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TabUp Makes Tab Sharing ElegantSeptember 3rd, 2008 at 1:37 pmSource: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: Ipoki 20-word Description: Ipoki is a GPS-based social network that allows you to share and track your position with our friends. CEO’s Pitch: Ipoki allows people to share geo-location data using a small application installed in their mobile devices. With Ipoki you can track the position in Google Maps or Google Earth of all our friends. Keep your tracks in Ipoki and upload your photos in Flickr. Now you can geo-locate all your Flickr photos from Ipoki just with one click! Embed your map with your real-time location in your Blog or any other site. Geo-locate live video with Qik integration. Send your position to Fire Eagle automatically, too. Mashable’s Take: Working the international, location-based social scene from its place of origin in Galicia, Spain, Ipoki’s play for a broad, mobile and well-connected membership is all about bridging connections. That goes for friends as well as popular Web services. The company’s CEO mentions names like Google Maps, Google Earth, Fire Eagle, Flickr and Qik. Such references help to explain clearly what it is Ipoki’s role is for its users. Location integration, is how I would frame it. Ipoki hasn’t been around for very long, even when compared to other location-based services. There certainly are more veteran names in the sector. Loopt is just one. But Ipoki is nonetheless a good choice for those who wish to share their mobile lives as broadly as possible, with friends, family, and the network at large. And fortunately, many mobile phone users can enjoy what Ipoki provides. Downloads are provided for Windows XP, Vista, Pocket PC, Smartphone platforms as well as Symbian S60 and BlackBerry devices. A mobile-specific URL, “http://ipoki.mobi” is available as well. For users of phones which can scan mobile QR codes, Ipoki displays one on its website for fast access. Of course, if you use Ipoki simply for the sake of tracking, there’s not much to it. It’s a little too simple in that sense. But employ it to its full potential as the hub or nexus it is, with the few value-added connections it can establish for networkers, and everything seems to mesh. Or “mash,” as we’d like to put it. It is only as powerful as its users allow it to be. You can make your account singularly dish short blog posts. Or you can get involved with photo and video, too. Your call. Tread lightly or heavily. Within reason, Ipoki allows it all. Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials
There was interesting talk about venture capitalists and their role in Internet startups last week. It started with a post by John Casasanta of Taptaptap simply entitled “Fuck the VCs.” Responses from Hacker News and John Furrier, among others, led to a lot of heated debate over the role and significance of venture capital. Although I clearly cannot provide justice to the topic of venture capital in one or even a thousand articles, I did want to talk about the changing face of venture capital for Internet startups. Venture capital is a spread-out game with a large cast of players. Angel investors, professional VC firms, incubators, bankers, lawyers, investment funds, and entrepreneurs are all involved in nothing less than a tangled mess. Finding venture capital often takes luck, great networking, or eye-popping credentials, not to mention dedication and a thick skin to streaks of constant failure. You could submit your business plan to a hundred VCs and get a response from ten or from zero depending on when you send, what they’re looking for, and who you know. In other words, it can be a crapshoot for both the VC firm and the entrepreneur. But that model is slowly changing to one that takes out some of that uncertainty and disarray and acts as a filter for venture capitalists to reach good, solid business ideas. The leader of that model is Y Combinator. Y Combinator is altering the game as the university of Internet startups by providing some of the resources, education, and networking many entrepreneurs need, providing its brand credibility, and most of all, acting as a filter for solid, developed Internet business ideas. What’s the mission of a university? Well, I could read you Harvard’s mission statement, but it essentially boils down to the advancement of education. But what’s the purpose of a university for a society? Beyond the learning, I argue that the university is a filter for society to sort people by their intelligence, talents, and interests, especially in regards to the corporate world. When the high school grad finally comes out of college with that diploma, you can assume that they have the dedication, intelligence, and personal interest to work in certain industries and companies. McKinsey and Google know that when they hire a graduate of Harvard, Stanford, or Northwestern, they’re going to (usually) get a quality product. The university serves as a gatekeeper. Yes, I am simplifying the role of the university, but the result is just the same - companies generally hire college grads for higher-level, thought-intensive jobs and can initially gauge your intelligence based on the college you attended and your GPA. Oh, and in return for this social filter, you cough up tens of thousands of dollars. Y Combinator is similar to the university. You join a class of peers when you arrive. You get startup education, networking, and those lovely entrepreneur dinners. And most of all, you get the right to show off your work at the Y Combinator demo day, where venture capitalists will come, rip your idea to shreds, and then hopefully pour a couple million dollars into your idea. Oh, and in return for this startup filter and the Y Combinator brand name, you cough up ~6% of your company. Sure, Y Combinator is probably not the first firm to do these things, but it is the first to become so well known for it. The class model is unlike how any incubator or angel investor operates. Y Combinator now has brand credibility, and that’s why VCs come to the demo day - they know they’re going to find quality ideas. The Y Combinator has served its purpose. It has brought up the best ideas for the next level. In this sense, Y Combinator is the premier university of Internet startups. Hundreds apply, no more than a few dozen get in. And those few that get in have been successful or are on the right track. 102 startups have been through the program with 81 having been funded, purchased, reached profitability, or are in the process of funding. Those are great success rates in the world of venture capital by any standard. And that success has spurned several competitors or copycats, whichever way you see it. Y Combinator is helping create a more streamlined path and a new filter for startup ideas. Now as more firms like the Y Combinator pop up and more entrepreneurs and VCs choose to go to Y Combinator seed firms for the support, brand name, and filter, the question becomes this: Do we want Universities of Internet Startups to be the regulator, filter, and gatekeeper for startup ideas? We need to confront the pros and cons of having Universities of Startups in the world of entrepreneurship and venture capital, especially as the Y Combinator model grows and expands. We may very well be seeing the transformation of venture capital. —Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Soup.io Offers Simplest Microblogging YetGoogle Apps Education Edition Becoming More Widely AdoptedGoogle and IBM Hook Up on Cloud Computing InitiativeBuddy University: Attack of the Facebook CloneChaCha Partners with Indiana UniversityIn Your Face, RIAA. The University of Oregon Takes A Stand.Woman Sues University Over MySpace Controversy
Are you a fan of widgets? Do you enjoy having lots of small Web apps at hand, arranged into a sort of customizable start page whose features are eminently drag-and-droppable? If so, you might want to give TabUp a few moments of your time. Designed to give users various standard components like news and weather feeds to things meant to be accessed by groups or communities of fellow users. The basic act of tab sharing is how the service’s creators regard its social dimension. The intent behind TabUp appears to be the act of doing things around a set of mini applications - rather than the opposite, which is the general prioritization scheme most social services try to instill. Granted, what is “ordinary” has turned out to be immensely popular. But TabUp departs from the what-are-you-doing-now kind of interaction among the membership and keeps things much more casual. The social features of TabUp are in fact placed below the surface to the extent that a user could perhaps take TabUp to merely be an iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Yourminis competitor, albeit one with a far less voluminous set of widgets to integrate into an account. Use the social, or don’t use the social. It’s up to you, really. Quite honestly, there’s little chance that TabUp will make the sort of splash its founders, a Stamford, Conn.-based group known as Kindle Innovations, may wish it to. For one, it’s simply too lacking in resources to attract a large number of users. And it’s too on-the-fence in terms of its utility. Yes, it is both meant to keep you and those you know more organized. Which in many cases isn’t so complicated to do. But the set of applications currently in place feels too generic and in some cases without any need or purpose - as exemplified by the garnish that is its Gas Prices and Reuters Video widgets. I’ll gladly give points to TabUp for the pleasant design it exhibits at the front end. It is certainly easy on the eyes. And if you don’t demand much from your multi-functional Web app platform, this might do the trick. Only, this beta requires a good amount more work to effectively reach a broad base of users. Good looks tend to put great things over the top. And TabUp has yet to deliver the latter.
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