TweetSaver.com Launched
September 1, 2009
I haven’t posted much recently because I’ve been head down working on getting a new app out the door. I’m happy to announce that we (Squeejee) have launch TweetSaver.com!
TweetSaver is a service that allows Twitter users to back up, tag, search and share their tweets quickly and easily. Currently, search.twitter.com only allows people to search the most recent 6 days of tweet history. If a user goes to a twitter.com profile there are 3200 tweets accessible if you’re willing to manually page through all of them. If you want something easy to use or access to older tweets you’ve been out of luck until now. (more…)
Startup Profile: TheHappyHourLocator.com
June 25, 2009
Company: The Happy Hour Locator
Name: John Harvey
Title : Owner/President
Email : john.harvey@thehappyhourlocator.com
Give us the 30-second elevator pitch on your company
The Happy Hour Locator is an internet advertising website with the target market being the business traveler. We will feature 20 of the best establishments around a 10 to 15 mile radius of each airport in Texas for now but soon will be nationwide. We will provide photos of each establishment, their specials and music so the traveler will already know what to expect before they arrive their destination. (more…)
A Real Semantic Search Engine is Coming: Q&A With Swingly CEO Andy Hickl
March 18, 2009
I had the pleasure of meeting Andy way back at Pitch Camp Dallas when he gave a short presentation on Swingly. Andy and his team have been hard at work moving towards the release of their search engine, so I was glad when he was able to respond to a few questions I had shot him a while back via email.
FWSB: Introduce yourself and tell us what is Swingly on both a layman’s and more technical level.
Hi, I’m Andy Hickl, CEO of Swingly.com.
Swingly is a new kind of search engine that’s aiming to change how people search for factual information. We’re looking to accomplish this by combining two powerful types of “semantic” search engines: automatic question-answering and adaptive recommender systems. (more…)
Foodies in Fort Worth Have a Great Resource
March 17, 2009
At the Fort Worth Startup Happy Hour last night I finally had the priviledge of meeting Crystal and Matt , the duo currently behind the website Fort Worth Foodie.
The site is a nice little treasure trove of information on the local Fort Worth food/restaurant scene, offering everything from restaurant reviews to a happy hour list. Fort Worth Foodie also puts out a print magazine every quarter that you can pick up for free at a variety of locations around the city and surrounding areas.
After coming across Crystal on Twitter (@FortWorthFoodie) we had a brief email exchange were she gave me some more background on their project:
The site was initiated by a couple of TCU students that moved out of state and were looking for someone to take it over. My boyfriend and I came upon it last summer and decided to purchase the rights to the site and magazine (they had put just one out for Oct 07 at the time). We were already looking to start something similar, so this was a good way to get started without having to build a site from scratch.
So now we’re just finding our way. We’ve put out a Fall/Winter issue last year to see what type of response we could get and it’s been great! We distributed 15,000 last quarter and are about to go to print with our Spring Issue and just hired an ad sales rep.
Our mission is really to promote all the great independent restaurants in Fort Worth. So many times they get overlooked and people opt for a chain restaurant. We just want to make people aware of all the wonderful options out there! It’s been a lot of fun so far - just hoping we can take it to the next level.
So if you are ever kicking around Fort Worth and need a little help picking your next place to eat. Check out Fort Worth Foodie for some great tips and hidden gems.
Swarmforce Launches Twitter Mashup, Swattr
March 6, 2009
DFW/Boulder based Swarmforce recently launched an awesome twitter application called Swattr. The main function of Swattr is to “kill the noise on Twitter.” The application uses Swarmforce’s highly advanced swarm intelligence algorithm, along with something called swarm karma, to display the best tweets in any given swarm (or category).
Right now, there are 23 active swarms that users can participate in. Swatter users can also create swarms. So how does Swatter work? You’ll recognize the interface immediately, as it borrows liberally from the Twitter website itself:
You got your status update box, your tweetstream, and your sidebar navigation.
You can see the swarms you belong to, the tweestream for each swarm, a summary of the best tweets from each swarm, your groups and their tweetstreams, and all the standard twitter stuff like @replies, dms and favortites.
The crux of using Swattr hinges on people sending tweets “into the swarm” via the Add to Swarm button
Adding a tweet to a swarm increases your swarm karma as well as allows others to vote the tweet up or down.
While Swarmforce CEO Jason Jones says the app is really in an alpha stage, I have to say it does the job pretty well. The best part of Swattr, which I only discovered today, is the Summary Tab.
The summary tab shows you the top tweets over the past 24 hours for each swarm that you belong to. What’s cool about this is that it actually works, and the summary shows me some great tweets that I could have otherwise missed from my huge tweetstream. For example, here is my summary for the Technology Swarm:
After talking a little with Jason today about Swattr, I’m really excited to see the app grow and evolve as they release new features they have in the pipe. As it matures, I think Swattr will become the default method for the way I interact with Twitter.
Big Tech Suffering… What About Small Tech?
February 17, 2009
This morning I’ve seen a few tweets come across with links to a TechCrunch article titled, “Tech Layoffs Surge to 300,000.” As I scanned down the list of companies, which included the likes of the LA Times (didn’t know that was a tech company… anyway…), what I saw was big corporation after big corporation.
My first thought was, is this really that surprising? My second thought was, what about the small guys? (more…)
New Year’s Resolution: Blog A Lot More!
December 30, 2008
One thing I’ve learned from all my time doing SEO, monitoring web traffic and blogging is that when you stop blogging, people stop coming to your site!
So, as SpringStage is set to really take off in 2009 I’m committing to writing a lot more on this blog, getting more deeply involved in the Fort Worth startup community and generally bringing people together.
As you can see from the image below, I was blogging a lot more during October!
Startup Profile: Mixng - Bringing it All Together
October 20, 2008
I caught up with Justin Coleman, founder of local startup Mixng for a quick Q&A over email:
What’s the one sentence pitch for Mixng?
Mixng is an all-in-one social experience for those people who are tired of having numerous accounts for numerous activities and for those who are just getting into the social internet.
Elaborate a little bit on that and give us some details
Basically, Mixng is social networking, social news, social messaging and an aggregation tool. You can manage and keep in touch with friends, upload and view photos, chat with friends, share and discuss cool news items, message publicly with friends and strangers and follow your other online profiles in one spot.
I see it as a tool for two different groups of people: social internet veterans and newcomers. Veterans who are fatigued by the immense number of varying social websites and utilities can come to Mixng to simplify that. You can tell your friends to join Mixng with the promise that they won’t have to join 6 other sites to see EVERYTHING your doing online. They can see what you think is cool online, see your pictures and talk with you under one roof.
As for newcomers, this is a great way to experience what the social internet has to offer. Want to test of social networking and online photo storage without having to sign up for multiple profiles? Cool, we can help you there.
Our name Mixng, is short for Mixing, means that we are not only mixing people, but mixing these different technologies and tools into one simple to use utility.
Some of Mixng’s primary features are:
- profiles for every user
- photo albums
- an aggregator to pull in information from websites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Digg
- a messaging tool that enables you to have public or private conversations with friends and strangers
- a feed that monitors all your friends activity on the site and keeps you updated
- a content sharing tool that enables you to submit, vote on and discuss cool online content with your friends and peers
- emailing your friends
- groups for people of similar interests to come together and discuss and share cool content
We have many more features in the oven that will help to make Mixng that much more of a comprehensive experience. We just felt that our intial feature set were the essential elements to what could be considered the online social experience.
Are you funded? If so how?
Mixng is privately funded by a family member of mine. I approached my uncle with the concept of Mixng and did a simple pitch and he agreed to help us out. We took only $10,000 to cover basic development, hosting and domain costs. Obviously, we will need to approach Angel/VC investors in the near future to keep growing Mixng to where we want it to be. $10,000 got us a working concept. Something we can let people use, work on and show to potential investors so they can see what we are really thinking.
What’s your business model?
As of right now, our main business model is to offer paid ‘Pro’ Mixng accounts. We will supplement these paid accounts advertising throughout the site. The ‘Pro’ accounts will offer users a number of exclusive features and benefits such as: early access to upcoming features, customizable profile pages, no advertisements and a few other things I can’t get too into at the moment. We are also working on a few other features that could lead to more and varied monetization opportunities. We want to avoid advertising as much as possible, because we feel it detracts from the sites design and the experience users have. Our main goal is to provide a free product that people love and use and then give them the opportunity to add other features to it if they feel the need to.
Have you officially launched your beta… how many users to you have?
Mixng Beta will be launching within the next 1 - 2 weeks. It will be a private beta for around a month or so we can monitor things on our end to make sure the code and databases hold up to an increased load. Once we are comfortable with everything, we will open the beta up and run with that for a while. As of now, the only people using Mixng are me, my team and a few close friends who are bug testing for us.
You’re 19 right? Give us a little background on yourself and what prompted you to launch a startup… what about the rest of your team?
I was 19 when I came up with the concept and first started the planning of Mixng. At the moment I am 20 years old. I am originally from a small west Texas town called San Angelo. I was a military kid growing up (lived in Italy and Maryland to go with Texas). I’m now a Junior at the University of Texas at Arlington majoring in Communication Technology with a minor in Information Systems. I decided to start Mixng almost a year ago after working with some high school friends on a website called Tekshout.com (no longer running) when I realized that I wanted an all-in-one experience.
I think the thing that sparked the idea was that I had had a bad day and when I came home to check all my online profiles, Firefox had lost all my saved passwords and I had to enter about 10 username/password combos into all of those websites. So I said then and there that I would try to solve my problem by creating something that offered what all of those websites offered in one simple location.
I actually put my team together through Facebook because I was visiting home in San Angelo at the time. My main partner is a guy name Sushil Raghav who did all of the development of Mixng. I handled all the design aspects of it. And then the other partner is Graham Michaels who is handling advertising/marketing matters.
We are all first time startupers so it has been a fun and exciting experience for all of us.
Want to profile your startup? Send an email to startup-profile[at]blj.otherinbox.com
Startup Profile: Nectar - a fresh look at you
September 10, 2008
Quick Facts:
- Nectar is the hub for your personal brand online.
- Founded by Dave Onkels, Josiah Platt, Brett Tilford, Caleb White and Charles Williams
- Funding: Personal savings and sweat equity, no outside funding
- Business Model: users are charged a flat fee initially based on the design they choose and its exclusivity (each design is limited in the number of times it can be used), and then a monthly hosting fee that includes domain and email forwarding
- Anticipated Launch Date: October 13th 2008 12:00pm CST
I’ve been speaking with Dave about the project over the past few weeks and am excited to get a look at it when it launches. The Nectar team spent the past weekend in a 72 hour hackathon to give development a big boost. They have a great post over at their freshly launched Nectar Blog, outlining the effort. They also put together a great time-lapse video of the entire weekend, which I’ve included below.
Here is a quick Q & A I did over IM with Dave:
What is Nectar, really?
In the past, people used business cards, resumes, and word-of-mouth testimonials to define who they are and what they stand for – or said another way, to create their personal brand.
Fast-forward to now, where our activity on the Internet, to a great extent, establishes our reputation and is what delivers our first impression. Your brand is comprised of personal media in the form of web sites, blogs, photo galleries, videos, music, comments, reviews, chats, and shared items. Yet as personal as this media is, it’s spread across the Internet only to be found by the select users part of a similar community or through deep Google searches.
We believe you can shape your personal brand online to better define yourself, convey your personality, and share your talents. Nectar delivers exactly that solution by providing a personal brand hub created by the world’s best designers and communicated using the most elegant and simple of all interfaces.
Who will be the average Nectar customer?
For the next 12-18 months it will be medium to heavy social media users / bloggers / and freelancers outside of the design industry (assuming a professional designer won’t want a pre-designed site)
How did the Nectar team come together?
I had been recruiting writers for a content publishing project and was approached by Josiah - after doing some research on him I realized I needed to see if he’d be interested in talking with me about my vision for personal branding… we met and hit it off smashingly - he and I met with the rest of his Fuor agency team and got them on board with the project
We consummated the deal with a formal partnership / LLC last month.
I think the most fun was the mind-meld / absurd humor that came from late nights.
The least fun for Josiah and Caleb would be some of the initial development hurdles… they had to write some new javascript to implement the design the way we wanted.
I’ll have to quote Caleb on that one…
If you are working on a startup here in the metroplex, take a cue from these guys and get to work!
