startups Archive

Since founding the Columbia Venture Community a few years back, I have watched the group continue to thrive due to the efforts of the talented leaders that have taken it upon themselves to drive the organization forward.   It has indeed come a long way. 

Initially the group was focused on creating a vibrant entrepreneurship community within the Columbia population.  Now that the group has become increasingly institutionalized in the fabric of the university culture, the organization is now working towards fulfilling its broader community responsibility:  helping to build the startup ecosystem in NYC.

I’m very proud to announce, a major step in that direction, our first NYC-wide startup career fair for job seekers from any university.  We’re also very excited to take this step in conjunction with the NYU Venture Community (founded by Chris Gimbert).

Special thanks to AOL for hosting the event and to the event’s organizers (especially Alex Horn, Dave Whittemore, Mike Brown, Nick Hurley and Chris Gimbert) whom have worked hard to pull this together.

If you’re a startup seeking talent or a student seeking a job this is the event for you.  The details of the event are below. 
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Last week London-based Skimlinks launched the SkimKit, a tool that helps publishers find products that have affiliate opportunities attached. Martin Bryant from Next Web has a good overview from the launch of the SkimKit service.

This morning I met with Skimlinks founder and CEO Alicia Navarro in NYC to learn more about her service and the new SkimKit launch. It was a great conversation because it combined a product demo/pitch with a good industry discussion.

We’ve covered SkimLinks several times before but if you are new to the service, here’s a simple description from my earlier post. Skimlinks provides a way to instantly turn all of your product links into affiliate links with no changes to individual content. You add one line of Javascript to your template and then, where Skimlinks has a relationship, the links automatically become affiliate links.

Alicia noted that one of the benefits (actually the main benefit) of using Skimlinks over signing up for affiliate programs yourself is that you will generally make more money because Skimlinks typically receives the highest commission levels while most affiliates will generally stay in the lowest bucket. Skimlinks takes a cut of the earned revenue (25%) but even with the split, you will most likely still earn more. You also only need to signup once with Skimlinks and then you can participate in all of the programs that Skimlinks supports – over 7,500 of them.

The SkimKit is an Adobe Air application that helps publishers find products for the stories they are writing. If you are familiar with how Zemanta helps you find links for your stories, the SkimKit does the same thing for products except that the SkimKit only shows products where there is an affiliate relationship.

The idea behind the SkimKit is to make it super easy for writers (especially teams of writers) to find product links to include in their blog posts and articles. The SkimKit also provides short URLs for sharing links in emails along with direct share links for Twitter and Facebook.

Skimlinks has grown from just Alicia to now 20 employees all based in London. Their widget is “loaded” to over 470 million unique visitors a month and the javascript that loads the Skimlinks service is loaded 300 times a second.

Also checkout Alicia’s guest post about building a startup in the UK.

Memonic is online information capturing and organizational service. It allows you to capture pieces of information like maps, routes, photos or text. The capturing process can be completed in a variety of ways including: a smart bookmarklet, an iPhone application, email your documents and/or using copy and paste. Once the content is in the Memonic system you can organize the data in collections and share the content with your friends. An example of a nice collection is Johnny’s iPad collection with shows offsome new technology. Memonic could be considered a competitor to the popular information capturing service Evernote.

The Swiss-based Memonic team is made up of five business and development team members. Memonic has quickly sky rocketed to become a new darling in the Swiss startup scene.

This week, Memonic has launched their business model. For a yearly price of 29 Euros (USD 39) you receive storage of unlimited items & collections and up to 10 GB of storage. For comparison, Evernote charges $45 a year. Neither Memonic nor Evernote charge for file uploads although Evernote has a monthly limit of 500 mb.

Have a look at the Memonic Tour to see if the application could help capture the information you are interested in across the Internet. And you can easily start using the service by creating an account or just anonymously organizing your bits of information.

Typically corporate trips are great – you get to use someone else’s credit card for travel and meals. There’s only one time that corporate travel sucks – and that’s the time it takes to put together the expense report for the trip. As a former accountant and auditor, I got the bonus of having to review and let employees know when their steak and vodka was over the corporate limit.

Startup ExpenseBay aims to make reporting expenses easier and less painful. ExpenseBay allows you to connect to your personal or corporate credit card. Your transactions are downloaded into ExpenseBay and then you can assign them as needed into the different categories (e.g. meals, hotels, escort services, etc.). The mobile app also allows you to note cash transactions as they happen which is typically the biggest issue with expense reporting. 

You can attach receipts into each expense transaction which makes it easy to submit the expenses once complete. In addition, expenses can be submitted into your account via email.

ExpenseBay connects directly with some of the popular corporate accounting and expense reporting packages. They can also provide in-house company expense report management.
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It’s interesting that everyday we hear how email is dead yet everyday I see someone using email in a new way. The benefit of using email is that it’s understood by nearly any Internet user as opposed to many of the new social networks that take time and investment to be able to effectively use.

Yesterday I spoke with YouTellYou founder Ruggero Domenichini to learn more about the service. YouTellYou is an easy way to create a photo magazine. The service can pull in photos from photo sharing services including Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook and you can also upload photos from your computer. The magazine can also include a Google Map so you can provide the location where the photos were taken.

Jolie O’Dell at RWW has a good review of the YouTellYou service from their launch back in January. She notes, “In about 10 minutes, we created this story about SxSW 2009. We were able to get access to all the needed Flickr photos through a simple interface. Pics were then organized into layouts of one or two photos per section with optional captions for most layouts.”
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I’m currently working on a cool startup called SubMate. SubMate allows you to discover the familiar strangers you see every day in the subway. This super cool idea has some history. Here is how I learnt some basic entrepreneurship lessons, the hard way.

About 4 years ago (early 2006), while I was living in New York, we sat down with a good friend to tackle an idea we had. It turned out to be a cool idea, something that would solve a problem (or fill a gap) we all knew. The service we imagined would allow subway commuters to discover and meet each other. SubMate was born.

In brief, we failed. We failed for various reasons, and it took us two years to pull the plug. 
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About eight years ago I applied for a job at one of the largest insurance companies. After a few phone interviews and some testing, I made it to the in-person interview. I showed up in my suit and tie, the portfolio had copes of my resume printed on nice bond, and I met with several executives. After the team interview was over, I met with the HR person. She said that the team liked what I had to say and my vision and she said that the only things left were the drug test and the “Google test”. She then rotated her chair towards her computer, loaded Google into her browser and typed in my name. For the next 10 minutes she browsed links that had my name associated with them and she explained that they like to look into the background of the people they hire.

Lately we’ve read reports about people losing their job or not receiving a job offer because of what they write about on their blog or post on one of the social networks. But what about the new location tools like Foursquare and Gowalla? Could using one of these services be the quickest ticket to a pink slip or a non-offer? While I don’t think that either service will hit the mainstream, no matter how much a certain tech blog pumps Foursquare, no other service shows off everywhere you go like the location-based services do. In fact, on Foursquare and Gowalla you are rewarded for showing off where you go in the form of silly badges, pins and stamps.

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