StartUp Beat

Company: Agent Ace

Website: www.agentace.com

Founder: Mazen Fawaz

Headquarters: Los Angeles

Year Founded: 2011

Twitter: @agentace_com

Brief Company Description: Agent Ace is a free service for connecting homebuyers and sellers to the highest performing real estate agent in their area.

By Mazen Fawaz, Founder

Our free, web-based service for referring agents was built in response to an inconsistency we saw in the real estate industry. When compared to other industries (retail, travel, automobile), we noticed that real estate was lagging in terms of the tools people have for decision making. When looking for a flight or a new car consumers use online services to find the best deal, but when looking for an agent, the web offered no system for comparing and making an informed decision. When we started looking at historical home sales data we noticed a disparity between average and top performing agents (top agents simply sell more homes in less time), and we knew that a service that connected homebuyers and sellers to these top agents would be valuable. With this in mind, we set out to build a smarter, performance based service for connecting people with the top agent in their area. For free!

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Agent Ace simplifies the home buying and selling experience by connecting consumers to high performing real estate agents" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Reachable

Website: www.reachable.com

Founder: Paul Stevens

Headquarters: Palo Alto

Year Founded: 2007

Investors: vSpring Capital, Parkview Ventures, Rho Capital Partners

Twitter: @Reach_able

Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Reachable/210520862329223

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/792846

Company Description: Reachable lets users leverage collective relationships and extend professional networks to reach more people and close business faster.

Company: LifeGunk

Website: www.lifegunk.com

Founder: Javan Joel

Headquarters: Brooklyn, New York

Year Founded: 2011

Investors: Self-funded

Twitter: @ProjectLifeGunk

Brief Company Description: LifeGunk is the world’s first Life Network that gives you the tools to keep track of your activities, goals and ideas so you can get back to achieving!

By Javan Joel, founder

Product Overview

LifeGunk is a free, user-based Life Network where you can keep track of your activities, goals and ideas all in one place. Users can also collaborate with others on projects, assignments and much more through the use of LifeGunk’s project management features. Our product is for any individual with an active lifestyle and/or hobbies as well as businesses that utilize innovative communication methods with employees.

LifeGunk provides a comprehensive set of services and tools that provides members with all the tools they need to manage their lives. LifeGunk’s user interface, called the ‘AGI’ board (an acronym for Activities, Goals, Ideas and pronounced ‘oggie’) allows members to manage their own personal schedules and notes. This section is always visible to the user and allows them to quickly search, add and edit these items. In addition, users can help others reach their goals by joining in on their activities and brainstorming with others on their ideas. Users can also create groups, which have their own AGI board, and connections separate from the user’s profile.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: LifeGunk offers a lifestyle and goal-oriented approach to social networking" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Korrio

Website: www.korrio.com

Founder: Steve Goldman

Headquarters: Seattle

Year Founded: 2009

Investors: Ignition Partners, Martin Coles, Sam Schmidt and Damon Huard

Twitter: @KorrioSports

Brief Company Description: KorrioSports uses cloud and mobile technology to support the youth sports market with club management tools and social networking for members to share their sports life.

By Steve Goldman, Korrio CEO and Founder       

Korrio is a cloud-based service for the youth sports market, providing both administrative tools for organizations and a social network for families and players, all in a single integrated platform. We built Korrio to take advantage of advances in cloud and mobile technologies and to improve the youth sports experience for players, families, coaches and organizations. Emphasizing simplicity and unity, we designed our product as an integrated, intuitive and easy system to help volunteers and staff run youth sports organizations, and help young players and their families keep their sports lives organized and social.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Korrio seeks to transform the youth sports world using the cloud, social media and mobile technology" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Voices Heard Media

Website: www.voicesheardmedia.com

Founder: Will Overstreet

Headquarters: Knoxville, Tennessee

Year Founded: 2007

Investors: Privately funded

Twitter: @VHMedia

Brief Company Description: Voices Heard Media creates social media widgets that spark engagement for businesses while increasing interaction through Q&As, polls, contests, etc.

By Will Overstreet, Founder

At Voices Heard Media, we create embedded social media widgets that spark engagement and build communities on company websites, mobile applications and social media platforms. We provide a one-stop-shop for companies to streamline all engagement platforms. Providing our clients with top user comments and questions allows them to cohesively communicate to their audiences and focus on the issues at hand. Our widgets increase the interaction on a company’s website which means the audience is more engaged, stays longer and ultimately invests more—in the company’s products as well as their brand.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Voices Heard Media is increasing engagement for websites of all types and sizes through interactive social media widgets" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Healthrageous

Website:  www.healthrageous.com

Founders: Rick Lee, Mary Beth Chalk, and Doug McClure

Headquarters: Boston

Year Founded: 2010

Investors: North Bridge Venture Partners, Egan Managed Capital, Long River Ventures

Employees: 25

Twitter: @healthrageous

Brief Company Description: Healthrageous is a leading provider of mobile and multi-device next-gen health solutions that change behavior on a sustained, measurable basis.

By Rick Lee, President and CEO

Healthrageous has been serving employers and health plans as a catalyst for behavioral change since January 2010. In that time, we have recruited a sterling management team to Boston, built and refined the software platform, installed our analytics engine and deployed the Healthrageous solution to more than 4,000 participants. We promote self-management of health, a 21st century solution to the paucity of available physicians and substantive medical interactions.

According to the World Health Organization, more than half of all chronic disease costs are instigated by lifestyle choices and unhealthy—but correctable—habits; most notably, poor nutrition, high fat diets, unbridled portion control, tobacco use, alcohol abuse, insufficient sleep, and sedentary lifestyles. Two-thirds of us are overweight or obese and fail to engage in regular physical activity. Our one or two annual physician visits are contrasted by the other 363 days of the year when we are not “patients,” and must rely on our own self-management and self-control.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Healthrageous offers a ‘digital coach’ that employs advanced social tools and individual analysis to improve overall personal health" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: MiNeeds

Website: www.mineeds.com

Founders: Raed Malhas and Deniz Erkan

Headquarters: Seattle, Washington

Year Founded: 2008

Investors: Paul Thelen and Usama Fayyad

Twitter: @MiNeeds_Article

Brief Company Description: MiNeeds.com is the fast-growing online service that instantly matches local professionals who bid on needs posted by local consumers.

By Raed Malhas, co-founder

Product Overview

MiNeeds.com is the fast-growing online service that instantly matches local professionals who bid on needs posted by local consumers. MiNeeds.com, which has soared past 50,000 professionals registered nationwide, offers a highly efficient lead and revenue generator, instantly alerting professionals via phone and email of new, highly-qualified customers in their area.

For consumers, MiNeeds.com is an incredible time saver, a free and super-efficient way to post their exact “need” or “needs” once then receive competitive proposals they can compare and choose without having to initiate contact, negotiate costs or waste time on the phone.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: MiNeeds matches local professionals and local consumers through a bidding process with some innovative features" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Drippler

Website: www.drippler.com

Founders: Matan Talmi, Dotan Galron, Ronen Yacobi

Headquarters: Tel-Aviv, Israel

Year Founded: 2010

Investors: Reuven Agassi, Yanki Margalit, and David Assia, among others

Twitter:  @drippler

Brief Company Description: Drippler is the ultimate information source for gadget users, keeping you constantly excited about your gadgets!

By Matan Talmi, CEO and co-founder

Product Overview

As gadgets become smarter, gadget users must stay up-to-date in order to make the most of their gadgets. There’s plenty to know—usage tips, software and firmware updates, apps, accessories, tech-support and more, and with online content exponentially growing, it’s getting harder and harder to keep up. Drippler provides consumers with personalized updates on the gadgets they love, and helps them make the most of their gadgets while making sure they don’t miss any valuable content.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Drippler—building a community of gadget enthusiasts" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Social Goodies

Website: www.socialgoodies.com

Founder: Carie Salter

Headquarters: Pasadena, California

Year Founded: 2011

Investors: Self-funded

Twitter: @socialgoodiesco

Brief Company Description: National daily deal site funding good deeds with good deals. We give customers a way to change the world and get something in return.

By Carie Salter, Founder

At Social Goodies we offer amazing deals from retailers in the home décor, lifestyle, fashion and beauty arenas at up to 70 percent off and donate 20 percent of the gross purchase price of every deal to charity. We feel our business model delivers tremendous value, as we have created a win-win-win for our customers, featured charities and retailers. Our customers receive great deals on cool merchandise while simultaneously and effortlessly donating 20 percent of their gross deal purchase price to well-vetted charities. Our three featured charities receive concentrated amounts of money from a new donation source, as well as increased exposure about the good work they do.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Social Goodies is putting the daily deals model to work for charities" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Badgeville

Website: www.badgeville.com

Founders: Kris Duggan, CEO, and Wedge Martin, CTO

Headquarters: Menlo Park, California

Year Founded: September, 2010

Investors: Norwest Venture Partners, El Dorado Ventures, Trinity Ventures

By Kris Duggan, co-founder and CEO

When customers walk into Badgeville headquarters today, they find it hard to believe that our company launched just over a year ago. In 2010, I decided to launch a company, along with my co-founder Wedge Martin, that would help businesses measure and influence user behavior. After talking to many of my friends and acquaintances across the enterprise, it became increasingly clear that there was a huge opportunity to combine game mechanics and sophisticated behavior analytics to increase serious business objectives.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Badgeville is leading the enterprise gamification surge with its social engagement platform" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Unrabble

Website: www.unrabble.com

Founders: Kevin Watson, Chris Rickborn, Marc Slack

Year Founded: 2009

Twitter: @unrabble

Brief Company Description: Unrabble is a cloud-computing hiring software solution that helps hiring managers make their next great hire. It’s an entirely new, and better, approach to the hiring process. It saves time and money by better qualifying candidates, automating core hiring tasks, automatically ranking top candidates based on skills and verifying claims made through social networks, thus saving hiring managers from candidates who stretch the truth.

By Kevin Watson, CEO and co-founder

Product Overview

Unrabble is a pure cloud-computing solution that simplifies and redefines the process of hiring new employees. Unrabble was created for a new class of end user who must make hiring decisions, but doesn’t have the time or resources to do it quickly, effectively and inexpensively. Unrabble is not regimented HR enterprise software, a job board, or a legacy-style applicant tracking system for processing resumes. Unrabble is an innovative new approach to hiring.

Unrabble makes it easy to create a new job posting, instantly broadcast the job to your social networks, publish it to job boards of your choice, and then quickly identify the most highly qualified candidates as they apply from multiple sources. Unrabble removes the need to invest in expensive HR software and significantly reduces reliance on HR staff and professional recruiters. Unrabble is the first solution of its kind to put hiring in the hands of the decision maker and unchain hiring from back office, administrative and expensive third-party services.

Continue reading "Featured StartUp Pitch: Unrabble’s hiring software engages both employers and employees in a social media-driven hiring process" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Clever Zebo

Website: www.cleverzebo.com

Founders: Josh Krafchin, Igor Belogolovsky

Headquarters: Los Angeles

Year Founded: 2011

Twitter: @cleverzebo

Brief Company Description: Clever Zebo is a group of web marketing strategy experts who love growing small businesses by helping them find their voice and make it heard online.

By Igor Belogolovsky, co-founder

What We Do

We’re online marketing strategy all-stars. We specialize in SEM, SEO, email, content marketing and conversion funnel optimization.

What Makes Us So Awesome?

We’re actually pretty darn good at helping companies make money. We’re not automatons who just plug away unthinkingly at one channel or another; we focus on the big picture to make you successful. We’re really, really interested in learning new businesses and helping them grow, whatever it takes.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Clever Zebo seeks to bring big picture online marketing expertise to small businesses" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: ServisTree.com
Website: www.servistree.com
Founders: David Cohen and Adam Weizer
Headquarters: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
Year Founded: 2008
Twitter: @servistree
Brief Company Description: Merchants, retailers & other biz utilize @servistree 4 socmed mktg, giftcard/loyalty programs, creditcard proc & more http://bit.ly/sPbbZg

By David Cohen, co-founder

Product Overview

Helping businesses of all sizes grow to their full potential, ServisTree.com allows companies to immediately merge the worlds of marketing, loyalty and social networking. Shoppers can tap into loyalty programs and redeem gift card offerings from local businesses via their smartphone, virtually ending the days of carrying all the cards around in a wallet or purse.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: ServisTree combines social media and the cloud to increase customer loyalty in the foodservice industry" »

Posted by startupbeat at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: CoupTessa

Website: www.couptessa.com

Founders: David Horn and Francisco Gonzalez

Headquarters: Miami

Year Founded: 2010

Employees: 40

Twitter: @CoupTessa

Brief Company Description: Unique daily deal site specifically for women, delivering discounts of 50 to 90 percent off high-end merchant services and products.

By David Horn, co-CEO

Website Overview

CoupTessa is a daily deal site specifically tailored for women. Our site offers significant discounts for higher-end products and services that are in demand by discriminating female consumers. With percentage discounts typically ranging from 50 to 90 percent, we provide consumers with enticing offers, and merchants with a steady supply of sophisticated repeat customers. We are currently offering deals in five major United States cities, and our users can choose from merchants including spa/salon providers, dance and exercise classes, and dining at popular restaurants.

Founders’ Story

CoupTessa was created by myself and another former executive at Morgan Stanley, Francisco Gonzalez. I enjoyed a successful tenure at Morgan Stanley, and ended my career as the global leader of sales and marketing for some of the firm’s wealthiest clients. During a walk near my home in the Dominican Republic I encountered Francisco, and we began discussing possible business ventures. We were intrigued by the daily deal website model and decided to focus our business efforts on a certain population segment. We chose women consumers due to their considerable buying power and brand allegiance. From this chance meeting on the beach, CoupTessa was formed.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Started by two former Morgan Stanley execs, CoupTessa targets daily deals specifically to women looking for high-end products and services" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: BetaBait
Website: www.betabait.com
Founders: Cody Barbierri and Rory Thompson
Headquarters:  Bridgeport, CT
Year Founded:  2011
Twitter: @betabait
Brief Company Description: A place for startups to connect with early adopters who love new apps.

By Cody Barbierri, co-founder

Product Overview

Launched in 2011, BetaBait is a service for startups to connect with early adopters who love to test and try new web, mobile and social applications. BetaBait’s mission is to become the destination for startups to find beta users and testers, while providing consumer and professional early adopters access to the newest applications. With the notion of early access to the latest apps, our users have opted-in to receive a daily email spotlighting all beta opportunities. BetaBait currently has a growing community of more than 400 beta users and testers and 80 startups. BetaBait is 100 percent free.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: BetaBait is connecting startups and enthusiastic early adopters through a social platform" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: RobotsAppStore
Website: www.robotsappstore.com
Founder: Elad Inbar
Headquarters: San Francisco
Year Founded: 2011
Brief Company Description: RobotsAppStore is an online robotic apps marketplace that enables robot owners to purchase and download applications written by developers from around the globe that extend the functionality of their robots.

Company: StatFly

Website: www.statf.ly

Headquarters: Santa Monica, California

Year Founded: March, 2011

Investors: Self-funded

Twitter: @statfly

Brief Company Description: StatFly Social Media Management and Analytics makes campaign monitoring and reporting collaborative, intuitive, powerful, and affordable.

By Bryan Crick, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

StatFly is a Social Media Management and Analytics company created by both agency and tech-industry veterans like myself. StatFly’s newly launched social media reporting and management platform is designed with a usability-first philosophy to be intuitive, powerful, and affordable.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Recently launched Statfly is on a mission to bring a new level of functionality to social media campaign monitoring" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: imATHLETE

Website: www.imathlete.com

Founders: Jeff Matlow

Headquarters: Santa Monica, California

Year Founded: 2009

Twitter: @IAmAthlete

Brief Company Description: imATHLETE: leveraging technology to enhance and inspire athletic activity, through registration, fundraising and community interaction.

By Jeff Matlow, founder and CEO

Product Overview

Simply put, imATHLETE is aggregating athletic interaction. Like Fandango did for movies, TripAdvisor for travel and Yelp for dining, imATHLETE is disrupting the $90 billion amateur athletic industry by uniting the commerce and community into one single, robust platform.

We provide unique technology that helps event organizers, city governments, non-profits and governing bodies better manage their participant interactions. imATHLETE’s technology is focused on supporting the four pillars of athletic commerce: registration, fundraising, ecommerce, training. We provide systems that streamline and transform our clients’ businesses in ways never before seen: reducing workload by up to 60 percent and increasing revenue channels into new, innovative arenas.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: imATHLETE aims to disrupt the amateur athletic industry with a robust online platform" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Givepals
Website: www.givepals.com
Founders: Eric Imasogie, Adelanwa Adesanya, Kelvin Ihaza, Ore Ayodele
Headquarters: Houston, Texas
Year Founded: October, 2010
Twitter: @givepals
Brief Company Description: Givepals.com is an online social marketplace where students can buy, sell or trade their textbooks, electronics and services to other students on their college campuses.

By Eric Imasogie, co-founder, CEO and Product Development Leader

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Givepals is giving college and university students a new, social alternative to the campus bookstore" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Proformative
Website: www.proformative.com
Founder: John Kogan
Headquarters:  San Jose, California
Year Founded:  2009
Twitter: @proformative
Brief Company Description: Proformative connects the world’s corporate finance leaders to provide instant advice and insights on the tough financial and strategic challenges they face every day.

By John Kogan, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

Proformative connects the world’s corporate finance leaders to provide instant advice and insights on the tough financial and strategic challenges they face every day. Proformative is the first professional social network specifically designed to help corporate finance professionals be successful in their jobs and careers. Proformative is used by more than 40,000 CFOs and has more than 400,000 corporate finance and business professionals, 80 percent of whom hold titles of Director, Vice President and above, in its fast growing network. Proformative members represent companies of all sizes—including the majority of Fortune 500 companies.

Launched in 2009, Proformative is the only social network for corporate finance professionals that provides real-time access to tens of thousands of senior financial experts. Corporate finance executives from companies like Citibank, Coca-Cola, Apple and General Electric Co. use the Proformative network for daily advice, counsel, news and information. Our products include Proformative’s extensive and dynamic peer network of 400,000 senior finance executives; Ask the Experts Q&A; News and Bloggers; Career Center; Expert Webinars; Network Newsletters and more.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Proformative—an online social forum specifically for business leaders" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Tokii

Website: www.tokii.com

Founders: Karla Stephens-Tolstoy and Al Tolstoy

Headquarters: Toronto, Ontario

Year Founded: 2008

Twitter: @tokiilife

Brief Company Description: Tokii is an online relationship management platform that helps couples explore different aspects of their partnership through interactive games of play and discovery.

By Karla Stephens-Tolstoy, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

Tokii is the world’s first relationship management platform designed to help couples enrich and strengthen their relationships. 

Tokii gives couples a private and secure venue to work on and explore their relationship. Based on user feedback, Tokii has developed four unique tools to help couples connect:

• TradingPost – An online venue for couples to negotiate for what they want from each other. Offers can range from household chores to intimate moments. Create your own Trade Ideas or choose from approximately 1,000 already on the site.
• DiscoveryGames – Fun series of quizzes that initiate conversations and help partners learn more about each other. There are over 100 unique games available for play from over 15 wide-ranging categories, from Love to Environment.
• MoodMeter – A status system that lets partners express and know each other’s state of mind. There are currently over 30 moods to choose from.
• Profiles – Quizzes that give a view into each partner’s personality and preferences. Our current LoveZones Profile gives partners an analysis and shares how each like to be loved.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Tokii is creating a market for 'online relationship management' with a platform for helping couples strengthen their partnership" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: MentorMob
Website: www.mentormob.com 
Founders: Vince Leung and Kris Chinosorn
Headquarters: Chicago
Year Founded: 2010
Twitter: @MentorMob
Brief Company Description: MentorMob simplifies learning any topic by organizing content from anywhere on the web into a step-by-step format called a Learning Playlist.

By Vince Leung, co-founder and CTO

Product Overview

MentorMob, founded in 2010, seeks to achieve nothing less than a revolution in the way human knowledge is transferred by turning the power of crowdsourcing loose on the learning process. Its website at www.mentormob.com is a free, community-powered repository of information on any skill, hobby or subject in which the community wishes to engage—a resource that is accessible anytime, anywhere. MentorMob seeks to bring the sense of discovery, fun, and “addictiveness” back into learning while making it extremely easy. The potential for MentorMob to impact individuals, companies, organizations and society in general is significant.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: MentorMob—Crowdsourcing online education and learning through ‘Learning Playlists’" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: KnowBe4
Website:  www.knowbe4.com
Founder: Stu Sjouwerman
Headquarters: Clearwater, Florida
Year Founded: 2010
Twitter: @KnowBe4
Brief Company Description: KnowBe4 delivers next-generation security awareness training and testing, addressing the needs of business owners, IT, HR and end-users.

By Stu Sjouwerman, founder and CEO

Product Overview

KnowBe4 provides proactive next-gen Internet Security Awareness Training that really works against phishing attacks. Our training reduces phishing susceptibility by 75 percent and higher. When our customers asked for more, our answer was to present security consulting services with a special proactive angle focused on making an organization a hard target for phishers.

Founder’s Story

My name is Stu Sjouwerman (pronounced ‘shower-man’). I have been in the IT industry for 32 years and am one of the founders of Sunbelt Software, which was established in 1994. Sunbelt was recently acquired by GFI software, a portfolio company of Insight Partners, a large venture fund in Boston.

As part of the management team, I helped make the decision to build a brand new low-overhead anti-malware platform from scratch. In 2008, we released VIPRE Antivirus, which is continuing to expand in this crowded AV market. Being inside the AV industry, I came to find they have a dirty little secret: their effectiveness is not all it’s cracked up to be by their marketing departments.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: KnowBe4 –providing ‘Internet security awareness training’ to help enterprises avoid phishing and other costly online scams" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Web2Carz

Website: www.web2carz.com

Founders: Ben Wallach and Alex Bravy

Headquarters: Highland Park, Illinois

Year Founded: 2006

Twitter: @web2carz

Brief Company Description: Web2Carz is a car shopping website featuring several million used and new vehicles, a robust research section, and unique editorial content.

By Ben Wallach, co-founder

Web2Carz is a car shopping website. There are several million used and new vehicles for sale listed on the site, a robust research section, and unique editorial content on all subjects automotive. Around 20,000 unique users a day come to the site to browse vehicles, do research or read articles.

Alex Bravy and I founded the company during the summer of 2006. We both had successful careers at other Internet companies including Orbitz.com, Monster.com and Cars.com. We decided to join forces and utilize our strong technology backgrounds and auto industry knowledge to build Web2Carz. Web2Carz started attracting a fair share of the car shopping public fairly quickly and today is listed on the Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the country.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Web2Carz—bringing robust search and unique editorial content to the car shopping process" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: CouponTrade.com
Website:  www.coupontrade.com
Founders: George Bousis and Bradley Wasz
Headquarters: Chicago
Year Founded: 2010
Employees: 20 
Twitter: @coupontrade
Brief Company Description: CouponTrade: where coupon experts buy and sell daily deals and gift cards.

By George Bousis, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

CouponTrade.com is a secure marketplace where coupon experts buy and sell daily deals and gift cards. Our long-term goal is to teach consumers better shopping habits while helping them save money and take advantage of these awesome deals, and perhaps even make money off of their own deals and gift cards.

We’re aiming to create the web’s most extensive marketplace of gift cards, daily deals, coupon codes, map views, digital coupons and more, to empower consumers with exceptional savings to help them stretch the value of a dollar. By developing innovative technologies to support this new social shopping model, it’s our goal to put purchase power back into the hands of the people as a way to help boost the economy.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: CouponTrade.com—a new marketplace for buying and selling daily deals and gift cards" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: DoubleDutch

Website:  www.doubledutch.me

Founder: Lawrence Coburn

Headquarters: San Francisco

Year Founded: 2010

Investors: Charles River Ventures, Launch Capital, Accelerator Ventures

Twitter: @DoubleDutch

Brief Company Description: DoubleDutch is the creator of HYVE—a suite of social, location-aware mobile apps that help organizations become more transparent, data-driven and productive.

By Lawrence Coburn, founder and CEO

Product Overview

DoubleDutch is the category leader for geo-social productivity apps for the enterprise. DoubleDutch HYVE is a suite of social, location-aware mobile apps designed to help organizations become more transparent, data-driven, and productive. By enabling every team-member, customer and stakeholder to communicate through structured status updates, enterprises can maximize performance and measure productivity like never before.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: DoubleDutch—bringing geolocation mobile productivity apps to the enterprise" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: SmartRecruiters

Website: www.smartrecruiters.com

Founder: Jerome Ternynck

Headquarters: San Francisco

Year Founded: 2010

Investors: Angel

Employees: 10

Twitter: @Smartrecruiters

Brief Company Description: SmartRecruiters’ free recruiting software makes hiring easy for business by leveraging the power of free open software, social networks and job sites.

By Jerome Ternynck

SmartRecruiters provides free online recruiting software that meets the needs of small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). Our job posting and applicant-tracking Software as a Service (SaaS) platform has over 10,000 companies, with 200,000 job seekers and 25,000 job openings already processed, proving that our approach to recruiting gets results.

Throughout my career, I have been passionate about developing solutions that work to eradicate unemployment globally, through innovation in HR software. I started my first recruiting company at age 22 in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell. I then turned my attention toward the recruiting software industry in 1999 by pioneering one of the first global enterprise SaaS platforms.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: SmartRecruiters—making hiring smarter for SMBs by utilizing powerful Internet-based tools" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: LogicMonitor
Website: www.logicmonitor.com
Founder: Steve Francis
Headquarters: Santa Barbara, California
Year Founded: 2008
Twitter: @LogicMonitor 
Brief Company Description: Hosted monitoring of networks, servers, applications, storage, cloud and virtualization. Monitoring, alerting, graphs, reports—out of the box.

By Steve Francis, founder and Chief Product Officer

Product Overview

LogicMonitor is a hosted monitoring solution that monitors all elements of an IT Infrastructure—network, servers, applications, storage, cloud and virtualization—from a single pane. With embedded knowledge of most data center vendor’s equipment, LogicMonitor will tell you everything you need to know about the health and performance of your systems, and proactively alert you to any issues without you having to spend months becoming a monitoring expert, or purchase any costly hardware.

The all-in-one SaaS-based solution provides monitoring, alerting, graphing, and reporting right out of the box. So you can have robust monitoring not in weeks, or months, but today.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: LogicMonitor—an SaaS, single-screen solution to IT infrastructure monitoring" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: eDrinkit.com

Website: www.eDrinkit.com

Founders: Omid Sabet and Alex Roizen

Headquarters: San Diego, California

Year Founded: 2011

Facebook: www.facebook.com/edrinkit

Brief Company Description: “eDrinkit.com features deals specifically focused on nightlife and entertainment. Our customers enjoy discounts of 50-90 percent off drinks, VIP bottle service, cover charge, private transportation, wine/brewery tours and fun vacations to places like Cabo San Lucas.”

By Omid Sabet and Alex Roize, co-founders

Product Overview

Founded in 2011, eDrinkit.com was created to assist venues in promoting their business, while providing customers with deals to popular nightclubs, bars and restaurants. The company offers customers discounts of 50-90 percent off drinks, VIP bottle service, cover charge, as well as other deals for social activities, including private transportation, wine tours and vacations. The company is located in San Diego and will soon be expanding to additional cities in California, as well as Nevada and Arizona.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: eDrinkIt.com—bringing deals exclusively to the clubs and bars scene" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Small Bizeo

Website: www.smallbizeo.com

Founder: Kal Gullapalli 

Headquarters: Philadelphia

Year Founded: 2011

Brief Company Description: “Small Bizeo is a research platform that provides objective data, consolidated reports and insightful investment analysis to small business and franchise buyers.”

By Kal Gullapalli, founder

Company Overview

At its core, Small Bizeo is a franchise and small business research portal. When looking at a franchise, we look at average store economics, failure rates, growth rates, litigation issues and specifics within the Franchise Disclosure Document (300 page Annual Reports created by franchisors). Second, we have a listing platform people can use to search existing businesses for sale.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Small Bizeo—aggregating research and business intelligence for small businesses and entrepreneurs" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: nanoRep
Website: www.nanorep.com
Founders: Doron Herzlich, Aviv Dror, Amit Ben Shahar, Ofer David
Headquarters: Herzliya, Israel
Year Founded: 2009
Twitter: @nanoRep

Brief Company Description: “nanoRep is the instant-answer, self-service help-desk solution and ticketing system promoting rapid business growth and minimizing customer support costs.”

By Doron Herzlich, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

nanoRep is the only help-desk solution capable of instantly answering between 80-92 percent of incoming customer support queries, enabling startups, SMBs and enterprises enjoying rapid growth to keep support costs flat. It does this via a self-learning, Q&A tool that integrates to a company’s website one of three ways—(1) as a floating widget, able to follow customers across every page of the site, (2) embedded within a company’s support page, (3) or via a Facebook application. Companies input their FAQ into a single knowledge base, and with every customer question asked and response provided by a support rep—across all channels: email, live chats, Facebook, Twitter and more – the knowledge base automatically builds itself up. Within three months, nanoRep is able to accurately answer up to 92 percent of customers’ questions, leaving only 8-15 percent to be escalated to support reps via an intuitive ticketing system. Try it here.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: NanoRep—bringing a smart and efficient help-desk to businesses of all sizes and their customers" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Mobilecause

Website: www.mobilecause.com

Founders: Douglas Plank and Danny Scalisi

Headquarters: Calabasas, CA

Year Founded: 2009

Twitter: @Mobilecause

Facebook: www.facebook.com/mobilecause

Brief Company Description: “Mobilecause, currently serving more than 900 nonprofits in the U.S., is the leading provider of Mobile Communication, Mobile Data Gathering and Mobile Donations to the nonprofit sector.”

By C. Douglas Plank, founder and CEO

Product Overview

Mobilecause is leading the way in mobile technology designed to serve the nonprofit sector. Empowering charities with mobile tools that enable them to easily communicate, build mobile lists, gather important CRM data, and raise money through various mobile means—from carrier billed to traditional credit card pledge fulfillment. In 2010, the U.S. nonprofit sector raised $211.7 billion in donations from individuals. When you include corporate, public and private foundations, it totals $290.89 billion. During the 2008-09 economic crisis, giving dropped 13 percent according to the Center on Philanthropy. This fact alone has accelerated the need for nonprofits to better utilize traditional and new tools like mobile to address donor attrition including lower response rates for direct mail, email, telemarketing and event participation. Given the explosion of mobile smart phone technology, the fact that consumer donors are accessing their email, looking at the nonprofit’s web page, texting and viewing rich media through their mobile device—it is imperative that nonprofits act quickly to take advantage of this new bustling technology explosion in order to reach current and new supporters via mobile.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Mobilecause—Empowering social enterprise (nonprofits) through mobile communication, data acquisition and mobile giving" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Weyrich Enterprises

Website: www.divaliciousapp.com

Founders: Andrew Weyrich and Rich Kessler

Headquarters: Fairfax, VA

Year Founded: 2010

Twitter: @DivaliciousApp

Facebook: www.facebook.com/divaliciousapp

Brief Company Description: “Weyrich Enterprises is the inventor of Divalicious, a revolutionary mobile shopping application for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, which was created to make mobile shopping easier than ever by featuring nearly one million fashion and beauty items from 300 popular brands in one centralized location.”

By Rich Kessler, co-founder and CTO

Product Overview

Divalicious is a new mobile shopping app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that completely changes the way you shop. By giving users access to 300 retailers, we put an end to driving from store to store, standing in long checkout lines, and having to search for the size you need only to find out it’s out of stock. The full day adventure at the mall is a thing of the past. Those hours you couldn't spare but had to, can be yours again with everything at the tip of your fingers.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Weyrich Enterprises—bringing social media and mobile technology to the shopping experience with the Divalicious app" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MomentFeed is a fully-integrated platform for businesses to manage social media channels across multiple locations. The Santa Monica, CA–based company was founded in 2010.

SUB: What is the value proposition MomentFeed offers to both merchants and customers?

Reed: MomentFeed offers an integrated solution for managing Foursquare, Facebook Places, Twitter Places, and Gowalla across hundreds or thousands of locations. In a nutshell, it maximizes the efficiency and efficacy of utilizing these platforms for companies with more than 20 locations. There is a lot of secret sauce involved in synchronizing all of this data and activity across so many locations and services, such that a brand can have a comprehensive, holistic, and accurate view of how consumers are engaging with their locations at the local and global levels.

Continue reading "Q&A with MomentFeed founder and CEO Rob Reed about social media management for businesses with multiple locations and the companies recent $1.2 million seed funding round" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Cloudware Hosting

Website: www.cloudwarecity.com

Founder: Keith Hall

Headquarters: Warrington, UK

Year Founded: 2010

Twitter: @cloudwarecity

Brief Company Description: “Cloudware Hosting Ltd. provides an easy way to offer paid subscriptions to web apps, service and content websites, via Cloudware City”

By Keith Hall, founder and CEO

Product Overview

Cloudware City is designed to provide a pain-free way for website owners to include subscriptions and recurring billing to their sites, and can plug into popular web content management systems like Joomla and WordPress. The service utilizes a combination of the latest technologies to offer a one-stop platform from marketing and selling subscriptions in its web app store through to cloud-based end user subscription authentication, and can be up and running within three minutes.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Cloudware Hosting—a new platform for content subscription management and app monetization" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: BiteHunter

Website: www.bitehunter.com

Headquarters: New York City

Year Founded: 2010

Twitter: @BiteHunter_com

Employees: 6

Brief Company Description: “BiteHunter.com is the first real-time search engine helping frugal foodies locate great dining deals in their area from one website.”

By Gil Harel, co-founder

With more than 10 years of online management experience in the hospitality and restaurant industry, I was hungry for my own business venture in the dining industry. While working on my first startup in the industry, I saw a problem in the market. It was fragmenting and users had to spend too much time trying to find the great specials and deals everyone was offering to them. We wanted to alleviate having to go to multiple sources just find that $5 off. So, my business partner and I put our heads together and came up with the idea of helping consumers dine out without the guilt of spending money AND make it easy. Thus, BiteHunter was born. Although it was founded in early 2010 by myself and Ido Shillon, BiteHunter did not release its official beta version of the site until March 2011. From there, we rapidly grew.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: BiteHunter—a search engine for daily deals at restaurants" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: CPAlead

Website: www.cpalead.com

Founders: Robert Reynolds and Troy Krzyston

Headquarters: Las Vegas

Year Founded: 2006

Twitter: @cpalead

Employees: 20+

Brief Company Description: “CPAlead is an online marketing company enabling web publishers to monetize their premium content.”

By Robert Reynolds, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

The CPAlead Widget is a web content monetization tool that provides consumers and web publishers with a payment alternative to traditional advertisements and paywalls. It works like this: when a person visits a website with premium content, they complete a brief survey, quiz or game, which unlocks the content they wish to view. These incentive-based offerings are sponsored by advertisers who then pay the website publisher for each one that is completed.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: CPA Lead—changing the online ad landscape with an unconventional approach" »

Posted by startupbeat at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: aisle411

Website: www.aisle411.com

Founders: Nathan Pettyjohn and Matthew Kulig

Headquarters: St. Louis, MO

Year Founded: 2008

Twitter: @aisle411

Brief Company Description: “aisle411 is the premier mobile shopping platform allowing users to navigate to products down to the specific section of an aisle.”

By Nathan Pettyjohn, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

Approximately 24 percent of all retail revenue is lost because consumers cannot find the products they want, or information about it.

aisle411 is a mobile in-aisle shopping platform that empowers anyone with a mobile phone to find and navigate to products and promotions quickly and easily in retail stores. With intuitive voice recognition technology powered by Nuance, we offer a unique in-store search and comprehensive mobile retail shopping solution. With the aisle411 app, users can instantly locate products in stores down to the specific section of the aisle, manage shopping lists, find offers and share experiences with friends via social media integration.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: aisle411—helping consumers navigate the brick-and-mortar shopping experience" »

Posted by startupbeat at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Pikimal

Website: www.pikimal.com

Founders: Eric Silver

Headquarters: Pittsburgh, PA

Year Founded: 2010

Employees: 13

Twitter: @Pikimal

Brief Company Description: “Pikimal is a decision engine, using only facts, that allows users to sort, compare and determine the most important products for them.”

By Eric Silver, founder and CEO

Product Overview

Pikimal is a decision engine that allows users to sort, compare and determine the most important products for them. We use only facts—no marketing, bias or opinion—to help users find the best product or choice for them.

Our mission is to help consumers make the best buying decisions. From data that is scattered, vast, and technocratic, we gather it all in one place behind an intuitive interface aimed for use by everyday shoppers. We help users choose amongst brands and types of products, allowing users to find the product that best suits individual needs and preferences. Through our website, consumers interact with product Pikis, or web applications, which convey each product’s qualities, specifications and features. The Piki allows the user to select how important each feature and specification is to the user, and, upon adjustment, the Piki determines the products that best match the user’s preferences. Behind each Piki is a current, comprehensive database of products generated from available information.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Pikimal—on a mission to save the web from marketing" »

Posted by startupbeat at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Sentigo

Website: www.sentigo.com

Founders: Gadi Shvadron and Omri Braun

Headquarters: Ramat Gan, Israel

Year Founded: 2009

Brief Company Description: Sentigo’s Wall St. Scanner enables users to make wise investment decisions by providing a one-stop source for information affecting the stock market.

By Gadi Shvadron, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

Wall St. Scanner is a free smartphone app which uses sophisticated text analysis and proprietary algorithms to aggregate and capture the online sentiment of publicly traded companies and market data. Its unique method combines information gleaned from both traditional news media and corporate websites and opinions expressed on social networking sites, chat rooms and blogs. The application enables users to make wise investment decisions by providing a one-stop source for all of the information affecting the stock market.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Sentigo—helping stock traders make more informed investment decisions" »

Posted by startupbeat at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Creaza

Website: www.creaza.com

Founding CEO: Jostein Svendsen

Year Founded: 2011

Employees: 6

Investors: Founders

Brief Company Description: Everybody has a story to tell, and Creaza enables the world’s stories to come to life via video with its intuitive, socially engaging and affordable cloud-based video production platform.

By Jostein Svendsen, CEO

Product Overview: Creaza is the cloud-based online video production platform designed to enable users to collaboratively produce, share and store user-generated video. By combining the power of broadcast-quality HD and the vast reach of social media, Creaza is in an unrivaled position to “make video social.”

Creaza is about to become the cloud’s video production platform of choice for consumers, businesses and professionals who want to produce and collaborate on self-generated, broadcast-quality video content. Creaza is affordable and easy to use, yet it gives video content producers creative freedom.

Founders’ Story: Creaza’s founding team is Norwegian and has known each other for a number of years. This year, they have come together to launch Creaza, which has roots in a video editing platform with more than 160,000 users in the educational market in Europe.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Creaza—making video production social" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Tip It Girls
Website: www.tipitgirls.com
Headquarters: Louisville, Kentucky
Employees: 2
Investors: Founders

By Christian W. Hahn, co-founder

Product Overview:

Tip It Girls was created to make discovering and sharing the things girls love easy and fun. A simple separation of followers and friends allows for either private or public/open communications. Anyone can see public tips, but only Tip It Girls (friends) can view private tips.

Users of the Tip It Girls network don’t have to search for friends, but rather can make new friends by watching what they tip on the tip scroll. Tip It Girls shares every new public tip on the tip scroll, which is on the site’s homepage and the iPhone application’s front page. Every few seconds, when a new tip is added, the other tips scroll down.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Tip It Girls—an online social sharing space for girls only" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Giraffic

Website: www.giraffic.com

Founder: Yoel Zanger, CEO

Headquarters: Tel Aviv

Year Founded: 2008

Employees: 7

Company Description (in 140 characters or less): “Fully-distributed VOD acceleration and delivery cloud.”

By Yoel Zanger, CEO

Product Overview

We offer the Giraffic Fully Distributed Video Acceleration Cloud, which has been adopted by more than 500,000 users across the world in less than 3 months, with over 10,000 new users joining daily, accelerating and offloading 70-80 percent of customers’ video traffic.

Our technology has proven its ability to save online video distributors over 50 percent of their bandwidth costs, delivering video content with a smooth playback and virtually eliminating the annoying re-buffering pauses.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Giraffic—video-on-demand acceleration in the cloud" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: XYZ Interactive
Website: www.xyzinteractive.com
Founders:  Michael Kosic, CEO, and Andrew Lohbihler, CTO
Headquarters: Toronto, Canada. Silicon Valley office at Plug and Play Tech Center  
Year Founded: 2002
Employees: 3
Investors: Angel
Company Description (in 140 characters or less): “XYZ has a very low cost 3D positioning sensor technology enabling touchless and gesture control for all electronic displays and interfaces.”

By Michael Kosic, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview: XYZ is a software licensing company, the magic in what we do is not in the hardware sensors, but in the positioning method. Our method enables 3D positioning using common IR components like you would find in your TV remote control. Although our technology can be applied to many markets, (switches, appliances, industrial displays, toys, badge-tracking...) we expect it will find its way first to smartphones, e-readers, tablets, and associated peripherals.

Founders’ Story: The founders of XYZ Interactive are Michael Kosic and Andrew Lohbihler. We met in the 90s when Andrew was still working at Nortel and Andrew had come up with a method for accurately locating cell-phones for E-911 purposes using just base station software changes. We shared a passion and a core belief that as our systems around us inevitably became more complex, our precise location (down to the mm) would become more and more important and valuable. We believed that having a low-cost method of doing this would create huge opportunities and value and so founded XYZ Interactive.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: XYZ Interactive—a new twist on a proven technology that enables touchless and gesture interaction at a price that could have 3D sensors everywhere" »

Posted by startupbeat at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: LocalYokel
Website: www.localyokelmedia.com 
Headquarters: New Canaan, Connecticut
Founder: Dick O’Hare, CEO
Year Founded: 2011
Company Description (in 140 characters or less): “Local Yokel Media is the Internet’s first hyperlocal online ad marketplace.”

By Dick O’Hare, co-founder and CEO

Our Company Background:

With the tremendous growth of the Internet, consumers continue to migrate online for local information. More local businesses are moving their advertising spend online, to follow this audience. As a result, online local advertising is now a $16.1 billion market and growing rapidly. Meanwhile, “hyperlocal” content is booming—filling the editorial void left by the waning coverage from traditional local media organizations. This valuable, community-level content presents a compelling, targeted advertising opportunity. Research shows that 80 percent of consumer spending happens within 20 miles of home. Local Yokel Media (LYM) focuses on those 20 miles (and more) to help local marketers reach only those communities within their immediate service area on publisher content those community audiences know and trust. This level of granular ad targeting delivers “geo-contextual” relevance which drives overall ad performance and media efficiency.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: LocalYokel—making hyperlocal online advertising work" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: MediaRoost
Website: www.mediaroost.com
Headquarters: Metuchen, New Jersey
Founders: Mark Krieger and Fred Pack
Year Founded: 2011
Investors: Self-funded
Employees: 3
Company Description (in 140 characters or less): "MediaRoost’s Twitter Management Tool, TweetRoost, helps groups and individuals monitor & manage tweets, bringing order to the chaos."

By Mark Krieger, co-founder and president

Product Overview:

Designed for departments within large or small organizations (sales, marketing or customer service), and agencies (marketing, advertising and public relations) that manage one or more Twitter profiles, TweetRoost provides a central platform to manage, assign, tag, search and archive Twitter conversations. Automatic brand-monitoring is provided.

Unlike other Twitter management solutions, TweetRoost includes a powerful saving capability that enables users to permanently archive all incoming and outgoing Twitter streams. Users and groups can internally tag, comment and discuss via threaded conversations all Twitter interactions and utilize auto-assignment, routing and approval functionality to support social media processes and workflow. 

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: MediaRoost—social media management for the enterprise" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Loffles
Website: www.loffles.com
Founder: Brandon Yoshimura
Headquarters: Providence, Rhode Island
Year Founded: 2010
Employees: 4
Company Description (in 140 characters or less): “Loffles is an online giveaway service for consumers that provides advertisers with a new channel for consumer targeting and engagement.”

By Brandon Yoshimura, founder and CEO

Product Overview

Loffles is an online sweepstakes service for consumers that provides advertisers with a new channel for consumer engagement and businesses with a promotion solution that maximizes brand impact.

Consumers register on loffles.com by completing a user profile. This enables Loffles to recommend relevant giveaways while simultaneously capturing data points that allow advertisers to target specific audiences.

To enter a giveaway, a user must first choose a contest from our prize catalogue. After clicking a prize, a user is presented with a 10, 15 or 30-second video ad. After watching the ad and answering a few questions to confirm message reception, the Loffles user is entered into the giveaway drawing.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Loffles—Armed with 500K in seed money, Loffles seeks to bring real legitimacy to online sweepstakes and prize marketing" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: ADmantX
Website: www.admantx.com
Headquarters: Hartford, CT
Year Founded: 2010
Employees: 12
Investors: Atlante Ventures ($2.8 million, closed 6/8/11)
Company Description (in 140 characters or less): “ADmantX reads URLs and knows consumers ‘frame of mind’ in real time for superior contextual ad data including emotions and buying intention.”

By J. Brooke Aker, CMO

Product Overview

ADmantX is a contextual targeting data provider that improves the match between ads and content using semantic and natural language processing technology. We provide unique data channels on buyer intention and emotions that represent a consumers “frame of mind” in real time. This advanced contextual data is cookie-less and a viable alternative to behavioral targeting or can supplement the same. Recent Yahoo research suggests a combination of behavioral and contextual targeting generates 40 percent better ad engagement.

Founders’ Story

ADmantX is a spinoff of Expert System which is a leader in semantic web and natural language (NLP) processing platforms. Thus ADmantX was born from a 20 year history of spell checkers, grammar checkers, NLP, semantic networks and semantic coding tools across hundreds of corporate and government engagements. Now tuned for the digital advertising vertical space ADmantX is uniquely placed to excel at providing contextual data at a speed, depth and accuracy level not seen before.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: ADmantX—Taking online ad targeting to a new level (without cookies)" »

Posted by startupbeat at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: RMZ Development LLC

Product: MyStream

Website: www.mystreamapp.com

Founder: Richard Zelson

Founded: 2010

By Richard Zelson, founder and CEO

Product Overview

MyStream is a new device-to-device(s) music streaming app that eliminates the cumbersome practice of sharing headphones or using a splitter in order to enjoy listening to music with friends. Using MyStream, music fans can wirelessly share their favorite songs with any other app user(s) within range.

MyStream users simply browse their library and select the songs or podcasts that they want to share with others via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The interface is simply designed with minimal buttons and tabs. Utilizing our Live Streaming technology, users can listen to and simultaneously stream full songs synchronously with other users. Utilizing MySound asynchronous technology, users can browse through another user’s MyPlaylist, select a song, and listen to a 90-second clip of that song. A “Buy” button appears on a listener’s device next to each song or podcast that is played for them. This button creates a direct and search-free link to the iTunes store to enable instant music purchases.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: RMZ Development’s MyStream app uses Bluetooth for wireless music sharing" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Enloop
Website: www.enloop.com
Founder: Cynthia McCahon
Headquarters: San Francisco
Year Founded: 2010
Employees: 6
Investors:  Family and friends

Company Description (in 140 characters or less): "Enloop helps entrepreneurs and small business owners auto-write business plans, test their idea and forecast their success."

By Cynthia McCahon, Founder and CEO

Product Overview

Enloop is a free software-as-a-service tool that helps everyone from the seasoned business owner to students dreaming up businesses in their dorm-rooms to quickly build bank-ready business plans and quantify the probability of success for their business idea. Users complete a simple step-by-step online form and Enloop automatically generates a customized business plan and performance score for the user, complete with text, financial forecasts and ratio analysis prepared on-the-fly, ready to present to financial institutions.

Founders’ Story

Enloop was created out of frustration. I had been helping small businesses with their financials for over 15 years and watched a lot of people break into their savings and 401ks only to end up empty-handed because they didn’t understand their risk. The simple truth was that there was no system that could help people answer the essential question of ‘How do you know if a business idea is a good idea’? Why? Because a good business plan helps you communicate business ideas, financials and the risk associated to partners and lenders. And a great business plan helps you communicate with yourself about whether the business is worth pursuing.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Enloop—Bringing sanity to the small business planning process" »

Posted by startupbeat at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Orpheus Media Research (OMR)/Clio
Website: www.cliomusic.com
Headquarters: New York City
Year Founded: 2010
Investors: Self-funded

Employees: 4-8

Company description (in 140 characters or less): “Orpheus Media Research is an advanced music research and development company that automates the search, analysis, and discovery of music.”

By Greg Wilder, Founder and CSO

Product Overview

Traditionally, large libraries of music have been very difficult to organize and search. Most music search technologies rely on metadata, or written descriptions of the music, rather than looking at the music itself. This has inherent limitations, as words can never fully describe our experience of what we hear.

Clio is the only pure music-to-music search and discovery platform that uses music to find music, producing higher quality matches and analyzing music at least 5,000-10,000x faster than existing keyword search technology. Clio eclipses traditional search methods, allowing metadata to refine, not define, music search and discovery results.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Orpheus Media Research/Clio – Taking automated music search and discovery to a new level" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Vizu
Website: www.vizu.com
Headquarters: San Francisco
Year Founded: 2005
Investors: Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson, Greycroft, Innovia and angel investors including Ron Conway, Mike Maples, and Esther Dyson
Company Description: "Vizu measures the effectiveness of your online brand advertising and tells you what is working in real time."

By Dan Beltramo, co-founder and CEO

Department store magnate, John Wannamaker, is famous for saying, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Vizu answers that question for you.

Broadly speaking there are two types of advertising: Direct Response advertising which attempts to drive immediate, measurable actions such as a website registrations, online purchases, application completions, etc.; and Brand Advertising which attempts to influence your attitudes and opinions about products in the way desired by the advertiser.

In the online environment, measurement of direct response advertising has been a science for many years. Direct response ads have long been measured consistently based on Click Through Rates (CTRs) and Cost Per Actions (CPAs). Brand advertising, on the other hand, was often not measured at all or was measured using lengthy custom market research studies that were often methodologically compromised and only delivered results months after an ad campaign had been completed.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Vizu—Pioneering innovative brand advertising measurement for ‘affordable real time brand lift data’" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Tongal 
Website: www.tongal.com
Headquarters: Santa Monica, CA
Year Founded: 2009
Founders: Rob Salvatore, Mark Burrell, and James DeJulio 
Employees: 5
Quick company description (in 140 characters or less): “Tongal allows companies to use crowdsourcing to develop fresh, high quality video content while propelling undiscovered talent.”

By James DeJulio, President and Co-Founder

Product Overview

Tongal is the leading creative social platform that empowers companies to tap into its crowdsourcing model to concept and produce video campaigns.

Tongal’s web platform circumvents the Madison Avenue system by using social media in a process that incentivizes talent around the world to collaborate with each other and the organizations that need them, creating fresh, compelling, high quality content. For a fraction of the cost of traditional means, brands can rise above the noise and propel undiscovered talent.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Tongal – Using the web to democratize the film and video production business" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: uSell
Website: www.usell.com
Year Founded: 2010
Founder: Doug Feirstein 
Company Description (in 140 characters or less): “uSell.com is the leading cash commerce platform that easily and securely turns your electronics into cash.”

By Doug Feirstein, CEO and Co-Founder

Product Overview

uSell.com is the leading cash commerce platform that turns people’s cell phones and electronics into cash—and everybody needs extra cash.

uSell.com operates by purchasing unwanted, high-value items directly from consumers, providing them fast payment, erasing all personal data, and then either refurbishing or recycling the phone, depending on its condition. Convenient and secure, uSell helps consumers avoid the hassle and risk of peer-to-peer sales channels such as eBay and Craigslist.

uSell.com’s 100 percent happiness guarantee ensures our customers are deliriously happy or we’ll make it right.

uSell.com is a subsidiary of Upstream Worldwide, Inc., a publicly traded company headquartered in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. For more information please, visit www.UpstreamWorldWide.com.

Founder’s Story

The original idea was hatched when a friend and I tried to sell some old electronics that were sitting around on eBay and realized that the process was very cumbersome. We believed that there had to be a better way for people who wanted to dispose of their old electronics and keep them out of landfills and get some cash in the process.

Continue reading "Featured Company Pitch: uSell—A new secondary marketplace for high-end electronics" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Joshua Schwadron, founder and CEO

Product Overview

Betterfly helps people find tutors, coaches, stylist, trainers or other "Betterists" who can help them be better at something. At the same time, Betterfly helps those Betterists get new clients and brand and market themselves.

Tutors, coaches, stylist, trainers and other "Betterists" list themselves on Betterfly and create their own Sites to market the services they offer related to personal betterment. Then, people looking to be better can search and book the tens of thousands of service providers listed on Betterfly’s 300+ Category Pages by price, location, verified reviews, availability and more. By catering to individuals instead of companies Betterfly enables users to compare apples to apples, people to people.

Continue reading "Featured Company Pitch: Betterfly—connecting ‘Betterists’ to new clients" »

Posted by startupbeat at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: AirRun
Website: www.airrun.com
Headquarters: Chicago
Year Founded: 2010
Founder: Rob Matthews
Investors: Privately-Funded
Employees: 6
Company Description (in 140 characters or less):
"AirRun is the first of a new generation of social media applications that enable hyperlocal peer-to-peer (P2P) commerce."

By Rob Matthews, Founder and CEO

Product Overview

AirRun is a free app available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and eventually Android devices. We connect two groups of people—those who are looking for a product or service (seekers) and those willing to perform the task (runners)—in a geography-based marketplace.

Whether it’s a college student without a car craving a late-night snack or a small business that needs a package delivered on a deadline, seekers post a job to AirRun’s marketplace, which uses Google Maps to geo-locate the individual. Runners can browse the marketplace and find the jobs most convenient for them. After claiming the job, the runner performs the task and receives an agreed-upon payment from the seeker.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: AirRun—A unique hyperlocal job marketplace for short-term tasks" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch – PR for People: Using technology to bring PR to the masses" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Move That Block

Website: www.movethatblock.com

Headquarters: Albany, NY

Year Founded: September, 2010

Founders: Todd Drowlette and Patrick Gray

Investors: Privately-Funded

Employees: 30

By Todd Drowlette and Pat Gray, Co-Founders

Product Overview

MoveThatBlock.com is an innovative, cutting-edge website that offers professional quality, one-stop shopping for jobs, dating, commercial real estate, residential real estate, apartments & home rentals, vacation rentals only before found on pay-to-post sites. We offer more features, better functionality, and dynamic cross traffic that no single pay-for-use competitor offers. Our custom features are easy to use and allow simple searching and posting in an uncluttered environment. MoveThatBlock.com is the world’s first premium quality site to offer full access free of charge across multiple categories in the Essential Life segment of the Internet. We also offer personal, step by step guidance through life’s most difficult decisions, providing local experts in each step of the process. From buying a home to landing that dream job or date, we’ve got you covered. You never have to go it alone. Welcome to the Block.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch – MoveThatBlock: Connecting consumers and local professionals for free" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: ExpertBids.com

Website: www.ExpertBids.com

Headquarters: Chicago

Year Founded: Launched in November 2010

Founder: Nick Cronin 

Investors: Self-funded, in addition to a small angel investment 

Employees: 3

Company Description: ExpertBids.com is a professional services marketplace where clients can get personalized bids from lawyers, accountants and consultants.

By Nick Cronin, Founder and CEO

Product Overview

ExpertBids.com is an easy-to-use platform which connects clients and professionals saving both parties time and money.

The site works like this: Clients register and post a service request which either lawyers, accountants or consultants can view. Professionals then search the requests by location, category, and other criteria. When they are interested in a service request, they can send the client a personalized bid using either a flat fee or an hourly rate. The client can then review the details of the bid and the professional’s profile, which includes information such as their name, educational information, licenses, websites (i.e., Linkedin, Facebook, etc.), and finally, past client reviews of the professional’s work.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch – ExpertBids.com: A free marketplace that connects potential clients with professionals" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: GameStaq

Website: www.gamestaq.com

Headquarters: New York City

Year Founded: 2009

Founder: Joseph Gindi

Investors: Self-funded and private equity

Employees: 4

Quick Company Description: GameStaq is a simple way to buy and sell videogames at fair and preset prices.

By Joseph Gindi, Founder

Company Overview:

GameStaq is a peer-to-peer marketplace that features set fair pricing for the buying and selling of console video games. I knew that traditional brick and mortar game resellers introduced huge markups. The spread between the price you would receive for selling a used game and the price to buy that same game is just too wide.

We bring together sellers and buyers at an equitable price that is developed by looking at average pricing across the web. Our transaction process is simple. A seller offers a game, and then is matched with a buyer looking for that specific title. GameStaq is always the mediator, as we have eliminated any need for the buyers and sellers to interact, so there is no auction or haggling. Through transparent and equal pricing, we establish a marketplace where neither party feels like they are getting a raw deal. Furthermore, we guarantee all transactions and ensure all personal information including payment data is kept secure.

The site has more than 12,000 current users after being live for about 10 weeks. We focused our initial outreach to the hardcore console gamer community that desires the best and latest games.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch - GameStaq: Making the used video game market a snap" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Eegoes

Website: www.eegoes.com

Headquarters: Boston and Vevey, Switzerland

Year Founded: 2010

Founders: Guillaume Molter and Al Zane

Investors: Self-funded (currently preparing round A funding)

Employees: 6

Company Description: Connect like-minded people worldwide and provide organized relevant information based on its users’ interests.

By Guillaume Molter, CEO and Co-Founder

Product Overview

We built eegoes to be a leading new generation social networking site. The goal of eegoes is to provide a user-friendly and relevant platform for engaging social interaction. We deliver what matters most to users, which is relevant, geo-located and organized content based on their interests. What we want to do is to offer a tool that will help you to deal with all of your online identities, will simplify your online life and will help you stop wasting your time.

At the same time eegoes also aims to be:

-a “stand alone” social network (like Twitter or Digg) where people can connect with others and share some links, pictures, videos and events in the easiest way possible.

-a social media client (like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck) allowing our users to access and filter content from their other online identities and share some content on them (this feature is in development).

-a content portal (like YouTube or Flickr) where people can search and browse random content shared by strangers which has been automatically (semantically) organized around categorized “Networks” which are themed into categories like Travel, Sports, Music and more.

These three aspects of the product make it a unique actor in the market.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: Next generation social networking with Eegoes" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: TekTrak

Website: www.TekTrak.com

Headquarters: Los Angeles

Year Founded: 2010

Founders: Arik Waldman, CEO and Luka Sklizovic, COO

Investors: Angel Funded

Employees: 5    

Company Description: TekTrak provides smartphone security by allowing users to track their phone, and secure any sensitive data stored on the device.

By Luka Sklizovic, Co-founder and COO

Product Overview

We have all experienced losing an electronic device, whether it was a digital camera, mobile phone, MP3 player, etc. Well, after losing one too many phones, we decided to find a solution to this problem that would not only help us know the location of our devices at all times, but also make sure that the content within those devices was safe.

Smartphones, like all other mobile phones, are used so frequently these days that they are more susceptible to loss than any other electronic device. Did you know that 20-30% of phones are lost every year?! Throw cloud computing into the mix, and you might be losing more than just your device; your privacy, contacts, emails, bank account access, pictures, business documents, etc.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: TekTrak...never lose your smartphone again" »

Posted by startupbeat at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Expensify

Website: www.expensify.com

Headquarters: San Francisco

Year Founded: 2008

Founder: David Barrett

Investors: Hillsven Capital, Baseline Ventures, Red Swoosh founder Travis Kalanick, Redpoint Ventures

Employees: 8

Company Description: Expense reports that don't suck!

By David Barrett, Founder

Product Overview

Expensify does “expense reports that don't suck!”  We do that by importing expenses *and receipts* from your credit cards and mobile phones (so no typing or paper receipts), submitting expense reports through email (so no printouts or envelopes), and reimbursing through QuickBooks and direct deposit (so no manual bookkeeping or physical checks).

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: Expensify--making the expense report less tedious" »

Posted by startupbeat at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: 1SaleADay

Website: www.1saleaday.com

Headquarters: Brooklyn, NY

Year Founded: 2006; website launched in 2007

Founder: Ben Federman

Investors: Self-funded

Employees: 40

Company Description: 1SaleaDay offers unheard of discounts on name brand electronics, watches, jewelry, toys and wireless gear. Deals last just 24 hrs!

By Ben Federman, Founder

What is 1SaleADay.com?

1SaleaDay.com offers rock-bottom daily deals on electronics, watches, family products and jewelry with unheard-of deep discounts up to 90 percent off retail on products that are only available for just 24 hours.  The site is the largest independently-owned daily deal site in the world, and wields tremendous buying power to offer outrageous deals to more than 350,000 daily site visitors on everything from high-end GPS units and digital cameras to pearl necklaces, luxury watches and even housewares and games.  As a special surprise, the company clears out its inventory with its Chunk o’Junk Deal that features a box full of items randomly selected from past deals—for just $10.  Customers never know exactly what they’re going to get, but Past Chunk o’Junk deals have included laptops, MP3 players, GPS units and even a 42-inch TV.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: 1SaleADay brings ultra-discount shopping to the web" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Assistly

Website:  www.assistly.com

Headquarters: San Francisco

Year Founded: 2009

Founder: Alec Bard, CEO

Investors: True Ventures  and Social Leverage

Employees: 10

Company Description: Assistly is an elegant, web-based platform that makes customer support in a social marketing culture smarter, easier, and more affordable.

By Alec Bard, CEO

What Is Assistly?

Assistly is a hosted customer support platform that organizes and manages all of your customer conversations into a system that makes customer support efficient, fast, and effective. Assistly delivers the most current and relevant information about your customer requests to the right people in your organization and gives your teams intuitive and powerful tools to WOW your customers.

We understand that a sustainable competitive advantage is determined by your relationship with your customer. We help our clients embrace the customer-focused model, drive positive customer experiences, and build brand value.

So How Is Assistly Different?

- Listen to Your Customers IN REAL TIME

Assistly's help desk software collects and organizes all of your customer conversations into a single framework. This comprehensive, real-time view captures not only what customers are saying to you but also about you so you can intervene to manage your reputation and capitalize on "good buzz." As your support organization grows, this will keep your customer service agile and efficient.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Assistly wants to make customer support more social" »

Posted by startupbeat at 05:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: WebiMax

Website: www.webimax.com

Headquarters: Mount Laurel, NJ

Year Founded: 2008

Founder: Ken Wisnefski

Investors: Self-funded

Employees: 100+

Company Description:

By Ken Wisnefski, Founder/CEO

Product Overview

In 2003 when I was building my first venture, VendorSeek.com, I sought a Search Engine Optimization firm that could help the site achieve higher natural search results to help lower our growing monthly Pay Per Click ad spend.  We were a small company and did not outsource anything at that point as we frankly could not afford it.  We spoke with several SEO firms and decided to take a leap of faith and work with a firm that “guaranteed” a dramatic improvement in our rankings.  Six months and over $50,000 later, the site did not rank even slightly better in natural search results and the company informed us that our monthly cost would have to increase in order to see results.  I then realized that I needed to learn how to get my website to rank well in order to effectively expand my business.  It was not an easy task but over the next five years our natural search results improved dramatically and we were able to fine tune our PPC spending down from nearly $200,000 a month to just under $50,000 a month.  When the call came from a large company to buy VendorSeek, I was reluctant but frankly the offer was too good to pass up.

I always envisioned helping other companies achieve the same sort of success through our online marketing initiatives and, based on my experience, believed there were few firms that could actually deliver desired results.  With that notion in mind, less than three months after the sale of VendorSeek, I launched WebiMax.  Our company has now grown to over 300 clients and is rated by TopSeos.com, an independent third party evaluator of SEO firms, as the #1 SEO firm in the United States (http://www.topseos.com/rankings-of-best-search-engine-optimization-companies).

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: WebiMax seeks to make SEO easy and effective for all" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: CabCorner

Website: www.cabcorner.com

Headquarters: New York City

Year Founded: 2008 (launched in 2009)

Founders: Jonathan McKinney and Jesse S. Sommer

Investors: Self-funded

Employees: 6

Company Description: CabCorner.com connects people located in the same area who are headed the same direction around the same time.  Save costs and the planet!

By Jesse S. Sommer, Co-founder and COO

Product Overview

When my friend and fellow Wesleyan University alum Jonathan McKinney approached me to share an idea he was concocting, neither of us could have anticipated the enthusiasm with which the public would greet what would one day become “CabCorner.”  Our web-based, mobile-accessible “social transportation logistics utility” is designed to connect individuals located in the same area who are headed the same direction around the same time.  Its mission is to reduce street traffic, subway congestion, and urban pollution.  Yet beyond the environmental benefits, we seek to transform taxicab paradigms and habits, expanding taxi travel to a new demographic that previously couldn’t afford it.  By leveraging cities’ private taxi networks, we’re creating a new form of public transit, and driving more business to cabbies.  Currently operating in NYC, CabCorner.com is accessible worldwide.  And it’s also entirely FREE to use!

While our team didn’t invent the concept of “cab-sharing,” it’s a matter of mere modesty to say we perfected its implementation online.  And the biggest players in our space agree; our acquisition of CabEasy this past spring was followed by our acquisition of industry pioneer Hitchsters.com a few months later—and in both cases the founders of these sites approached us to join our enterprise.  We’re so grateful that the media has embraced and promoted our product, and the recent proliferation of competitors has actually benefited our company by introducing web-users to this idea.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: CabCorner wants to fill empty 'back seat real estate'" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: RecreateMyNight

Website: www.recreatemynight.com

Headquarters:

Year Founded: 2010

Founders: Tejpaul Bhatia

Employees: 5 full-time and 5 part-time

Company Description: RecreateMyNight allows users to relive their shared experiences online within a single, streamlined view.

By Tejpaul Bhatia, President

Product Overview

Today, more than ever before, we live and share our lives online.  The members of “Generation Y” are now reliving many experiences on social media platforms and mobile devices.  After a night out, whether at a concert, wedding, or just a party with friends, within minutes there tends to be an enormous amount of fragmented data (photos,videos, tweets, status updates and check-ins) relating to the events of that night. I founded RecreateMyNight.com to be a web-based platform where users can easily discover, compile, share, and relive experiences collectively.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Piece together memories of your nights out with RecreateMyNight" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Moonit

Website: www.moonit.com

Headquarters: New York City

Year Founded: 2010

Founders: Dana Kanze and Mason Sexton, Jr.

Employees: 6

Company Description: Moonit is a social engagement tool that provides users to with a new way to analyze their relationship compatibility and introduce friends.

By Dana Kanze, CEO, and Mason Sexton, Jr., President

Product Overview

Moonit is a social optimization resource that provides insights into Generation Y users’ relationships.  The core offering allows users to enhance their romantic, platonic and professional relationship connections by running compatibility assessments based on astrological underpinnings, while receiving relationship guidance based on psychological guidance.

Through a personalized “Mooniverse,” users are able to run comprehensive relationship compatibility assessments; track their relationships via daily relationship horoscope alerts; play matchmaker by setting up their friends; obtain expert and peer advice via “The Couch” feature; and get the scoop on celebrity matchups and breakups via “The Stars” feature, while sharing their relationship stories and opinions in the form of blog posts and community contributions.  Moonit is integrated with Twitter and Facebook, allowing users to import contacts and broadcast relationship status and compatibility ranking updates.

Continue reading "Featured Startup Pitch: Moonit offers a social tool to determine relationship compatibility and make connections" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: SoftCity

Website: www.SoftCity.com

Headquarters: Montreal, Quebec

Year Founded: 2008

Founders: Blaise Rabaud and Marc-Antoine Ross

Employees: 11

Company Description: The world's leading social commerce platform for developers and software enthusiasts to learn, grow and earn.

By Marc-Antoine Ross, co-founder and COO

SoftCity began, in its earliest form, as a project for Blaise Rabaud, a former employee of the software publishing company, Avanquest Software.  Blaise had successfully launched an e-commerce business based in France that sold hardware and software as early as 2002.  His belief in the Internet as a tool for communication and collaboration would eventually lead to SoftCity’s creation in 2008.

The concept for SoftCity was to build a new kind of software community, one where the developer and the user interacted.  It wasn’t just about selling more products, it was about true social interaction, a comfortable and safe ecommerce platform and a community built on sharing and developing knowledge. 

Enter Marc-Antoine Ross, whose passion for social networking, e-commerce and collaboration helped Blaise solidify what SoftCity could be.  By harnessing ecommerce with a solid platform built on enterprise technology, the two set out to accomplish their goal.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: SoftCity creates online community for software enthusiasts" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: North Social

Website: www.northsocial.com

Headquarters: Oakland, Calif.

Year Founded: 2010

Employees: 15

Company Description:

Simple Applications. Powerful Facebook Pages.

By Alex Bernstein, Partner

Facebook has become a marketing must for any brand, whether a global corporation or an indie band.  But not anyone can take advantage of the offerings on Facebook due to budgetary and technical limitations.  How many brands have the budget of Red Bull and the engineering savvy of Google?  The most compelling, engaging fan pages on Facebook were built with thousands of dollars by the most talented developers and agencies.  What’s a smaller brand to do?

Shortly after Facebook launched pages for businesses, we were meeting with clients who wanted to enhance their presence on Facebook but couldn’t afford the cost to build and maintain custom applications and didn’t have the time or technical knowledge to outsource developers.  We immediately recognized a need and engineered a way that we could enable all brands, big and small, to overcome the financial and technical challenges of Facebook by offering a full suite of easy to use applications that were both affordable and powerful.

Continue reading "Featured Company Pitch: North Social" »

Posted by startupbeat at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Local Bigwig LLC

Website: www.localbigwig.com

Headquarters: New York

Year Founded: 2010

Investors: Self-funded

Founder: Ray Madronio

Employees: 11

Company Description:

“Live the Local Life” with Local Bigwig, a short-term home rental source and a place where global travelers and local homeowners meet.

By Ray Madronio, CEO

With the mission to help global travelers and local homeowners meet, Local Bigwig LLC specializes in short-term home rentals.  However, the Local Bigwig brand itself focuses on far more than short-term home rentals—it is built to be the go-to source for travelers and locals alike seeking information on everything from travel tips and logistics to the latest city happenings.

Local Bigwig’s motto is “Live the Local Life” and it encourages homeowners to share their neighborhood secrets and “hot spots” with other users and travelers.  The website encourages travelers to enjoy a more genuine experience of a city—one that is difficult to attain in a traditional hotel.  Local Bigwig is the antipode to the typical tourist-y vacation, the one in which you stop at every popular museum and landmark but don’t really feel the vibe of the city that you’re in.

It is no surprise that I started writing the Local Bigwig business plan in the Rio de Janeiro-Galeao International Airport, about to board a plane home to New York.  As a travel and real estate buff, the website seamlessly combines my two loves.  One of the first things that I asked a fellow intern on their first “bigwig lunch” was: “so tell me about your favorite spots around NYU—interesting, cool spots that not too many people know about.”  Scouring for the city’s best-kept secrets is my hobby and now, instead of spending my Sundays going to open-houses around Manhattan, I brainstorm for the website.

Company: CheckAlt

Website: www.checkalt.com

Year Founded: 2010

Founders: Shai Stern, George Karfunkel

Investors: Self-funded

Employees: 10 

By Shai Stern, CEO

There are more than 40 million households using electronic payment today.  Time is money and people want business done quickly and efficiently.  Now more than ever, companies are adopting high-tech methods when dealing with their corporate needs.  CheckAlt is at the forefront of this technological revolution.  They are helping businesses run more smoothly and cost effectively.

An alternative electronic processing solution, CheckAlt provides merchants with a fast, affordable, and reliable means to receive payments online.  Not only are businesses improving their bottom line with the service, but they are also doing their part to help the environment.

Paper checks are outdated; they are a strain on our natural resources, not to mention an inconvenience in today’s fast-paced business environment.  Receiving payments from a consumer can sometimes seem like a losing battle.  Whether the check is “in the mail” or payment simply slips the mind, CheckAlt is the solution that benefits both the merchant and consumer.  Merchants can debit a client’s account directly, making “just in time” payments easy and late fees a thing of the past.  A paper check can take up to ten days to clear, whereas CheckAlt’s e-checks or ACH are posted in only 48 hours.  Companies using CheckAlt are mitigating risks and improving customer loyalty, making business transactions a breeze.

Merchants no longer need carry the burden of credit card or wire transfer fees, plus the worry of lost checks can be eliminated.

Continue reading "Featured Company Pitch: CheckAlt" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: MyBankTracker.com

Website: www.mybanktracker.com

Headquarters: New York City

Year Founded: 2008

Founders: Alex Matjanec, Tadas J. Nikulin and Jason Reposa

Investors: Self-funded

Employees: 7

Company Description: 

“Coined the Google for banks, MyBanktracker.com offers consumers information about banks in order to help them make smart banking decisions”

By Alex Matjanec, Co-founder,

The concept to launch MyBankTracker.com began in early 2008, when Tadas J. Nikulin, Jason Reposa and I saw a need to shift the way banking information was presented by providing a more consumer-oriented personal finance portal.

Headquartered in New York City’s DUMBO neighborhood, MyBankTracker.com helps consumers make informed banking decisions and save money—and it is available free of charge to the consumer.  To meet the growing demand for easier access to clear information about the best banks and rates in the country, we provide an easy-to-use web portal that lets consumers rate and review banks, compare interest rates and learn more about the savings and investment options to best meet their goals.

Now, more than 200,000 unique monthly visitors later, we track more than 50,000 state based products and more banks than any other site in the industry—more than 1,000 to date—with rates for CDs, savings, checking, mortgage, credit card and home equity line of credit accounts updated daily to provide the most current information that helps consumers find the best rates at more banks across the country.

Continue reading "Featured Company Pitch: MyBankTracker.com" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: OneRoof

Website: www.oneroof.com

Headquarters: San Francisco. CA

Year Founded: 2005

Founders: Dwight Wilson, Miguel Raimilla, and Eric Spector

Investors: Angel investors

Employees: 23

Company Description: 

“OneRoof's goal is to make a difference by facilitating sustainability of public computing worldwide by providing quality software at no cost”

By Eric Spector, CEO

We founded OneRoof, a company of entrepreneurs and philanthropic-minded backers, in October 2005 to franchise cyber cafés in the developing world and to offer a range of Internet-enabled services in small rural towns such as: email and browsing, financial services, insurance, rail/bus/air ticketing, education, and job skills training.  OneRoof opened scores of browsing centers in rural Tamil Nadu state in southern India, and in the states of Campeche, Veracruz and Yucatan of rural Mexico.

After some time working with their browsing centers, we discovered a need for timely information from their locations in India and Mexico.  This led us to research most point-of-sale (POS) software products, and they eventually chose CyberCafePro for use in our businesses.  In 2008, we moved beyond the rudimentary reporting features of the otherwise solid CyberCafePro by creating a robust, web-based online management information system.  Initially, this work was done for internal purposes, but over time OneRoof began to garner interest in licensing our software from colleagues working in government-funded telecentre networks, from owners of private cyber cafés and from government officials around the world.

Continue reading "Featured Company Pitch: OneRoof" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: CyberSynchs

Website: www.cybersynchs.com

Headquarters: New York City

Year Founded: 2008

Founder: Amos Winbush III

Investors: Self-Funded

Employees: 15

Company Description:

"CyberSynchs offers applications that enable data synchronization, sharing and transfer through the hybrid cloud"

By Amos Winbush III, CEO

Leaving my native Louisiana for New York at the age of 19 to pursue my dream of a music career, only in my wildest dreams would I have envisioned that five years later I would trade in my headphones for an entrepreneur’s hat as the founder and CEO of CyberSynchs.  In two short years the company has grown into a $20 million technology company with an ever-expanding impact on the mobile, wireless and home entertainment industries.

CyberSynchs is a Universal Data Synchronization (UDS) company that offers $2.99 per month subscription-based wireless applications that enable consumers to automatically synchronize, backup, share, transfer and retrieve mobile device content as well as other consumer electronic device data.  CyberSynchs Mobile, our flagship product, performs these actions at individual pre-determined intervals.  Users sign up for the service at www.cybersynchs.com, after which a text message is sent to his or her mobile device, providing a link that installs the CyberSynchs application.  Data synchronization is immediate; CyberSynchs doesn’t require any hardware, cables, SIM or storage cards.

That’s the 30-second elevator pitch. There is the proverbial “so much more.”

Continue reading "Featured Company Pitch: CyberSynchs" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Knewton

Website: www.knewton.com

Headquarters: New York City

Year Founded: 2008

Founder: Jose Ferreira

Investors: FirstMark Capital, Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital; angel investors

Employees: 45

Company Description:

“Knewton is replacing mass education with personalized learning.”

 By Jose Ferreira, CEO

The idea of learning on the Internet is difficult for some people to swallow; the phrase “online education” evokes grainy one-way video lectures, boring, ineffective lessons, and/or slimy for-profit degree mills.

Knewton is none of the above.

Instead, with the help of our revolutionary adaptive learning engine, we at Knewton are out to prove that online learning works—and in fact, can be more engaging, effective, and scalable than traditional classroom approaches.  We currently use an initial version of our adaptive learning engine in our online GMAT, SAT, and LSAT courses.

The idea for Knewton first came to me 18 years ago, when I began working at Kaplan. I saw a lot of unproven instructors teaching students at local Kaplan centers, and got tired of telling students they needed help in broad areas like “geometry.”  I wanted to be able to target students’ weaknesses at a much more granular—and meaningful—level.

Company: Lightfleet Corporation

Website: www.lightfleet.com

Headquarters: Camas, Wash.

Year Founded: 2003

Employees: 22

Company Description: “Lightfleet’s optical fabric is a breakthrough to multiprocessor computing that overcomes the performance bottlenecks of typical interconnect architectures.”

By John Peers, CEO

Imagine for a moment that firms on Wall Street can execute trades and trading algorithms much faster, where trading even milliseconds faster can mean millions in profits; or that the military can put high-density analytics systems like facial recognition in command aircrafts to speed intelligence, decision support and response efforts; or that today’s leading Internet service providers and search engines can dramatically accelerate services while cutting power and cooling costs in half and minimizing server footprints in over-crowded data centers.

Enabling these types of strategic advantages and business opportunities is what drives our team at Lightfleet, and today this vision is closer than ever to reality.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: Lightfleet" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: doddle/ Mobile Imagination, LLC

Website:www.doddleme.com

Headquarters: Jupiter, Florida

Year Founded: 2009

Founders: Jim Robertson and Richard Kwiat

Investors: N/A

Employees: 14

Company Description:

"Doddle puts the production industry in the palm of your hand."

By Jim Robertson, Founder and Principal

You might be wondering by now—what’s a doddle?  Well, by definition it means a job or task that’s easy to complete.  And that’s exactly what this new smartphone application delivers.  Imagine taking all the production guides from around the world, and putting them in the palm of your hand.  Initially designed for iPhone, the “it” phone for the production industry, doddle promises to transform the lives of production professionals—from movies and television to audio, and video production segments—by giving them the unique ability to plan, communicate with, and manage their workforce from their smartphone throughout the creative process.  It’s a doddle!

No more wasting countless hours frantically searching through antiquated and cumbersome production guides or squandering precious time schlepping to an office to fax call sheets and call disconnected equipment rental shops.  In short, doddle makes it possible to work the way you do, “On the go.”  This extraordinary app is revolutionizing the production industry, letting professionals spend less time chained to a desk and more time in the field where the magic is created.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: doddle/ Mobile Imagination" »

Posted by startupbeat at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By David Kaiser, CEO

With the surging popularity of online video viewing, Coincident TV (CTV) is a new technology that transforms online video into a unique type of browser.  It enables viewers to simultaneously watch a program while being presented with a vast menu of relevant online information, such as a given character’s Facebook page, a live Twitter feed, or a link to purchase the same type of hat another character is wearing.  The sequence and combination of possibilities is only limited by the content creator’s desires and business objectives.

I was inspired to develop CTV in 2008 while watching the news on television with my laptop beside me.  A story during the broadcast caught my attention, and I attempted to look up additional information on my computer.  However, I quickly became frustrated with the disconnected experience.  By the time I found the related story, I had completely lost my train of thought and also lost focus on the newscast.  That simple yet profound experience motivated me to build a technology that would create a truly seamless online viewing and web surfing environment.

What I developed is a form of “hypervideo” technology: a simple-to-use software suite that combines online video, social media, weblinks and commerce into one immersive experience.  At its core, CTV is a language to describe manipulating media (video, web display, web services and feeds).  We are also developing third party tools, a player, an editor, an analytics portal and a PERL library application, that enable quick, intuitive creation and playback of CTV files.  Over time, we anticipate that content publishers and software developers will embrace our language and build their own authoring tools to create better multimedia experiences.

Why are we doing this?  In a nutshell, because audiences have adopted online video viewing at astonishing rates.  According to a recent Nielsen report, there were more than 141 million unique video viewers in February 2010 and a whopping 10.3 billion videos were streamed in the same month.

With these types of numbers, it’s clear that people want both the instant gratification of using the Internet to connect and research, along with the entertainment value of video.  To date, no one has been able to take these two parts and make them into a singular ecosystem.  This is the void that CTV is filling, as well as providing rich monetization opportunities for content creators and great, unique exposure for brands.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: Coincident TV" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

E-commerce 2.0 is here, and Friendgiftr is proud to lead the way.  We are the first social media and mobile based company in the world to offer real, purchasable brand name company products—currently virtual and physical gift cards—to be bought through social networking sites like Facebook and mobile phones like the iPhone.  We have partnered with over 135 big names in the retail and restaurant businesses—players like GAP, Starbucks, Chili’s, Banana Republic, Sephora, Regal Cinemas and others—specifically with the intent of enabling consumers to shop from anywhere.  In other words, we have started to commercialize both the social media and mobile platform spaces for the first time in the U.S. but are also moving into other profoundly innovative areas so people can quickly and conveniently make purchases (most of this is still secret for now).

The idea behind this entire concept occurred in late 2008, as there was a realization that the then novel social media and mobile application platforms would become huge commercial playgrounds if you leveraged them properly.  In other words, there was an increasingly palpable feeling that a company could market and sell real brand name products to the existing users in these communities just like they had on eBay (as an aside, one of the brilliant parts of eBay’s business model, for example, has been that they have allowed smart companies to set up online retail storefronts on their website, adding great value for customers, businesses, and eBay itself).  When Facebook and Apple created their own application programming interfaces (APIs), it became clear that, just like on eBay, companies were willing to establish large footprints on these platforms.  But they were only doing so with virtual goods and virtual games.  And that is when Friendgiftr was born.  We realized that these companies were doing a great job at monetizing items like virtual smiley faces and cupcakes but that the market was much bigger for real products, which is the void we wanted to fill as the first company to offer real products through these APIs.

Company Description in 140 characters or less: 

"eJamming pioneered synchronizing high-fidelity live audio streams among musicians so they can play and record together online, in real time."

By Gail Kantor, Co-Founder and CEO, eJamming

All the activities musicians perform—playing, recording, writing, rehearsing, and arranging as well as learning, can now be done together live over the Internet.  All they need is eJamming AUDiiO’s pioneering software, a broadband connection, an audio interface device and a microphone.

You may be surprised to learn that until now, musicians haven’t been able to collaborate online in real time like other creative people have.  Technology has been the obstacle.  Bandwidth, speed and latency have made it difficult, and musicians have been patiently waiting for technology to catch up.

Our company, eJamming Inc., has spent the past decade pioneering live, synchronized, high quality audio-streaming technologies that bring musicians together to play and record online across the world.  eJamming co-founder Alan Jay Glueckman and I formed eJamming in 2001 to develop software that fills the void that kept musicians from participating in the online revolution that has connected most other people over the Internet.  Previous online collaboration solutions for musicians did not address real time or synchrony.  Yes, collaboration tools and games exist, but none are appropriate for music-making.

For musicians, timing is everything.  eJamming AUDiiO’s Jam Mode facilitates playing online from multiple locations by providing the fastest possible transmission speed and full pristine audio to inspire the session participants and satisfy their requirement for the highest fidelity reproduction of their instruments.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: eJamming" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Company Description in 140 characters or less: 

“KODA is the leading online community that introduces today's young professionals to the world's employers.”

By Jeff Berger, CEO

Finding a job in this economy may have just gotten a little bit easier.  Our San Francisco and New Orleans based social recruiting startup, KODA.us, is making waves in the private investment community for our innovative approach to helping people find jobs.  We just received an additional $1.5 million in private angel funding to support KODA’s growing user base and continued community expansion.

I see KODA challenging traditional resources like classifieds and job boards by getting “back to the basics” of the job search.  The recruitment industry doesn’t work for today’s young job seekers.  I know, because I was one of them.  The unemployment figures are staggering for recent college grads (with national rates topping 17 percent).  I truly believe that part of the problem is that recruiting sites aren’t paying attention to how young people communicate and what employers are really looking for.

Born out of job search frustrations as a recent Tulane graduate in a post-Katrina New Orleans, we designed KODA to fill the gap left by social and professional networks and job boards:

-Social networks are for socializing, not for finding a job.

-Online professional networks only work for those with already-existing contacts after several years of work experience.

-Traditional resumes and job boards are impersonal and static—a growing frustration for a generation that is accustomed to wide-open communication channels.

I see our team as pioneers in the “social recruiting” space.  We define it as using an online social medium to find your best candidate.  KODA is the first online community where young professionals and companies can come together in a professional environment that encourages self-expression.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: KODA" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Dialectic Networks

Website: www.dialecticnet.com

Headquarters: Osprey, Florida

Year Founded: 2005

Founder: Lee Hansen, CEO

Employees: 15

Company Description in 140 characters or less: 

"Dialectic Networks offers public/private commercial cloud computing and virtualized data center environments for mid/enterprise clients."

By Lee Hansen, Founder & CEO 

Businesses in all kinds of industries today are dependent on one common area—technology.  From the simplest ice cream shop all the way up to the most complex, multinational Fortune 100 corporations, all companies have some sort of technological backbone driving operations.

Large companies often have hundreds of thousands of square feet worth of space dedicated to housing massive amounts of technology such as servers and storage.  Some of today’s largest companies even contract with other businesses to house their data in separate places, just in case something goes wrong and they need to access data during or after a disaster.  Smaller companies may not be this complex with their data but still rely on technology to help drive the business.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: Dialectic Networks" »

Posted by startupbeat at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Currensee

Website: www.currensee.com

Headquarters: Boston

Year Founded: 2008

Founders: Asaf Yigal, VP of Product; Avi Leventhal

Investors: North Bridge Venture Partners

Employees: 20 

Company Description in 140 characters or less:

"Currensee Inc. is the first Forex trading social network that connects Forex traders based on real-time trades."

By Dave Lemont, CEO and President

Currensee was founded in August of 2008 by Asaf Yigal, a highly successful software development executive and one of the founding members of Onaro.  Asaf was a member of the founding tech team at Onaro, which was acquired by NetApp for $130 million.  At Onaro, Asaf was responsible for setting the overall product architecture, including the early versions of the product and building out the professional services practice in the company.  Previous to that, Asaf was Project Manager for an algorithmic research project in the Israeli Navy.

We are headquartered in Boston.  The company employs over 20 employees and has raised $6 million in funding from North Bridge Venture Partners to date.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: Currensee" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Company: Stonefield Software Inc. and Stonefield Software USA

Website: www.stonefieldquery.com

Headquarters: Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

Year Founded: 1991

Founders: Mickey Kupchyk, CEO; Doug Hennig, CTO

Investors: Bootstrapped

Employees: 20
 

Company Description in 140 characters or less:

Stonefield Software, makers of award winning Stonefield Query, develops BI database reporting software with the end-user in mind.
 

By Mickey Kupchyk, CEO and President

This is how I describe Stonefield Query to non users: Stonefield Query is a user-friendly Business Intelligence database reporting software tool.  With its step-by-step wizard driven design, Stonefield Query makes report writing a snap for even the most novice user.  No more waiting for IT or report developers to build reports on their timetables.  Stonefield Query lets you take advantage of the wealth of information stored in your business database when you need it.

People are surprised when I assure them Stonefield Query lets you create elegant and persuasive Quick Reports, Charts/Graphs, Cross-Tabulation Reports and Labels (mailing, barcode, etc) in minutes with little or no technical knowledge.  Stonefield Query is loaded with built-in features you expect in an enterprise BI reporting solution such as scheduling, ability to email reports, formula editor, and more.

Stonefield was incorporated in 1991.  My past experience as a Certified Management Accountant (CMA) and integrator of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems helped me design an ERP implementation and consulting division.  My partner and co-founder, Doug Hennig, relied on his expertise as a software developer to set up a custom software development division.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: Stonefield Query" »

Posted by startupbeat at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Web Site: www.parimics.com
Headquarters: Saratoga, Calif.
Year Founded: 2002
Founder: Axel Kloth, CTO; Royce Johnson, CEO
Investors: Self-funded
Employees: 5

Web Site: www.bizwiki.com

Headquarters: Aldershot, United Kingdom

Year Founded: 2006

Investors: Self-funded

Employees: 12

Company Description in 140 characters or less:

“Bizwiki.com is the user-edited Business Wiki.  Anyone from Bizwiki’s fast-growing audience can add and edit business listings for free.”

By Matt Aird, Co-Founder

Bizwiki is literally a wiki for business.  The site launched in the U.S. in July 2009, promising to change the way local search works by enabling its users to build up the most detailed and up-to-date index of business using wiki-style functionality.

Three years ago myself and co-founder Keith Hinde were discussing our frustrations with the long delay and lag between when a company’s details change and when they have been updated during our work for conventional directory and “Yellow Pages” publishers.  Tens, even hundreds of thousands of important details such as a company’s addresses and phone numbers may be incorrect or out of date, but the books keep on being printed.

In a break with traditional Yellow Pages websites, Bizwiki invites business owners and representatives to get involved in adding and improving their records with everything from contact details to prices and opening hours, completely free of charge.  These can be updated with changes and additional information quickly and easily on the site.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: Bizwiki" »

Posted by startupbeat at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Web Site: www.yakaboutit.com

Headquarters: Buffalo, NY

Year Founded: 2009

Founder: Jeff Gawronski, CEO

Investors: Self-funded

Employees: Gawronski, with a board of advisors and outsourced contingent workforce.

Company Description in 140 characters or less:

“Shop for the latest and most unique products you’ve never seen before. Yak About It only features products from independent inventors.” 

By Jeff Gawronski, CEO

YAK ABOUT IT is an e-commerce e-retailer that only carries items from inventors and independent entrepreneurs.  The underlying goal of YAK ABOUT IT is to get products noticed and Yak’d About.  The web site not only wants to provide consumers with great products, but it is also geared toward making inventor based creations a success.  Achieving the same wide-spread placement and awareness that large suppliers and companies do is an uphill battle for independent entrepreneurs.  Inventors are the true underdog.  In general, inventors and independent entrepreneurs face two major hurdles in getting their products noticed and, consequently, enjoyed by you, the consumer: (1) access to retailer shelf space, and (2) customer awareness once shelf space is awarded.

YAK ABOUT IT’s goal is to remove these roadblocks.  When you visit YAK ABOUT IT, you are purchasing, paying attention, and showing retailers which products are worthy of notice.  Giving products you like recognition through the sharing of opinions, purchase, and comments within YAK NATION, you become a part of the product’s climb in popularity.  It’s important to YAK ABOUT IT that consumers like you have a real voice within our YAK NATION.  Your voice is also heard every time you tell a friend or post what you’ve found throughout the web (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc).  The true long-term success of products is only achieved when you, the customer, make a purchase and share your experience of the purchase.  It’s these same useful benefits the inventor had in mind when he or she stopped life to work on bringing his or her vision to market.  YAK ABOUT IT featured inventors and start-up entrepreneurs appreciate your help in getting their products noticed!  And YAK ABOUT IT welcomes you to the very beginning of increasing awareness of these tremendous products!

YAK ABOUT IT featured products all started off as ideas, ideas conceived of by ordinary people like you and me.  The people behind these inventive products had the courage to change their lives as they once knew them and take a risk on their dreams.  This vision to bring a product to market and to start a company is not all-encompassing; it’s not a dream shared by everyone.  The learning process, hard work, cash investment and time make it all the more special for inventors and independent entrepreneurs when their ideas are brought to market.  The problem is that once a product is ready to sell, it doesn’t mean that a sale is guaranteed.  It’s not that the invention or creative product is useless; rather, the product lacks awareness.

Where would you go to look for new and useful inventions?  Where are the products from innovative inventors featured?  Before the birth of YAK ABOUT IT, the answer was nowhere.  New, market-ready inventions were all in random locations on the Internet or spread out in mostly smaller, niche retail stores.  YAK ABOUT IT’s mission is to get new products noticed.  Now inventors and start-up entrepreneurs’ new, innovative or exciting products can be found in one central place—YAK ABOUT IT.  You now have one spot that ensures that previously unknown products of yesterday become popular products of the future.  Join us at the ground level and YAK ABOUT IT!

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: YAK ABOUT IT" »

Posted by startupbeat at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Web Site: www.8kmiles.com

Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA

Year Founded: April 2009

Founder: Dr. Suresh V. Chari, CEO

Investors: Bootstrapped

Employees: 20

Web Site: www.earthtone.net  

Year Founded: August, 2007

Founders: Nader Alaghband, founder and CEO, and David Reid, founder and CFO

Investors: Angel investors

Employees: 10

Launch date: February 10, 2009 (Northeast U.S.); October 2009 (National launch)

Company Description in 140 characters or less:
“Earthtone is an online service that connects businesses and users to a network of independently-operated print providers across the country.”

By Nader Alaghband
Earthtone developed out of a mix of personal experience and professional ambition.  My colleague and friend David Reid and I came up with the idea for Earthtone a few years ago.  We were trying to find a local green printer where we could have an important presentation professionally produced quickly and conveniently.  We tried to search for the right supplier online, but the process was both time consuming and inefficient and we spent several fruitless hours searching through hard to comprehend pricing lists without finding what we were looking for.  In the end, David and I had to resort to the yellow pages and call all the printers in the relevant section to find out what services they offered and what environmental accreditations they had.Most places wanted 24 hours just to turn around a quote—not much good to us given that we were cutting it close, time wise!  We realized that there had to be a better way to get something as simple as twenty copies of a 20-page presentation, printed on 100% recycled stock, nicely bound and finished by an ISO-accredited printer.

We were surprised to find that in spite of many affordable, independent print businesses to choose from, there wasn’t any way to find them, not to mention to compare their services in one place before placing an order online.  Sure, some printers had websites but they were hard to find online, and even once you did find them, they were so hard to navigate that you’d end up getting frustrated and just calling the place up, spending time on hold and finally getting a quote for something that wasn’t quite what you wanted anyway.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: Earthtone" »

Posted by startupbeat at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Web Site: www.veeple.com
Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA
Year Founded: August, 2007
Founders: Scott Broomfield, CEO, and Craig Sproule, CTO
Investors: Self-financed and friends-and-family
Employees: 12

Web Site: www.vidoop.com

Headquarters: Portland, Oregon

Year Founded: 2006

Founders: Joel Norvell, CEO, and Luke Sontag, President, Technology

Investors:

Employees: About 30 

By Joel Norvell

How many passwords do you currently have to remember?  How often have you tried to log onto an important Web site, such as your bank or retirement account, and struggled to remember which username and password you registered with?  On the flip side, do you worry that your financial information is unsafe, because you use the same username and password at every location?

Vidoop got its start in 2006 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I met co-founder Luke Sontag.  Luke had gotten a glimpse of the security problems that plague large financial institutions when he worked as a security analyst at a bank.  We knew that that there had to be an easier way to handle secure logins.

We founded Vidoop to provide a solution to the problem of remembering complex passwords that provided a great user experience while still maintaining the strong login security required by our most sensitive online accounts.  At the same time, we discovered there was also the opportunity to turn logins into a revenue generator for financial institutions.

Protecting users’ identities has become a hot topic lately.  The increase in hacking, from keylogging malware to phishing attacks, has made it vital that online financial accounts be able to protect their consumers.  At the same time, our research shows that 69 percent of Web users who connect to financial institutions online have at least four or more passwords.

Enter Vidoop’s ImageShield.  Instead of making consumers remember a static password, Vidoop uses the human mind’s superior ability to recall pictures.  Sites protected with Vidoop present their users with an ever-changing grid of photographs in different categories—cars, boats, cats, flowers, etc.  Each image is tied to a one-time sequence of letters, which the user types in like any other password.  Only the user will know the correct categories, since automated hacking attacks are not able to interpret images, and the actual letters entered onto the site change with each login.

To provide even more security, Vidoop offers a range of multi-factor authentication options.  In addition to the ImageShield, financial institutions can elect to have one-time passwords sent to a user’s cell phone or to have a confirmation by voice phone.  With these methods, Vidoop makes sites easier to use and harder to breach.

Furthermore, the cost of deploying stronger authentication has been prohibitive, but Vidoop can lower cost and potentially eliminate it from the equation.

While Vidoop’s authentication solution is licensed per a financial institution’s user base, Vidoop can change authentication from being an overhead cost to a revenue generator by selling the images in the grid to advertisers for product placement.  So, instead of seeing a generic flower in the image-grid, consumers might see a bouquet from Flowers.com.

It sounds simple, but it has great potential.  For financial institutions willing to share ad revenue, we can provide Vidoop’s strong authentication for free in exchange for sharing revenue from the ad sales.  For financial institution sites that choose this option, the advertising version of this model works like this: Vidoop provides the image grid application.  The financial institution simply integrates this application with their existing authentication infrastructure.  Vidoop supplies the image and advertising content, and they share viewing-related data, such as how often each image was shown or clicked on.

It’s pretty simple, the financial institution keeps its users, and Vidoop provides usable security, stronger authentication, and a better user experience.  And with sponsored images the everyday login suddenly becomes a revenue generator and marketing asset.

So where are we today?

Physically, we moved the company to Portland, Oregon, in September to take advantage of a stronger economic environment and talent pool for our company.  Our headquarters are now closer to our customers, partners and West coast engineering talent, which will further drive the development of our products and solutions.

As a company, Vidoop has rolled out its platform for financial institutions, and we have also launched a free password manager—myVidoop.com—that is available to anyone on the Web.  Like any start-up, we welcome interest from investors, but we are also aggressively marketing our strong authentication to financial institutions and other higher transaction businesses.

Multi-factor authentication shouldn’t come in the form of expensive key fobs, tokens, or USB drives.  It should be simple and secure as image recognition, and it should be easy, fun and an opportunity to generate revenue.  Vidoop’s authentication solutions finally allow profitable, usable, secure access.

That is a solution everyone can embrace.

Vidoop - www.vidoop.com

Posted by startupbeat at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Web Site: www.biztrader.com

Headquarters: New York

Year Founded: 2008

Founder: Colby Sambrotto, CEO

Investors: Private Investors

Employees: 3

By Colby Sambrotto

Launched in April 2008, BizTrader.com is a global hub for business.  Users can buy, sell and value businesses, find value-added advice about all three processes, and get access to financial services and consulting.  Think of it as a global exchange for small business.  There are currently more than 25,000 businesses listed for sale on the site.

BizTrader.com’s wide range of services include Web 2.0 functionality such as video capability, mass listing syndication and distribution, RSS feeds, chat boards, and real-time, automated translation between English and Spanish.  This improves the ability for small business owners and buyers to easily connect on a global scale.

I founded BizTrader.com after serving as COO of ForSaleByOwner.com, the world’s largest resource for buying and selling real estate without a broker.

ForSaleByOwner.com was sold to Tribune in 2006 and after going through that process, I was inspired to start BizTrader.com to meet the needs of entrepreneurs and investors.  The company’s start up was funded by the original team of partners that created ForSaleByOwner.com.

At BizTrader, I am responsible for all executive and operational aspects of the business including overseeing business development, Web development and strategic planning.  We currently have three employees, and we utilize a team of more than 20 consultants domestically and abroad.  Over the course of the next few months we will make strategic hires in our business development area, and in marketing and sales.

Based on industry statistics that tell us only 25 percent of businesses for sale in a given year are actually sold for any of a variety of reasons, BizTrader.com has created a blended sales model, which enables owners to list their enterprises for a potential by-owner – no-commission sale.  Clients may reach out for the assistance of a professional broker if necessary should their by-owner sales efforts prove difficult or unsuccessful.

Significantly, our “blended” model offers owners a far better potential of selling their businesses than surprisingly abysmal industry averages.

According to the IRS, there are about 25 million small businesses in the U.S., which includes home businesses and very small businesses with no employees.  And of the 25 million approximately 5 to 6 million small businesses have one or more employees.

Our primary targets are those enterprises with at least one employee (5,547,000—of which 80.5 percent have annual sales of less than $1 million).  At any given point, it is estimated that as many as 20 percent of the owners of these enterprises are actively considering the sale of their businesses.  That’s roughly a million enterprises.

Significantly, only 25 percent of these enterprises (250,000) will sell in a given year and business brokers will be responsible for about 50 percent of that total.  The low level of success is most often blamed on owners overpricing their businesses—not the performance level of the brokers.

Almost unbelievably, 75 percent of the businesses for sale remain unsold every year while 90 percent of the potential buyers remain on the sidelines.

At BizTrader.com, we primarily derive our revenues from three sources:

All-Inclusive Listings – Priced at $49 Until Sold, enable sellers to highlight their ventures on BizTrader.com as well as numerous related sites.  Owners may attach up to six pictures of their ventures and use as many as 3,000 words to describe their ventures adequately;

Web Site Advertising – For entities such as financial institutions and franchisers who want to reach BizTrader’s sellers and buyers;

Exclusive “Blended” Broker Model – Brokers are able to list their client businesses-for-sale on the Web site for free.  Additionally and exclusively, BizTrader.com provides sellers the opportunity to seek the assistance of a professional broker should they encounter difficulties with their “by-owner” efforts.

In the blended model, owners needing help are directed to brokers who have contracted with BizTrader.com to serve the needs of prospect clients forwarded to them.  BizTrader is paid a “finder’s fee” of 10 percent of the total commission received by the broker should a sale eventually take place.  BizTrader’s management believes that there is an outstanding opportunity for a new player to address the deficiencies in the current market approaches, which fail to address the needs of the bulk of the marketplace.

Led by a seasoned, successful management team, BizTrader.com is moving aggressively into the businesses-for-sale industry with an array of new and unique tools for business owners and business brokers to help them sell effectively.

BizTrader – www.biztrader.com

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Web Site: www.prismastar.com

Headquarters: Chicago

Year Founded: 2005

Founders: Joshua Z. Tabin, CEO

Employees: 30

By Joshua Z. Tabin

PrismaStar has developed a patented product search tool that helps shoppers find the best products and services.  It is designed for use on the web, in kiosks or from mobile phones.  Founded in Prague, Czech Republic, in January 2005, PrismaStar has recently opened offices in London and Chicago.  The company is growing quickly, and currently employs thirty staff.

Our vision is simple: To be the leading provider of e-commerce and consumer guidance technology.  Consumers have been neglected far too long.  PrismaStar is here to change that by creating the most comprehensive and unbiased tools available for making purchase decisions.  By helping shoppers find and decide on the very best product for their individual needs, we give shoppers confidence to move forward with a purchase.  After all, we’re consumers too. Our goal is to make shopping fun again!

AnswerOil

PrismaStar’s product selection engine, AnswerOil (www.answeroil.com), uses patented interdependent slider technology to help consumers make better, faster, decisions.  AnswerOil revolutionizes the online and in-store kiosk shopping experience by focusing on what and why consumers buy.  Shoppers can search for any product feature or specification and trade-off the importance of different features; fine-tuning their search, and sorting and ranking relevant results in real-time.  Because every shopper’s needs and priorities are different, our technologies are designed to allow each shopper to choose what they are searching for rather than have it dictated by the retailer.  We put the shopper in control of their search.

The AnswerOil user interface allows fast, easy comparison of multiple products based on any and all specifications.  As shoppers tweak their search, the results dynamically sort in real-time.  For retailers, AnswerOil brings higher sales conversion rates, higher customer satisfaction, fewer product returns, more repeat business and, ultimately, higher revenues.

Happy Customers

Jessops

In July 2008, PrismaStar signed Jessops, the UK’s largest photography retailer.  The cornerstone of Jessops’ success has been its exceptionally high standard of customer service.  PrismaStar has brought this standard to an even higher level since implementing AnswerOil for the Jessops web site (www.jessops.com).

123Shop

AnswerOil was implemented at 123Shop, a camera retailer in the Czech Republic (www.fotoplaneta.cz).  This resulted in a two-fold increase in their sales conversion rates.

“The ratio of visits to orders placed has doubled and user feedback is also assuring us that we hit the mark,” says Pavel Včíslo, Director of Sales, 123shop.cz.  “Potential customers going through the decision-making process were frustrated by the difficulty of finding relevant and accurate product information.  The AnswerOil Product Selection Engine is our response to this problem.  The system makes it significantly faster and easier for a shopper to find and choose the best camera for them.”

Award Winner

PrismaStar was awarded the first-place 2007 Internet Effectiveness Award by Economia Online, a leading Czech business publication, for its implementation of AnswerOil in 2007 on a Czech and Slovak hotel search site at www.hotelselector.cz.

Mology

We are very excited about the imminent launch of Mology, a social networking site for online consumer electronics shopping (www.mology.com) powered by AnswerOil.  The site currently features just a camera selector, but other product categories will be added soon, followed by a unique feature that will allow users of Mology to create their own personalized selectors to use AnswerOil to help them make virtually any decision.

More functionality will be added to the site to make Mology the place where Techthusiasts go to discuss, rate and buy consumer electronics online.

Business Model

By licensing our patented AnswerOil technology, PrismaStar provides retailers with a solution that quickly and easily identifies what consumers want, increasing the likelihood of making a purchase.  Retailers pay a monthly licensing fee and we take care of everything else.

DataOil is part of the back-end of AnswerOil and is a proprietary system that gathers, integrates, and validates highly detailed and accurate product specification data, which is also available for purchase.  Another component of the technology is Real-time Performance Metrics (RPM), which stores and analyzes every purchase made via the AnswerOil selection engine.  The result is unique, unsurpassed market research data—captured in the natural act of shopping—that tells our customers WHY shoppers are purchasing their products.  This data will also be sold in the future.

Finally, Mology generates revenue via a variety of affiliate programs and by bringing the power of AnswerOil to the world.

The Brains

I began my career in 1982 as a computer programmer on the CDC Cyber/PLATO mainframe at the Computer Education Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois.  In 1986, I worked for SuperValu Corporation as a programmer working on Burroughs (Unisys) mainframe computers and PC-based database systems.  In 1990, I transitioned into the field of Corporate Sales and Management for ComputerLand.  In 1993, I moved to Chicago to work for Elek-Tek, where I leveraged relationships with large companies such as Case Tractor, GE, Philips and Tribune to build a sales team whose annual revenue reached $30 million in just two years.  In 1996 I started Tabin Corporation (www.tabin.com) and by 1999 it was the 83rd fastest-growing company in the United States (according to Dun & Bradstreet).

In 2000, I was awarded the Chicago-Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame Award.  By mid-2001, Tabin Corporation’s monthly revenue grew to nearly $4 million per month from offices in Chicago, Dallas, Texas, and Seattle, Washington.  Sales growth of 4,250 percent for the five years from 1997 ($600,000) to 2001 ($26.1 million) would have placed Tabin Corporation number 26 on the Inc. 500 had it not been sold to California-based EnPointe Technologies in October 2002.

My energy comes from collaborating with my staff—a multi-cultural collective of inspired young technology enthusiasts, whose creative spark is constantly turning ideas into reality, thereby making a positive difference in people’s lives, in ways they did not previously think possible!

PrismaStar – www.prismastar.com and www.answeroil.com

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Company:  rSitez, Inc.

Web Site:  www.rsitez.com

Headquarters:  Sparks, NV

Year Founded:  2007

Founders:  Rohan Hall, Sylvie Hall

Investors:  Private Investors

Employees:  10

By Rohan Hall, Founder and CEO

Web 3.0 - Monetizing Social Networks

Web 3.0 will be about monetizing social networks.  Entrepreneurs will use social networks to create revenue from advertising, membership fees and service fees.  Non-profits and associations will collect donation, association fees, event fees and convention fees online.  And corporations will be able to target products and services to specific audiences while having full control of their brand.  They will not be able to do this with the current large generic social networking sites.  They will need to do this with their own targeted branded site where they have total control of the site, content, and revenue.

I had a discussion about this concept with my wife, who is also my business partner, two years ago.  My wife was an EMEA Manager at Oracle.  I owned an ERP technology consulting firm whose clients included PeopleSoft, Honda, Sierra Pacific Resources and other multinational organizations.  It was clear to us that the benefits of online social networks had not yet reached many corporations, groups and organizations—some of which had offline networks with millions of members.  In addition, I realized that entrepreneurs like myself had not yet figured out how to capitalize on social networking.

Many could not afford or did not have the ‘know how’ to build a complex application like this from scratch.  The unexplored value of social networking is found in its potential to easily attract and monetize existing or new networks, but this value was not available to everyone.

rSitez evolved from this epiphany.  We provide an application where entrepreneurs, corporations, associations, non-profits, and any other group, individual or organization can create an online social network in minutes and monetize this network.  The entire process to create and start monetizing a new social networking site with our application takes less than 30 minutes.  What’s great about this for our clients is that we do practically everything for them.  We create a full-featured Web 2.0 site with blogs, chat, IM, photos, video, personal profile, groups, forums, newsletters, email and a variety of other features; we host the site for them or our enterprise customers can host the site themselves; we provide 7 days/24 hours support for our customers;  we provide regular upgrades and add the latest technology innovations at no additional cost to the product; we provide daily backups and security features; and we provide a variety of monetization features.  We also provide full customization services to clients who want to modify the software to further meet their business needs.

Because no technical skills are needed to create or manage our sites, we believe that our platform will continue to provide opportunities for everyday individuals and groups who would like to benefit from the social networking trend.  Not only are our clients able to turn on monetization features, but they can easily turn these features off as well.   Our customers are given full control of the site, content, members, revenue, and other features.

The results have been extremely successful for both us and our clients.  We continue to grow our customer base and revenue month over month.  We were profitable the 2nd month after launching the business and continue to be profitable today.  We generate revenue from licensing fees, hosting fees, advertising, and consulting fees.  We will also introduce transaction processing fees in the future.  We are privately funded and will be seeking investment to expand our market presence in the near future.

This month is our one year anniversary and we are in the process of releasing Version 3.0 of our product where we will release a variety of new features and additional monetization options for our clients.  We look forward to continued success for both ourselves and our clients in the coming future.

rSitez - www.rsitez.com

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Web Site: www.plandone.com

Headquarters: Petaluma, Calif.

Year Founded: 2006

Founder: A.J. Wacaser

Investors: Privately funded

Employees: 4

By A.J. Wacaser, Founder and CEO

PlanDone is a disruptive project planning tool that is transforming the web-based project collaboration market.  Designed to help companies and their teams complete projects on time, PlanDone is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) social project planning application that utilizes web 2.0 features such as instant messaging and wikis to help distributed teams work together more efficiently and effectively.

After managing a team of software engineers in India and California while reporting to managers in California, Illinois, and Amsterdam, I grew frustrated with missed deadlines and incomplete projects using complex, bulky tools not designed for efficient communication.  I found the use of email, traditional project software and document editors ineffective and I knew there had to be a better way to collaborate.

After many years of research and development, in 2006 I developed what would later be called PlanDone, web-based project collaboration software to help small-to-medium sized businesses manage and complete their projects.

Most project team members have no formal training as professional project managers and are left to use linear, static tools and processes in isolated meeting spaces.  PlanDone prevents commonly experienced problems with managing projects such as accessing the most current document.  These problems are solved by providing a centralized, interactive platform designed to gather and capture critical pieces of information such as files, guidance, goals or ideas within an open, flexible framework.

PlanDone also organizes, prioritizes, schedules and enables better communication in a maintenance-free, hosted application that is easy to use for staff members at every level of the company.  The software was designed to support people in the way they work naturally—not forcing them to change their working style based on the confines of the software features.

Unlike other products, PlanDone has a built-in wiki system for tracking recent changes, a priority ranking system for differentiating task importance, an instant message system that captures chat information directly into the supporting documentation and a projected deadline system for accurately pinpointing end dates with certainty.  PlanDone avoids the back and forth document version confusion by dynamically tracking the most current version in the wiki and providing clear expectations as action steps to team members of their prioritized tasks and due dates.  Teams report higher productivity, more accurate deadline projections, greater ability to get back up to speed, and reduction in miscommunication and confusion over shared roles.

Business Model

IDC forecasts that the small and medium-sized business (SMB) enterprise applications market will grow to $80.3 billion by the end of 2012, representing a 10.6 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2008-2012 period.  PlanDone fits nicely in this market and offers users a subscription-based model—either month-to-month at $16 per user for up to three users or discounted six and 12 month packages.  PlanDone’s services are best suited for small-to-medium sized business in the following industries: consulting, healthcare and manufacturing, but any industry that wants to cut costs and save time with distributed team planning and task management implementation can benefit from PlanDone’s solution.

Current Needs

We are currently evaluating early stage investment firms that have experience in the web 2.0 field to bring in seasoned management teams.

AJ Wacaser has more than 15 years of experience working in public and private software companies in desktop and web development.  He has managed numerous teams around the globe.

Previously AJ was the Web Development Manager at KnowledgePoint, an HR software company in Petaluma, Calif.  He helped guide development through the dot com boom/bust and helped many small businesses with a suite of pay-per-use, on-demand HR productivity tools such as HRTools.com, JobDescription.com, PerformanceReview.com and PersonnelPolicy.com.  These products are currently owned by Administaff.  When HRTools.com launched in 1999, the site was selected as a Codie Award finalist.

AJ graduated from Augustana College, and earned a M.A. in Environmental Planning from the University of Illinois.

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Web Site: www.sightmind.com

Headquarters: Fremont, California

Year Founded: 2006

Founder: Angie Wong

Employees: 4

By Kim Rubin, CEO

SightMind is a national Internet Protocol-based (IP) video surveillance, networking and security company.  We utilize IP-based digital video technology to provide local government agencies, educational institutions and large industrial facilities with the most technologically advanced service in its industry.  We have distinguished ourselves among more than 16,000 vendors and installers in the U.S. market today through the recent launch of our new SightMind franchise opportunity.

The company is a one-of-a-kind business opportunity in a highly fragmented market.  For independents, others in related industries or even newcomers to the field, the SightMind business investment comes with a proven business model, processes and necessary support tools to gain a significant competitive advantage.

As a seasoned entrepreneur with four prior technology businesses under my belt, I plan to grow the business from its home market in Northern California eastward across the country through franchising.

With the networked video surveillance industry reaching a sustained 44-percent annual growth rate, the switch from ageing analog cameras to sophisticated networked security systems will further propel the segment’s growth to new heights.  The sophisticated, reliable IP-based digital surveillance systems are proven to reduce theft, vandalism and injury claims.  System software delivers core business values such as locating parking spaces and reading license plates automatically, using a resolution 32-times greater than that of an average analog camera.

The sophisticated capabilities of our networked video systems not only provide direct cost-savings to many of our business-to-business customers, but also improve customer service and can help organizations focus on running and growing their business.  Every system we install has network monitoring, redundant storage and a system maintenance contract with up to a five-year service agreement.  Today’s systems deliver proven business benefits, which is what is driving the extreme industry growth.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: SightMind" »

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Web Site: www.ourstage.com
Headquarters: Chelmsford, Massachusetts
Year Founded: 2007
Founder: Ben Campbell
Investor: Signature Capital
Employees: 36

By Ben Campbell, Founder and CEO

OurStage is a brand new way for the world to discover the best new music—and for the industry to discover the best new artists.  Our goal is to solve the single greatest challenge facing the music industry in the new world order—separating out the truly great artists from the millions of people marketing their music online today.  At its simplest level, OurStage uses the work and the wisdom of the broader Internet community to rank from best to worst (not rate as in one to five stars) the music of thousands of emerging artists each month.  We use this information to produce rankings or charts to allow consumers to easily find and stream the very best new music—and to allow industry players (venues, sponsors, music labels, etc.) to identify who the best new artists are, and subsequently give them job opportunities.

The ranking process is done in our unique judging engine, which leverages an extraordinary series of proprietary anti-gaming technologies, preventing overzealous individuals from unfairly inflating the ranking of any given artist.  We are totally artist-agnostic.  In other words, we are not focused solely on “independent” artists.  We are focused on new artists and new music.  Artists on OurStage may be free of any association with any label, may be signed to a small independent label, or even signed to a major label.  We are about discovering the best new music, regardless of the source, as opposed to discovering the historical music catalogue of the major record labels, which is what most other “music discovery” sites do.

OurStage has enjoyed dramatic growth and general market acceptance since our launch less than two years ago.  We currently have more than 50,000 member artists, 250,000 registered users and two million unique monthly visitors.  In addition, several artists have achieved career-altering success as a result of exposure on OurStage.  Artists have garnered record label and publishing contracts, booking agent deals, mentoring sessions with major artists, profiles in national publications, and performance opportunities to tour and open for major acts and participate at major music festivals.

In early 2008, we began a very successful partnership with the world’s largest music site, AOL Music, to share some of our content with their community.  We’ve recently partnered with the world’s largest concert promoter, Live Nation, to offer opening slots at major performances to top-ranked OurStage artists through our talent and gig finder service, Marketplace.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: OurStage" »

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Web Site: www.tricklestar.com
Headquarters: Hong Kong
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Bernard Emby and Thomas Joergensen
Investors: Self-funded
Employees: 2 full-time

By Bernard Emby, Co-Founder 

TrickleStar has developed a range of energy-saving products with a strong focus on those which help to reduce the amount of standby power consumed by PC and TV accessory devices.  These types of devices are in hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and standby power is a big problem that can be alleviated with the use of TrickleStar’s products.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: TrickleStar" »

Posted by startupbeat at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Web Site: www.socialvibe.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Joe Marchese, Brandon Mills, David Levy
Investors: Redpoint Ventures
Employees: 24

By Joe Marchese, President and Co-Founder

SocialVibe.com is a new social media platform that facilitates interaction between people, the brands they love and the causes they care about.  SocialVibe is truly reinventing advertising by recognizing the power of the people within social media and converting media dollars into charitable donations.  We recognize that individuals hold the key to generating attention and wielding influence in social media.  It’s a powerful new way for brands to interact with people and it’s changing the way brands participate in social media.

Some time ago we realized that to crack the social media code, more power needed to be in the hands of the people who were creating the content; to be able to choose the advertising they are aligned with, and to allow people and the causes they cared about to benefit in meaningful ways from sharing their influence.

SocialVibe allows people to choose a brand to support, earning chances to get brand perks and points within SocialVibe.  The points that members earn are then turned into funds for the charitable cause of their choice.  SocialVibe is aligned with such brands as Coca-Cola, Adobe, NBA, Sprint and Nestle.  Most importantly, SocialVibe.com has partnered with the most requested non-profits in the space including Komen for the Cure, WWF, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, Invisible Children, One Laptop per Child, PETA and Donors Choose. I don’t know that there is anyone right now doing what we are doing, but then again if I thought there was we wouldn’t have started this business.  The idea that people can band together online to make a big difference in the real world is what social media is all about.  In social media, people are media and only with peoples’ explicit permission can brands find their way into their online profiles.  SocialVibe tries to recognize all of this.

It was SocialVibe’s members that led the site to where it is today: people caring about social issues but not having the monetary means to make a difference.  When we founded SocialVibe, the idea was simply that people controlled all the valuable attention and influence that brands wanted and that the people should get to decide how that value gets shared.  We weren’t “charity” themed, we were actually “member choice” themed.

Continue reading "Featured Pitch: SocialVibe" »

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Web Site: www.sodahead.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Jason Feffer, CEO, and Michael Glazer, President
Investors: Mohr Davidow Ventures, Tech Coast Angels, Ron Conway, Mission Ventures
Employees: 22 

By Jason Feffer

Continue reading "Featured Company: Big Moving Pictures" »

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Web Site: www.envysion.com 

Headquarters: Louisville, Colorado

Year Founded: 2006

Founder: Dan Caruso, Executive Chairman

Investors: Columbia Capital; High Country Venture; Bear Equity

By Matt Steinfort, CEO

Envysion provides a web-based video management service that enables organizations with multiple locations to use remote video to improve performance and profitability.  Envysion Video is an enterprise-level solution that transforms traditional surveillance video into a strategic management tool that enables increases in efficiency, quality, brand consistency and the bottom line.

Envysion Video solves two main problems.  The first is how to make video of multiple locations accessible to people throughout an organization.  Envysion Video allows authorized users to view, search and share live and recorded video of any number of locations via a single password-protected web interface.  Users can watch, analyze and improve whatever aspect of the organization they are involved with, whether it is security and loss prevention, operations, marketing, training or human resources.

The second is how to enable users to quickly find specific video.  By integrating video with a customer’s point of sale (POS) or other event-based business data, Envysion enables users to click on events in a report (such as "voids" or sales of a certain product) and immediately see the associated video.  Users can also create custom reports and receive automatic alerts when business rules that they define have been broken.

Founder's Story

Dan Caruso, Chairman of the Board of Envysion, Inc., was one of the founding executives of Level 3 Communications.  From inception in 1997 through 2000, Dan was responsible for engineering, construction and operations.  Between 2001 and 2003, he was responsible for most of the company's lines of business and marketing functions.

Continue reading "Featured Company: Envysion" »

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Web Site: www.mocana.com

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

Year Founded: 2004

Founder: Adrian Turner, CEO

Investors: Southern Cross Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures

Total Capital Raised: $12.1 million

Employees: 30

Company News: www.mocana.com/press.html

By Adrian Turner, Founder and CEO

Mocana is a security software company that delivers comprehensive protection for any embedded device or “thing” connected to the network.  This includes smartphones, PDAs, routers, switches, printers or VoIP phones, but also more everyday items like automobiles, home appliances, cash registers, power meters and HVAC equipment.  These “attached devices” are quickly outnumbering PCs.  Forrester Research predicts that there will be more than 14 billion devices on the net by 2010—and that 95 percent of these devices will be something other than a PC.

Product Line

Mocana offers its Device Security Framework (DSF) to deliver comprehensive protection for any device connected to any network, wired or wireless.  The Device Security Framework is made up of over a dozen separate Mocana product offerings that reside at different places on the device, network, or application stack to provide comprehensive device security and management.  Some of the DSF offerings are NanoSSL, NanoSSH, NanoUpdate, NanoBoot, NanoRadius and NanoSec.  Mocana’s DSF is designed for device manufacturers and service providers and includes design processes and software that are embedded into devices during the manufacturing process.  All components of the Device Security Framework feature an asynchronous event driven architecture, very high performance and very small memory footprint specifically designed for the special challenges that embedded device security engineers face.

The newest addition to the Device Security Framework is NanoDefender, an embedded Intrusion Prevention System technology that secures all aspects of a device: communications, identity, access, privilege, control and execution.  The new product, now being offered to device manufactures, enables product engineers to create a rules base of acceptable behavior for any applications running on the new device.  If an application begins behaving erratically due to malware or some other security threat, NanoDefender terminates the application so that the malware can’t spread across the network or impact the functioning of the device.

It’s clear that the existing “signature-based” model of detecting and eliminating viruses and malware can’t work forever—and it can’t work at all in the device environment.  That’s because there’s just too much bad stuff out there.  With millions of malware signatures required inside any antivirus product today—and 3,000 new viruses and malware signatures being added every hour of every day—there’s just no way an attached device would be able to keep updated or dedicate the processing power needed to screen all traffic against all virus signatures.  By turning the current “virus signature” security model on its head, NanoDefender monitors behavior against a rules base of acceptable actions, and thereby frees up administrators from having to monitor this rapidly-expanding army of viruses, trojans, worms and other malware at all.  It also provides a broader net for catching future Internet-based threats, since it does not rely on specific signature-based fixes.

The “Internet of Things”

The rate at which mobile devices are proliferating is staggering.  In fact, there are predictions that the number of devices on the Internet could reach far into the billions in the next three years.  According to a white paper by Harbor Research, there are approximately 2.8 billion mobile phones in use today, with 1.6 million new ones added daily.  Whether you call this phenomenon “the network of devices” or the “Internet of things,” the underlying message is the same: connectivity permeates our society.  Nearly everything in our day-to-day lives—from TVs and cell phones to cars, medical devices, networking equipment, thermostats, industrial sensors, aircraft and home appliances, and everything in between, connects (or will soon connect) to the network to operate.

Continue reading "Featured Company: Mocana" »

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Web Site: www.reliantaudit.com
Headquarters: Laguna Niguel, California
Year Founded: 2006
Founder: Dipak Shah
Investors: Privately funded
Employees: 26
Company News: www.reliantaudit.com/news_events

By Dipak Shah

Reliant provides software and consulting services for chief audit executives who want to reduce the high cost, complexity and uncertainty of enterprise-wide audits.  To effectively manage risk, auditors need efficient audit processes, reliable test data and continuous visibility into risks, controls and audit results at any time.  Reliant delivers all of these and more with the only continuous risk management solution for auditors.  With Reliant, organizations can continuously monitor controls, streamline audit operations, automate control testing and remediation, and implement a dynamic risk framework that shows up-to-the-minute status of audit programs.  Using pre-packaged, standards-based controls for compliance, operational and financial audits, we help organizations reduce risk while gaining efficiency, quality, insight and assurance throughout the audit process.

Audit has traditionally been a labor-intensive effort that requires huge amounts of manpower and time at the end of every quarter and fiscal year.  During this time, other operations can come to a screeching halt as resources are poured into the audit efforts.  As everyone who has gone through an audit will tell you, this is not an efficient process.  But there’s something else that gets lost; the business intelligence and business process management improvements that you can derive from continuous risk management.

And that’s how Reliant is different.  It would be hard to find a company today that is looking at risk in a continuous manner.  A controller may know the balance in bank accounts at any given time.  Your COO may know the inventory at any time.  There are even compliance managers who can look back and identify where risk has occurred using spreadsheets.  However, if you ask a CEO or CFO if they know where the risks are high for their business on a given day, all they will have are some static reports from the past.  This is where Reliant’s continuous risk management will fundamentally change how businesses view audit.  We enable companies to observe, understand, manage, and remediate risk continuously throughout the quarter, instead of waiting until the end of the quarter for the avalanche of financial reports.

Reliant Solutions helps to improve efficiency, quality, insight and assurance throughout the audit process.

Continue reading "Featured Company: Reliant Solutions" »

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By CaseyRyan, CEO

TickerMine is a collector of real-time channel and point-of-sale market data.  The company allows its customer base to integrate TickerMine’s real time data into current analysis of stock investment ideas, or a portfolio review.  Data can also be used by business professionals to track competitors, identify trends, or spot new opportunities in the market that are being revealed daily at the point of sale.

TickerMine was founded by me and three additional partners who were experiencing the significant changes in the financial research industry on a first hand basis.  Before founding TickerMine (and currently serving as CEO), I worked as a sell side equity research analyst.  While working at Wells Fargo Securities and then Nollenberger Capital Partners, I saw the strong need for primary data on the companies and industries that I covered.  The ability to source accurate, real-time information did not exist in equity research departments and the money to hire outside consultants did not exist, as trading commissions were squeezed and revenues for broker dealer firms fell between 2000 and 2007.

My partners and I developed a method to collect large sets of primary point of sale data, efficiently and cost effectively.  The view became one of offering this valuable service to the broader financial community with the belief that if analysts needed this type of data it meant that most investors and money managers needed the data as well.

Continue reading "Featured Company: TickerMine" »

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Web Site: www.syncplicity.com 

Headquarters: San Francisco
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Leonard Chung, CEO; Isaac Hall, Vice President of Technology; Ondrej Hrebicek, Vice President of Product and Platform
Investors: Angel investors
Employees: 4 plus part-time contractors
Company News: www.syncplicity.com/Press

By Leonard Chung, CEO

Syncplicity is a company with a simple goal: eliminate the limitations, headaches, and worries associated with user data.  We have built a product that ensures your files are always available, wherever and whenever you need them—automatically.  

Chores such as backing up or emailing files back and forth are a thing of the past.  Create a letter on your desktop, and it’ll be on your laptop, waiting for you.  Use Google Docs or want to view your letter on your cell phone?  No problem—your letter is already there, ready to go.  Sharing your letter with co-workers?  They’ve already got the latest version.  Any edits they make are safely synchronized and every file along the way has been backed up so there is never any risk of data loss.  All of this is done seamlessly.  Syncplicity is the only product that never asks you to change the way you work or forces you to create new places to store your data.  Just install Syncplicity and leave your worries behind.

The Real Cost of Data

Quick: name the most important part of your computer.  It’s a bit of a trick question as the most important and expensive part of a computer isn’t something you can touch like the processor or hard drive.  It’s your data.  Data is the only part of your computer that increases in value over time.  Over time, your data becomes more valuable as you invest more time and money while the rest of your computer loses value.

Think of how much time and money you spend taking care of your data.  If you do a good job, it’s costly, difficult, and monotonous.  The time and money spent managing copies across a desktop and laptop or between home and at work, spent tracking and emailing files back-and-forth to share and collaborate with others, and spent protecting data with backups is high.  If you do a bad job, the time and money lost to inconvenience (going to work and realizing the file you wanted is still at home) or catastrophe (your hard drive crashes) is even higher.

Eliminate Headaches

Given that data is the most important part of a computer, why is it still so hard to deal with?  Why hasn’t there been a solution that is broadly adopted?  There are many specialized products available today that do everything from backing up files to uploading photos to Web sites.  We founded Syncplicity around the realization that these products were as much of the problem as they were the solution.  The costs and headaches of losing and managing data were just replaced with learning and managing multiple products, each devoted to a small sliver of the overall problem.  Backup and folder sharing software, Web site word processors, and photo uploaders, oh my!  Users didn’t want multiple products, but instead a single solution.  They wanted their data to be available anywhere, anytime they needed it, but they didn’t want to just replace one type of headache for another.

Continue reading "Featured Company: Syncplicity" »

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Web Site: www.collegetonight.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2005
Founders: Zach Suchin, President & CEO; Jason Schutzbank, Executive Vice President & CTO
Investors: Publicly held (result of a reverse merger with Simex Technologies)
Employees: 6 full-time; 40 part-time; hundreds of campus representatives
Company News: www.collegetonight.com/press

By Zach Suchin, Co-founder, President & CEO 

College Tonight, Inc. owns and operates the web site www.collegetonight.com, an interactive service and networking platform for the college market that targets both active students and alumni.  As the antidote to “anti-social” networking, College Tonight differs from other social networks by promoting active social interactivity in the "real world" rather than the sedentary lifestyle nearly all competing social networks relegate their users to behind a physical computer screen.  College Tonight fosters in-person communication and activities with an emphasis on nightlife and other social events both local to the user's college campus and beyond that area for more broadly-based communities.  The web site provides an online forum for students to exchange information on social activities happening offline, serving as a catalyst for real-life relationships and interaction among users.

Founders' Story:

During college, I provided marketing and branding for several different companies and organized high-profile nightlife events for college students and celebrities.  It was a very unique situation because the celebrities loved hanging out with the college students and obviously, the college students were thrilled to party with their favorite artists.  It was a rare melding of the two worlds. 

Toward the end of college, I started developing the College Tonight concept with my partner Jason after a microcosmic success story in a conference called “Emory Nightlife” on the school’s server.  While the server was meant for strict academic and school sponsored extra-curricular, what was started as a conduit of communication between me and my small group of friends, quickly turned into the most populated group on the school server, with hundreds of “add-me” requests being processed each day.  The conference eventually reached about 85 percent of the undergraduate populous at Emory University with a strictly opt-in population.  There was even a practical sub-module in the group called “Drunk Lost & Found” meant for those who lost items at various events around town, which ended up becoming more relevant than the official school’s lost and found conference.  Since November, 2005, my partner and I have been developing College Tonight.

College Tonight was started completely organically, through a natural need at one school in Atlanta.  Jason and I realized that this was by no means an isolated vacuum in the market and we both put all of our money from our previous businesses into creating version .5 of the service.  This beta version of the service was meant to test with the Emory community exactly what features were going to be utilized and would be worth expanding upon.  In September of 2006, we held a beta launch event that attracted many people, including the largest periodical in the South, the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  We started to get press that no one expected.  At this point Jason and I knew it was time to take our knowledge of what worked and what didn’t, and we started to raise funding for a more official version of the service.  We hustled and finally achieved enough funding to develop the current version of the site.

Continue reading "4/22/08 - Featured Company: College Tonight" »

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Web Site: www.adooga.com
Headquarters: Santa Monica, California
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Perrin Chiles and Chris Sherrill, Co-Founders
Investors: Privately funded
Employees: 6
Company News: www.adooga.com/media.html

By Perrin Chiles and Chris Sherrill, Founders

Offering more than 250 contests and over 19 million dollars in cash and prizes, ADOOGA is the powerful search engine that connects creative, Internet-savvy fans with content-seeking brands by aggregating online contests in one user-friendly site.

At ADOOGA, our mission is to simplify the discovery and entry process for anyone who wants to participate in online contests.  There are hundreds of photographers, filmmakers, musicians and writers out there waiting to be discovered and receive recognition (or cash and prizes) for their work.  Now, ADOOGA is here to help expedite the realization of those dreams.  Check it out; hone your skills to enter a contest or two, and win money to fund your next record, indie flick or photo exhibit.

Talent agencies are scouring sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube looking for the “next big thing”—ad agencies and corporations should be doing the same thing by viewing the growing list of contest winners, dubbed ADOOGA All-Stars.  The Internet is such a powerful way to connect creative people with bold brands.  We wanted to simplify the process of putting talent in touch with the brands looking for fresh ideas.

Along with the growing popularity of social networking sites where members can share music, videos and other content they’ve created, the web is seeing a surge in blue chip brands tapping the creativity of the Internet generation to create their next big campaign through contests on sites such as YouTube, MySpace and BrickFish.

Continue reading "4/16/08 - Featured Company: ADOOGA" »

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Web Site: www.pluggd.com
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
Year Founded: 2006
Founders: Alex Castro, CEO; Jonathan Thompson, Chief Architect
Investors: Intel Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Employees: 13
Total Capital Raised: $6 million
Company News: www.plugged.com/news

By Alex Castro, Founder and CEO

At Pluggd, we are bringing a new slate of products to market this year that we hope will mark significant advances in the way consumers experience web video and in the way that advertisers can monetize that video. 

For starters, we have invented technology that allows web users to “search inside” a web video (or audio) file, before consuming the entire file.  This allows the consumer to find the section they want, then “surf” directly to that part of the video.  In this way, we hope to make video browsing much more like web page browsing.

Our patent-pending “Heat Map” technology is an innovative user interface that guides users to the content topics they wish to see or hear in an audio or video file.  The goal is to make multimedia search as easy and intuitive as general web search.

When a user clicks “play” on an audio or video file, Pluggd processes the file through our Content Publishing system, which essentially generates a transcript of the words and associated topics that are present in the file.  When a user enters a keyword search term, the query flows through our Transcript and Concept databases, generating a color-coded heat-map.  The heat-map shows relevancy of sections of the file to the search term.  Red indicates a direct match, orange a near-match, and blue a non-match.  Intuitively, a user can advance the “scrubber bar” to the part of the file that he or she wishes to see (or hear).  The system works for files of any length, enabling a new kind of viewing experience that puts the navigation of the video or audio file directly into the hands of a user who can browse according to their interest in topics they choose.

Not so long ago, popular video was the exclusive province of movies and television.  These programs were characterized by the following:

*High cost of production

*Established channels of distribution

*Monetization through direct purchase or attached advertising

Let’s take the popular situation comedy, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” as an example of the realities of video production by Old Media.  Each episode cost over five million dollars to produce.  The network, CBS, ordered 26 episodes for a standard season.  The program ran for nine seasons.  The high cost of production reflected the considerable talent of the writers, actors and unionized production crew of a hit show, which could only have been brought to life under a mature television production system.

Continue reading "4/8/08 - Featured Company: Pluggd" »

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Web Site: www.overlay.tv
Headquarters: Ottawa, Canada
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Rob Lane, CEO; Tyler Cope, Chief Architect; Nadav Zin, Vice President Products and Services
Investors: Celtic House Venture Partners, EdgeStone Capital Partners and Tech Capital Partners
Employees: 20
Total Capital Raised: $4.6 Million
Company News: blog.overlay.tv/press/

By Tyler Cope, Founder and Chief Architect

Overlay.TV is an interactive media company that provides a video commerce platform that enables Internet users, content owners and e-commerce sites to monetize and customize their video assets by overlaying contextual information directly onto online video content and linking to external websites.

Choice - Opt-In 

The original idea for Overlay.TV was conceived while watching my wife watch TV.  She would sit down to a line-up of shows that had been PVR’d the night before and be delighted with the fact that the next few hours of her evening would be spent happily viewing the shows she had selected.  Of course, there would be the occasional commercial interruption that she would fast forward through but at least it wasn’t like the bad old days where she was forced to sit through several minutes of advertisements.

My wife wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary.  Everyone I know has their own variation of on-demand content consumption.  Some people pause a show when it starts, make dinner and then resume viewing when dinner is done, allowing them to skip past all the commercial breaks.  With the Internet-oriented method of viewing content, users also shun the “traditional” advertising.  Banners, pop-ups and the like have very low click through rates and the minute that a video sharing site introduces the television model of interrupting content to show an ad, many of their users become upset and simply move on.  The common attribute among these viewers is that they are watching content without paying any attention to the advertising.  Traditional advertising models have not kept up with advances in technology and are severely broken.  Any new model would need to work in the world where the user expects to watch what they want, when they want it. This was the first ingredient for the idea.

The Content is The Ad

The second ingredient was this: Although people will choose to disregard the interruptive type of advertising that has been chosen for them, product placement is still partially working. My wife will watch a video or show and make a comment about the shoes, handbags, hairstyles or the lifestyles of the rich and famous. She might simply be curious about what an item is or she may actually be interested in buying something just like it.

Given the right timing, the right mood and the opportunity to dig deeper into what is being shown, these people would most certainly either read more about or purchase items on the spot. If the mood or timing isn’t perfect, they might just set the thought aside for another day. If only they knew exactly what thought to set aside. 

Users

Assuming that you could come up with an unobtrusive system that allowed people to delve into what they were watching, how would that system know what the objects in the video are? Artificial Intelligence isn’t even close to being able to identify objects in video at the detailed level required. Viewers want to know what brand, where it can be purchased and what is comparable. To do that, you need either the people that were involved in creating the content or people who know about the subject matter. That leads me to the third ingredient: the users. 

Users would be able to identify, classify, tag and comment on objects inside the content.

Continue reading "3/20/08 - Featured Company: Overlay.TV" »

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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.

Continue reading "2/19/08 - Featured Company: CircleUp" »

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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?

Continue reading "2/12/08 - Featured Company: Answerbag" »

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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.

Continue reading "2/7/08 – Featured Company: Passenger" »

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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.

Continue reading "2/1/08 - Featured Company: eHow" »

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