Two new offerings have come out of companies led by former leaders within Canadian tech giants.
Founded by Shopify alumni Robleh Jama, CEO, and Krishna Satya, CTO, Boom is looking to inject energy into remote work meetings with camera personalization tools. The MacOS app works with multiple video-calling platforms and allows users to add branded overlays, titles, and logos to their camera feed, whether they’re just talking, creating a special presentation overlay, or making a splash screen for when their camera is off. The app also provides a media board for users to play GIFs, effects, and clips in place of their camera.
“Despite what skeptics say, remote work works,” Boom says on its website. “But we need to stop recreating the old office online and start embracing the internet-native reality that made remote work possible in the first place.”
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Jama led Toronto-based mobile studio Tiny Hearts to be acquired by Shopify in 2016, where he went on to serve as Shopify’s director of product for the Shop app, and later director of product for blockchain, until departing the company in April 2023.
Boom is currently pricing its offering at $15 per month, billed annually, as part of a launch sale.
Meanwhile, goConfirm, a Toronto-based identity-verification platform founded by former Wave CEO Kirk Simpson and early Wave investor Peter Carrescia, has released a new tool that can vet suspicious emails and texts. Dubbed ScamSpotter, users simply upload a screenshot of the suspicious email or text to its website, where a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bot analyzes the likelihood of a scam. goConfirm says screenshots are deleted as soon as a user leaves the page.
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goConfirm, formerly known as just Confirm (and before that, Qui Identity), officially launched its flagship product, which aims to make peer-to-peer selling over online marketplaces safer, in December.
The goConfirm platform allows users to create a ConfirmID by submitting a headshot and government-issued document, which is then verified by Persona. Users create transactions with their ConfirmID and send to another party when facilitating an online transaction to confirm the identity of the buyer and seller without oversharing personal information.
“Working in this space, we quickly saw firsthand how people were being lured into online scams by bad actors impersonating people, companies, and government agencies, and knew there was a way we could help,” Simpson said in a statement. “By leveraging generative AI technology, we have been able to build a tool that can help people identify and avoid online scams.”
goConfirm said ScamSpotter was developed with OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 Turbo model, alongside its own training data, and will be updated and adapted as the AI evolves.
DISCLOSURE: Boom is founded by former colleagues of the co-founders of Good Future, which is the majority owner of BetaKit.
Feature image courtesy Boom via YouTube.