One of the most promising startups to emerge out of Ryerson's Digital Media Zone incubator over the past year was
Scanly, an app that gave students discounts from various retailers through their mobile phones. Business prospects appeared so encouraging after the company's launch in September 2011, the founders applied to and were accepted for a session at Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator that may be the most renowned in the world.
Interestingly, the company has returned reimagined, reinvented and renamed.
"As we prepared to go to California and scale up Scanly, we realized that expanding it beyond Ryerson would be very costly and risky, and that the business could never become truly big," founder Martin Drashkov
writes about the experience. "Abandoning a product and starting anew is always tough, but thankfully we had the support of the Y Combinator partners and the awesome YC Alumni community."
The reinvented company recently launched in its new incarnation,
Kyte, an app that allows any Android phone to be turned into a children's phone. "After doing some research, we realized we could write an app that runs on Android phones and completely locks down the phone into a limited, kid-mode, while letting parents control the phone from the web," writes Drashkov. "We had stumbled on a very interesting idea—we would be the ones to make sure every child in the world can get a smartphone!"
The app allows parents to control their kids' web experience and track their location by GPS. Work on the new product began in January. The Y Combinator process of mentorship helped with the development process. Finally, Kyte
launched at the accelerator's Demo day last month.
Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Lauren Schnieder, Ryerson DMZ;
Martin Drashkov, Kyte