Company Name

Soshiku

20-Word Description

Soshiku is a powerful tool that manages your school assignments. It can even notify you via email and SMS.

CEO’s Pitch

Aimed primarily at high school and college students, Soshiku is a simple but powerful tool that manages schoolwork. You can add assignments directly from email or your phone via text messaging, and you can also receive due date notifications via email or text messaging. For assignments that require partners, Soshiku also lets you add partners to your account so you can collaborate on notes, assign tasks, and share important documents. Having Soshiku available to students can have a serious impact on students’ grades and performance by always keeping them up-to-date on schoolwork.

Mashable’s Take

Soshiku was launched recently by Definitialize and its 17-year old founder, Andrew Schaper. The idea was born out of frustration with not being able to keep track of all of his school work assignments. He couldn’t find a service that addressed this common dilemma, so he decided to create it himself.

Even though the service is geared towards high school and college students, there’s no reason younger students and their parents couldn’t use it as well. The ability to add courses and homework assignments with mobile devices via text messaging and email is extremely useful. However, receiving reminders and notifications of upcoming due dates on your cell phone is the most important part of this service.

The other impressive thing about Soshiku is the feature that lets you collaborate with others on assignments. Many school projects and assignments require students to work with others as teams, so being able to invite others as partners on your account is very useful. Students working on the same assignment can then share notes, tasks and documents related to the project, all centralized online and updated in real-time.

I was surprised that such a simple and useful idea like tracking homework assignments wasn’t already a service. Yes, there are countless sites that allow you to track tasks and appointments but none of them are dedicated to school work assignments and students. It’s no surprise that it manages everything so well considering the fact that its creator probably uses it himself on a daily basis. He graduates from High School soon so we’ll see if he continues to use it at college. In the meantime, students can stop using that old excuse about the dog eating their homework. This service will make sure they don’t miss anymore deadlines.

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.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

Disclosure: I’ve been a tech guy for much longer than I’ve been involved in marketing. I’ve been building things, and acting as a consumer far longer than I’ve been the person connecting those two groups. That’s turned into an advantage as I begin to help with more PR campaigns. I’ve been able to sniff out the trouble before it happens, avoiding the need to do damage control later.

If your company, no matter how big or small, has hired a social media consultant to augment (or God-forbid, replace) your PR team, there are some things you should probably be sniffing out and identifying as red flags:

They have a “Twitter campaign” 


Or any other single-technology obsession. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter. I not only use it, arguably to excess, but it’s provided me with a whole lot of opportunity to extend the reach of my social capital exchanges. But if your consultant is convinced that simply putting your brand on Twitter is going to change the future of your company, show them the door. Twitter, and any other social media tool, needs to be used in conjunction with other tools, and the lot of them need to be used simultaneously. 


They push bleeding edge technology


It’s easy to get “wowed” by the fact that a technologist just showed you some new techno-gadget that you’ve never heard of, that clearly, you and everyone else on the planet needs. The problem? Bleeding edge is good for two people: early adopters and bleeding edge creators. As you could imagine, those audiences are relatively small. Understanding bleeding edge technology is important for a social media consultant. But being distracted by every new microblogging/lifestreaming/mediawhoring/wasteoftiming application out there is NOT important. It’s a distraction from the things that you really should be paying attention to, like your community of users.


They use the word “conversation” more than they use the word “community”

Or worse, they’re convinced they are the same thing. 
I’ve written previously about my distaste towards “joining the conversation” as a technique, a meme, or otherwise. Joining the conversation means you’re adding more noise, and in an arena that’s already about as noisy as sticking your head inside a jet engine, that’s not really an effective use of your time, money, or energy.

 On the other hand, if community is the buzzword of choice, be sure that they don’t confuse a bazillion followers, friends, or otherwise, with community. Communities require gardening, tending and investment of more than just your marketing budget. They take time to show your customers - the people you intend to be a community - that you care.


Guaranteed conversions


This one should be a no-brainer, but I understand that the guarantee of return is desirable. However, I’d give the same warning about the SEO industry: when the conversion is based on something that’s only constant is it’s unpredictability (humans, Google’s Pagerank algorithm, etc), that “guarantee” should make you raise at least one eyebrow. If you wait to raise the second eyebrow, you’re likely to end up looking surprised. Which you shouldn’t be, when you realize that you’ve been spending money on a worthless guarantee. 


They haven’t actually done anything in a year or more besides talk


This is a tough point to get across without sounding cocky or condescending, but I think it’s extremely important. Look at your consultant’s recent history. If they haven’t been in the trenches of a project sometime in the last 12 months, you should ask them why. It’s dangerous, in an industry that moves this fast, to not take time and spend it innovating. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s certainly disconcerting to me when a person spends that much time talking about a concept without doing it anymore. Something’s gotta get rusty, right?

Most importantly, though… trust your gut

Doing business by believing in your intuition is the most important skill you can have. There’s a great deal of risk being taken in the new media/social media space, and it’s important that companies are willing to take those risks in order for the space to grow. I’m nervous about some of the guidance being provided, as it counteracts the already uphill battle we’re fighting. Businesses need to be taking smart risks. If they can’t trust their consultant to pilot them through this asteroid field that we’re all flying through together, who can they trust?

Alex Hillman is a community strategy consultant and entrepreneur based in sunny Philadelphia. Alex has led and evangelized the coworking movement with the co-founding of Philly-based Independents Hall, a collaborative community focused on mixing social interaction with shared office space. Since opening the space, Alex has assisted a number of other similar group leaders in focusing and energizing their efforts. Visit Alex’s blog, Dangerouslyawesome.com or find him on Twitter.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Be a Digg Rockstar with Social Media Firefox ExtensionWeb 2.0 Marketplace Listings for August 21st, 2008Ticket Giveaway to SMX Social Media in Long Beach, CASocial Media Marketing Summit is Almost HereHow to Find Statistics on Social MediaAffiliate Summit Social Media 2008 is in Two WeeksAttend SMX Social Media Marketing: Mashable Readers Save 15%

Source:Mashable!

As social networking matures we’re seeing a wider variety of themes or interests represented with their own websites and social networking tools. We’re starting to see networks that are devoted to people who have been bitten by the creative bug. Communities are forming for people who want to create the next Halo, Star Trek, Star Wars, Terminator, or Batman. In this post we’re going to take a look at Zeros2Heroes and see what they offer for the amateur who’d like to become a pro.

Zeros2Heroes Media, a Vancouver, BC company, calls itself “the people’s publisher.” Its website, Zeros2Heroes.com, bills itself as “a thriving social network that connects thousands of creators, producers and fans of comics in a collaborative and creative environment.”

The site is in Beta, but the company itself has been around since June 2006. Zeroes2Heroes Media is a small company and it seems to be hosting a “by amateurs, for amateurs” community. However, it’s worth noting that there are several experienced industry players on the company’s board of directors, including Paul Gertz (formerly of Lucasfilm and Hanna-Barbera, now of Rainmaker Animation); Paul Dini (veteran comic book writer and producer/writer of popular animated cartoon series based on Superman and Batman, as well as Lost); and Dr. Greg Zeschuk (Bioware/Electronic Arts).

Zeros2Heroes aims to support a community of writers, artists, and fans of modern pop culture who are interested creating and publishing content. Zeros2Heroes also caters to people who are interested in breaking into the video gaming industry. The website provides Web-based tools to help creators go from unpublished, unknown creators (i.e. zeros) to published (i.e. heroes). One recent Zeros2Heroes success is shepherding three new movies based on the Reboot cartoon series to development and production; the movies were written and created by Zeros2Heroes members. The Reboot initiative is one of several contests that have been held on Zeros2Heroes to help new creators get published.

The heart of this social network is the ability to submit work for criticism and voting by the community’s members. Once a member has submitted their work (pitches, story ideas, or artwork) to Zeros2Heroes, it can be viewed and reviewed by other members. The submissions can be viewed in a page by page or comic book panel format. Each page or panel can be rated, scored, and critiqued using the reviewing system. This system can show feature script pages, artwork, or some combination of the two. The entire pitch or story can be rated as well, both in terms of quality and also in terms of suitability for audiences (e.g. E for Everyone).

The Zeros2Heroes community appears to have several thousand members and it has some significant and regular activity. Considering that comic book writers and artists aren’t as common as, say, bloggers, it’s hard to imagine that this could be a huge community, but it will definitely appeal to a number of creative types.

From a social media and social networking perspective, Zeros2Heroes does not use groundbreaking functionality. It could probably benefit from incorporating tools to automate submissions to social news sites like Digg or Reddit, as an example. Another useful addition, seen on many other Web 2.0 sites, would be to allow users to include profile information from other social media websites, like IM addresses, Twitter username, Facebook username, and so on.

Zeros2Heroes uses a number of tried and true functions like forums and blogs to create a simple social networking environment. The focus of the website is clearly on the content review application. It won’t replace Facebook, but it’s not meant to. Overall it looks like a decent way to introduce the creative processes to a new generation of fans and creators while making good use of Web 2.0 functionality.

Here are the funny bits, courtesy of my new obsession with video editing. I pasted “Frank Addante - Rubicon Project” into the first scene’s lower third, because I couldn’t remember his name or the company’s after watching three times.

Source:Valleywag

Frank Addante, founder of the Rubicon Project, an online-advertising startup, disproves all the myths about tech companies based in Los Angeles. Except this one: Their founders are neurotically defensive about not being based in Silicon Valley.

Source:Valleywag

Coined by R. Stevens in his webcomic Diesel Sweeties, “social nerdwanking” means lording your social-network superiority over others, which is secretly the only reason you bother with Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Orkut, and every other social network. Except your legitimate if fruitless use of Adult FriendFinder.

Council member: I heard you need my John Doe on something.
Clerk: I need your signature on some documents.
Council member: Yeah, my John Doe.
Clerk, laughing: You mean your John Hancock — John Doe is an anonymous dead body. [Council member looks puzzled.] John Hancock has the biggest signature on the Declaration of Independence — that’s where the term comes from.
Council member: Oh.

City Hall
San Francisco, California

This exchange was posted today on Overheard in the Office, a once-clever repository of quips and comebacks which has transformed into a vault of urban legends forwarded by people still using AOL. Still, this “council member” piqued our curiosity. We suspect the submitter meant our city’s Board of Supervisors. So which San Francisco supervisor mixed up his or her Hancocks and Does? Well, in order to answer that, you’ll need to know who the hell these people are. Here’s a primer:

There are eleven members of the Board of Supervisors. It includes three women, three guys with unfortunate facial hair, one guy who looks like a network TV anchorman, and one bald fat fellow. No longer included is former supervisor Ed Jew (who, by the way, is Asian, and not, to my knowledge, Jewish), elected to represent the Sunset district while, a pending case alleges, he was secretly living in Burlingame, a suburb near the airport. None of these people, to my knowledge, had an affair with god-mayor Gavin Newsom while married to his campaign manager.

Other than that? Not much to write home about. They’re San Francisco supervisors. The only thing they’ve done that has influenced tech is kill the citywide Wi-Fi deal. For my money, any of these boneheads could be the culprit. Why does the smartest city on the planet have the dumbest people running it?

Source:Valleywag

Less than a week after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was bitchslapped on Capitol Hill, his company has settled with the families of Chinese writers who were jailed in China. Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning were imprisoned based partly on documents Yahoo says it was “legally required” to hand over. Settlement terms were not disclosed. Yahoo will start a fund to provide “humanitarian relief” to dissidents and their families. Reportedly, one part of the settlement stipulates that Yahoo must lobby the Chinese government to release the two journalists. Right. Like Yahoo’s boys in Beijing will have more success swaying Communist hardliners than Yahoo’s D.C. reps had in avoiding this embarrassing debacle in the first place.

Source:Valleywag

Marvel is hesitantly entering the digital era with a new subscription service that grants access to its back catalog, and eventually will offer new releases on a (much) delayed schedule. Unfortunately Marvel is taking too many cues from its copy-fighting brethren in the music and television industries. Digital comics will be locked to a proprietary reader on its website. [PaidContent]

Source:Valleywag

The Internet is boring. Even the most interested/interesting man I know, artist and dandy Jonathan Grubb, is bored with it in eight ways. (Granted, he’s also super-excited; the man equivocates like he’s running for president.) Grubb’s insidery analysis speaks to those embedded in the dot-com industry, but here’s a wider view of why the Internet is boring, starting with the pinnacle of mediocrity called LOLCats.

1. LOLCats
“Those ladies who work at the reception desk in your office, they might be sharing these lolcats with their friends.” — David McRaney, Wall Street Journal

This:

Equals:

2. Prom Queen
“Five girls will be nominated for Prom Queen, but only one of them will win. And on Prom Night, something terrible will happen.” That’s the plot of the would-be successor to LonelyGirl15, the indie series that launched with very little backing under guise of nonfiction, achieving an impressive stature as the first mainstream web-based narrative series. Prom Queen, hailed by some of the stupider media outlets as a guaranteed Internet blockbuster and LonelyGirl’s heir, is a stale series which makes none of its predecessor’s innovations and has none of its charm.

Unfortunately, the show is representative of where “New Media” money is going. Clever ventures that fund and promote good online content are struggling to survive. VH1 canned the promising network Acceptable.TV; many online shows like Clark and Michael (starring Arrested Development actor Michael Cera) made failed bids for TV before giving up altogether.

Yep, the future of online video looks like this:

3. Twitter
Twitter messages are frequent and boring, but not as frequent and boring as articles about how Twitter messages are frequent and boring.

4. Facebook
When I was in elementary school, there was one kid who spent all of recess dribbling a basketball, every day. He’d walk around, dribbling, doing nothing else. Everyone tried to get him to play freeze tag, or “Invade the Jungle Gym,” or form a gang where everyone was named after an X-Man. And he was sick of all these frigging idiots and just wanted to dribble his ball. Well no matter how many people invite me to Bite Another Zombie, or Share My Movies, or Build a Super Friend Block Party, I just want to dribble my basketball.

Facebook is also a chance for all my high school friends to remind me how boring they are. Sorry, but if even I find you boring — and I spend all day building my Netflix queue and cleaning lint off of my body — then don’t try to reconnect with me after six years.

5. YouTube comments
They’re pathetic. See also: Digg comments, MySpace comments, and #3.

6. The computerized pleasure palace
Thanks to the Internet, I have a list of every film I want to see (thanks, Netflix); all the music I like and should like (thanks, Last.FM) and free copies thereof (Bittorrent and Limewire); every book I want for under ten bucks (Amazon, natch); beautiful photos of my friends (Flickr); fifty ways to reach my friends (AIM, e-mail, Skype, Facebook, Pownce, Hallmark E-cards, probably some sort of telegraph-by-web); and a form to fill out for local pizza delivery (I won’t tell you or you’ll clog up the system). I can also order an Ikea cushion for my sore ass.

7. Mobile sites
In case I’m away from the computer, I can still Be Efficient by using mobile sites to do half of what I normally want to do, at half the speed. When I walk down the street with my iPod on and my hands wrapped around my phone, it’s like I’m in a computer game and everyone else is an enemy toadstool. Last week I jumped on a homeless person.

8. Webcomics
Not everyone will get this; it’s a specialized condition, like an allergy. But for those of you that have it, clicking one of these links means you’ll spend ten hours of your next week reading the entire archive of a webcomic: Dinosaur Comics, Dresden Codak, Achewood, Scary Go Round, Thinkin Lincoln, Wondermark

9. Anything you can do, I can do better

Source: Wondermark

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. He’s writing a sitcom about a startup.