We all carry around these amazing devices and it’s incredibly simple to communicate with our friends and our family. But when I want to communicate with the places around me, why is it so hard? I don’t want to hunt through a little contact us page, and then call and press 1 and then 4 and then 6 just to be stuck on hold.

I just want to send a question and get on with my day. With Talk To, now you can. I’m Riley Crane And I’m Stewart Levinson, and we’re the founders of talk to. TalkTo let’s you text any local business as easily as you text your friends so that you can get text responses. And to show you how this works, Riley needs to set up an anniversary date, and he’s going to do it in this six minute demo. He needs a restaurantfront .

He definitely needs some flowers, and he wants to book a room in a really nice hotel. So let’s take a look. The difference is he’s going to do this entirely with text messages. So as he sends this message to Zuni Cafe, Barbara’s favorite, the first thing you notice is it looks very much like SMS.

There’s nothing new to learn. Instead of typing in your friend’s name, you type in the name of the business. You put in the message, “I want a table for two at eight and you send it. You get on with your day. Talkto literally lets you send a message to any local business, even if they’ve never heard of Talkto before.

So, he needs to get some flowers. He doesn’t know the name of a florist. So, he’s going to type in the category of “florist”. It’s going to do a search and, Kevin, could you choose one of them for us? He chooses one of the florists. We’re going to send the message, “Can I pick up some roses at the end of the day when I’m leaving work?” Now Riley is going to stay on the screen for a minute so if messages are coming back we can see those when they come in.

And you’re probably wondering what’s happening to those messages. Talk Two learns how businesses want you to contact them. That florist, perhaps they want to get an SMS on a phone. Another business wants to receive an email. Another business is a sophisticated Twitter user and would rather receive direct messages in Twitter.

The point is, every local business is different, but you’re the customer and your shouldn’t have to care. You should be able to send one message and get on with your day. So I have already gotten a response back from Zooni Cafe, they say they have a table for two at six forty-five or nine, do you prefer up stairs or downstairs?

So I’m going to take table at nine upstairs.

If you send a message to a business that Talk To has not learned anything about yet we don’t yet know how to send messages to them, Talk Two’s call center will actually make a call on your behalf to the call center, get the answer for you, and will send it back to you as a text message good for your, but it is also really good for us, because what we do is we use that as an opportunity to learn more about that business so we automate that process going forward, we now know how they want to receive messages, and we can do it automatically without a call center in the middle.

Now I got another one back from the florist. The Rose Bowl florist has roses available. Would you like the roses in a vase or wrapped. Also would you like red roses or two toned rose with read and cream, I guess I’m going to take red roses.

So the idea here is to realize that some businesses are going to be fast and some are going to be slow. TalkTo is going to track this responsiveness and we’re going to make it public. We want you to be able to make an informed decision when you go to by florist, which florist is likely to get back to you more quickly, based on how they responded to others before you.

So we like to do now is to get a room and a really nice hotel, and Barbara would like a room at the Taj Hampton place hotel in union square, beautiful hotel and so. what, in fact what Riley is doing at this point is searching for hotels so that we can tell you about two really interesting things here in our search.

He searched for Hotel Union Square San Francisco. And we see at the top that the Taj Campton Place Hotel is online, ready to chat with people that want to make reservations. You’ve seen in a buddy list, friends that are online but you haven’t seen in normal search results, businesses that are online and ready to chat with you.

So that’s one thing that’s really powerful. The second thing is that when a business is online, it means that it’s responsive to its customers, and so we move it to the top. It’s like paid search except you don’t have to pay for it. You just have to be responsive to your customers and you’ll be rewarded for it.

So Riley’s going to send a message that says, can I get a room… it is my anniversary and we would like to do something special. And while he’s sending that, let’s just take a minute to talk about how TalkTo is going to make money. We’re going to offer a premium plan to businesses that want to do more than just have chat and offline notifications So there are premium and advanced features that we’ll offer.

We’re also going to offer a premium plan to consumers that would like the call center to always act as a personal assistant, making calls on their behalf. And third, it’s kind of a natural opportunity for advertising and affiliate revenue. because the users of talk to are ready for business. Do you have this product in stock?

Can I get this repaired? Can I book this appointment? It’s the right audience. We’ve got a response back from the Taj Campton Place Hotel, which is online live right now in Union Square if anyone wants to go over there. They wished us a happy anniversary, said they have a Campton suite available, another message just came in, would you also like to dine with us?

So I’m going to get back to them, but in the course of this demo I’ve managed to book a hotel, I’ve got flowers, and I’ve got restaraunt for tonight and I did it all with text messaging.

Our beta is officially open today. Our mission is simple.We want it to be as easy to text local businesses, as it is to text your friends. To our amazing team, thank you, so much and to Tech Crunch. Thank you.

I told to everyone.

Ok judges. George, do you want to kick off any questions? Comments?

Well, there’s a couple of questions, one is large companies are likely to have automated systems to take input from customers, large companies like hotel chains. For simple requests I could see where this might get routed through an application through some kind of adapter. If I had some kind of complex request, isn’t it easier for me to pick up the phone and call someone as opposed instead of having ten texts back and forth?

It, it, it could be and if you want to call we’ll give you the number and you could always call. But I think TalkTo is built for people who think that sync through a contact page, and making a phone call, and pressing one and four and six and going through phone trees is painful and it’s outdated They’ve realized that texting their friends is the way they want to communicate and when you send that first message to a hotel or to a shop to find out something and you get that message back, it’s just delightful because you never had to make that phone call and so I think there’s an opportunity there.

I like that, the intimacy aspect of that, of making the customer feel like they’re engaged with someone. My question was really more about complex customer queries. But thank you.

Ok. Thank you. Kevin?

I love this idea. I think it’s awesome. You know, it reminds me of what Uber has done for transportation, just made it so simple. It’s like a single ush of a button it’s done. I don’t have to call the cab company and tell them where I live and all of those things. I just love the idea of being able to jump on and make a quick text and book something.

It makes complete sense. And I think the premium model of having a paid-for service that is kind of like an American Express card on crack makes sense to me. You know, you call American Express, you try to get a room or whatever and it’s still a lot of hand-holding. that the fact that I can just text is so much more light weight.

Good job.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Hilary.

Yeah I really like this also. I really think it’s awesome. But I was wondering I have two questions, actually. So do restaurants and other businesses show up in the listing?

I’m sorry?

You can’t hear me?

Okay.

Come over here.

Do the restaurants and business show up in the listing like when you’re just searching hotel union square. Do you have a data source for that or do you have to done business with them before?

Yeah, the fact is we’re launching today with all businesses. So that we’re not waiting for businesses to say, “We want to sign up with TalkTo.” If you want to talk to our restaurant or a shop or a hotel they’re there and we’re ready.

Do you give them back any analytics on how often they showed up or anything like that?

Today? No. But that’s definitely something that we’ve talked through with some of the other businesses, and their very interested so we’re working with them on that.

Awesome.

John?

I like the idea because you’re getting really close to the consumer. When you go to market you obviously can’t focus on everything all want. So what vertical are you going to focus on? And then also businesses have so much metadata around their products and prices. And you want to display all that to the consumer so there’s this specialized new item could exist.So you’re going to start with florists or… you know, hotels or.

I think we’re going to start with disrupting the way people communicate with businesses. We want them to stop making phone calls and going through being put on hold, and going through phone trees, and searching for email addresses. but to your point, we really want this to be about text. And I think there will be more advanced opportunities, but the first opportunity for us is completely simplify this so that the consumer can send one message and get on with their day.

Okay.

Any last thoughts from the judges?

Another question. Do you have anything in place to deal with dispute resolution where even with the best intentions there is some miscommunications and the consumer doesn’t what they expected. I mean today we don’t but again we’re coming out of stealth right now. This is the first time we’ve ever said anything publicly about TalkTo and so in this early phase we’ve been focused on consumers.

And so now we’re returning to phase two which is focusing on businesses and building up those tools that their going to need to handle these kinds of dispute resolutions. But at the end of the day you can communicate, you’re sending a text, you can. There’s all that right there.

Can talk to you provide my credit card credentials to the in business so that I can just release that, too.

So this is the one of the most requested things we’ve heard, is that, ok, you’ve enabled us to have this online chat. And we, and you’ve made it very easy. But that premium feature for consumers is not only the availability of the call center in the background, but it’s being able to store your profiles to the that information is available to whatever business you choose to share it with.

Right, ya, awesome. It’s not there, and we’ll look at that for the premium plan.

Quick question, what’s the technology used to route the message to the business? How do they receive it?

So, as mentioned in the talk. It’s a python stack with all real time infrastructure. So everything is technically chat going into the system, so if the business is online, it’s a real time chat. If they’re not online, then Businesses told us that they prefer “route it to our Twitter account, route it to our email, route it to the phone in my pocket”.

Then the phone gets brokered through us, to the business. The message gets brokered back to the consumer without ever sharing any details on either side.

And how about the first time a business has ever contacted inspected if they’re not in you’re database.

This is awesome. One of the best things, we believe, is that we have this database, but we want businesses to want those advanced features. And we’re led to them by consumers. This is all about empowering consumers. They tell us which businesses which they want to communicate with. And if we haven’t learned yet, how to communicate with them.

It gives us our in to the business to say, “How do you want to receive messages from your customers?” And once we do that we can start sending them copy of the conversation that you’ve been having with your customer, “Would you like to sign up”? So it’s a loop to the business, and then for the business to sign up and then tell all of it’s consumers that you can talk to us now, through TalkTo.

Ok, we’re out of time so a big round of applause.

That was a positive shot. All the judges came to like it!