Reviews

Below are five of the newest startups according to Killer Startups for the period ending May 14, 2008. Check out previous Killer Startups posts.

Susuh.de - Service Yourself

Berlin may have more of a reputation for bawdy cabarets, graffiti and a trendy 'It' status as the next Paris/Prague, but its creative endeavors aren't limited to spray cans and spandex. Take Susuh, for example. Susuh is a new startup that caters in services. This is fitting for Berlin, who's seen its share of unemployment problems and has been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for years.

WhatsUpInRuby - Following the Conversation

What's up In Ruby is the first of a series of niche sites that gives you insight into the conversations going on within a specific context, and then takes you to where those conversations are taking place. They find the best sources, filter out the noise, tell you what's going on, and send you on your way. If you're curious about a certain topic go ahead and search for it. What's up in Ruby follows hundreds of Ruby and Ruby-related blogs to deliver you the latest in conversation from the Ruby world.

Markthisdate - Share Your Favorite Events

Markthisdate is a Holland-based site that allows you to download the calendars of your favorite events directly to your favorite calendar program and thereby keep tabs on your favorite things. There are a number of calendars to choose from, for example, the Beijing Olympics, and you simply have to click "add to my calendar" when you would like to download the times and dates of an event to your icalendar.

FriendFeedLinks.com - What's Hot on FriendFeed

The idea behind the popular site FriendFeed, is finding new and interesting links, articles, sites, etc via your friends. It's an exercise in sharing the Web 2.0 way. Until now, there surprisingly hasn't been any FriendFeed memetrackers allowing a Digg-style popularity index to showcase the most viewed items. However, a clever Frenchman decided to change this and made his own FriendFeed memetracker aptly called FriendFeedLinks.

PlantWire - A Flickr Flower Garden

Gardening gets the 2.0 treatment with PlantWire. The site uses publicly licensed Flickr photos to identify flowers and plants. Currently, their floral database contains over 300 plants and over 6000 images. Plants can be searched for by tags, colors (using the ever so handy color pixel grid), and by name, using the search bar. The site uses both common, vernacular names alongside scientific names picked for the USDA GRIN Taxonomy database.

Back at Techcrunch40 last year, Musicshake launched their music mixing application. It was by far the crowd favorite and my overall favorite for the entire event. Unfortunately they didn't win the grand prize.

Tomorrow they will announce the launch of the newest version of the Musicshake application. The new system features over 400,000 music modules created by real musicians. The modules are all types of different sounds, instruments and other musical elements. In this new version, Musicshake has also added 80,000 new electronica music modules.

They call the system the "Mubot" for music robot and it helps you to automatically harmonize the various elements of the track so you always sound (and look) like a rock star.

Musicshake has also upgraded their social capabilities which include the ability to email and embed any track. You can also insert your music into Facebook and MySpace.

Honestly this is one of those apps that you just need to try. But only do it when you have time to play - this is not an app you will leave after a few minutes. If you do create any music, leave a comment so all of us can check it out!

NY-based Frevvo is moving out of beta today. Frevvo is a form creation tool that helps make online form creation and data collection easy. Frevvo reminds me of Wufoo which seems to be the forms creator that is mentioned the most in discussion.

Frevvo has created a few sample mashups using Google docs and spreadsheet applications. Frevvo offers a basic version which will work for most users and an XML version for those who want very advanced functionality which will allow for tying into business applications. Forms can be embedded to gather user data. Drag and drop controls make the creation easy. It seems similar in some aspects to Visual Basic.

In my limited testing I found the app to work well but it's certainly not for the most novice of users. It's a business application that requires an analyst to use. The Wufoo interface seems much more polished and easy-to-use for consumer-facing form creation.

Frevvo can run as a hosted service or as a downloadable version. Pricing looks pretty standard and they actually do a great job of pushing users into a paid plan. I've written many times before about giving away so much for free that there's no reason to pay. Frevvo handles this very well.

Lastly, I'd suggest that their name is a bit confusing - the two V's together look like a W and how do you pronounce their name? Is it free-voh or freev-voh or something else?

Fyrebug offers you a simple way to create a customized flash game with your own photos and music. I found the process of creating a game simple and easy. Ads are served after each game has completed and the ads are served by MochiAds. Since you will want to play more than once, you will watch the ad.

The game creator is a flash application which walks you through the steps to create the customized game. Fyrebug offers about 40 games that can be customized. For some reason, the boxing game appears to be the most popular game to customize. Games can be shared and embedded. I've embedded a sample game below.

The Fyrebug customized game gallery shows about 100 games that have been created. The games are on the very basic side and probably won't appeal to high-end gamers. But if you want to beat up your favorite blogger, Fyrebug works perfectly.

Jon at IndieStartups spoke with the Fyrebug founders regarding how he came up with the idea. Co-founder Jonathan Widro said, "My partner and I were working at 4kids Entertainment, and worked closely with flash games. We came up with the idea for Fyrebug, but kids cant upload their own images, so we decided to pursue the idea on our own."

Below are five of the newest startups according to Killer Startups for the period ending May 9, 2008. Check out previous Killer Startups posts.

3DegreesInc.com - Carbon Calculator

3Degrees is a site that focuses on protecting the environment by supporting clean energy and carbon reducing projects. The name comes from the scientific projection that in 2100 the earth's temperature will rise by 3 degrees Celsius which will cause huge environmental issues that will affect society. 3Degrees is a great site to visit and educate yourself on the impacts of pollution and ways in which you can reduce your negative contribution.

PriceAdvance is a simple browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that helps you find the best prices on the products you are interested in purchasing. The company initially launched last December and so far they have saved users over $100,000.

I am seriously wondering why FatWallet hasn't created something like this. They have an awesome cash back merchant gallery and this PriceAdvance plugin would be an excellent layer on top as it's alive all the time.

I am also wondering why semantic experts AdaptiveBlue aren't offering this type of money-saving technology.

Come inside to check out the PriceAdvance demo reel.

Below are five of the newest startups according to Killer Startups for the period ending May 5, 2008. Check out previous Killer Startups posts.

Friv - Games, Lots of Games.

Like the thrill of beating your friends, colleagues, and family at online games? Or do you just like games in general? If so, check out Friv. Friv may not sound like much, but you'll be surprised. Enter the site, and you'll be greeted with a load of tiny screen shots from a screen full of games. You can drag your curser over each screen shot to learn the name of the game and decide if you want to play. Click on the game that tickles your fancy and start playing.

iLocker - Store Important Documents

The last time you had a locker may have been high school, but that doesn't mean that using one now is anachronistic; you just have to find one to match your needs. Allow me introduce iLocker. iLocker is an online safe to store important text documents. The web application encrypts the text using a password of your choice and their own encryption method. Once the text is stored away, iLocker does not save any information linking you to the locker, including your name or password.

Surchur - Search Multiple Sites

Surchur searcher sans the new fangled web 2.0 spelling—is a meta search engine. It pulls up results from several different search engines, aggregating them into one space for you to read and compare. Using it is simple: enter your query, choose the category you want to search through—all, pages, news, pictures, videos or products and hit Surch.

Nuebbo - Virtual Business Cards

Communication both personal and business wise is largely done on the web now. For many people the best way to get in touch with them is by email so Nuebbo helps you organize your contacts by organizing them as virtual business cards. Have you ever lost your phone and therefore lost all of your contacts? Having all of your contacts at Nuebbo ensures that you will never lose them, that you can always access them and that the information will be current.

Onstageportal - Online Project Management Solution

OnStagePortal is an online project management solution that allows for easy group collaboration on all project tasks. Share documents and track changes, preserve and organize important correspondence, coordinate calendars, assign project tasks, monitor progress, streamline customer communication and customize the dashboard to preserve your company's brand. OnStagePortal is available as a free advertising supported solution or as a well-priced version without advertising.

Monkiri is a new Indian startup that offers a simple way to capture screenshots from anywhere online and blog about them instantly. Monkiri is in the same category as leader Skitch except without most of the Skitch features. Depending on your perspective, the lack of features may or may not be a bad thing.

You install a browser plugin in IE or Firefox and then when you want to grab a screenshot, just hit the browser button, highlight the area and you are done. The screenshot is then uploaded to your Monkiri blog and you can add more information about the screenshot or post it immediately.

Monkiri works with Windows while Skitch is Mac only. If all y ou want is a way to grab screenshots and share them, or for a simple scrapbook, Monkiri works well. Forcing users to use Monkiri for their blog will limit the success the tool has. If they allowed simple publishing to any blog (similar to how Skitch works), Monkiri would potentially see a more rapid user adoption.

A new NYC startup launched earlier this week named Kidmondo. Co-founder Daniel Hallac describes the site as, "Kidmondo is a personalized online baby journal that helps parents to easily chronicle their child’s life and share it with friends and family in a safe environment."

I was able to get a baby quickly and create a profile on Kidmondo for my new child. Kidmondo offers a diary (blog), image gallery, an about page, a growth chart, health records and a timeline. Photos can be uploaded to Kidmondo and videos must be uploaded to YouTube. That's a mistake in my book as most parents won't want to put their private child videos on a public site. I'd suggest that Kidmondo partners with a video host to create a private path to the videos.

There are connections to Twitter and Wikipedia. A nice touch is the "this day in history" on Wikipedia. I've addressed the pricing below but they need to consider an archive price - that is once the child reaches an age where you no longer want to add any updates but want to continue the account, the pricing should be much lower on an annual basis.

This site reminds me of Dogster in that it's a niche but could be a very profitable niche. While on the surface it seems like the site would only be used when the child is young, parents will want to return to it over time and share it with other family and friends. Kidmondo could be an affiliate dream by showing ads that relate to the child at their current stage of life.

I did notice a variety of layout issues in IE7 across the site. A partnership with NY-based SharedBook might be a perfect way to offer a printed album of the information on Kidmondo for those family members without Internet access.

I'd like to address one other area where I see startups making consistent errors in. Kidmondo offers a freemium model - that is, they offer some basic services for free and charge a small per-month fee for the premium services. Below is the pricing chart for Kidmondo. What I see over and over is that startups give so much for free that there is no reason to upgrade! With Kidmondo the only difference is number of child profiles, ads/no ads and storage size. The free account allows for 3 children and has ads. How many families will have more than 3 children? In my opinion it should be one kid for free, after that you pay. Please stop giving away so much that there's no reason to pay! Give away just enough and then hook them on the upgrades.

Last year I wrote an article about what I'd like to see in the perfect video system - combining online and traditional TV. Services like Joost and Hulu are making strides towards perfection but are still a long way off. Today Sezmi has launched what they are calling "TV 2.0" and a complete solution (why they would jam 2.0 on there is beyond me A&R Edelman should be shot). The feature list is quite impressive including:

• delivering everything video in one package - traditional tv, cable, premium channels along with Internet video
• the interface is seamless between Internet video and tv and recorded shows
• remote control that can be personalized for each person in the family
• social networking aspects - friends, share playlists and rate shows with the community providing feedback

To be honest, it's almost like Sezmi looked at my post and made that exact device. The big piece they are missing is the ability to watch whatever I want from where I want when I want. Pricing information was not provided. It does look like this isn't a box you can buy off the shelf, Sezmi will need to partner with local cable and Internet video providers to get it working. I am excited to see the Sezmi device enter the market