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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: Cant Wait!
Quick Pitch: Cant Wait pushes new movie trailers to your phone, helps you share your favorites and reminds you when they hit theaters.
Genius Idea: Social movie discovery and automatic reminders for movies you want to see.
Movie buffs and occasional film fans alike know the adrenaline rush associated with discovering a new movie that they just cant wait to see in theaters. Cant Wait!, a Y Combinator summer of 2011 class graduate, caters to this crowd with an iPhone application that promises to find them upcoming flicks to get excited about.
Connect to Facebook or Twitter to create an account, then you use the iPhone app to find and watch movie trailers for upcoming feature films. If something catches your eye, click the Cant Wait button to share the activity with your social network friends. The application will later follow up with a reminder when the movie premieres in theaters, and you can choose to purchase tickets in-app via Fandango.
We want to send you new trailers help show you what your friends are watching and remind you when movies come out, Cant Wait! co-founder Eric Florenzano says. People want reminders for the movies theyre excited about seeing, he adds.
The application may sound not all that dissimilar from Flixster or other movie-focused applications, but the difference, says Florenzano, is that Cant Wait! is all about building excitement.
If you look at all apps out there, theyre all about whats out right now, he says. Its a useful thing theyre totally tailored for when youre in the mood to see a movie. What were trying to do is be all about whats coming up its a fundamentally different experience.
Also different is the apps simple, slick and inviting user interface. The experience pivots around movie discovery in an elegant fashion that should appeal to even the most cynical moviegoers.
Cant Wait! sources its movie trailers from YouTube, a strategy that helps the startup avoid licensing costs but also keeps it dependent on YouTubes API. Sometimes thats a liability for instance, early Thursday a broken YouTube API led to app users being unable to watch trailers for several hours.
Released on the App Store in late August, Cant Wait! has been downloaded more than 10,000 times. The application has even received App Store promotional love from Apple.
Florenzano sees the startup expanding beyond movies and into video games and consumer electronics. Cant Wait! currently earns a percentage of the receipts from ticket sales sold through the application, and sees additional monetization opportunities in featuring studio trailers, offering group buying discounts and video game pre-orders.
Cant Wait! is funded by Y Combinator and has raised an additional undisclosed amount of seed funding.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Anders Adermark
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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