DiscoveringStartups -Tech Startup Reviews

MeeGenius! is a new reading, bookstore and publishing application for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Web users

By reading the digital books with in MeeGenius!, children benefit from extras that traditional books cannot offer, such as word highlighting, audio playback, personalization of each story and the convenience of reading anywhere and anytime.

MeeGenius! is set to revolutionize children’s book publishing – offers aspiring children’s book authors a viable alternative to traditional book publishing. By producing digital books with MeeGenius!, authors and illustrators can have their work edited, brought to life and available for sale through MeeGenius! and iTunes in days instead of months

App downloads / revenue share

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

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

We help retailers and food service companies easily create and communicate their employee work schedules. We give employee the ability to post availabilities and vacations on our site as well as view and swap shifts. Managers can easily take all of this information, and create schedules quicker then ever. Our users have found up to an 80% reduction in scheduling time and an overall improvement in employee moral.

Unlike other ‘business softwares’ we really focus on simplicity and using the best in modern web-design to help make SkedX really simple to use.

We focus on a specific market that is not a focus of the large scheduling companies and is to big for the all the small scheduling companies. We basically want to give our users most of the features and integrations expected in a large ERP system, but for a lot cheaper..

It is a SaaS company. Our prices start at about $3/user per month.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

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

ItsMyURLs simplifies your complete online presence into one location, one link, and one click! With more and more social sites being created all of the time, people are finding that they have many profiles out there, but with no easy way to let everyone know where to find them. ItsMyURLs solves this problem. With our extremely easy to use interface, and within 10 minutes, you can be set up, and don’t have to ever worry about telling people about your profiles or other links again!

Extremely easy to use. We are NOT a social network, nor do we want to be, so we don’t have features such as “friends, followers, updates, etc”. Our service is a tool, that people use to find and connect with you on the site of their choosing.. ItsMyURLs is also a great promotional tool, that make it extremely easy for you or others to share your links on any social network or by email, with our “sharing widgets”. Users can track which of their links are being clicked most, with our “link, hit counters”. We also have a few other features that our current users think are great, such as “Twitter Friends List”, Badges, etc. We are launching an updated design and interface in a few weeks, with our new “Widget” feature going live as well.

The market is huge, the need is there. We have caught the attention of some famous hollywood directors, and may have an announcement as far as seed funding in the near future. We have over 20 of the biggest celebrities, athletes, social media gurus, techies, models, dj’s, as “Verified Users” (similar to twitter’s Verification, except once verified on ItsMyURLs, their complete online presence is verified) on ItsMyURLs.com.

We currently generate revenue through selling ad space.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

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

Micromobs is a web service which allows users to quickly start group discussions. Users can stream multiple groups to one place making them easy to manage.

Most services focus on contacting an individual, but where do you go when you wan to contact a group? Unlike most group services, micromobs believes in getting one thing right–group discussion.

Micromobs will be big because everyone is a member of multiple groups. The definition of a group is changing from an entity that is permanent to entities that are created for short periods of time (eg. trips, events, volunteering, a college course). Micromobs will be the application that supports these temporary groups by quickly connecting the people within the groups.

The primary source of revenue for micromobs will be through sponsored mobs. Let’s say a group of people are discussing an upcoming trip to las vegas– we will allow brands to sponsor mobs based on topics being discussed within the mob. The secondary source of revenue will be through premium functionality. We will offer customization tools to groups who have additional requirements.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

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

Teamly has developed a productivity and people management SaaS web app for SMBs. For business owners and managers it solves the problem of how to make sure your staff are productive and effective, and how to keep on top of their commitments to you, without micro-managing them.

It makes users think about what is really important in their companies, commit to these priorities and then share these for review by their manager and team-mates. It combines priority and goal setting for the individual with real-time information on staff for managers. The key premise of Teamly is that by focusing on less things, you will achieve more, and that explains our strapline which is “Get The Right Work Done”.

The leading SaaS player in the performance management category is SuccessFactors, with projected revenue this year of $200M. Their product is enterprise focused. There is nothing equivalent for SMBs, and awareness of this category is growing. The market itself is growing at 20% per annum.

Currently we are still in beta and have no revenue. Teamly will remain free for single users, but in the new year we will start charging businesses for team access. This will be a typical SaaS product with a low per user subscription fee, and first month free.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

Please visit their website to learn more: http://teamly.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

OpenCal allows anyone who sells their time to offer appointment booking online. Making an appointment is faster and easier than a phone call and notifications and reminders are sent out automatically.

Because we focused on the design and user experience from day 1, we’ve created an extremely intuitive online booking experience that makes more sense to a business and their customers.

There are an estimated 25 million appointments made everyday in the US alone. In the future, probably all of these appointments will be made online because it is faster and easier.

We offer subscriptions to OpenCal that are either $19 or $39 per month.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

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

AboutOne is an online family information management system for people who don’t want to spend time on record-keeping, yet want to preserve memories and MUST have access to household information when certain life events occur, like having a baby, moving, applying to college, changing doctors, or a medical or other emergency.

AboutOne provides ONE place, accessible anytime, anywhere, from any device, where in just seconds you can store and manage what matters most: precious memories and household information (health records, education records, possession details, contact information, to name a few).

AboutOne stores the information with bank-level security. Then, the system automatically uses this information so you save time on family administrative chores like completing school forms, college apps, caregiver instructions, and tax returns, and creating family newsletters, scrapbooks, and hardcover memory books, and creating and mailing holiday cards. The information is also available, at your fingertips, to make informed decisions and respond quickly to an emergency.

Currently people store and manage memories and household information in 1 of 3 ways:

1) Do nothing or manual paper-based filing – neither solution addresses digitally organizing & preserving
data & making it accessible anywhere in seconds.

2) PC-based apps requiring more technical understanding &
need to backup data. These solutions do not address issue of being able to access data at anytime, from any location, plus, there is often a need to redundantly enter data across the various apps, and the data is vulnerable to loss if backup procedures aren’t followed.

3) On-demand tools including mobile and other SaaS apps are also used, but these are silos of data and require the user to manage multiple apps, which again means redundant data entry and a lack of synergy in data use.

With AboutOne, information is digitally organized and preserved, and accessible anywhere in seconds. Data is stored with bank-level security, and backed up hourly. Each unique piece of data must only be entered once. AboutOne automatically leverages the time spent entering data by synergistically using it across the system so you save time on activities that require you to access this data.

AboutOne is a consumer SaaS model targeted at moms, caregivers, military spouses, expats and corp HR departments:
Moms – 56m (grows by 4m/yr)
Caregiver – 44m (w/special needs & elderly)
Military – 1.5m (PCSing & deployed)
Corporate – 9m (Expats, HR benefit)

AboutOne is a $30/yr subscription-based app. We will generate additional revenue streams from affiliate programs, targeted advertising, lead generation, white label products, resale of partner products, & corporate licenses as an employee HR benefit.

Great concept! Really appreciate what you are doing.

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

Checkfront is a cloud based online booking system that allows businesses to better manage, market and sell their schedule based services online.

Traditionally companies with schedule based inventories required a multitude of independent applications to run their business. This could include property management system, customer management tools, a central reservation system and and online booking service.

Checkfront is able offer many of these applications under a single platform.

More service based business are looking to take their operations online, to better serve their customers and stay competitive.

Operating under a Saas model, our customers pay a subscription fee to use the software from $299 – $1800 per year.

No thoughts at the moment. Very interesting!

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