Local Heroes: Shifthub’s and Maluuba’s Video Interviews at TechCrunch Toronto

At their Toronto meetup, TechCrunch conducted a number of video interviews with Toronto area-based startups, two of which were Shifthub and Maluuba, which I’m showing below.

Shifthub aims to solve the problems of coordinating the schedules of employees who work in shifts. If you’ve ever worked in retail or at a restaurant or bar, you know how easily bunged up employee scheduling can get, especially when you’ve got factors like high turnover, personal emergencies and people trading shifts. Now that a lot of people’s tips go towards the purchase of a smartphone, a system like Shifthub, which handles the scheduling of staff and lets staff work out changes to their schedules in a way that ensures those changes don’t get lost in the shuffile, makes plenty of sense. Shifthub was founded by my old Tucows coworker James Woods (not the actor/Peter Griffin stalker) and Jeremy Potvin, who chatted with TechCrunch‘s East Coast Editor (and my homeboy) John Biggs in the video below:

The guys at Maluuba describe it as a “do engine” that understands what you say in order to help you get things done. It takes your natural conversations and converts them into queries that are applied to a set of third-party services and takes action on your behalf. Asking Maluuba about when the next showing of Skyfall takes place will show you movie listings for your area and give you the option of setting a reminder or marking a date in your calendar. Wolfram Alpha provides it with general knowledge, while other information is provided by Wikipedia, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Weather Underground, Eventful and more. In the video below, TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook talks with Maluuba’s Tareq and Eric: