Lil’grams pushes the grams to the network in the way the people in the network wish to receive them. I spoke with co-founder Gregarious Narain who explained that some people might want email notifications, others may want messages on Facebook and (gasp) some might even want Twitter direct messages.

There are a variety of grams including:

• media gram – for a photo or video
• food gram – “hey look little billy kept his cheerios down”
• word gram – “mom check it out billy said his first word – twitter!”
• story gram – “billy went for a walk today in the park and ate a hot dog”

We’ve covered a bunch of baby services including Kidmondo, Baveo, babyZbook and TotSpot. Lil’Grams is offering only paid plans with no free option. Most of the other services offer a free option and monetize with advertising, affiliate revenue or by partnering with other services that charge a fee. As I mentioned to Gregarious, it will be interesting to see if the other baby services follow suit with paid plans. Just like in other industries, someone always has to be first and then the others typically follow along.

Pricing starts at $29/year for 1 kid and goes up to $49/year for 4 kids and some additional options. I guess the Octomom would need 4 of the 4 kid accounts.

PickFu is a new website that offers a quick way to get A/B feedback. You setup a question (an example of Mac or PC is displayed below) and then the PickFu community replies to the question. You can either make a question public and have the community respond/listing in the question directory or make it private where you must share a link with those people who you want to see the results.

They offer a page with the current demographics of their responders which seems pretty diverse. The only question that’s missing is location – I’d want to know where the responders are when testing an application. The responders answer the questions via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Each question posted on PickFu costs $5 for 50 responses. What would be great is to be able to select the audience that will see the question in cases where you want to test against a specific audience (e.g. people over 60 with no college degree, women under 21 in Australia). Perhaps an extra fee gets you audience targeting.

I can only assume the site is real as they have a checkout for purchases. There are five “Swaxy girls” currently and they note that they are looking for more girls who want to win prizes and make money. Swaxy isn’t going to get me away from Amazon or NewEgg for my tech purchases. I honestly don’t know what to make of this so please leave your thoughts in the comments. 

Here’s a video of one of their products for sale (might be considered NSFW):

Founder (and good friend) Darren Stuart tells me that 1,000 startups are currently in the aggregator with more being added everyday. Apps for the iPhone and Android mobile devices are coming soon. You can follow the service on Twitter and Friendfeed as well.

What’s nice about StartupTicker is that all startups are on the same playing field – valley darling status doesn’t mean extra coverage. If you have a startup, you can submit your blog here. I’m not sold this could be a business by itself, but it could be a good way to get people into Darren’s network where he can push other apps in the future.

The Hapnin team is working with a variety of newspapers and bloggers to place widgets on their sites which will drive traffic to Hapnin and to the content sources. Users can contribute events into the Hapnin system as well.

Basically you install an application and then when you want to video call someone, you send them an email with an invitation to video chat. I guess that means you need to figure out when your friend or family member is around  for the chat. Logitech says they made the application as easy-to-use as possible.

The service is free for Logitech webcam owners; others can use the service for free for 30 days and then they are required to purchase a Logitech webcam.

I guess I am confused – Logitech makes out like it’s hard to make a video call today. I make a number of video calls using Skype and it couldn’t be easier. With Skype I know when my buddies are online and when I start a call with them I can click the “start video” button. That’s it. How does using yet another piece of software and having to send out emails versus just seeing my buddies online make it easier? I am also not forced to use a Logitech webcam – something my newly refurbished Dell laptop does not have.

I’ve been playing with TinyChat over the past couple of weeks and it too looks super easy for video conferencing. With over a dozen people using their webcams, the service was solid and no real lag was seen. Using TinyChat couldn’t be easier – there is a large button that says start conferencing – click it and your video and/or audio starts. That’s it – they don’t ask what type of webcam you are using. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore announced earlier this week that they will be using TinyChat for the new Mashable video lounge.

If Logitech wants to get into the video conferencing and calling game, perhaps they should acquire TinyChat.

On their FAQ page they outline how they get the books they sell, “Books collected by Better World Books come from two primary sources: the over 1800 college and university campuses on which we run textbook drives and nearly 1400 libraries and thrift stores that send us discarded and donated books.”

The CEO noted that up until now they mostly sold the books on eBay and Amazon. They are investing this year in building the BetterWorldBooks.com site and are hoping to sell the books directly to the public. You can also purchase a carbon offset for your book shipping.

The company expects to see revenues of $31 million in 2009.

As Nicole told me, Tribal Societe is “a online global bazaar whose concept is as fashion forward and green as the company is socially responsible and its products are a la mode”. What I took from the “pitch” was that TS is a portal for creating another channel for entrepreneurs in other lands (in this case Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, South Africa to name a few) deliver natural accessory products to the US and international market.

Nicole, who was born in Manhattan, but raised in Ecuador and Miami, got an early start at entrepreneurship – starting and successfully growing her first trading company at age of 20. After spending 8 years on her business, she took someones “advice” and decided to get an MBA at NYU Stern, thinking that the financial sector was where it was at.

At Stern, Nicole met Alma, a former banker who was looking to become an entrepreneur. As the two of them spoke, Alma convinced Nicole to return to her entrepreneurial roots and launch TS.

What makes TS different from something like Etsy?

Nicole talked about her passion for the local cultures in Ecuador. With her affection and strengths in fashion and marketing, she realized that while there was an amazing source of beautiful artisan work in Ecuador, there was an appalling lack of access and distribution channels for Ecuadorians to the US and international markets. One of the stories she told me was about tagua, a wood-like material that feels more like ivory than wood, and used to be what buttons were made out of until plastic substitutes made them “expensive”. Now, with logistics and telecoms, the price of tagua has come down – and the products made from it are absolutely gorgeous.

Additionally, Nicole and Alma feature various artisans and artists on their site and promote/showcase these products through the web and through retail merchandising as they move forward. In addition, Tribal Societé also donates a portion of its proceeds to the Global Fund for Women, keeping with their mission of giving back to the communities of the developing world.

The site, launched about 60 days ago, has already turned a profit and demand is beginning to grow.

Why are you telling us about them?

Yes, there is no major technology underlying their business model (heck, all the products are handmade by artisans in developing countries!) and the e-commerce model is nothing new. But, the energy I saw from the two women and the drive they have made me decide that an article on them was worth time to point them out and allow for others to discover.

Disclaimer: I met with TS to see how I could help them, and have taken no remuneration – aside from their gift bag at their launch event.

In these current times, a variety of applications have appeared to make website and document reviews easier. There’s ProofHQ based in the UK, ConceptShare out of Canada, and Argentinian-based ColaabFlow.

A new feedback application has hit the private beta scene recently named Notable. Notable describes their service as, “Quickly and easily give feedback on design, content, and code on any page of a website or application without leaving your browser. Notable helps your team collaborate through visual feedback on screenshots, via a chaos-free process so that everyone can express their opinion.”

There is also a browser plugin which allows you to bring any webpage into Notable for group review and annotation. This can be helpful when analyzing the competition with your team. I like how they build permissions into the system which allow for certain team members to see the designs at certain times. Notable also offers a historical dashboard which can be used to “remember” decisions from previous reviews.

Monthly plans range from $44-119 and Notable offers a free account which is limited to three users and one workspace.

Also…have a look at our CreationFlow, ProofHQ and ConceptShare coverage.

Currently TeachStreet has several U.S. cities setup including Seattle, San Francisco, New York and a few other cities. There are a wide variety of learning types on TeachStreet including music, language and shockingly there are teachers listed for Twitter.

TeachStreet uses a team in the Philippines who travel the Web looking for teachers of various subjects. TeachStreet then creates profiles in the TeachStreet system and contacts the teachers to take over the profile. It’s a pretty interesting tactic to get more profile pages. Dave did note that they prune profiles if they can’t get in contact with the teachers.

In the video below, Dave and Daryn discuss what TeachStreet is, how it works and how they plan to generate revenue. We also discuss the Seattle startup scene.

Brand-Yourself offers a dashboard where you can monitor how you are being perceived across the Web. The service also offers a portfolio manager which is basically a site creator and manager. There’s a recommendation engine which provides guidance on how to improve your online reputation. There are SEO options to help with obtaining better rankings for your name. What I like about the site offering is that you can use a name.com which will allow you to move the site in the future with no redirect issues. 

Brand-Yourself also offers some career tips and a blog for the job seeker. The site seems to indicate that there is a membership fee after the first 30 days free although I can’t find any information about the pricing.

It looks like the concept for Brand-Yourself started in late 2007 and the initial site launched in mid-2008.

PetSite

Each pet gets a profile page (like MySpace) where the pet can “talk”. The pet categories include dogs, cats, birds, horses, fish, rabbits, rodents (??), reptiles and ferrets.

This week’s featured pet is “Pepe” the cat – displayed to the right. Here’s how Pepe describes himself, “Hey there. I just wanted to introduce me quickly :). my name is Pepe and i live in Zurich, Switzerland in a nice apartment together with my brother Pepper. We are both 2 years old and love to sleep – play – eat – sleep every day (in this order). I will post some news from time to time here.” Pepe has a bunch of friends which include a dog, and a horse.

The pet profiles page also includes what the pets first day was like, what the pet enjoys doing, and things the pet likes/doesn’t like. Pepe notes he likes, “I  love to play with small balls, fake mice, my brother and everything else that i can catch.”.

Petsite also has polls and voting for the pet of the week. The site appears to be currently supported via advertising.

The main Groups are “Cohort Groups” which are based on creating groups based on similar age children. There’s a groups dashboard where you can see current activity across multiple groups. Katz noted that the groups are being utilized by not just parents but also by grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, pet fish, etc.

You can also add rich media in a group including YouTube and Vimeo videos and/or direct video and photo uploading. So far the most popular groups appear to be “first time parents” and “potty training help”.

Also make sure to check out my interview with Adam where we discuss where the idea for TotSpot came from, how the site works and what’s coming next.

The company plans to make money by mining the saved data and presenting you with related deals in the destinations you are considering. The example was if you save a variety of 4 star hotels in Munich, Gliider will offer up deals for 4 star hotels in Munich and if you book one through Gliider, they share in the revenue from the sale.

Here’s the demo video from the meetup:

Bueda

Bueda helps web publishers more effectively monetize their traffic by optimizing online ad placement in rich media and user-generated content via its innovative semantic matching engine. Leveraging research from Carnegie Mellon University, Bueda combines user-generated tags, existing ontologies, and semantic analysis in order to match the right advertisement to the right multi-media content. Bueda is seeking an angel round of funding.

ExactBrand

AJAX Street has developed a web-based document creation software called ExactBrand, which helps companies manage their brand message and reduce redundant design costs. AJAX Street is launching an alpha version of ExactBrand, and will be seeking an angel round to rapidly develop a public beta based on initial user feedback.

BitBlinder

InnomiNet allows consumers and businesses to guard their privacy online and avoid restrictions on their Internet access. BitBlinder allows users to anonymously browse the web and transfer files using BitTorrent. Currently, InnomiNet is focused on increasing the number of users on the BitBlinder network. Our goal is to have thousands of users and be profitable by early next year.

iTwixie

iTwixie is the ultimate online hangout for every tween girl. iTwixie.com is a challenge-driven site designed to engage today’s savvier 8-14 year-old girl, allowing her to explore engaging topics and express herself through creative activities. iTwixie is currently seeking an angel round of funding.

Stockcastr

Stockcastr is developing a global financial media platform that will become the American Idol of the investment world by “democratizing” the flow of and access to high quality investment-related content (stock picks, analysis, etc). The company is currently seeking an angel investment round.

The Resumator

The Resumator takes the pain—and paper—out of hiring. The company’s ondemand hiring platform helps employers save money on advertising jobs while dramatically increasing the speed at which they can collaborate to review submitted resumes. The Resumator is seeking an angel investment round.