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Source:Mashable!

CaptainU, the online recruiting network dedicated to soccer players and athletes, is officially launching this week with a few notable new features, most of which provide more attention to end users as a way to further differentiate itself from other online recruiting tools like Takkle and BeRecruited.

For starters, a new piece of software from CaptainU provides online guidance to help players with a useful checklist/schedule for the recruiting process, with tips for things like finding the right school and getting a coach to see you play.

Another way CaptainU is hoping to make its players feel special is a new one-on-one counseling option, where users can have sessions with former NCAA coaches. As I learned from my initial review of CaptainU, NCAA standards are rather important to the site’s CEO Avi Stopper, who is also a former NCAA coach. The entire recruiting platform is NCAA-compliant, offering all users a standardized platform they can be comfortable using.

One feature that private beta users requested was a dynamic player profile option, which enables athletes to more easily link between their CaptainU profile and other sites, such as a team site, as well as to easily provide a useful “front page” to send to coaches, as an athlete can upload their image and video content to their CaptainU profile.

With an online platform for something as life-altering as recruiting, it’s necessary for CaptainU to find ways in which it can provide more individually-oriented features that will help each user feel more special while offering additional value towards the overall CaptainU experience. This will hopefully be scalable and valuable features that help CaptainU stand apart from the crowd, as CaptainU has also informed me of its plans to expand its recruiting platform beyond soccer to all sports.

I asked CaptainU how it plans to scale its counseling feature with the upcoming expansion. The site’s Director of Business Development Michael Farb said “the one-on-one counseling will scale because we already have a network of ex-NCAA coaches in place across all sports that are recruiting experts and are ready to set up time with athletes.” As CaptainU hopes to become more competitive with the other established online recruiting sites, such differentiating features are important.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:CaptainU Gets Soccer Players RecruitedPrepChamps Raises $1.2M to Recruit High School JocksiPhone Arrives in the UK and Germany TodaySpock Serving 400 Pageviews Per Second at LaunchBlyk Still Not Ready to Launch Free Mobile ServiceStreakr Exchanging Clothes for Beta TestersMore Details on Gphone Emerge

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Sparkle*Shelf

20 word description: Online community focused on beauty and fashion, featuring original editorial content and user generated product reviews, Q&A, photos and more.

CEO’s Pitch: I started Sparkle*Shelf in May 2008 to deliver honest opinions and information about beauty & fashion trends to fashionistas everywhere. We have a team of talented writers who round up the latest trends and buzz-worthy products on a daily basis. In addition, the site features user-generated reviews, questions and answers, and wish-lists, as well as social networking features such as profiles, friends and activity feeds. We also offer entertainment in the form of beauty related games, quizzes and polls. Our goal is to be the trusted destination for all things beauty and fashion in a fun, vibrant community.

Mashable’s Take: A trend in the online fashion industry is to have a network that enables experts to promote their knowledgeable opinions and become valued influencers within the community. A new network called Sparkle*Shelf is making this a direct incentive to fashionistas that are interested in the fashion and beauty space, with a new platform for receiving and contributing related content.

To start, Sparkle*Shelf has a team of writers that add content to the site, offering informative articles about various fashion and beauty trends. Anyone can sign up for a user account, but options are limited to begin. By participating in more site activities such as adding bookmarked items, reviewing products and commenting on others’ submissions, a user earns points to move up in rank. After earning 500 points, a user can add their own fashion and beauty polls to Sparkle*Shelf, which other users can take for fun. A full on Expert, who has earned 1000, gets to add content to one of the site’s featured blogs.

Incentive-based systems are often a good idea, especially when it comes to encouraging users to offer things like product reviews. Sparkle*Shelf’s particular application of its incentive-based system appears to be one that merely offers supplemental user content for its online publication, leaving the focus on the content created by its own editorial staff.

Something that Sparkle*Shelf could benefit from is an easier way in which to add bookmarked items to the site, which could then be reviewed and commented upon. Right now, a user must visit the Sparkle*Shelf site and manually submit an item, inserting the link and uploading an image from their desktop. A more useful option would be a browser toolbar add-on that allows users to bookmark items as they surf the Web. I also wouldn’t mind seeing some import options for items users have already bookmarked on sites like Delicious or even another style site like StyleFeeder.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

This is a guest post written by Michael Cerda. He blogs about startups, people and the variety hour at Cerdafied.

There is a certain psychology to fund raising. Here are seven questions VCs ask, what they really mean, and how you can answer them:

1. How long have you been fund raising?

Translation: How important am I to you; are you giving me the first look or has everyone already seen it?

Talk to a friendly VC or two to beta test your pitch and if you don’t know any, well just don’t go into the most popular firm in the valley as your first pitch. But then, rather than slowly engaging VCs, get as many meetings on the calendar in a given few weeks as you can schedule. That way you can honestly say “we’re just getting started.” You also get the potential of having multiple VCs in the same deal pace.

2. Who else are you meeting with?

Translation: Who can I call after this and compare notes with? Are you pitching firms I would consider working with.

Best answer: “The usual suspects.”

This way you don’t reveal anything you don’t have to.

3. Do you have any customers or business partners expressing interest?

Translation: How much homework have you done?

Ideally you will have some validation points from some people who are willing to use or spend money on your stuff when it’s ready. So a good answer might be “We’ve talked to a potential partner at company X and they said they were interested and would be a beta site” or “We’ve held some 3rd party focus groups of our target audience, and the feedback was…”

4. Who are your competitors?

Translation: How much homework have you done? (You aren’t the only company thinking about this idea!)

A good answer: “Our top three nearest competitors are X, Y and Z, although all of them are trying to be destination sites and the teams behind them don’t have a history in the target market. We on the other hand are multimodal, being a website, mobile application and social web application - and we’ve been living and breathing this space for the past 3 years”.

5. Where do you see your company in five years?

Translation: Do you think you’re going to pump and dump or are you trying to build something for the long term? Oh - and how much thinking have you done about how this fits into your industry?

Answer: Our vision for our type of product is ______. We plan to execute our plan which we hope will earn us a leadership position in this market. If we’ve done that right, we’ll have a variety of strategic options by then.

6. How much money are you raising?

Translation: What can you accomplish on a particular amount of money and how do you think about?

You need to have done your homework on how much cash you need and how far it takes you in your plan. You should actually have a slide that answers this, in the form of a simple abstract chart of Use of Capital vs. Time. So something like “Our plan calls for $3MM which gets us from beta product through a 1.0 launch and an early partner business model over the coming 12 months”.

7. What’s your valuation expectation?

Translation: Dance rabbit!

Best answer: We’re obviously very excited about our company, but we’re going to see what the market says.

You don’t want to project a valuation expectation early on, because that answer might derail the situation.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 1:31 pm and is filed under business, startups, venture capital, funding, vc, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.