DiscoveringStartups -Tech Startup Reviews

Betterfly is the easy way to find the people – not companies- to help you learn, look and feel better. Betterfly excludes companies to focus only on people, making it easier and more efficient to find the right person to help you learn, look and feel better in over 1,000 ways, from Accordion to Zumba.

The company feels that excluding companies from the search gives it a competitive advantage by allowing its users to search with more specificity and allowing users to compare apples to apples, people to people.

We also have live booking on our site so users can book appointments in real time!

Betterfly is set up to be the ultimate consumer guide to personal betterment. On Betterfly, they can find people that are best suited to their personal criteria, and read what others have to say about their experiences. When trying to perfect your French pickup lines you’ll be working with Jacques the French teacher, not the whole Je Parle Français School. On Yelp or Citysearch, you’d find a review of a great hair salon, or a new gym, and you’d have to scour the comments hoping to find a name. On Betterfly, you know immediately who you should ask for when you get there. With the economy the way it is, service providers are looking for more ways to build their brand and reach new clients. Betterfly answers those needs, with a free service. And who doesn’t like free stuff? We’ve already gotten a tremendous response in just the few months since we launched, and there’s no reason why things shouldn’t continue to grow.

I would love to discuss this over the phone. We plan on making money in numerous ways. One way involves a payment system we will implement in which we will act as a neutral third party and holds the money in escrow until we verify that the service was actually rendered.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://betterfly.com/

Visage Mobile is a leading enterprise mobility management company that enables businesses to take control of their mobile budget and inventory and set policies that govern employee usage of smartphones and mobile broadband. Its flagship product, MobilityCentral, is a cloud-based SaaS application capable of quickly analyzing data from thousands of employees across multiple carriers. Its customizable reports and actionable metrics are displayed in user-friendly graphs, giving companies unprecedented insight into their mobile activity. which provides usage data on over 50,000 U.S. employees spread across all geographies and industry verticals.

We are unique in our delivery model and time to implementation. Most businesses can be up and running in days rather than weeks, which is traditionally the time it takes to manage a businesses mobility. Our competitors are mainly BPO services/consulting companies that focus on telecom. They are known by the acronym TEM – Telecom expense management. We do not find competitors taking the same technology and value proposition approach (i.e., cloud-based SaaS app) as we do at this point.

According to market research firms, there are currently 20 million corporate-liable smartphones in use in the United States, representing 13 percent penetration of the total U.S. workforce. By 2012 this penetration rate is expected to increase to 20 percent, led by IT’s adoption of mobility management tools to help manage cost and complexity.. Our product helps IT departments of corporate America deal with these trends/challenges. On the one hand there is a push to enable the employees of a corporation to be more productive by having access to corporate apps while they are on the go via mobile broadband and smartphones. We address this chaotic environment where these devices are growing like weeds by providing a cloud-based application that brings together 3 sets of data – employee/HR data, device data and carrier billing data – and with data providing metrics/analytics/budgeting/visibility/policy setting so that an IT department can get control and manage to a budget.

See above. The more smartphones that are adopted and the more the workforce becomes mobile – the more businesses are going to need a solution that manages their mobility quickly and easily to save cost and support policies.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://www.visagemobile.com

First there was Netflix for movies, then came Pandora for music. Now there’s Yummly.com for food and cooking. Founded in 2009 by internet startup veteran David Feller, who held key positions with Half.com, StumbleUpon and eBay, the company is pioneering semantic search for recipes.

Yummly is the first cooking website to apply algorithms and semantic search to recipe and food search.

Yummly uniquely ‘understands’ food on a variety of levels (taste, ingredient, dietary appropriateness, potential allergens, etc.) and ‘learns’ about users based on their likes and dislikes, developing a deeper understanding each time they use it. This enables Yummly to make personalized recipe suggestions containing only those foods the user want.

Designed with simplicity and usability in mind, Yummly marries high tech with common sense to provide a vastly improved user experience over other cooking sites. The result is a platform that’s fun and easy to navigate for cooks of every skill level, and makes discovering and customizing recipes a snap.

With more than half of American households cooking at home more frequently, Yummly is a much-needed tool in any kitchen. It’s what online recipe search has been lacking for quite some time.

Yummly is currently exploring different monetization and revenue models.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://www.yummly.com

Shape Up The Nation is the first corporate wellness company focused on leveraging the power of trusted social networks to promote healthy living. Founded in 2006, Shape Up The Nation has pioneered an innovative approach to behavior change that uses social networking to reduce health care costs by improving the health of large populations through peer motivation, support, and accountability. Shape Up The Nation’s evidence-based online platform is used by more than 120 leading self-insured employers and health plans.

Shape Up The Nation incorporates trusted social networking into the wellness arena. Studies have shown that the biggest long-term influence on an individual’s health is his/her peers; we take this to the next level by placing peers/co-workers on a platform, allowing them to encourage one another with healthy activities.

Health care costs as a percentage of GDP are estimated to reach over 30% within the next 25 years. Large self-insured organizations and health plans are turning to prevention as a way to alleviate costs. Shape Up The Nation offers a proven, evidence-based preventative solution that capitalizes on social media technology.

Employers and health plans pay on a per participant per month basis.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://www.shapeupthenation.com

Sure2sign.com is the vehicle that will help you accomplish your mission of earning a college scholarship. Create and update your online profile, Sure2Sign will create your professional highlight video, and we’ll provide you all the necessary resources to generate interest from college coaches nationwide. You have questions? We’ve got answers.

Highlight video production is included in our subscription. Our industry experience and price point will serve every demographic.

The college recruiting process has become very internet based. High school athletes are able to reach out to more college coaches, more efficiently. College coaches can pre-qualify more athletes from around the nation without leaving their desk.

Subscription based.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://www.sure2sign.com

CloudFlare brings the performance and security tools previously reserved for the Internet giants to the rest of the web for free.

Webadmins used to have to install or keep a variety of tools to get fraudsters and scammers at bay. CloudFlare has brought a full suite of tools to webmasters with just a quick five-minute change over of name server (DNS) information to CloudFlare.

Our tools, once resolved for the internet giants at very expensive rates, are now available to small and medium sized website owners as well.

CloudFlare is offering Pro accounts with more advanced security features and statistics. We hope to offer an enterprise version in 2011.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://cloudflare.com

Yoomly is a new type of job search and employee finding website. Yoomly creates a marketplace for both employees and employers, allowing employers to compete for employees and vice-versa. Employees create employee profiles, which offer extremely high visibility–including easy access to employers and ranking on Google–as well as easy personalization (users can even upload video clips). Yoomly is a smarter way of finding jobs and employees.

Yoomly takes the mystery away from finding jobs and employees. Instead of showing only a black and white resume, employees can show a full profile to employers. Employees can easily see information about other applicants applying to positions and can therefore connect with employers faster. Yoomly also offers much more exposure than traditional job search websites–with all employee profiles indexed in major search engines. Employers can also see basic information about other employers offering employment to candidates. Yoomly is completely free for employers and employees.

Many businesses cannot afford to hire employees on traditional job search websites, with job postings often costing around $500–Yoomly is an efficient, free alternative. Yoomly creates an efficient marketplace between employers and employees–which will help employers find employees they can afford–an extremely important benefit, especially in a recession.

Yoomly will eventually be a paid service in some sort of way for employers–we will most likely not be charging employees to use the service.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://yoomly.com

Fashion-Ade.com is a virtual closet and e-stylist tool that helps women get the most out of their closets and empowers them to dress with confidence every day. Women can easily build a virtual closet by either selecting from nearly 100,000 pre-populated garments, or by uploading photos of unique garments to the application. The site’s patent-pending Outfit Engine then suggests combinations that users can rate and share through Facebook and email which in turn generates usage data that Abundant Closet can provide to retailers in the form of Closet Insights reports.

• Users don’t have to spend time uploading photos. Instead, they can build a virtual closet in 15 minutes or less, leveraging the 95,000 garments preloaded into the system

• Fashion-Ade’s patent-pending Outfit Engine allows users to view, rate and share thousands of outfit combinations.

• The Closet Insights tool will help educate retailers and improve their ability to understand their users’ interests and style preferences.

Fashion-Ade has the potential to make it BIG. American women spend $215 Billion on clothing annually, yet consumer research reveals most wear less than half of what they own, leaving more than $100 Billion worth of garments hanging in a closet, or worse, a thrift store. Fashion-Ade’s patent-pending Outfit Engine helps them utilize more of what they own and presents them with more of what they want: improving ROI on their clothing investments.

At the same time, online retailers in the women’s apparel category – more than 300 at this point – are grabbing an increasingly large slice of the retail pie; online sales as a percentage of overall sales are up 11% in the last year alone. Fashion-Ade presents retailers the opportunity to build relationships even when users are not shopping. Our data mining capabilities give retailers access to market intelligence literally not available anywhere else.

Fashion-Ade will provide user insights reports to retailers for a fee (per user).

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://www.fashion-ade.com/

We are the leader in creating and seeding social advertising on the web.

We create unique sharable ad products and seed them across the web. The real pay-off is the organic impressions and earned media that brands get from consumers sharing the advertising with their friends on social networks where they spend the bulk of their time. Our patent-pending technology makes us one of the few companies that traffic, track and measure social media advertising. Our proprietary “Share Banners” turn the standard IAB unit into an rich engaging social plug-in that seamlessly allows consumers to share a branded experience with friends directly into Facebook. AdNectar units are Facebook approved and currently the only rich media units you can find in the Facebook newsfeed.

We believe that social endorsements will always be #1 in moving the needle, and social media is only making it stronger. Advertising’s job is to rally your biggest fans and turn them into your biggest advocates. We believe in advertising that asks questions, entertains, engages and is shared among friends.

We invite brands to share. All brands should engage with consumers around common passion points, not copypoints. In the world of social media, if your ad isn’t being shared, how do you know it was truly break-through? If your ad isn’t being shared, how engaged was your core consumer? Due to our seamless share functionality, and high standard for brand engagement, AdNectar campaigns are the only ones in the current marketplace that can guarantee viral pass-a-long of your brand messaging by real, unpaid consumers.

AdNectar designs custom social media programs using our proprietary products. We seed engaging, interactive advertising to targeted audiences and provide them with the seamless opportunity to share. Our programs are scalable, allowing any site to serve an ad unit that feeds directly into Facebook.

We currently charge based on a CPM for production and campaign seeding. With our patent-pending platform, we track results on a daily basis and can optimize on the fly. Both traditional and viral analytics are delivered to our clients.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://www.adnectar.com

We provide visual voicemail on any internet connected device – mobile phones, iPads, computers – that unifies your mobile, home, and work messages.

We’re focused on:
1) A great experience for callers – including greeting callers by name or personal greetings
2) A leverage of community – users post greetings, users provide caller id info, users tell us who the spammers are
3) One-click upgrade from existing voicemail – effortlessly get a better experience.
4) Making voicemail easy to share – one click posting to Facebook, for example, as well as easy IMing and texting.

1b+ mobile voicemail boxes are out there, and it’s a horrific experience. We replace that with a dramatically better experience at no cost to consumers. We already have well over 1m users, and have handle roughly 500,000,000 calls. We also have 6 carriers that have made YouMail their voicemail, with 2 more signed and on the way.

We make money on free users through advertising, and we have a number of premium offerings we’ve been able to upgrade people to.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://www.youmail.com