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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: Zeer

20 word description: Zeer helps people buy better groceries: Get food reviews, build shopping lists, join communities, share advice, and go mobile.

CEO’s Pitch:

Zeer helps people get answers to their questions about groceries, so they can “believe in what they buy.” On Zeer consumers can:

- Get food reviews: With nutritional information on more than 100,000 products.

- Get organized: Build your shopping list and keep track of what you have in your fridge or pantry.

- Join communities: Going green or organic? Have a food allergy? Trying a new diet? Join a Zeer community to learn from people like you.

- Go mobile: Visit m.zeer.com on your mobile browser to get food reviews in the store, and see your shopping list on your phone!

Mashable’s Take: Since the iPhone and the iPod touch came along, it’s been easier for me to keep track of things like driving directions and shopping lists while I’m on the go. There’s nothing worse than having all your groceries scribbled on a sheet of paper that you’re carrying around the store, digging in your purse for a pen so you can check things off your list. And now that we have things like highly established grocery delivery, online ordering and list creation services, the task of grocery shopping is becoming even easier.

Zeer is a Web-based solution that spans both your computer and your mobile device, so you’ve always got your grocery list on hand. And its community-driven groups and discussions can help you form grocery lists around things that are important to you, such as a low-carb or an organic diet. In this sense, Zeer is a service that helps you find the food you should be eating and has the added benefit of a grocery list manager.

Creating a list is easy enough–just search for items you need and add them to your list. Zeer is also a product review site, meaning you can add items to your wish list, write a review or read other users’ reviews. In this particular sense, Zeer is also a recommendation tool that lets you leverage the wisdom of crowds in order to choose the food that’s best suited for your needs. Given Zeer’s initiatives towards this end, I wouldn’t mind seeing some more specific features that help recommend and manage a user’s diet, from grocery items to full recipes.

And while Zeer is still in its beginning stages, there are a number of other services that it competes with on some levels and could work with on other levels. For instance, Qponix has created a grocery list manager that works with retailers to help consumers create lists while also receiving coupons for immediate (in-store) redemption. Working with Amazon’s wish list integration capabilities, Zeer could also help consumers manage their lists and shop for items online. Such integration would also encourage other users to take advantage of Zeer’s tools, as it wouldn’t require users to start from scratch when joining Zeer’s site.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:21 iPhone Food Apps to Eat Your Heart Out

Source:Mashable!

Coming back from my summer vacation (it was fantastic in a weird way, thanks for asking) and checking back the backlog of stories I’ve missed, I’ve noticed that the number of Twitter-related articles, having been quite huge to begin with, has even increased. Here on Mashable we’ve had four articles on Twitter in the last 48 hours, and I wouldn’t call it excessive; it’s only necessary, since so much is happening around this (once tiny) service.

One story is particularly interesting to me - the one about Twitter adding support for threaded replies. It’s already been there in a hacky sort of way, as people have been using @username for replies since the beginnings of Twitter, but now it’s official.

And, once again, it seems like history repeating itself. Threaded replies? Is that new? Is that newsworthy? Why are we even talking about something that other communication-related services have had for ages? Nicole Simon notes in a comment:

“And in 15 years we also maybe arrive at features available on IRC and usenet ten years ago like crosspost elimination (better aggregation), watch and kill filter plus scoring … *sigh* it is not that the information is not there.

Threading has been done in usenet, and all the problems around it are solved as well, devs just would have to look back into the specs and go on from there instead of reinventing everything. ”

Once, I’ve had the same mindset, but not anymore. There’s always room for invention, but the internet has sprawled into so many different directions and niches that reinvention is in order. This is why Twitter succeeds; it reinvented the way we communicate on the net. You can read more of my thoughts on that in my article on simplicity.

This is not exact science we’re talking about. You cannot guess what will happen in five years and create a service that will perfectly fit the mindset of users of the future. You have to ride the wave early, recognize the trends and fulfill the needs of users. In Twitter’s case, this meant recognizing that people want to share their thoughts with a loose network of friends and acquaintances using short messages that could be sent from anywhere. People were sick of all the complex ways to communicate and they wanted something simple.

Once again I get to the conclusion that having more or less features isn’t crucial for the success of your web service; it’s having the right features. Personally, I love IRC. I’d love it if everyone would just switch to it, because it’s still one of the best ways to communicate over the net. But being the best sometimes doesn’t help, and IRC is slowly turning into an internet relic, which almost no one uses today, except some scene kids and oldschoolers like myself.

Which makes me wonder; what will be the next way of channeling the communication that will hit the spot with users as well as Twitter did? Will it be something complex and advanced, or something even simpler?

Right now, we seem to be aiming towards simplicity, but our conversations are too diversified to follow. This is where FriendFeed comes into play, adding consolidation to the mix. We have many simple streams of communication, all consolidated by one meta-communication service. But, FriendFeed - and, arguably, even Twitter - yet has to go mainstream. Facebook, on the other hand, is already very mainstream, and it’s doing a really good job of both offering various ways of simple ways to communicate as well as consolidating communication from other web services.

So, what’s the next step? With iPhone’s platform doing well and Android coming round the corner, desktop web applications will (finally) converge with mobile web apps. However, will it just be the case of creating the best mobile application for your web service or will the increased usage of mobile web apps demand some new, different form of communication remains to be seen. One thing is certain: it will, once again, be a case of dumping the features that the collective mind that is the internet doesn’t want right now, and keeping the ones that are necessary.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Living without Twitter with No RegretsvBulletin Acquired By Internet Brands, Inc.Digsby First to Support Facebook ChatGoogle Is Right About This: YouTube Lawsuit Threatens The NetCBS Wants in on Politics Web 2.0. Partners with Digg.Twitter Takes Funding from Del.icio.us InvestorNext New Networks Now on MySpaceTV

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 3:30 pm and is filed under social networking, web 2.0, web, communication, twitter, information, channeling. 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.