WHAT: Scans social media campaigns and gives suggestions to the company to maximize their impact.
LAUNCHERS: Alex Benzer, CEO [ @abenzer, LinkedIn ]. Charlotte Genevier, CTO [ @cgenevier, LinkedIn ]
With 20K Listings, Flextrip Takes on Tours -- Another Travel Market Ripe for Disruption
WHAT: Online travel companies add tours and activities to their site with Flextrip's API, which has over 20K listings. Consumers can go directly to consumer site to search for and book tours. Supply is global and activities include indoor and outdoor, one-day and multi-day.
LAUNCHERS: Leith Stevens, CEO [ @leithstevens, LinkedIn ]. Alex Kremer, COO [ @axk,
LinkedIn ]. Andrew Glover, CTO [ @ajglover ].
Bueller, Bueller? TruantToday Tips Parents and Puts Money Back in Schools' Pockets
For Just 3 Cents a Contact, FullContact's API Keeps Records Up-to-date
WHAT: Developer tool for keeping contact information (email addresses, phone numbers ) current and adding social information to contacts. FullContact's database has over 100 million contact records.
LAUNCHERS: Bart Lorang, CEO [ @lorangb, LinkedIn ]. Dan Lynn, CTO [ @danklynn, LinkedIn ]. Travis Todd, COO [ @travis_todd, LinkedIn ]
Brands Winning: GoSpotCheck Reinvents Secret Shopper with Crowd-sourced Missions
WHAT: Brands get real-time insights into their in-store merchandising when GoSpotCheck's crowd-sourced workforce go on brand-directed “missions” like taking pictures of a product’s shelf positioning.
LAUNCHERS: Matt Talbot, CEO [ @MattTalbot, LinkedIn ]. Samantha Holloway, head of customer insights [ @SamBHolloway, LinkedIn ]. Joey Alfano, head of mission control [ @JoeyAlfano, LinkedIn ]. Bart Ciak, head of technology [ @BartCiak, LinkedIn ].
Game on: Developers Can Make Games for All Devices with Creative Brain Studios
WHAT: Enable game developers to make games that can be used on any smartphone, tablet or computer. Creative Brain Studios' Engine is built on HTML5. Games are deployed to the cloud.
LAUNCHERS: Brian Booker, CEO [ @bookergames, LinkedIn ], Joe Sengir, CTO [ LinkedIn ], Gerald Wallner, VP Development [ @GeraldWallner, LinkedIn ]
Hottest TechStars Company Debuting Tomorrow: InboxFever
WHAT: Email-powered applications. Send an email to appname@inboxfever.com with basic information in the subject line to do almost anything imaginable: get directions or a list of sushi restaurants in a city, order flowers, retrieve reports, etc.
LAUNCHERS: Doruk Aytulu, CEO [ @daytulu, LinkedIn ]. Joshua Thorp, CTO [ @stigmergic, LinkedIn ].
With Fortune 50 Clients and $1M+ in Revenue, Affectiva Proves Market for Measuring Emotion
WHAT: Tools for measuring emotion in research and business outside a lab. The Q Sensor, worn on the wrist, measures emotional arousal, temperature and activity (will soon have streaming capabilities). Affdex uses a webcam to read facial expressions and can determine whether someone likes or is paying attention to the commercial or movie trailer she is watching.
LAUNCHERS: Co-founders are Rana el Kaliouby (CTO) and Rosalind Picard (chief scientist and leader in affective computing). CEO David Berman helped build WebEx, which Cisco acquired.
WHY: Testing in lab is more invasive, labor-intensive and expensive. Marketers can measure actions but cannot assess emotion. Webcams capture good-quality video and are ubiquitous. Emotional data can be used in social networking and gaming.
Famous for Getting Charlie Sheen on Twitter, Ad.ly Launches Open-Source Analytics Software
WHAT: Matches brands with celebrities to start conversations about the brand and drive clicks, mainly on Twitter (paid, in-stream messages not allowed on Facebook). Target audiences include moms, sports fans, teen boys and girls, and men and women ages 18 to 34. Celebrities pick brands and approve copy, Ad.ly delivers the endorsement. Must have at least 25K followers to be accepted to platform.
Blingalytics, which Ad.ly developed for its own real-time business intelligence needs, is open-source software for tracking social engagement and creating custom reports. Also integrates with financial software for billing and revenue reporting. Built in Python.
LAUNCHER: Arnie Gullov-Singh, CEO, is a former Fox and Yahoo executive.
Nodejitsu Takes on Heroku and Joyent as Node.js Goes Mainstream
WHAT: Cloud hosting for Node.js applications and websites, individuals to enterprises. Because Nodejitsu's platform is open-source, customers can use any cloud computing provider or their own hardware. Also, Nodejitsu focuses on the "user-land" part of Node.js, meaning everything outside the language's core functionality.
Coming soon: marketplace for Node.js apps so people can customize their Node.js sites.
LAUNCHERS: Charlie Robbins (CEO), Marak Squires (chief evangelist), Paolo Fragomeni (CTO). All are developers.
Node.js Makes Backend of Web Apps More Efficient to Transform Internet as We Know It
WHAT: Server-side JavaScript -- the language of front-end developers that makes web pages interactive -- created to efficiently and quickly handle thousands of simultaneous requests, common in today's real-time applications (think stock tickers). Node.js uses an event loop rather than threads for requests; an event is a message from other applications or input from a user. This approach leaves a smaller footprint on a server.
Node.js is built into HP's webOS 2.1, meaning developers can build their entire webOS applications in JavaScript. Microsoft agreed in June to help port Node.js to Windows so that it can be used on Microsoft's newer servers, including its Windows Azure cloud platform.
Technical details: Built on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, uses the commonJS module system, written in C, is open source.
CREATOR: Ryan Dahl (shown above) has a master's degree in math from the University of Rochester. His open-source projects beyond Node are the Ebb web server and the "EY" load balancer module for Nginx. He has worked as a freelance programmer and lived in Germany.
ShowMe App Lets Anyone Create Lessons to Make Online Learning Accessible to All
WHAT: Create lessons on a virtual whiteboard with a voice-over, then share them with the ShowMe community. The community votes lessons up and down, with the best lesson of the day appearing on the homepage. Available for free as an iPad app for lesson creation. Users can access lessons on the ShowMe website.
LAUNCHERS: San Kim, CEO and Karen Bdoyan, CTO. San founded Easel Learning, which helps students prepare for the SAT and learn algebra using iPad apps. Karen is the co-founder and CTO at Easel. He worked for Lycos Europe and founded/sold a startup in Europe before moving to the U.S.
ThinkNear Helps Local Businesses Attract Customers in Slow Periods to Evolve the Deal Space
WHAT: Restaurants, hair salons and spas tell ThinkNear when their businesses are usually slow and how much they are willing to discount. An algorithm uses this information plus variables like weather to generate and distribute mobile ads to drive customers during slow periods. Customers click on the ad to get the coupon (which has a tracking code), then show it to the merchant on their phone for the discount.
Free three-month trial right now. The monthly fee of $99 guarantees businesses 5K impressions a month but not a certain number of customers or deals offered. Nightly emails report how many people saw their ad, how many clicked and how many claimed.
Available only to merchants in New York. Los Angeles coming soon.
LAUNCHERS: CEO Eli Portnoy and John Hinnegan, head of software engineering. Both worked at Amazon (but not together). Eli previously founded a company that matched low-skilled laborers like dishwashers and janitorial staff with employers.
Reunik Makes Social Photo Books to Improve How People Share Images
By Kirsten Winkler, Europe Contributor
@KirstenWinkler
LAUNCHER: CEO Yann Bienvenu has worked for several companies and startups in the telecom sector in France and abroad. He also studied photo sharing in social networks as part of his master's in business administration and sociology.
CodeLesson Offers Instructor-led Tech Courses Online to Challenge University Model
WHAT: Online courses in the latest programming languages and platforms, with demand driving new courses. Instructors are vetted experts who communicate with students and answer questions via message boards. A course start date is set once enough students have signed up for it.
Courses typically last four to six weeks and cost around $300 depending on the technology being taught. Passing the course earns the student a "badge" on their CodeLesson profile page.
Students come from all over the world, and some instructors are from outside the U.S.
LAUNCHERS: Jeffrey McManus (CEO) was eBay's first technology evangelist and co-founded/led the Yahoo Developer Network team. Ernie Hsiung, a developer, has worked for Ning and Yahoo (and is founder/editor of the 8asians.com blog).
Vibe.me Brings Emotion to Social Graph to Change How People Connect
WHAT: Share what you’re feeling within Vibe.me’s social network (asymmetrical like Twitter) as well as on Twitter and Facebook, or keep your check-ins private. There are 12 color-coded vibe categories -- six positive, six negative -- and dozens of adjectives and phrases in each one. Earn "karma points" for updates and getting new people to join. You can also send a vibe to someone in the network or via email. Web only right now.
IN THE WORKS: Integration with foursquare and Tumblr among others, ability to “vibe” about YouTube videos, news articles, etc. iPhone app coming in late 2011/early 2012. Same time as app will be analytics dashboard for viewing emotions over time.
LAUNCHERS: Kevin Fremon (CEO), Will Mason (CTO) and Dustin Brown (COO). Kevin founded the boutique digital agency Don’t Blink Design, where Will is CTO and Dustin handles business development.
Nginx Creator Plans Company to Better Serve Millions of Sites Using Its Web Servers
WHAT (TECHNOLOGY): Nginx is an open-source, high-performance web server that is designed to serve static content quickly and provide accelerated proxying capabilities to application servers, which run things like Python, Ruby and PHP.
Nginx uses an event-driven, therefore asynchronous, approach to handling requests, and it also has a very efficient reverse-proxy caching layer. A master process is responsible for configuring tasks and launches a number of single-threaded worker processes. In turn, each worker is then capable of handling many simultaneous requests.
Event-driven servers are lightweight compared to servers like Apache that use a process or thread per request because of the overhead of using more and heavier threads. Performance does not drop when Nginx has thousands or more concurrent connections because having only a few small and efficient workers doesn’t require as much RAM. Also the server does not have to waste time switching threads. Nginx is available for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Windows.
Note: many sites deploy Nginx with Apache.
[Editor's Note: We have slightly revised this description based on information from the Nginx company founders.]
WHAT (COMPANY): Nginx the company intends to improve support and documentation as well as introduce new features and speed up patches and fixes.
GitHub Simplifies Sharing Code to Change How Developers Work and Market Themselves
WHAT: Simple way for developers to share and store code. Developers have a profile page and can follow others, watch repositories (where code is stored) and discover new projects. Many use their profiles as a resume. GitHub encourages forking -- taking code and developing it in a different direction -- to try out ideas (the practice used to considered negative).
[ Git is an open-source version-control system that Linux creator Linus Torvalds developed in 2005 ]
LAUNCHERS: Chris Wanstrath, CEO; Tom Preston-Werner, CTO; PJ Hyett, COO.
WHY: Git should make it easier for developers to collaborate, but it needed infrastructure to do just that. SourceForge requires permissions and approvals to post new projects and make code changes, limiting the amount of code shared. Other tools for version control are cumbersome. Plus there was no place for developers to easily track their own projects and coding history.
Personal CRM Startups Hashable and Rapportive Launch New Features to Make Their Apps More Addictive
WHAT: Hashable: Manage all your contacts and relationships on your phone(s) and desktop. The 2.0 version makes "private" the default setting and adds follow-up reminders that integrate with your calendar, follow-up messages (e.g., thank yous), relationship histories and private notes about contacts.
Rapportive: See info about the person emailing you -- photo, current job, recent tweets, etc. -- in you inbox (Gmail only right now) and add private note about him. Latest feature: see info about the person you’re composing an email to.
LAUNCHERS: Hashable: Michael Yavonditte, CEO. Rapportive: Rahul Vohra (CEO), Martin Kleppmann and Sam Stokes (CTO)
Internet TV Network The Wired City Promises to Make Everyone Live in Public
WHAT: People broadcasting themselves from home will interact with each other as they attempt to earn their way onto a "Star Trek"-style set where everything is wired and recorded. Those on set will spend much of their time monitoring streams and communicating with those at home, led by a captain who has earned his or her way into that role. Thousands (and eventually) millions of hours of footage will be distilled into a one-hour prime-time broadcast each day.
“Citizens” of the The Wired City -- limited to the U.S. to start with -- will be able to purchase backdrops and uniforms they can use in their home studio.
In other words: massive multiplayer online game meets reality TV. Raising money now on Kickstarter.
LAUNCHER: Josh Harris, who founded research firm Jupiter Communications in the mid-1980s and the internet broadcaster Pseudo.com in the late 1990s. He famously created a wired bunker in Soho that the authorities shut down and wired/recorded his and his girlfriend’s home life before he cracked (both experiences are captured in the documentary “We Live in Public,” the Grand Jury prize winner at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival).
In 2007 Josh founded the short-lived Operator11, which let people create their own live web shows (though the original premise was The Wired City).
WHY: People want their 15 minutes of fame. It’s technologically feasible, and enough people have webcams and broadband internet connections to participate. Plus, it hasn’t been done yet.