SocialMedian was barely a thought for people back in February, but it has gained a solid following in the 9 months

of its existence. Many people would ask why this startup has gained any traction. It is yet another social news site with voting and commenting. Did we really need another? Given the amount of traffic that socialmedian is getting, it is obvious that they are onto something.

With this in mind, I figured it was time to chat with SocialMedian Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg and find out if things were actually as good as they sounded.

A look Back

During the summer, there was rapid growth as SocialMedian added Google Reader and other service integration, as well as replize. These features were added because of user feedback. Goldberg has stated several times, “Our model at SocialMedian has been:  small, fast, and listen to users.” You have probably noticed that you do not see any advertising or many press releases plastered all over the major news sites. Essentially, SocialMedian has been built through its user base. The only “press coverage” you tend to see are reviews from various blogs, including here on Mashable.

Almost a month ago, SocialMedian integrated with Facebook and users saw a large amount of traffic coming from the popular social network. Also, in the weeks leading up to the election, socialmedian announced partnerships with the Washington Post and The Guardian. Their election widget was gaining adoption, and Goldberg stated that the few days following the widget release had seen a 300% increase in traffic. Why? It is probably due to the partnerships created through the Election Talk widget.

A chat with SocialMedian

Rob: How big of a traffic boost did the Facebook integration give you?

Jason: We got a nice initial boost when we launched our Facebook integration as our existing members were suddenly easily able to find and follow their Facebook friends and to invite new friends to check out SocialMedian. Since then, Facebook has been a steady boost for us as our users have amplified their SocialMedian activities to their Facebook friends and new users have also taken to our Facebook features. On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of overall impact to our growth and engagement, I’d say Facebook integration has been about a 7, but has the potential to be a 10 with some new developments we have planned to even better leverage the Facebook platform.

One thing the Facebook integration launch did though was it really went a long way towards starting to mainstream SocialMedian. I used to measure our growth entirely on new registrations. It taught me that awareness comes first then adoption. The Facebook integration made a whole bunch of new people suddenly aware of SocialMedian via their Facebook friends. After seeing SocialMedian postings on their friends’ Facebook pages for the 5th, 10th, 50th time, you start to see adoption. The second thing it did was really up the engagement level on SocialMedian. Suddenly it was really easy to follow people via Facebook. That hit our currently active users with a slew of new follow messages, which ignited them.

Rob: Obviously, the Washington Post and Guardian partnerships are a big deal. Do you see SocialMedian making several partnerships like this?

Jason: YES! It took us two weeks to put together the micro-site election.socialmedian.com for the Washington Post and then 1 phone call to get The Guardian excited about taking the widget. Now we know how to do it fast and know better to get ahead on working with more partners to include them. We also built this in a way in which we can replicate it again and again and again with only 2 days to get a micro-site up and running for any topical SocialMedian news network.

We’ll do our second one next week for the Monaco Media Forum event in Monaco November 12th, where the Prince of Monaco brings together 300 leaders in the transformation of media. It’s a closed event but SocialMedian will enable people to follow every blog post, video, picture, and tweet from home. You heard that here first. The page for that will be http://mmf.socialmedian.com.

Rob: Do you see any scalability problems with the micro-site idea? Meaning how often can you do these without affecting how much staff you must maintain?

Jason: No. It basically builds right on top of our “news network” concept in which anyone can create a news network to gather and discuss news about a particular topic. For these microsites like election.socialmedian.com or mmf.socialmedian.com, all we really do now is apply a template created for the election site which adds some additional views like “rising fast” in addition to “popular” and “recent” and which enables anyone to grab and embed a widget for the news network. We can do hundreds of these without any negative resource impact.

Rob: At the beginning of November Quantcast showed SocialMedian at just over 160K page views, what is the real traffic? I saw the email regarding the 300% increase over 3 days. Does that give you over 475K pageviews?

Jason: Conservative estimates had socialmedian at 500K pageviews (rolling 30 days). October ended consistently above 20K per day. Overall, there were 225K pageviews in September, 280K in October, and 120K the first week of November with traffic rapidly increasing as we got closer to the election. Quantcast has significantly more conservative numbers.

Rob: So how do you measure user engagement?

Jason: Clips/day is our best measure of engagement. Clips aggregate all user activities: clipping, sharing, like/dislike, and 1st comment a user makes on a story. In the past 60 days we’ve gone from averaging 1500 clips/day to more than 3500. We have seen the same sort of increase in comments as well. We attribute our replize feature, where users reply to other users vs. just leaving comments, as the key to the rapid rise in comment levels. One thing worth noting is that Mixx has probably 4-5x our traffic, but we are far higher than them on clips/story vs. their votes, and comments/story. In other words, we have more quality traffic we think and more engaged users.

Rob: Have you seen a traffic boost due to the election partnerships?

Jason: We see that our user growth has been more about the tech community suddenly all talking about SocialMedian at once vs. being all about the election. Over the past 4 days we’ve added more new registered users than in the previous 4 weeks. We’ve seen our 3 biggest traffic days yesterday (on a Sunday!) and the two prior days. It happened because users started talking publicly about how they seem to be getting value from SocialMedian. Nothing beats positive word of mouth. And we’ve worked really hard to cultivate that, while spending $0 on outbound marketing.

It’s all about satisfying users and getting them engaged in the service. Then, when they recommend the service to their friends or readers, it helps that newbies see a party going on when they get to SocialMedian (a vibrant community) that they can join in on vs. have to create. Notably, our strongest area is still tech news and we still have a very tech-oriented early user base, but at the same time our users have created more than 2000 news networks on all sorts of topics.

Rob: Will end of election season hurt traffic significantly, or are you seeing increased engagement from the new users?

Jason: So far we are holding up very nicely as new people introduced to SocialMedian because of the election and from Twit.tv seem to largely be staying around. This past Sunday was our biggest Sunday in history and Monday was better than the Monday before the election…so far so good. I think it’s fair to say that the election helped draw people in but the discussion continues around the news of the day.

Rob: What is the biggest complaint from users and how are you addressing it?

Jason: The biggest feature request we have is for us to add topical news search. We have none right now. That’s coming in just a couple of weeks. We’re also working on better filters and cleaning up the UI, which have been big user requests/complaints.

Rob: What do you see as the biggest reason for success?

Jason: The biggest reason for success is simple. We listen to users. We have done very little to focus on growth and marketing and instead focused almost entirely on helping one users at a time find value and get more engaged with the service. Our theory is that one happy user will bring 10 over time. That’s our focus.

Looking forward

Obviously, things look to be going very well for Jason and SocialMedian. It is still too early to determine whether the traffic will decrease now that the election is over, but the micro-sites give SocialMedian the ability to have focused coverage on any major event or conference. SocialMedian is maturing nicely, and I would definitely keep an eye on their future.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:SocialMedian is Raising $500,000 … In 140 Characters or LessSocialmedian Releases Replize to Start Conversationssocialmedian: The Latest Social News Aggregator [Invites]Socialmedian Opens Up Combining Many of the Best Ideas in Social NewsSocialMedian Adds News Streaming and Opens its Walled GardenPick a Startup to Get Funded: The VenCorps Mashable ShowdownSocialMedian Tweaks Site with New Beta Features [Invites]

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%

TechStars, the mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund, presented twelve lucky startups today in their first showcase in the Valley. Unlike DEMOfall 08, where 72 startups battled it out for everyone’s attention, these dozen services got to show potential new investors what they are all about in a more relaxed atmosphere. Most of the services will sound familiar because they’ve already launched and have begun to gain traction.

TechStars Executive Director David Cohen explains the purpose of this special event. “This is the first time we’ve done a demo day in Silicon Valley. We’re just trying to show the Valley what’s going on with TechStars. Many of the companies have their rounds complete, or very near complete. Certainly, adding new investors is one goal, but building awareness for these startups is the real key.”

Here’s a roundup of the twelve startups that strutted their stuff today:

Ignighter makes it easy to go on group dates, which is becoming a popular trend these days. We recently discussed Ignighter in a post about group dating.

Devver wants to convert desktop developer tools into cloud-based services. The theory is that it will reduce setup and configuration time, enable easy scheduling, display rich reports and make it simple to share data between team members.

Foodzie is an online marketplace where consumers can discover and buy food directly from small artisan producers. Small producers can sell their products online, making it easy for foodies to discover their favorite foods.

Travelfli helps frequent flyers maximize the full potential of their loyalty programs and discover the value in this hidden currency. Users can manage their award programs in one secure centralized place, find ways to get free travel using their miles and book award travel online.

Gyminee is a fitness social network for detailed tracking, online accountability, and motivation. Members can find workout programs and track their progress, food and nutrition, and set goals. On the social side of things, they can find gym buddies to keep them accountable towards their goals and participate in fitness challenges.

IntenseDebate today announced that they have been acquired by Automattic. IntenseDebate replaces the default commenting system found on most blogging systems with one that adds identity, threading, reply by email, and more. IntenseDebate can increases subscriber engagement and repeat visitors. They are similar to Disqus and SezWho.

Filtrbox is a media monitoring service that monitors and filters mainstream media, blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, and more. It then delivers it all in an easy to consume format that can save a lot of time.

Artist Exploder gives bands a dynamic presence on Facebook and offers a one stop application for managers and artists to connect with their fans.

Brightkite is probably the most well-known service in this roundup. They are a popular location-based social network that enables users to see where their friends are, share their experiences and make new friends based on location. You can access Brightkite by Web, text messaging, e-mail or device specific applications like the iPhone.

Occipital uses artificial intelligence to organize photo streams and enables vivid recollection with innovative visualizations.

App-X (Application Experts) provides software as a service (SaaS) to venture capital and private equity fund managers, pensions, endowments and other parties that invest in venture capital and private equity.

EventVue builds online communities for conferences that help attendees network and meet the people that matter to them at a conference. EventVue communities can also help conference organizers generate revenue by providing highly measurable sponsorship opportunities and driving more attendee registrations to their event.

Final Thoughts

The concept of presenting a handful of the best startups you’ve supported to potential new partners and investors makes a great deal of sense. If nothing else, as David Cohen stated, it’s good exposure not only for the startups but TechStars themselves.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:SocialThing Raises $300K in Early-Stage FundingYouTube Gandhi, mDog MySpace, OfferTrax, TechStars, Limelight, BuzzLogic, MTV Virtual Hills, StupidVideosA New Way to Date: 6 Online Resources for Group Dating

Source:Mashable!

Searching for things through a service that scours multiple engines is one thing. Searching for things through a service that scours certain aspects of the news and social discussion space is another. This is what a new invention called Social Mention allows you to accomplish.

Employing Yahoo’s increasingly noteworthy BOSS search platform, Social Mention, an Ottawa, Canada operation, distinguishes its results by their variety of source. If you’re looking for items to do with, say, today’s official debut of the T-Mobile G1 device, you can specify that the engine find blog posts, microblog posts, bookmarks, comments, events, images, links from social news websites, or videos.

Adding extra flavor to the mix is an asset labeled “Hot Conversations.” Everything deemed of the moment is listed, though these are not specific a category. If you search for the abovementioned handheld, and transition from left to right through the available tabs, the picks in the right-hand column stay largely the same.

Everything seems to work without much trouble at all. While it’s a bit difficult to gauge for relevance for links, at least given our brief test of it, the delivery of information is pretty much how you’d expect it to appear. Yet, you’re likely to notice the length of time it takes for the engine to provide information, both from the start and through successive moves to all sections of the results page. A 5-second wait time is what I sense is the average to see results. Not terribly extensive, but noticeable for sure. Keep in mind, if one aspect is cached, the time spent twiddling thumbs is less. Images and videos, meanwhile, may take longer to display.  This is in part due to its aggregation of material from sources like Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious, Flickr, Reddit, Digg, YouTube, and coComment, as well as the many blogs that inhabit the Web.

What has me most excited about Social Mention is its take on keywords and how they are used in the blog world, the new media space, and conversations had in numerous places. Companies and organizations undoubtedly find it valuable to track mention of their names, brands and products to register trends, pinpoint troubles, and generally involve themselves more in the chatter, as they have been known to do in a venue like Twitter. Social Mention simply broadens the scope. Its speed could be improved, but to begin with, its quite an admirable piece of kit.

Note: Mashable is currently running a contest for Yahoo BOSS developers.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Christopher Reeve Social Network LaunchesTioti - Tape it Off the Internet!Last.fm Partners with The Orchard…Mashable Readers Fall AsleepMySpace for Stat Heads: Nielsen’s Social NetworkAnother Cautious Report – Global Social Networking Ad Spend Estimates LoweredClipSyndicate Proves Canada Loves MashableOrkut Launching New Design

Company Name

UberSpat

20-Word Description

UberSpat is a new online debate community where evidence presented and rated by users allows the best debates to float to the top.

CEO’s Pitch

UberSpat is an online debating site that allows users to input a debate of their choosing. What separates UberSpat from its competitors is that users can add evidence to support or oppose a debate. The evidence can then be rated by other users. All of this information then becomes extremely beneficial to people who want to know more about both sides of the debate. They simply read all of the best articles from either side. This focus on evidence makes UberSpat a research tool as well as a debating site. That’s what makes this an amazing site. It is something of a cross between Digg, Wiki, and Google.

Mashable’s Take

Nearly two months young and launched out of Richardson, Texas, near the cities of Dallas-Fort Worth, UberSpat is a startup intended to provide a forum for debaters of all stripes to challenge one another on a myriad of issues, from politics to science to sex to sports to comedy to conspiracies.

We recently offered up a group of several online debate services and resources, all of which prove valuable in their own way. There is also the name-brand Debate.com domain, whose owners too promise to deliver a platform on which users may spar against one another. It is somewhat incomplete in its design, but it’s there all the same. What UberSpat manages to offer to its users, however, is both an efficient and well-detailed design. This means that while it presents a Digg-like ease of use and an intuitive framework, as its creators suggest above, it is very accommodating of discussion - and lots of it.

Granted, at the moment, submissions for topics listed aren’t flowing in fast. Given the site’s age, the place is moving at a decent clip, but still has long to go before it really hits its stride. Yet it still makes for an interesting visit. Some of the traffic it receives is banal and does little but flatline. Other items catch the eye. And those which do manage to grab a good bit of attention are enhanced by UberSpat’s hybridization of commentary so-called supporting evidence. The user’s ability to attribute articles to a discussion on one side or the other exceeds the usual he-says-she-says structure common in online debate.

Furthermore, the ability for users to not only comment and vote on subjects posited by members, but also to rate comments as well allows the community the option to act as a collective moderator to the space. This gives UberSpat the ability to maintain a sort of civility. As much as such a service with user management features can allow, anyway. (Naturally, the political stage is home to the most vehement chatter at present.)

Of course its name, admittedly, isn’t the choicest one to emerge from the niche it inhabits. UberSpat. It might suit you, it might not. And there are a few strange quirks in the sign-up process that will puzzle some registrants. It is required that you submit a birthday and marital status, for example. But my sense is that these points aren’t particularly important. Deal breakers they are not. The substantive impression the site itself can make on the visitor is key, and the way in which UberSpat operates is engaging and provoking, and ensures that the service stands among the top of its class.

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

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Artition

20-word Description: Artition is a unique network that provides its members with exceptional works. People around the world who have an ambition for creation present their art here.

CEO’s Pitch: Are you an artist? Are you a photographer, a painter, a writer, a singer, a model, member of a band? Or are you expressing your personal idea of art through videos, pictures, music and text? Then you know how hard it is to be recognized. Artition can do you a great service. We not only provide you a place to present and share all your artworks and to develop and discover totally new styles and creations, but further the chance to make you recognized.

Mashable’s Take: It’s not often that you come across a site that balances utility and visual appeal so well. Yet that is what the team behind Artition, a group based in Cologne, Germany, have done. From the home page to individual art representations, Artition receives from us considerable marks for both form and function.

It might be a stretch to compare Artition to something like Artlog, a service we featured in early June. Artlog is more about bridging the busy schedule of the gallery world than simply showcasing images. But if Artlog is to be thought of as a benchmark, Artition handles itself well on the same stage. Yes, it is young, and not especially voluminous. Budding is how I would describe it. But it has all the makings of a future favorite.

I do have a very slight gripe with its position of adverts amid its pages. Perhaps a different arrangement might be better. You might notice slight delays in response when navigating around the place. And you might not take well to the Amazon- or Apple CoverFlow-like browser bar which sits front and center at the top of the domain. Apart from these minor issues, all of which are entirely subjective, everything is quite pleasant. I especially enjoy that art shown here is the primary concern. All else is ancillary. Just as, say, digital photographs are to Flickr (although Artition is measurably less featureful).

If you are at all a fan of canvas art, photography, glasswork, etc., Artition’s delivery deserves a bookmark and a sign-up. No question about it.

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

Picking and choosing your way to a furnished home is rarely a perfect science. Appliances you think would go well with your kitchen blueprint,   for example, may not fit so well with things once you take delivery. The planning process is inevitably followed by tweaking, compromise, and reserved acceptance that things will not go as originally desired. But with the advent of Web-based services, you can perhaps find a more complete view of what’s to come. MyDesignIn, a new 2D and 3D design and shopping service introduced at DEMOfall 08 this week, is one such aid.

First, it’s necessary to emphasize the beta label on this one. While most of the functions  operate as advertised, there are a few fibers frayed at the ends that make the user experience less than exemplary. For one, the occasional emergence of a progress window within the MyDesignIn editor space sometimes lingers unnecessarily. Suffice it to say that it can be distracting. What’s more, the ability to drag-and-drop products onto the overhead layout of a space is very convenient, yet there are bugs in evidence. When designing a virtual kitchen, components would occasionally fail to display properly in 3D.

Yes, there’s no question that MyDesignIn requires some getting accustomed to. You might dabble in room making for the good part of an hour before you’ve made much progress in fitting items as you wish. And unless you happen to be very spartan in your ways and are quick to please, the restriction put in place to add items from the right-hand menu only when in 2D view simply brings tedium to the mix. Still, the service, given the audience it seeks to attract, has its benefits. It presents a fairly broad supply of products to the user, and if what MyDesignIn provides isn’t quite enough, you can use the available bookmark utilities to grab images from elsewhere around the Web to include in a portfolio of ideas. Admittedly, things grow a little disjointed in that respect, as MyDesignIn is naturally not intelligent enough to take odd photographs and assemble interactive graphics. But from a planner’s perspective, the service’s various features could prove handy all the same.

In short, some aspects of MyDesignIn are intuitive. Others are not. There are quite a few pros and cons to weigh, but this beta release is overall an interesting one, and could ultimately be useful enough that it warrants a try. If you’re remodeling or making anew, and you want to experiment with brand names without having to spend a penny, this is something to register for. If you want to share your designs with others, you can do so. It’s really all a matter what the user will get out of his/her account. Time is the only investment here.

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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

Source:Mashable!

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.

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Source:Mashable!

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.