StartUp Beat

 

Web Site:  www.circleup.com
Headquarters:  Newport Beach, Calif.
Year Founded:  2006
Founders:  John Payne; Doug Tung; Jim Jonassen
Investors:  Sid R. Bass Associates and early angel investors
Employees:  15
Total Capital Raised:  $3 Million
Company News:  www.circleup.com/my/cu/info/press/

By John Payne, Co-Founder and CEO

The evolution of emailing has been incredible to watch since its inception.  From a techie tool used by engineers, academics and scientists to the defacto method of communication for hundreds of millions of people, email has transformed the way that people from all walks of life communicate.  Instant messaging has been hot on its heels in the younger demographic and is now reaching critical mass even in the enterprise.  With emails worldwide totaling almost 100 billion messages daily, an almost unmanageable torrent of information flows every single day.  And with the emergence of the social platforms and their proprietary messaging and publishing systems at places like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and others, the problem of group collaboration and communication across these heterogenous messaging systems has continued to grow.

It is no surprise that although Internet communications among groups is the most widely used collaboration tool in existence, the messaging systems themselves have proven to be relatively inefficient when it comes to group communication and information gathering.

For a year now, CircleUp has turbo-charged group communication via email, instant messaging and social networking services already in use around the world today.  Where messaging has failed, CircleUp has taken the lead in creating an innovative communications tool that allows users to gather information, make plans or decisions and collaborate more effectively.  CircleUp is a social communications service for real world groups that is built to make people’s lives easier and reduce information overload.

Why CircleUp?

Today, when you ask a specific question or gather information from online and “real world” communities you get back a blizzard of emails that often include random answers, distractions and extraneous details that complicate and delay the information gathering, collaboration and decision-making process.  The problem today really has three parts: You ask for information, opinions, decisions, facts or guidance from 30 people in a group you belong to, and you get back 35 emails or instant messages to sort through, including tons of “reply to alls” that really gum up the works.

You not only have to find and open all 35 emails or instant messages, but you have to painstakingly cut and paste the information you need to get the group information all in one place.

Once you have it in one place, it’s buried on your hard drive somewhere it can’t be used or shared by anyone but you!

CircleUp solves that problem with a unique new social communications service that gathers the answers and presents you and the group with a single, organized result that can be used and shared by everyone.

CircleUp is a free service for consumers, professionals and small businesses.  There is no charge to ask or answer questions, and no registration, download, or membership required for those who are circled-up.  The service uses your messaging credentials as a proxy for membership in a group you already belong to.

Who Can Benefit From CircleUp?

Campus Clubs Use It: Send a CircleUp to 100 people in the campus ski club asking for drivers for the spring trip to Lake Tahoe.  Get back a breakdown of who can drive, who needs a ride, and how many snowboards fit on top of each car instead of sorting through a flurry of 80 IM and email responses.

Businesses Use It: The event coordinator sends a CircleUp to ask 50 sales managers for their flight arrival and departure information so she could schedule airport pickups and hotel arrivals and gets back a single list of arrival and departure info instead of 50 emails.

Politicos Use It: CircleUp with 100 local campaign volunteers to see who can attend the big rally, who needs a ride, who can drive and who has a truck or van to haul the really big signs.  Get back a single list of all attendees that can be shared by riders and drivers.

Coaches Use It: Expedite a CircleUp to the families of 20 kids who made the traveling team for the big soccer tournament, asking how many tournament T-shirts they want.  Get back an exact list of shirt sizes instead of 27 emails and IMs.

 

 

CircleUp Results

How Do I "CircleUp"? 

CircleUp was created with the mainstream email and IM user in mind: techie or non-techie, the mom on the go, the soccer coach dad, the president of the university ski club, or the event coordinator of a top company.  

Simply ask a question using the CircleUp Wizard found at www.circleup.com and integrated to messaging applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Facebook or at www.circleup.com.

Then choose a specific AnswerPattern, which determines how the results (answers) will be returned, putting an end to the back-and-forth that often goes along with getting incomplete or incorrect information while organizing them in one single location.

 

If you are on the receiving end of a CircleUp question, you will get what looks like a normal email, Facebook message or notification or IM from the questioner.  So, if you typically communicate with friends or colleagues through Yahoo! IM or through email, that mode of communication will not change.  You will only realize that you’ve been circled up when a Flash-based QuestionBox widget with the sender’s picture appears on your desktop or in a browser to explain the question and collect your answer.

 

The respondent makes a quick, focused response that’s even easier and more efficient for them than crafting a response to the email.  And the results are aggregated for all riders and drivers to share.

Most widgets today are distribution endpoints, a way for someone to take something from his/her site and offer distribution everywhere.  As you can see in discussion above, we’ve turned the traditional widget model on its head by using the widget as a collection endpoint.  CircleUp widgets act as a tool to focus a user on a specific task and gather very specific information or decisions.

CircleUp is Now on Facebook Platform

CircleUp recently announced the availability of its powerful new messaging features on Facebook Platform that significantly enhances the power and utility of Facebook groups, events and Friend Lists when added to any user’s profile on Facebook.

With CircleUp, group leaders and members can collaborate effectively via Facebook with simplicity, time savings and flexibility.  CircleUp builds a user customized messaging application on the fly which is delivered to recipients via Facebook messaging, posting to the group wall or individual profiles, newsfeeds, notifications, the CircleUp Inbox and optional email messaging.  Responses from all group members are organized, summarized and presented on a public or private results page inside the CircleUp application on Facebook Platform that can be accessed directly from links on the group page.  The results can exported to XLS or PDF files, viewed and mashed-up with other applications using Microformats, or continually updated in an RSS feed or daily HTML email Daily Roundup.

CircleUp is one of the first applications to take advantage of recently available features in the Facebook Platform api to access informal groups of friends via Facebook Friend List.  To check out the new Facebook application from CircleUp, go to http://apps.facebook.com/circleup/.

CircleUp Continues to Make Group Communication Painless

Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 100,000 registered leaders who can use CircleUp to reach 4.5 million members in their various groups, teams, clubs and business organizations.  To meet the demands of our expanding user base, we have added exciting new features to our application.  Some of these new features include:

*A new inbox that makes organizing your CircleUps easier than ever before.

*Fast and easy to use Circle Management that is even more powerful and flexible.

*New and improved Outlook Toolbar that lets you integrate CircleUp with your Outlook contacts in real time, right inside of Outlook, for free

There are many other improvements that can be seen by clicking here. These features continue to make CircleUp even easier to use with your groups, teams, clubs and business contacts.

When we first started CircleUp, our main concern was to make sure that our solution mapped to the problem consumers find most extremely painful—efficient communication in groups.  We’re social animals, and participating in a wide variety of communities is a normal way of life for all of us.  Email and IM have become the standard for communications among those groups, whether in sports, school, volunteerism, politics, online gaming, or even business.  Our goal is to take the basic, extremely powerful tools we all use today and dramatically expand their efficiency where it counts the most -with the circles of people we interact with every day.
 

What do you think about CircleUp?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

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Web Site:  www.answerbag.com
Headquarters:  Santa Monica, Calif.
Year Founded:  2003
Founder:  Joel Downs
Investors:  *Answerbag is owned by Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand Media, which acquired the company in 2006.
Company News:  www.demandmedia.com/news-media.asp

By Joel Downs, Founder and CEO

What is Answerbag?

Answerbag.com is more than a leading, independent social knowledge platform and online destination.  To the many users, Answerbag is a community of people helping others.  Users can ask questions, share answers and collaboratively evaluate information, while building a permanent archive of knowledge and experience.  Other sites that share the Answerbag platform—bloggers, web publishers, etc.—leverage the company’s knowledge platform to provide live, social Q&A to their audiences.  Answerbag’s mission is to help people find and share knowledge.

As of February 2008, Answerbag has 236,000 registered members who have asked more than 500,000 questions.  The site receives over 10,000 answers per day (totaling 2.1 million answers to date since the site’s creation) that are provided in response to the 1,500 daily questions that are received across 6,000 categories.  Additionally, Answerbag serves Q&A to 5-and-a-half million unique visitors per month.

What is Social Q&A, and How is Answerbag Different?

As the Internet continues to expand into billions of pages, search tools such as Google and Yahoo! are showing their limitations.  For a typical search, they may return hundreds of thousands of results, but they are not useful in helping people find opinions, in evaluating the information they find, and they do not let people ask questions about the information they find.  Social Q&A has evolved in order to fill this gap.  Using Social Q&A, individuals can ask questions of each other using plain English, they can share answers and as a group they can evaluate the answers and decide which are best.  Almost 90 percent of questions are answered within one hour or less.

Unlike other Social Q&A sites, Answerbag archives only unique questions with the best answers to each; it does not allow duplicate questions, so people looking for answers can find them easily without looking under multiple instances of the same question.  Answerbag also allows any questions to be answered at any time, and those answers may be rated at any time, so the best answers will be thoroughly vetted and will filter to the top.  Additionally, Answerbag’s community works together to help identify duplicate questions, spam and other inappropriate content so that it is quickly removed from the site.

In 2006, Answerbag was the first social Q&A site to add both Image Answers and Video Answers, allowing their members to express themselves in new ways and share knowledge in whatever medium is most appropriate.  Questions like “how do you do a wheelie?” or “how do you bathe a baby?” are very hard to answer using straight text, so Video Answers were added to meet that need.

What is the Answerbag Platform?

In an effort to open up its database of questions and answers, Answerbag created the first and only Social Q&A platform that allows other web sites to tap into its active, established community and deep archive of vetted answers.  Through its API, partner sites can read Q&A and allow their users to contribute Q&A directly to the Answerbag database.  Those questions are then seen by any site on the platform, and users of any of those sites may provide answers, providing a true open question-answering community across the entire platform.  When using the Answerbag API, partner sites are charged a nominal fee for making calls to the API, and they can then monetize the traffic however they wish.

For sites that don’t have the resources to take advantage of the API, Answerbag provides a white-label version of their site, as well as a widget that offers Answerbag Q&A in a module that can be skinned to match the partner’s site.  When using the white-label solution, Answerbag can share revenue with the partner, so they benefit from the Q&A activity of their members.

Answerbag Widget:

White-Label Implementation of Answerbag:

Answerbag’s Social Q&A Platform is ideal for publishers or e-commerce sites that would like to add community or customer support to their sites.  Using the API, the white-label solution, or the widgets, publishers can share Q&A in any category they choose.

Answerbag’s questions are separated into a taxonomy of 3,600 categories, with categories as broad as “Real Estate” or “Autos” to categories as narrow as “Particle Physics” and “Mormon Dating.”  This deep categorization allows publishers to choose relevant Q&A for their users, no matter what vertical they focus on.

Answerbag’s target market is anyone who is looking for information.  Like a traditional search application, just about anyone can benefit from the experience, opinions, and archived, vetted answers found on Answerbag.  Its members are 55 percent male, 45 percent female and 50 percent are between the ages of 18 and 34.  Currently, Answerbag’s social Q&A experience is only available to English-speakers.

People are naturally inclined to share their knowledge, and using their Social Q&A Platform, Answerbag allows the people of the world to share not just information but knowledge with each other, to improve each others’ lives, and benefit the global society.

Answerbag was founded in July, 2003 by Joel Downs and purchased by Demand Media, Inc., in 2006.  The company is located at the Demand Media headquarters in Santa Monica, California.
 

What do you think about Answerbag?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

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Web Site:  www.thinkpassenger.com
Headquarters:  Los Angeles
Year Founded:  2005
Founders:  Andrew Leary and Justin Cooper
Investors:  Shelter Capital Partners

By Justin Cooper, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation + Marketing

Most forward thinking marketers would agree that the advertising and marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years with the dawn of web 2.0 and the powerful influences of social media.  As more and more consumers embrace social media as a way to communicate with each other, marketers are clamoring to tap into this relatively new medium and its vast influence.  Perhaps the greatest marriage of social media and marketing can be found in the engagement of targeted consumers with an established brand in a collaborative process of “co-creating.”

Passenger has built upon the idea of co-creating by redefining collaboration to bridge the communication gap between businesses and their most valued customers.  This rich, interactive experience is about meaningful relationships that turn dialogue and on-demand access to opinions into actionable insight.  The ability to capture and gain a clear understanding of the human context in which these collaborative activities take place will drive business innovation and growth while empowering your customers.  Passenger’s mission is to make these collaborative relationships possible through an incredibly user-friendly platform.

What is Passenger?

Passenger essentially bridges the gap between technology and everyday brand management by enabling the simple deployment of private brand communities which create collaborative relationships between brands and their most passionate consumers.  The conversations within these communities provide companies with timely, actionable insight, while empowering consumers through ownership of ideas and driving positive word of mouth.  Passenger’s on-demand technology platform is designed for those companies and organizations that view their customers not merely as a target, but as an integral part of their business process.

Passenger allows brands to take part in the discussions their customers are already having, and not only provides brands with the who, what, where and when of marketing, but also the most important aspect, which is the WHY!  The Why is something marketers have not been able to answer in the past, but now they can with Passenger.

Passenger is delivered “Software-as-a-Service,” which means customers benefit from continuous feature enhancements as well as the flexibility to segment and seamlessly launch additional communities as business needs change.

What are the Benefits of Customer Collaboration?

One inherent benefit of customer collaboration is a brand’s ability to drive advocacy.  “Advocates” are those individuals who are fully committed to a brand beyond the typical relationship of brand and customer.  They express the greatest level of involvement with the brand by being active, vocal and proud.  These people have an emotional bond with the brands that they regularly use.

Their lifestyle mirrors that of the brand and they are proactive in talking about their brand experience with others.  By engaging its Advocates, a brand will gain further insight into exactly who these customers are, what motivates them, why they make the decisions that they do, who they might influence and why and how they do it.  Marketers that are true to the collaborative approach will consistently demonstrate relevancy to each customer as an individual and will ultimately endure the test of time.

Those who choose to embrace customer collaboration will benefit greatly from customers who feel empowered through ownership of ideas.  It gives customers the feeling of ownership which promotes active participation and a desire to accumulate more knowledge about the brand or product.  Those customers who feel more informed have the ability to drive more favorable opinions with their peers; therefore delivering the most trusted and effective marketing practice: “Word of Mouth.”

How is Passenger Different from Traditional Customer Relationship Management?

Until recently, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was the default solution to manage customer decisions.  But in reality, the systems only help manage the marketer’s needs, not the customer’s.  The fragmentation of traditional media has made it increasingly more difficult to locate your customer, let alone catch them at a time when they’re receptive to listening.  Randomly manufactured “opinion leader” teams are not only costly, they also jeopardize the authenticity of the messaging.  Marketers who continue to rent someone else’s customers to talk about their brand are simply ignoring their own customers who continue to remain un-tapped.

Unlike traditional CRM, Passenger identifies and collaborates with key customer segments and leverages socially-networked, existing customers to acquire new customers.

Passenger drives customer advocacy through ownership of ideas and provides the ability to analyze vital customer and competitive insight.  Through this insight we can identify emerging market trends and discover/refine new opportunities in the areas of new product innovation, service ideas and creative concepts.

Ultimately, Passenger can acquire a longitudinal view of customer attitudes and preferences and can analyze how these change over time, something traditional CRM can only scrape the surface of.

Who Is Using Passenger?

Leading brands such as Coca-Cola, ABC Television and Sara Lee are leveraging Passenger to easily deploy private brand communities.

Who is Passenger?

Passenger is a privately held start-up based in Los Angeles, and was founded in 2005 by Andrew Leary, chief executive officer, and myself.  The roots of Passenger stem back to early 2002, when Andrew and I met while developing consumer advocacy programs for one of the world’s largest mobile phone companies.  Over the next few years, we continued to observe the changing marketplace; specifically the proactive role that consumers were taking in both marketing and product innovation.  Identifying a real shift in the consumer dynamic, we brought our collective expertise in customer-driven marketing and pioneering spirit to form Passenger; determined to bridge the gap between brands and their most valued assets—their customers.

Passenger is the leader in on-demand customer collaboration.  Passenger assists companies with identifying and managing an ongoing dialogue with their most valued customers.  Fortune 500 companies are leveraging Passenger to engage customers in a collaborative environment that empowers the customer, while driving business innovation and growth.

The company is backed by Shelter Capital Partners.  Passenger’s advisory board members include Shawn Gold, SVP, marketing & content of MySpace.com; Daniel Walker, former chief talent officer of Apple; Nelson Gayton, Wharton School adjunct professor; Art Bilger, managing partner of Shelter Capital Partners, and Dr. Bahram Nour-Omid, partner of Shelter Capital Partners.

 

What do you think about Passenger?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

 

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Web Site:  www.ehow.com
Headquarters:  Santa Monica, California
Year Founded:  1999
Customers:  More than 13 million per month
Investors:  *eHow is owned by Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand Media, which acquired the company in 2006.

by Gregory Boudewijn, eHow General Manager

eHow is a rich content web site where professional experts and people with expertise can come together and share their knowledge to create and contribute to a growing library of “how-to” information.  Every month, more than 13 million people visit eHow to learn how to do just about everything.  eHow has more than 150,000 articles and is growing by the thousands each month thanks to its easy-to-use publishing tools, which enable professional experts and members to express their knowledge through text, images and video.  Video is becoming an increasingly important medium for how-to information and eHow continues to focus on building its user tools and video library.  In the near future, video will become a prominent part of the eHow experience and compliment the text articles.

The eHow web site is more than just a reference library where users can find comprehensive and useful how-to information.  eHow fosters a conversation between readers and experts through a robust set of social network tools that launched in April 2007.  Readers share their thoughts and expertise through ratings, comments, person-to-person messaging and community forums.  They can also build a network of friends around their interests.  Putting a face behind each piece of content lets eHow add depth to the readership experience.  Finding useful how-to information is important, but connecting readers to experts and creating a dialogue is invaluable.

In June 2007, eHow rolled out its Writer Compensation Program.  For the first time in eHow’s history, people who contribute to eHow, both professionals and non-professionals, are compensated for their written articles.  Membership in the eHow community is free, after which users can instantly enhance their profiles and begin contributing content.  Members who sign up for the Writer Compensation Program start earning money from their enrollment date on any new articles as well as their existing articles.  Compensation is based on a per-article basis and an article’s earning potential can be based on a combination of several elements, including the amount of times it has been viewed and its category.  The more useful the articles are to the reader, the more money members can make.  eHow’s Writer Compensation Program will eventually include video, but for the time being only written how-to articles are eligible.

 

 

eHow was originally founded in March 1999 with close to $30 million in funding.  At that time, the company employed 200 professional writers and had a team of 25 engineers.  By 2001, eHow’s library contained thousands of accurate and helpful articles.  The combination of professional writing and major advertising across radio and television briefly made eHow one of the Internet's top ten news and information sites.

Despite the increased brand awareness and popularity of the site, eHow was not profitable and was forced to declare bankruptcy.  In 2001, IdeaExchange.com bought eHow out of bankruptcy with the hope of charging eHow’s readers to access its how-to articles.  Unfortunately, eHow remained unprofitable and was sold in 2004 to Jack Herrick and Josh Hannah.  Approximately five years after the company was launched as a 200-person operation, Herrick and Hannah and one other person maintained the eHow library of thousands of articles themselves.

Between March 2004 and April 2006, eHow traffic increased from 250,000 to over 4 million visitors per month, which attracted the attention of the founders of the yet-to-be-formed Demand Media, Inc.  Demand Media was subsequently founded through the acquisition of eHow and a handful of other companies.  eHow is one of Demand Media’s top media web sites and leverages the company’s core proprietary platform, which fuels user-driven publishing and community development while dynamically optimizing properties to maximize advertising revenue.  eHow’s vision and focus is directly aligned with its parent company’s core strategy of empowering the user, creating distribution channels and compensating them for content.

 

What do you think about eHow?  Leave your comments below.  Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com

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