Reviews Archive

During NY Entrepreneurship Week, I was in New Work City and two women came into New Work City (our coworking space) looking for Jeevan Padiyar (who is part of NYCENT) to confirm their business plan had gotten submitted. In the course of helping them resolve this issue, I learned about their company and efforts – and was intrigued by the two women, Nicole Basabe and Alma Sehovic, and their incredible energy. If every entrepreneur in NY had these ladies smarts and drive, I am certain NY Tech and Entrepreneurship will life NYC to new heights.

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.

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If you are as old as I am, you might remember the days of Fedex’ing comps back and forth from designer/agency to client for approvals. The process was long and expensive and, many times, took some of the “oomph” out of the team waiting for either a signoff or feedback on more items to change.

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.

This morning I met with Seattle-based TeachStreet and company CEO Dave Schappell and CTO Daryn Nakhuda. The service is described as, “a dynamic online community that brings motivated learners and talented teachers together.” I compared it to ZocDoc but for teachers instead of doctors. The easiest way to describe TeachStreet is that it’s a marketplace for teachers and students to come together for learning.

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.

Last week we posted a demo of job blog service JobsForBlogs. Today I’ve found another service that aims to help online job seekers. Brand-Yourself describes their service as an online reputation manager for job applicants.

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 is a new Zurich-based startup that aims to create a pet community. I don’t have any pets (except for the rats in the subway) but I know that those with pets believe they actually talk and so forth. PetSite is a social networking site for pets similar to Dogster/Catster. PetSite is available in a number of languages including English.

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.

Online baby manager TotSpot announced the launch of Groups earlier this week. Totspot co-founder Adam Katz tells me that the new groups functionality is a step towards creating a full community site.

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.

Tonight at the Web2NewYork meetup, Gliider presented their new NY-based travel resource . Gliider’s tagline is, “plan funner trips”. Gliider allows you to save out bits of content from across the Web for locations and destinations you are interested in. It looks like it’s a Firefox plugin which allows you to highlight content and drag it to a Gliider folder.

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: