA will give a five-to-10-minute pitch onstage in front of several hundred conference attendees at the event in Durham. The other four presenting companies are all from the Triangle area.

“The pitch is supposed to be an educational thing about our company, and we’ll be announcing our newest partnership,” Will Smith, Waterplay USA’s CEO, said Thursday. “It will be a good experience and we’ll have some fun with it, especially since we have the vacation season coming up.”

Founded in 2012, Waterplay USA uses proprietary software to operate an online reservation hub for water-related vacation destinations and activities. Smith said the company continues to increase its bookings coverage.

“We are spread throughout all of Florida right now and have activities in 20 other states, including Hawaii, as well as the Virgin Islands,” he said. “We are the largest provider of water-related activities in the U.S.: We list over 2,700 things to do, spread throughout 100-plus destinations.”

Speedfaces, based at tekMountain, is a web-based platform for connecting students with resource people such as mentors and faculty members, according to its website. Users can engage in real-time, one-to-one video conversations with a single person or a series of individuals and have access to other features such as document exchange and conversation archiving.

In selecting early-stage companies for the Startup Showcase, NCTA spokesman Marc Montoro said there are a couple of things the organization looks at.

“One is the technology itself, and the other is whether it’s cutting edge or unique to the market it serves,” he said Thursday, adding that NCTA officials felt Speedfaces’ platform that connects students with mentors and advisors is a “very powerful tool.”

The selection decisions are also influenced by where the startups are in their stage of development, Montoro said, adding that showcased companies are in a good position to get some exposure and funding.  

George Taylor, chairman of Wilmington-based Next Glass, will be on one of the conference’s breakout panels – one whose topic is Big Data. Montoro said Taylor was asked to be on the panel because of the ways in which Next Glass is poised to use the data it collects from the users of its app, which creates a wine and beer preference profile for its users.

“They are going from hundreds of thousands to millions of users. That data will be really useful  to the consumer market as it goes on,” Montoro said.
“They are poised to do great things. While the app itself is valuable to the user, its biggest value is to both the stores that stock wine and beer as well as to brewers and wineries. [Next Glass data] will be impactful information on what new products and flavors to develop.”

Next Glass was the winner of the 2014 Startup Showcase, which also featured Social Pathway Solutions, a Wilmington startup that ultimately was folded into Triangle-based Lea[R]n.