Search Engine Leap.It Wins Steve Case's $100K Startup Competition

Steve Case with Leap.it CEO and founder Mike Farmer. (Credit: Rise of the Rest)

In the afternoon of the first day of this weeks Big Kansas City technology entrepreneurship conference, billionaire and ex-CEO of AOL Steve Case listened to ten representatives from ten different startups talk about their companies. They had five minutes to give their pitch (no easy task, as the timer beeped mid-sentence on several occasions) and field questions from Case and a panel of judges.

The prize? A $100,000 investment from Case as part of his Rise of the Rest road tour. During this tour, Case is visiting five cities Detroit, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Kansas City, and St. Louis. At each stop, 10 startup companies compete for that $100,000 investment. The judges for the competition included Gary Shapiro of Consumer Electronics Association; Sarah Granger, an author and entrepreneur; Kimberly Bryant of Black Girls Code; and Robb Heineman, CEO of the soccer team Sporting Kansas City.

Kansas Citys competition was part of the Big Kansas City conference, focusing on technology startups and entrepreneurs. The offerings in the competition were a pretty diverse bunch, ranging from Keyzio, an app-based solution that aims to make buying and selling a house less expensive, to ShotTracker, a wearable that lets you know how well youre playing basketball; to FitBark, a wearable collar for your dog so you can monitor her health.

The winner of the competition and $100,000 investment was Leap.it. The companys goal is modest. They want to challenge Google in the search engine space.

Their key to doing this is by focusing on search results in a different way. For one, rather than a list of text links, Leap.it provides a much richer visual set of search results. Here, for example, is what you get when you type in Forbes:

Example of Leap.it search results.

The search engine is socially based. Search results depend on whats trending on Twitter and other networks, which are then integrated with web results.

Twitters great at real time stuff, founder and CEO Mike Farmer told me. But it doesnt provide context. By relating this to web objects, youre sort of overlaying this real-time stream. Like a map thats overlaid with real-time weather.

Leap.it users can also provide curated searches called perspectives a visually organized group of articles like Best Actors of the Past 50 Years or things to do in New York City or the best amusement park rides.

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Search Engine Leap.It Wins Steve Case's $100K Startup Competition