Reviews Archive

BidMyCleaning is a startup celebrating their one-year anniversary this month. The service is basically a marketplace which brings together those seeking cleaning services and those providing cleaning services.

BidMyCleaning reminds me of two of my favorite web services – eMove and ZocDoc. Back in the days when I had money, I had a cleaning person come about once a month. It took several trials before I found a person/team that did a good job.

The service is simple to use – you enter your location and what type of cleaning you are seeking (move in, regular, heavy, etc.). From there you are presented with a list of cleaners and their bids (see example below). You can see reviews and ratings for each cleaning service. From there you select a time using their very slick calendar app. Then you pay using Paypal/credit card and the appointment is confirmed.

There’s no reason for a service provider (in this case a cleaning provider) not to list their services on BidMyCleaning – even if it results in only one additional customer, it’s still additional revenue. It looks like BidMyCleaning takes a percentage of the service price. The challenge with all of these marketplace offerings is not in getting supply – it’s in getting demand.

The website is worth a look as it’s very well designed and polished. I think we will see more of these marketplace offerings this year – they are huge timesavers and provide real value with actual customer feedback. Oh yea, and they actually generate real revenue.

We’ve reviewed a ton of travel-related startups here on CN from TripSay to Sosauce to GoAbroad to Driftr and more. I like checking out travel sites because I love transportation and enjoy visiting cities online that I might one day travel to offline.

Today’s entry is Where’s Cool? Co-Founder Bill Morse calls the service, "a global Yelp for traveling hipsters". Where’s Cool is currently in Alpha and has listings for about 60 cities around the world. Content is organized by category and location. Their goal is to provide information for low-budget travelers. I’d like to see public transportation information provided for each listing — if you are going to do things low-budget, what’s better than taking a train or bus instead of a cab or car service?

Reviews are written locally on Where’s Cool? I think it might help the site look more complete if they aggregated reviews from other trusted sources while they are building.

I also think Where’s Cool? could differentiate themselves by creating local guides for their target. Have two days in London – download our guide of places to stay, eat, visit, etc. The guides could even offer specific, targeted ads and discount offers for locations along the guided route.

I always like sites that help travelers save money and Where’s Cool? is headed in the right direction. If they can build a regular userbase, the site could do well for both the Where’s Cool? team and for travelers alike.

Blurb is a tool that helps you create your own printed books. It reminds me a bit of NY-based SharedBook. Blurb helps you create books in a variety of sizes and styles including softcover and hardcover. They say the books are bookstore-quality in quality and flexibility. Book pricing starts at $4.95 and go up to $54.95. 

Jolie O’Dell sits down with Mike from Blurb to learn more about how Blurb works:

This week the founder of travel social networking site Driftr, Erick Laubach, has launched a new service aimed at pets. Cute as Hell is a pet community site where pets of all types (cat, dog, hamster, horse, pig, etc.) can setup a profile page. The profile page features information about the pet, comments from other site users, and photos about the pet.

Other parts of the site include information about pet adoption, cuteness ratings for every pet, a pet store and the Thunderdome. The Thunderdome is similar to the NCAA basketball tourneys starting this week. Basically you nominate a pet to go inside the Thunderdome and two pets in each bracket go at it HotOrNot style. One pet will win from the Thunderdome and will win a variety of prizes.

Erick tells me that since their launch on Monday, over 1,600 photos have been posted and 200 pet comments left. It looks like the site will be monetized using a combination of advertising and affiliate sales. 

Regator is an Atlanta-based startup which provides curated blog aggregation. They have created aggregated pages for over 550 topics ranging from arts to health to local interest to politics. Readers can vote a story up or down within Regator and that helps to make the story more important in the Regator index. 

Check out my chat with Regator co-founder Scott Lockhart where we discuss Regator along with his tips for growing a site when you aren’t located in the valley.

This afternoon at SXSW I was able to grab a couple of minutes with Mark Schmulen. Mark is one of the co-founders of NutshellMail. Here’s their company overview, "NutshellMail transforms your primary email account into a universal inbox so you can retrieve messages and manage all your accounts in one place. NutshellMail was also designed to enable employees, restricted from third-party messaging accounts, to securely access personal messages at work without violating their employer’s IT policies."

Check out my NutshellMail demo with Mark:

We’ve reviewed a number of collaboration tools including Canadian-based ConceptShare and Scotland-based Colaab. Today I took a look at Argentinian-based CreationFlow. CreationFlow is a Flash-based collaboration and project management suite.

 You setup tasks inside of projects and then assign users to the tasks. The users can create reviews which is where you can draw (as shown below) to add notes to a review. I found the service a bit more difficult to get comfortable with than ConceptShare/Colaab, but once I got the hang of it, it is well designed. You can also switch the language to Spanish.

CreationFlow is more than just "stick up an image and get feedback" – it’s more like a team-based visual project management tool. It would work well for design agencies and other teams where client reviews are needed to approve tasks to continue with a project. I like the tracking component which makes it easy to confirm that a user accepted a design or other piece of creative.

I think their pricing model could use a bit of tweaking – they need to lower the number of users on the free plan to 1 or 2 (from 5) and introduce a pricing plan that’s less than their lowest plan currently at $50/month. Take the 5 user plan and set the price at $19/month or something similar. There’s just too big a jump from free to $50/month. Move them up the plans slowly I think is best.

My suggestion is to take all of the collaboration tools for a free trial with your team and determine which is best for your particular needs.