DiscoveringStartups -Tech Startup Reviews

Discovering Startups would like to announce a new partnership with peerbackers.com!

Peerbackers is a community dedicated to helping entrepreneurs get the funding they need to turn a small start into a big finish.  Peerbackers offers an online “crowdfunding” platform that allows business owners to raise capital from their “peers” – in small increments – in exchange for tangible rewards to those who contribute. They make it simple to share your business & funding campaign with the world using our social media tools – just send out the link from your peerbackers pledge page to friends, family, co-workers, Facebook friends and more and anyone with even $10 or $20 to spare can “back” you!

DiscoveringStartups has proudly partnered with peerbackers to allow any of our finalists or winners (who are seeking funding of $35,000 or less) to have inclusion in the peerbackers service. In addition, our DiscoveringStartups’ Best-of Monthly winner will be featured on the peerbackers homepage for 90 days if they choose to enroll in the peerbackers service. Of course, any winner who chooses to enroll in the service must adhere to peerbackers’ guidelines (click here to learn more).

We are excited about partnering with Peerbackers, as we feel adding their service to our contest rewards is a natural fit.

Please continue to watch for additional partners being announced over the next few months!

To our readers, users, companies, and friends: we’re sorry!

Due to an emergency situation with our team, we were not able to properly maintain the website over the last two weeks. We assure you that DiscoveringStartups is still very much active, and will resume normal publishing starting today. Please keep looking forward to the usual 4- 15 startups every business day and we look forward to announcing the September contest winners shortly!

-The DiscoveringStartups Team

First of all, we greatly apologize for the suspended service. We had some technical difficulties that have been resolved, and we look forward to start posting reviews again with full force starting tomorrow.

Our first month was exceptionally positive, but we also realized a number of fixes and tweaks that needed to occur to our initial system. Some of them were technical, like those described here, others revolved around defining a more clear startups focus, and we also realized there were problems inherent with the voting system, like the advantages and disadvantages of contestants who were published earlier or later in the month.

This post is designed to announce a number of changes to the voting process that will take effect immediately.

First, in order to solve the lack of voting time that companies towards the end of the month have to be voted on, we are announcing a change in the timetable when posted items will be counted for each monthly contest, as well as when the votes will be counted.

From this point forward, posts for a given month’s contest will be eligible for votes in the last week of the preceding month, as well as the first three weeks of the month itself. So, if the April contest was repeated under the same rules, any post that was published in the last week of March, or the first three weeks of April would have been eligible for the April contest.

Additionally, the voting for the contest will close on the last day of the month at 10:00 pm. So, even the last company which is posted in the period will still be able to have a full week of voting time.

This should greatly alleviate some of the problems with our first contest.

Secondly, we realize that there were a number of companies who should also be recognized, even if they did not garner the top spot at the end of the month. Therefore, we decided to add four monthly awards, starting with April’s contest.

We will be continuing to give out the monthly Best of Discovering Startups award to the startup which garners the highest number of votes in each monthly voting period.

We are announcing a new award type however called a Monthly Finalist award, and they will be given to the companies which come in the 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th places in the monthly competition. There is no differentiation in the awards between the places, since they are designed to recognize the value of the startups even though they did not win the contest outright. They will also collectively be covered in a post when the winners are announced at the end of the month.

Lastly, we will also be adding an “Editor’s Pick” award. This award will be roughly equivalent to the “Best of Discovering Startups” award, and it is the company that the Discovering Startups staff recognizes as their favorite for either demonstrated growth or potential. There is no official policy for picking the recipient, other than it is the company that demonstrates the most potential as seen by the industry veterans on our staff. The only requirement for eligibility is that a startup must have at least 15 votes. The reason is that we at Discovering Startups want the companies to be vetted first and foremost by our readers. After that, we will pick the recipient that we feel best reflects the nature of the award.

That’s it! Thank you very much for all of the support and we look forward to reviewing more startups and announcing the additional winners for April immediately.

This is a quick post to let all of our readers know that the April contest will end tonight (4/29) at midnight, and the winners will be announced tomorrow (4/30)!

Since we just launched the voting/competition component this month, we realized early that there were some deep flaws in the model since companies who were reviewed later in the month (especially those reviewed yesterday), were inherently disadvantaged. We do apologize for not anticipating this, and assure our readers that we will be announcing changes for the next month’s contest. However, we will keep this month as originally stipulated in  the rules, since we feel it is even more unfair to change the rules of a live competition mid-stream.

That being said, we are so proud of the overwhelming response from all of our readers and are excited to announce the winners (yes there will be additional prizes given) of our first month’s contest. Thank you for all of the support and get your last votes in! (

First, we want to thank our users for the tremendous outpouring of support we’ve received from them after launch. We’ve gotten hundreds of responses from startups all over the United States asking to be reviewed. We’ve also received dozens of unsolicited compliments about the site and the concept – so thank you!

We are more than happy with the initial traction we’ve seen and only look to improve our service – attracting more eyeballs, which in turn equates to more traffic to the startups we review, improving the site and its functionality, as well as streamlining the submission process – and this post is meant to announce the first part of that process.

We just released a new version of DS that has fixed nearly a dozen bugs reported from you – our users. Some things were minor, like the color rendering oddly in some browsers, and some were more complex, such as trouble reported with the submission process. Our users should see a major improvement in their experience, but we still request that you send any additional problems you find  (or of course general suggestions), to .

Our first official “Best Of Discovering Startups” monthly competition is just about to wind up in less than a week, so get your last votes in. We’ve been shocked at the responses from our readers and are happy to see our top two startups this month – MtCareNavigators and PracticeFusion – with over 100 votes each and encourage our audience to keep up their incredible engagement!

From all of us at the Discovering Startups team, it truly is gratifying to see such a large, positive response and we thank every one of our users. Check back on Monday for our next wave of startup reviews!

Discovering Startups is announcing that it will officially be active as of today. Therefore, it’s first active month, including the monthly contest will be April. We are looking forward to reviewing startups on a daily basis and you  – as a reader – are invited to vote for your favorite startup. We will comment once or twice a month on the current monthly contest standings, and officially announce the winner at the end of each month. The most voted startups will be featured in an additional news post from us, in addition to the “Best-of” DiscoveringStartups award. We hope you enjoy the first startups that will be added soon!

We at Discovering Startups are excited to announce that our site redesign has officially been launched! Over the last few months, we have worked diligently to rework and refine our site’s appearance – from major architectural issues to small details – and it is now live. We have added a number of pages, and have flushed out much of the functionality that we had originally envisioned.

From a operational perspective, now that the majority of the site framework has been laid, we are looking forward to devoting more time to pursuing our core mission – reviewing and showcasing startups.

Most of the bugs and site flaws have been removed, but please continue to let us know as more arise.

Thank you and we hope you enjoy the redesign!

Discovering Startups has launched in Alpha!

As of December 2009, Discovering Startups  has launched in alpha and is looking forward to reviewing its first startups. We are still very much in development mode – furiously coding away on design, functionality, and layout out of our future content structure.

We anticipate continuing fixing bugs and further designing the site for another few months, and beginning to review startups on a daily basis in April of 2010. Thank you for the support and we look forward to writing more.