Liad Shababo is the CEO of Doof. Visit the company blog here.

What is doof and how does it work?

doof is a rich internet application devoted to playing games, meeting people and having fun.
Offering loads of online games and tones of great ways to meet people and interact with them, doof is a Web 2.0 playground wrapped up in a cutting edge and visually stunning web application.

Who is your competition?

Whilst there are many other companies operating in the Social Networking or Casual Gaming space, to our knowledge no-one else has decided to combine these two distinct industries into one unified and cohesive product, leveraging the power of new internet technologies as we have thereby creating a truly absorbing and rich “Social Gaming” end-user experience.


What do you think will be your biggest challenge after you launch?

Launching social software, with a commitment to listening to our player-base and integrating functionality they are asking for, will definitely lead us on a roller-coaster ride. Our biggest challenge will be keeping up to date with the demands of our player-base whilst making sure that our software continues to scale, be stable, intuitive to use and stunning to look at.

What is the meaning behind the name doof?

From an objective standpoint, we wanted the brand name to be short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, easy to remember and most importantly distinct in the marketplace.
From an subjective standpoint, we wanted the name to sound fun, youthful and exciting, so that it would adhere to the brand values we were hoping to create.

We think by all accounts, doof hits the spot!

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Whilst most startups these days have a social networking component to their product, I think it’s important for social features and functionality to have a defined value to the end user and not just be used as a buzz-word in start-ups business plans. At doof, the very essence of the product is playing games with others, be them existing offline friends, or new-found online ones, adding social networking features to our product was inherently needed in order for the product to function. It’s important for internet entrepreneurs to remember that they are building products for people to use, benefit from and ultimately enjoy. Keep focused on the functionality that your product needs and your user-base wants. If that remains your overriding priority….good thing will come!

Josh Morgan is the co-founder of Intense Debate.

Can you tell us a little about what the development process was like? What has happened from when the idea was conceived up until today?

Intense Debate was started in October of 2006. We worked on a new way to debate online until we were accepted into the TechStars program in June of 2007. We were advised to pursue one of our future goals which was to make blog comments better. Blogs have long been touted as conversation tools, but the factory installed comment systems that come with blog publishing tools have hampered the the very discussion it should foster. So, after some difficult conversations about the viability and chances for success of our debate product we decided to move forward with a different idea.

We began development in early June of our comment system and launched into a closed beta on August 7, 2007. We launched into an open beta on October 30, 2007 allowing any publisher to install our comment system.

How does Intense Debate make money?

Intense Debate will make money by offering an opt-in advertising unit to be placed within our comment system where we will share the revenue with any publisher wishing to have an additional source of revenue.

What are some challenges you've faced up to this point?

The biggest challenge to us thus far has been changing ideas. We had worked on a product for nearly nine months and decided to go a different direction. It was very difficult to put aside eight months of work to pursue something else. Another challenge we overcame during the first eight months was working virtually. I had never met my partners in person until we were accepted into the TechStars program. We used services like Basecamp, Skype, and IM to communicate and build a complete product.

What is your biggest strength when compared to competitors?

Our biggest strengths in regards to our competitors revolve around our commitment to the publisher. We do not mirror every comment made on the publisher's site back on our own. We offer a tremendous amount of features, customization options, and comment display options. We support OpenID. We also have a commitment to offering data migration options. We allow every publisher to download an XML file of their comment data as often as they like. We were the first to do this. We also offer comment export options for publishers using Wordpress and Blogger. We are the only company offering this.

Exorogame was co-founded by 5 National University of Singapore(NUS) students. Kenneth Tan is the CMO. They have devised a way for people of all ages to learn about Entrepreneurship through a hands-on, collaborative approach. Do read more about this upcoming startup based in Singapore here.

When was ExoroGame founded?

ExoroGame was first started back in November, 2005 as a flagship workshop project for the NUS Entrepreneurship Society as part of their local outreach program. We used prototype props to conduct the games. Response for the game was good, and we saw our product being widely adopted by many schools both local and overseas. We then decided it would be a great opportunity to spin this project off as a company in July 2007.

What is your long term vision with ExoroGame?

Our vision of ExoroGame is to become the Entrepreneurship pedagogical tool for every educational institution and corporate training company. So far, we have educational institutions who expressed interests in incorporating ExoroGame into their Economics curriculum as well as corporate trainers interested in having ExoroGame as one of their training components in their workshop packages. Hence, we believe that we are on our way towards our vision.

Where or who does ExoroGame get their funding from?

Besides contributing in funds ourselves, we got support from the National University of Singapore’s Funding scheme (FUSE).

Congratulations on your first ExoroGame competition success! Can you please tell us a bit about the competition?

In conjunction to our product’s commercial launch last month, we hosted a National ExoroGame Youth Challenge for the Junior Colleges and tertiary institutions in Singapore. This competition was organized with the First Ever National Youth Entrepreneurship Conference named, "The Next Generation of Entrepreneurs," which discussed the grooming of the next generation of entrepreneurs in Singapore. We were fortunate to have Mr. Ron Sim, Founder and CEO of OSIM International Ltd to be our Guest-of-Honor and panelist at the conference. We invited each school to send entrepreneurial students to participate in this challenge. This event would also serve as a place for these like-minded students to network with one another and create new sparks for the local entrepreneurial scene.

Reading the instructions alone on your site was not very clear on how a non-business or less economically inclined individual such as myself, could play ExoroGame successfully. How do people like me learn beneficially from the game? What aids do ExoroGame provide to be able to enhance my steep learning curve?

Before every workshop, we will carry out generic and specific briefings for the participants to be familiarized with their roles in the game. Our ExoroGame commercial set includes a training CD to facilitate participants in playing the game as well. However, the game is not as difficult as it is perceived from reading the web descriptions. In fact, most of the game participants were junior college and secondary school students who had zero or little background knowledge in business or economics. With the help of trial rounds in the game, most people can pick up after one session.

Is the startup currently profitable? If so, how many game sets have you sold?

ExoroGame was profitable since the first sale (game workshop using the prototype set) in 2006, and we had over 800 satisfied game participants, since then. The commercial game set was recently manufactured in July 2007, and to date, we have managed to sell 10 sets. Besides, we’re already in discussion with a few educational institutes in implementing the game in their school curriculum.

What is ExoroGame’s target market?

We are targeting budding entrepreneurs who want to experience realistic simulations of start-up company operations, organizations that seek introductory activity for recruitment, operations, and team-bonding activities, corporate HR departments who can use ExoroGame as part of their entry-level exercises to help identify attributes like adaptivity, teamwork, responsiveness, and management, and last but not least, education institutions. Academically, ExoroGame has been used as a conclusion exercise for Entrepreneurship and business courses because of its extremely objective scoring system. It can be implemented as part of the school curriculum for business-related courses such as economics, management, marketing, and entrepreneurship.

Ariel Poler is the CEO and co-founder at TextMarks - Reactee. Indeed, an incredibly talented individual having been educated at both MIT and Stanford. Before starting TextMarks, he started two other companies , sits on the board of multiple startups, and is the chairman of StumbleUpon, a startup acquired by Ebay in May, 2007. Get your Reactee t-shirt now here!

Can you please share with us how Reactee all got started?

Actually, Reactee is a product of TextMarks, Inc. a leading provider of simple SMS services for publishing via text messages, coordinating group activities, and making web pages accessible via SMS.

We first had the thought of making t-shirts to help people promote their TextMarks, but after brainstorming and great feedback, we thought we should offer Reactee t-shirts as stand-alone products.

As a result, Reactee launched as a stand-alone entity.

What is Reactee’s marketing strategy?

So far, we’ve done mostly PR.

Reactee is seen as a fun and innovative product so we've been getting great coverage.
Currently, we are working on some partnerships with social networks, which we will be announcing over the next few weeks.

As a result of the PR success we’ve been able to achieve, we've been getting a few large orders. For example, current.tv, has ordered 500 t-shirts to promote their brand offline. In addition, we got orders from LionsGate Studios to promote their upcoming movie, “Good Luck Chuck” which their staff wore at the recent Comic-Con conference in San Diego.

In addition, we have been experimenting with a bit of advertising so our affiliate network has been growing.

All in all, our PR marketing strategy has been effective at gaining us some large media companies as customers.

What is Reactee’s long-term goal?

We feel that t-shirts are great for communicating and sharing the things people care about so we see them as a great promotional medium.

Until now, t-shirts have been static.

We believe that there are many situations in which making a t-shirt dynamic is very valuable. Imagine if t-shirts could be interactive by giving different responses in different circumstances and to different people depending on who reads the t-shirt.

Our goal is to become the leaders in this new industry of "interactive shirts" and other apparel.

We want to use t-shirts as a tool to engage people, meet people, and establish a dialogue with people.

We believe that as SMS becomes more mainstream so will the interactivity of t-shirts.

I understand one of the obstacles Reactee had to face was finding the best balance among quality, appeal, and usability? Can you please describe how Reactee tackled that problem?

We wanted to make t-shirts that looked great and that people would want to wear,
and at the same time communicate instructions for “texting” that were easily understood.

One of the elements that helped us was to establish a standard layout for the text and a set of color schemes.
This was able to provide a certain level of customization to customers, and yet maintain a certain look and feel which could help with both aesthetics and functionality.

We did a fair amount of user testing. We started with something that was very clear, but very ugly. Then, we came up with something that looked great, but the instructions were not prominent enough. Finally, we came up with our current design.

Needless to say there are still improvements that can be made, but through continual feedback and adjustments, I believe we can come up with the “perfect” design.

What is TextMarks long-term strategy to counter the inevitable development of mobile browsing? Does this not pose a threat to the SMS space?

I am confident SMS will remain an important technology for a long time.
It serves a different purpose than browsing. For one, it has a "PUSH" component. For example, we have users, such as sports teams and fraternities, that have created alert and discussion lists with TextMarks. Web browsing doesn't replace that.

While I agree that technology like the iPhone has incredible web browsing capabilities, I think that it will be years before the average person's phone can provide a great web browsing experience.

For certain things, short text messages just simply works better, such as appointment reminders.

On a follow-up note, where do you see the text messaging space in 3-5 years?

In many parts of the World, such as Singapore, SMS is highly intertwined with people’s daily lives. In fact, it is almost as common as speaking on the phone.
Although, we are not there yet in the U.S., I feel that it is only a matter of time before we will.

As I mentioned above, I think SMS will become better integrated with web browsing and other technologies.

Today, we are already starting to see very innovative uses of SMS by some of our customers.

Message to leave with:

Buy a Reactee! Folksonomy readers can use the Coupon Code "folksonomy" for a 10% discount.

Seriously, we are seeing some really great uses for the t-shirts.
Everyday, I see new design creations by professionals, whether it be photographers, web designers, accountants, real estate agents, personal trainers, or actors, you name it!

In addition, we have seen our t-shirts being used for promoting non-profits and political campaigns.

And, of course, there are people having a lot of fun with t-shirts like "SOMETHING TO TELL ME?" or “THINK I AM HOT?”

I would encourage all of you to get a t-shirt.

We are always looking for great people to work with so anybody who likes what we are doing, email us.

Steve Newcomb is the founder and COO of Powerset. They are "The startup" that is going to revolutionize search engines as we know it through their breakthrough technology based on natural language processing.

I look forward to Powerset going mainstream with your September launch, changing my home page to www.powerset.com, and exploring long-term career opportunties in Powerset.

In July 2007, your ranking feature was still in development, can you please comment on the progress you’ve made?

Sure. One of the things we try to do here at Powerset is be very fair and open to the communities that we’re talking to. To give you an example, we recently invited approximately 40 people on our demo day and started off the meeting by saying, “ask any question you want and we’ll try to answer it. We won’t try to spin it, avoid it, or dodge the question.” There’s definitely some things that we can’t talk about because it’s our secret sauce type of stuff, but I can certainly address the ranking question.

First, it’s really important to understand how ranking works. For keyword-based search engines, pages are ranked using a number of criteria and features: PageRank [link graph analysis], keyword frequency, and keyword proximity, just to name a few. Google was clearly the innovator in that area. Significantly better ranking, in large part based on link-graph analysis, was one of the core inventions that they brought to the table. As a result, it made them better than their competitors in the search space.

Years later, Powerset is changing, through semantic analysis, the way ranking is performed, amongst other things. In fact, although, we are different in our approach, at the end of the day, the core of every search engine is an index, and pages retrieved from that index must be ranked in order to be returned to a user.

To build the index, you crawl the web and transform the text in information that is stored and optimized for fast access. At query time, you select the pages from the index that are potentially good matches (for a traditional search engine this is all the pages that contain the query keywords).Then, you use ranking algorithms on that information to arrive at the “rank”, which is the order in which you show them to the user. One of the important things to note in that process is that whatever information found in your index can be used to compute your rank.

The way that we store data in our index and compute rank is thus quite different compared to a keyword index.

To compute the ranking function, Powerset uses all the factors found in keyword-based searches plus our own unique linguistic and semantic features. This gives us a number of extra features that we can rank on beyond standard criteria that you can find for keyword ranking. It is by building a more elaborate [than simple keyword sequences] model of the information contained in textual documents that you can achieve better ranking, especially when there is more context, more linguistic information in queries themselves. But we can really take advantage of the best of both approaches, simple keyword-based features and semantic features, to deliver better relevance. We have a lot more data to help us out with ranking.

This is quite fundamental. The primary value of our system lies in the fact that we capture more data in the index. We can have better recall and precision, as well as better relevance through ranking, because we have a more elaborate model of the information on the web.

Ultimately, that is how we derive better quality search results.

Do you foresee privacy concerns with Powerset’s semantic web approach? If so, how are you addressing those issues? That is, if Powerset is a “better” search engine, is it then easier to find private information?

If some website is publishing private data and any search engine is then indexing it, then it is possible to find that data. Every search engine uses techniques to not bring back private data like social security or credit card numbers. We don’t track or record or index any specifically private information and we recognize the privacy issues related to user queries.

In essence, while I think privacy is a big issue, I do not think we’re any different from any other search engine on how we would approach it.

Where do you see Powerset in 3-5 years in the search space?

When we founded Powerset, one of the reasons why we and investors were so excited about it was because we were looking to create a company that was going to focus on building the next decade or two of search. We were addressing the fundamental question of what the next big breakthrough in search was going to be about. I believe Google did the same thing when they got started.

When Google looked at search, it said, “the core of search is broken”. Directory-based ways of doing search were limiting in so many ways. They saw algorithmic keyword search as being the next decade of search similar to how we see natural language semantics and machine learning approaches as being the next decade of search. We strongly believe that is where the next leap will be.

We look at keyword search and believe that nobody does that better than Google. And probably nobody will do better than what Google has accomplished for keyword type searches. But that ladder can only go so high. The other ladder that will take over and go much higher is about natural language, and about using a combination between machine learning and semantic approaches.

Powerset is working on the type of search that is going to dominate for the next decade or two in this space of search. We are the company that has the most resources, the most money behind it, and is the most focused on just that.

We are singly focused on changing the core of search yet again, where the other large search engines out there are focused on hundred of peripheral things at the same time.

That’s one benefit that we experience here at Powerset - everyone is focused on the exact same thing.

You ask where we’ll be in 3 – 5 years in the search space. Will we be out of business? Will we be a mediocre player? Will we be a leader? Will we be dominant? Certainly, we focus on these questions somewhat, from a business development perspective, since we do want to capture our audience, but at the same time, we are all here to make search better.

We have a really good feeling based on our current comparative results that we are going to come out as the dominant leader in this space by combining keyword approaches with semantic approaches to produce better ranking.

We are already how much better search results can be from these very early stages, and we believe it’s the tip of a giant iceberg.

What has been Powerset’s approach to hiring talent and building a great team?

“Talent begets talent.” An “A” player will also find other “A” players that they know in their peer groups. If you hire a “B” player or “C” player then you will get other “B” or “C” players on your team. We concentrate on only hiring the best of the best right from the beginning. You can see this in our teams. We have hired people that are well known in the search community, well known in the NLP community, well known in the data center community, or well known in the product and consumer experience community.

Two really good examples were Ron Kaplan and Chad Walters.

We knew that we needed to build a natural language team that was just the best in the industry so we hired Ron Kaplan who had been the head of Xerox’s natural language group for 35 years. He was the inventor of the Xerox language technology that we have licensed. The German newspaper Der Spiegel has dubbed him the Albert Einstein of Computational Linguistics. Every single person in the field of natural language processing knows who Ron Kaplan is.

Similarly, on the search side, we hired Chad Walters who was one of the lead search architects for Yahoo runtime. He was an individual that many search engine engineers have come to know and respect. He develops very elegant code, has a conservative mindset about what can or cannot be done, and he really knows what he’s doing.

When you hire people like that, you start bringing in other “A” players into the groups. The best part is that for a long time we have not had to hire an outside recruiter nor have we posted our jobs on job boards.

However, we have just hired an in-house recruiter, and she also handles our recruiting for PowerLabs. She does all types of recruiting, be it recruiting for employees or for people for our beta testing programs.

But most of the people that we hire are coming from people who know people who know people, and that’s how you build a very strong team.

It’s hard to imagine Google won’t see you guys as a threat. How do you think Google will respond to your launch after September? Do you see an acquisition as a possibility to eliminate the competition, if you will?

First of all, we have the utmost respect for Google and what they have accomplished. We feel that we are on the same side as anyone within the search industry who is trying to make search better. It is rare here that we see Google as the enemy.

We actually get quite excited, when we hear, for example, that Google is trying to change their message from “data, data, data, more data” to more model-based approaches. They are building their natural language teams. In fact, because our DNA is so intrinsically tied to the NLP community, we know many of the leads of their natural language teams very well.

That said, I think it’s going to take a long time for them to change anything about their core index because after all, that’s where they derive their fundamental market value from. However, I do expect them to use some techniques in natural language. In turn, that has a couple effects on Powerset.

We are already seen as a dominant player in natural language search. Our name is sort of synonymous with natural language search. If Google gets into the natural language search space, number one, it validates our belief that natural language is going to be the next ten years of search. Now, that may or may not mean there is an acquisition opportunity with Google. It may actually amplify the other search key players in the industry to say, “oh my, if Google is getting into natural language search then so should I and that sort of thing. “

But I would say that all the key search engines are starting to invest heavily in natural language search. I think that over time, they will start to see and understand what Powerset is doing. There’s always a lot of confusion about what we do exactly, and how we are different than anyone who’s tried to do this in the past.

I see that in five years, people will adopt this combined approach between machine learning, symbolic natural language processing , and keyword indexing. What that means in terms of our exit, whether we go public or we get acquired by somebody, I don’t think that’s something we should necessarily concentrate on or analyze right now. We are focused on building a superior product.

We are trying to maintain close relationships with each of the search companies out there and it’s quite common for some of them to talk with us on a weekly basis. In fact, some of those whom most people would consider our competitors were in just this week to come and chat with us.

What has been some of Powerset’s greatest obstacles to building your product?

I think that there were a couple of fundamental risks we had to consider. There was technology risk and there was execution risk.

From a technology risk perspective, the biggest obstacle that we’ve overcome was the threat posed by our cost of indexing. Building a semantic index is many times more expensive than building a keyword index. In fact, until recently it was financially impossible to use our same technology to build a search engine. Just a few years ago, all the computing power in the world wouldn’t have been enough to process that much information, as deeply and as fast as we need it to be processed. The cost of doing that, measured in the number of machines that you would have had to buy to index the web, would have made it impossible to build a sustainable business. We’ve now broken through, making it financially feasible to build a search engine based on our technology. We have been successful in getting it to where we can parse sentences fast enough to make it possible to do this at large scale.

The second thing is actually physically scaling out. How do you get thousands of cores working at the same time to build a semantic index?
How do you scale technology built for a million document index to process 10 million, then 100 million, 500 million, a billion documents? How do you deal with spam? How do you build a crawler? How do you build a content repository? How do you build the indexer? How do you distribute the index at runtime? Some of these are known challenges and we have built a team that addresses and reduces this risk.

From an indexing perspective, we feel like we’re there. And right now, we’re working on our core runtime technology, and that’s going to be the next big hurdle we have to cross. But we have a pretty good team under Chad Walters to address that obstacle.

How many people consist of the Powerset team today?

We’re 72 people right now.

Message to leave with:

One of things that nobody really talks about Powerset is the things that we’ve done that are breaking the mold that are outside our technology and outside our space of search.

This is my fifth startup so I’ve been here a few times before and Barney’s been around the block as well. Barney, Lorenzo, and I set out to really break the mold in several different ways in terms of how we create a company with the hope that other companies copy us.

For example, we take care of everybody’s health care. As a startup, that is almost unheard of. We have great commuter programs. Also, we pay for everyone’s commute tickets and we pay for EVDO cards so everybody in the company can always be online at all times. We have a meeting every Thursday where we get the entire company in a room and they are allowed to ask any question that they want to the founders and the founders have to answer the question, transparency like that is very important to build culture.

The type of stock-programs that we give employees are very innovative. They are the very first of its kind in their nature. We make our compensation packages very unique in their structure so when people come on board they say, “wow! that’s different. I’ve never seen that before. It’s wonderful!”

We’re trying to create a great culture, and sort of change the world one little bit at a time. Already, we’ve had 15 companies copy our exact infrastructure. In fact, we’re going to be releasing our non-secret sauce operational models with the intention of helping other startups.

We’re releasing our financial models and data center models to the public, as well. We are sharing who we get our HR from and who we get our accounting from? How are we doing our recruiting? Everybody always asks us, “who is your press agent?” Who is your press company? Who is your marketing company? I want to hire them.

And the answer is we didn’t hire anybody. There is no press agency that represents Powerset.

One of my goals as an entrepreneur has always been to help other entrepreneurs. Actually, between company three and four, I left the venture world for two years and did nothing but non-profit work. It was designed to help out entrepreneurs. I helped to create the “VC breakfast club” where every Thursday of Silicon Valley, we bring in 6 or so engineers with great ideas and introduce them directly to general partners and VC’s. They get to pitch to VC’s and we help to evaluate them.

In our second year, I was the Managing Editor of a book entitled, “The Entrepreneur’s Workbook.” I went out to entrepreneurs that are engineers that aren’t used to creating companies and asked, “what are your basic questions on how to create a company?” Their questions were like, how do I rent an office? How do I create a stock option plan? What is a cap table? How do I incorporate?

Then, we went and took all these questions and we had all the lawyers, VC’s, and service companies write a chapter of that book. Now, that book is out in over 10k copies.

I’ve always felt that engineers have the best ideas and putting great business people with them is the trick. That should never be information that is held tightly within the company, but should be shared freely and as much as it’s humanly possible. So we’ve actually been doing that at Powerset, just sharing with the people how we do it.

Allison Atsiknoudas is the founder and CEO of Investment Instruments Corporation, the company behind Rentometer.

Can you tell me a little about your company?

Sure... The name of our company is Investment Instruments Corporation. We offer web-based tools and services for the residential real estate industry. We currently have two services available:

iiProperty is a web-based system for managing properties and properties as investments. We cater to small portfolio owners of 50 units or less.

Our other service is called Rentometer.com. Rentometer provides real time comps for rents as well as advertising for rental units. Our mission is to create transparency in the market...to make it easier for tenants, owners, and professionals to work together and individually.

We are also a web 2.0 company. We recently won several awards in the web 2.0 category for real estate applications

Who do you consider your competitors?

I think there are several point applications that compete with us for individual services, but we combine point applications into one complete solution. We are very unique in terms of the market that we serve. Any similar service is really focused on a higher number of units per owner where as we really focus on smaller portfolios and are looking to grow with our users. I can say that many services others offer currently, we offer for free.

We currently serve customers across the US and in Canada with iiProperty and we have a US, Canadian and UK version of the Rentometer. So we are growing very quickly and we are hiring! We have some very exciting one of a kind services we plan to reveal in the next few coming months. The services that we have launched just start to paint a picture of what we are all about.

Can you tell me about yourself and your personal background in business?

Sure. I am a former US Army officer (of 13+ years) and I am a registered architect. I met my business partners in 1994 when we were students at MIT. I spent most of my career traveling around the world designing and building and more recently was the director of a $1 Billion dollar property portfolio for the US Government in Europe.

I also have direct experience in creating web based management systems for use in business. My partners and I all have experience in real estate and technology at some very high levels. I have worked both in the public and private sectors. When the timing was right I approached my partners about starting a venture and together we created the concept for our company and our products and services. We started IIC in 2004.

What did you study in college?

I studied architecture at the University of Miami then later wen on to MIT to receive a Master of Science in Architecture Studies with an emphasis in Design and Computation. My thesis involved developing architectural visualization using virtual environments (varied levels of VR from full HMD to VRML).

How important do you think the right degree is for being successful in business?

Good question. For me, both my military background, experience as an architect and life at UM and MIT all influenced my career choices and what I was able to accomplish. I have been fortunate to have a variety of experiences...everything from leading troops and jumping out of planes (Airborne!) to leading design and construction on jobs exceeding $300M each, to managing large portfolios an assets that will influence people for decades. Now I am quite thrilled to be working with my partners here at IIC.

It is not only your degree that matters in my opinion, but how that information opens your eyes to new possibilities and, of course, problem solving. At MIT no matter which degree you earn, the one thing everyone has in common when the depart is an education is creative problem solving and perhaps an injection of the entrepreneurial spirit!

The Army is quite an education as well. I learned how to get the job done no matter how limited the resources, and how to devote myself to the service of others and to learn from everyone on the team.

What are some unique features that Rentometer offers?

Right now it is the only nationwide service that can quickly give you an assessment of comparable rents in your area. It also gives you a graphic view of the results with an animated meter showing you the low medium and high results along with a map view of some of the results...many of the results expand into full listings.

If you are renting, this is a valuable tool because it saves you the trouble of digging through newspapers and online sites to assemble the information yourself.

If you are an owner and you are wondering what you may want to charge for rent, it gives you a quick comparison of like units in the immediate area. Owners love to send us their data because we are a free source of advertising for them and they know we have excellent traffic from renters and prospective tenants.

We also link both of our sites with cross functionality. If you post an listing on the rentometer, we provide you with a free account in iiProperty to manage your listings and to push those listings to other popular sites.

What is the current state of the company and service?

We are a Delaware company doing business in Massachusetts. We are located just outside of Boston and we also have an office in San Francisco. We employ people in various parts of the US however as we are really looking for the best talent, regardless of location. We serve thousands of users across the US and in Canada with iiProperty and the Rentometer, although a new service, has been accessed over a million times.

Right now we are just under 20 employees strong including in-house hires and outsourced team members. Did I mention we were hiring? ;-)

How are you funded, and how does Rentometer make money?

We primarily make money through our main service iiProperty via monthly subscriptions. Rentometer is a free service. We do make some revenues with the Rentometer through arrangements with large classified sites who charge for their own listings. Our company is funded via a syndication of private and corporate investors.

What press coverage have you gotten so far, and how did you get it?

We have had a lot of press. Most of the press that we have had so far started out in the blogosphere then hit the main stream press. We have been featured on sites such as PC Magazine, Washingtonian, Wall Street Journal/Real Estate Journal, MarketWatch and on TV broadcasts across the US, NPR. We were also featured on the front pages of Digg and delicious, and many others...

Once people tried our services, word spread fast and hit the blogosphere, then hit larger blogs and finally the main stream press. It was only recently (past few weeks) that we hired PR.

Is there anything a startup can do to generate this kind of press coverage besides the obvious answer of providing a unique and useful service?

I think it really depends upon the industry you are in and how information is disseminated to the customers you are trying to reach. We were trying to reach main stream consumers as well as a specific market within the general population so our message was to offer something of value that we knew our audience had a need for. It is actually a part of our everyday business practice. The other thing I would say is that your personal network and your mentors (no matter what your business) are invaluable in being able to generate press. You never know who may be in your contact list who could help promote your values and your message. Finally, I would recommend that startups do a lot of reading, to see who is writing about similar subjects.

Do you have any parting thoughts?

Thanks for taking the time to talk with me! We are pretty excited about the new developments taking place within our company and we look forward to keeping you updated. :-)

Jonathan Abrams is the founder and CEO of Socializr. Launched only a few months ago, Socializr is working to bring users a service that seamlessly combines social networking with event functionality.

For those of you who are not familiar with the name Jonathan Abrams, he is best known as the man that brought you one of the first social networks that hit the internet, Friendster. Read more about the journeys of this successful entrepreneur at his website.

One of the panel discussions at the Web 2.0 conference was a topic called “Build to Last or Built do Sell: Is There a Difference?” How did Socializr get started? Do you have any comments on your philosophy when you got started?

I started the company in late 2005, but really got serious with it in June, 2006 when we raised our seed round, got an office, and started hiring some folks.

Combining Evite functionality or event functionality with social networking was an obvious idea that people asked me about when Friendster launched back in 2003. But to this day, I still feel no company has met that need.

Being someone who owns a bar, and does a lot of parties and events, it was an obvious thing for me to do. It’s a product that I myself and my friends would use and that nobody has really done “right.” As far as “building to last” vs. “building to sell,” at an early stage, you really don’t know.

A lot of companies like Slide.com or Paypal started with a very different model than that which they succeeded with. To presume that you are going to be a huge public company when you are really small, may mean that you take on a cost structure that’s prohibitive too early or you end up with expectations that are too high. But if you focus exclusively on the idea that you are going to flip the company quickly, you may make other mistakes.

I think the reasonable thing to do is to not assume either outcome. Build a product and a business and see where it takes you. I really never go into anything assuming I know how it’s going to end up.

What is the differentiator between Socializr and your competition?

Well, our most obvious competitor would be Evite. One of the differentiators between Socializr and Evite is our integration with numerous other web sites such as Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace, or widget providers, photo sites, and events sites. We have integrated with a lot of companies and sites in both directions.

What is Socializr’s revenue model?

Right now, the state that we’re at is building out the product. At some point, that will shift more to growing the user-base, and after that, it will inevitably shift more towards revenue.

Currently, the anticipated business model is one based on advertising. I think the unique thing about Socializr compared to a generic social networking service that generates a large number of page views per user, but has very little context is that a site that’s focused on people making social plans and deciding how to spend their time and money when they’re not at work is more targeted.

I think in that context, there’s probably some interesting business opportunities for sponsorship, promotion, e-commerce, and advertising. But again, we’re not at the point right now. We’re really focused on building out the product.

Since, one of the core ideas at Socializr is being able to see what their friends are doing, there seems to be an important connection to the mobile space. Does Socializr have any plans to address this?

Yes. Absolutely. We already have mobile features.

We have the ability to get mobile reminders on the events you RSVP to which is a feature that I myself am finding quite useful. Then, I can tell Socializr that when I RSVP “yes” to an event, an hour before the event, send me a reminder via text message to my phone with the address.

Also, we have the ability for users to click on a link that allows you to send the event to your phone so that you don’t have to copy down that information.

If you are a Socializr member, you can also send a text message to Socializr and actually query what things are going on that night on your calendar or with friends.

We have a number of mobile features that we are in the process of improving to better let users know that we have those features.

We have a mobile partnership that we will probably be ready to announce over the next three months. So far, on the mobile side, the features that we have developed are based on SMS. We’re focused only on the U.S. market for now.

We feel that browsing on the phone still does not work very well. It’s very slow. The user experience is still not very good. For any kind of mobile browsing or mobile applications, we still don’t feel that this is something that has been adopted by the mainstream in the U.S.

So for now, we’ve addressed mobile features for the U.S. market with a text messaging interface and that’s been working pretty well. You send a message to Socializr. We send you a message back. And you don’t have to sit there and try to use the mobile browser and wait. Although, text messaging works best for now in the U.S., we are open to other things and I do imagine that as technology develops, mobile browsing may one day become usable in the U.S. and if so we’ll be ready to adopt it.

At Socializr, what has been your marketing approach? At PageFlakes, they have hired an external PR firm, at Powerset, they have relied on word of mouth marketing, the blogging community, and social networks like Linkedin. What has been Socializr’s penetration approach?

We don’t have a PR firm. We’ve been in the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and San Francisco Chronicle, just to name a few. We’ve received some good press coverage so far, but since we are still such a young company, our focus is still really on continuing to build our product. Our site just launched in March, 2007, so it’s only been a few months since it has been open to the public.

We are still focused now on listening to feedback from power users, such as, party promoters and people who throw lots of parties and events, to find out the things that they want.

With all the talk on Facebook apps and the topics that were discussed at CommunityNext’s Viral Marketing Conference about Facebook, does Socializr have any intentions on developing a Facebook app?

Well, already on Socializr, when you look at an event, you can send it to your phone, you can add it to a blog, you can add it to Outlook, you can update it to Twitter, or you can share it on Facebook. I think it’s inevitable that we have a Facebook application as well, since our strategy is to integrate with everything.

When you’re doing something that involves events, people really want to be able to invite all their friends to an event regardless of whether or not they are members of one specific site or not. You can invite people to an event using Socializr even if that person is not a member of Socializr and they’ll be able to see that event and RSVP. We want to make it easy to take your event and put it on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, or on any place you want it to be.

We are going to work with Facebook, but I think what makes Socializr cool is that we’re going to work with all of the popular sites so you will not just be limited to the people that are on Facebook or just the people that are members of Socializr.

We’ll integrate with everything.

What is your opinion about the importance for a startup to have an exit strategy? Certainly, no one wants to focus on the negative like an exit strategy when building any startup, but do you feel that its necessary to have one and if so, what is Socializr’s exit strategy?

If you are structuring your business as a cash-generating business, you probably want to structure it as an LLC or an S-corporation, a flow-through entity where employees and investors all have the right expectations.

If you’re raising VC money, or angel money, and giving people stock options which is typical for any tech startup, all of those things set forth an expectation that there will be a liquidity event of some kind where people some day will be able to sell their shares. Inevitably, what that means is that there will be an exit of some kind.

But I don’t know what exit “strategy” really is. As far as I know, you can only sell your company, go public, or sometimes you do both. Would we like to get acquired for a ton of money? Sure! Would we like to go public and be worth a lot of money? Sure! Those are both great outcomes! But I don’t have a magic “strategy” for guaranteeing either of those.

We are building a site that we think a lot of people will use, we think it is something real – that there’ll be a need, and we’re not spending a lot of money, and that’s where we are today.

We are hoping that in a year or two that will translate into a successful business with good revenue and profitability, and inevitably at some point, that will translate into a liquidity event for our employees and investors.

But for a company that has just launched with three employees, presuming that we know how where we are going to end up and how we are going to have a liquidity event is a little presumptuous.

What do you think attributed to Friendster’s success in Singapore?

I actually have no idea why Friendster is popular in Singapore. I have not been to Singapore myself, yet. I am from Canada and live in the States. I really have no idea why Friendster is so popular in Singapore and some of the other countries that it’s popular in.

I have a suspicion that some of these sites, whether it be Orkut or Friendster, some of their international growth maybe attributed to random chance. For Socializr, we’re really focusing on only the U.S. market because there’s a lot to be done for a very small startup in terms of completing the product, making sure the technology scales and is reliable. We don’t want to get distracted yet by international concerns in markets we may not understand.

First, we’re focused on making sure we’ve got the product developed, features done, scalability addressed, and have eliminated all the bugs, so for focus reasons, we’re only U.S. for now.

Given your experiences and knowledge that you have learned at Friendster, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned that you can apply to Socializr?

At Friendster, we learned that it’s really important to focus on the technology, to make sure that the technology works, that the product works. If you haven’t done that, everything else doesn’t really matter.

You can get a bunch of bigshot CEO’s and VC’s that are trying to do big deals with large companies such as AOL and MTV, but if the site isn’t working well, then it doesn’t really matter.

Also, what I learned is that if you get a team of people that are already really successful and have fancy resumes that may not really be the best thing. What maybe the better strategy is to find people that are still hungry, passionate, and fit into the demographic of your product and users.

I definitely learned the importance of focus. Often, it’s very hard for startups to focus on the few things that really matter. For Socializr, we’re really focused on a small number of things and trying to stick with that.

What do you think is going to be the next big boom after Web 2.0? Also, can you please shed some light on your reference to Web 3.1?

Well, Socializr is a Web 3.1 company, which is an arbitrary and silly buzz word similar to Web 2.0, but even sillier and 55% better. It’s sort of a joke on our part to indicate that we think the term “Web 2.0” is overused and lacking in real meaning.

Having worked in the Internet industry for quite some time now, I know that what goes up must come down. And we’ve been pretty frothy for a few years, not quite the same as 1999, but we’re seeing a lot of silly stuff going on. I assume at some point there must be some kind of a correction. Although, I have no idea when that may be.

During the crash period between the dot com boom and Web 2.0 bubble, there was still growth to the internet. Moore’s Law didn’t stop, the internet didn’t stop growing, and companies like Paypal, Ebay, Google, Overture, and others kept doing very well. So the Internet industry will continue to grow even if there is a bust.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there will be some kind of correction coming at some point. Actually, I think that it’s during those fallow periods when the real innovations are born that may become the basis for a lot of things in the next boom, but I absolutely have no idea when that might happen.

I’m pretty excited about video, about the inevitable migration of content from traditional television to the internet, but I think that might still not be even hitting its peak for another 5 years or so. The entire crop of companies that are doing web video now, may not even be the ones that are important 5 years from now. It’s still quite early. So I am sorry to say that I have absolutely no idea how to predict the future, I only know how to make stuff.

As an entrepreneur myself, I take it upon myself to ask this question for me and our readers is Socializr hiring?

Yes. That’s a wonderful question! I appreciate you asking. Our entire company is only 3 full-time people and a couple interns. We are just about to look for some new people to expand our team. What we’re looking for next is 3 programmers to join the Engineering team and help to build the product.

Message to leave with:

We’d love to hear from people that have ideas for Socializr. I think one of the whole reasons for our existence is that Evite hasn’t improved for over 5 years. We’re only three people, but I think that we’ve already surpassed what Evite has done in so many different areas. We have integrated with social networking sites, video, music, and all these kinds of things that you can share with your friends, but we’re not done by a long shot. We’re excited to hear from more people what you want in the ideal, ultimate, events sharing site. Let us know and we’ll build it!

I was paying a visit today to newly-launched "biography wiki" WikiYou when I noticed something that made me grin:

To browse through the "unauthorized biographies", you are presented with two choices: "People" or "Celebs". Upon seeing this, I let out a sigh of relief, thankful that I'm categorized as a "person"... at least on WikiYou.

When you're working on a startup web service, naming things is something you're forced to do often as you develop the service and expand. It is important to choose the right words for things to avoid confusing your users.

Dividing their biographies into "People" and "Celebs" might seem funny at first glance, but it might have been the best thing they could come up with. Other choices would have been much more humorous. (Common Folk, Normal People, Not Famous People, Peons, Ordinary People).

Tread carefully when choosing your words.

Waleed Abdulla is the founder of Ziizo.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your service?

Sure. I'm a software engineer and an entrepreneur. I moved to Silicon Valley recently to start my new Internet startup, Ninua, Inc. to develop consumer Internet services. Before that I worked as a team lead, senior Web developer, and programmer in couple of big corporations. I also built some open source projects. I designed XRules, an XML business rules language and the engine that runs it, called DynamicDOM. My little brother, Rafid, helped me a lot in the implementation.

My Service is Ziizo.com. It's an online bookmarking and productivity tool. I built Ziizo because I tend to save a lot of notes and bookmarks and want to be able to access them from any computer. So, I built a bookmarking tool that's focused on speed and easy access to information.

In what ways does Ziizo differ from other bookmarking services that are currently out there?

In many ways, actually.

First of all, it's designed as a productivity tool rather than a sharing tool. Although, you can share your bookmarks, the main focus is on easy access to information and productivity. Also, you can save notes. Which is an important feature. I personally tend to save a lot of quotations, code snippets, and misc. notes that I need to keep for my records. Everything on Ziizo is private by default, which is important if you're using it to save your own bookmarks. You can share your notes and bookmarks by making a specific tag public. When you do that, all items tagged with that tag are shared on your public page.

Ohh, and don't forget the fast search as you type. It's a feature I'm proud of :) And, also the quick bookmarklet that lets you save bookmarks and tag them without a popup.

How large s the company and how many employees are there?

Ninua Inc. is very small. I'm the founder, the CEO, and the janitor. My little brothers help me on a part type basis on a few features here and there.

Where are is the company headquartered?

Redwood City, California. The city where the climate is best, by government test.

What programming languages and technologies do you use?

On the server side, I'm using ASP.NET. And, on the client side I use the Yahoo UI library for AJAX operations, and the Sarissa library for XML operations. Ziizo has a lot of AJAX features to allow the fast response time and the nice client side interface. So, the majority of the effort is actually on building the client side JavaScript and AJAX.

How long did it take to develop Ziizo?

I built Ziizo as a hobby and for my own use more than a year ago. It wasn't called Ziizo at that time. But, I decided to make it a public service recently. I spent the last few months finalizing it and getting it ready for a public release.

Why did you choose to name the service Ziizo?

Funny thing is, choosing the name was probably the hardest part of building Ziizo because all the good names are taken. I searched and listed hundreds of names and asked all my friends to help me choose. Ziizo turned out to be the one that most of my friends liked. It doesn't mean anything, it's just nice to say.

How much money did it take to bring Ziizo to this stage?

Not much out of pocket. There is the hosting fees and $200 I paid for the logo design. The real cost is the time I'm putting into it, which otherwise I could've been paid for if I was working for someone else.

How many users do you currently have?

Ziizo is almost public. Right now it's still by invite only so that we can handle any potential issue or feature requests easily. So, we have less than 300 users now.

What mistakes do you feel online services are making these days?

Hard to tell. The truth is, unless you put your service online and let users see it, it's almost impossible to judge weather people will like it or not.

How do you plan to make money with Ziizo?

It's going to be ad supported. We might expand and build premium team features that could be used by groups. But, there are no fixed plans yet. It'll depend on how the market receives it and how users end up using it.

Do you have any parting thoughts?

Thank you, Michael for this wonderful blog. I'd like to invite your readers to sign up for our beta program and let us know if there is anything we can do to improve their experience. Please use invitation code: folksonomy.

It gives me immense pleasure to introduce CEO of social personalized startpage startup Pageflakes, Dan Cohen. I had the rare pleasure of interviewing a successful CEO, down to earth, who was more than happy to share his experiences to our passionate readers, and face-to-face no less. Thank you Dan for reminding me why I love being a writer for Folksonomy.

All thoughts are most welcome and enjoy reading!

How did you guys get started?

Pageflakes was actually started virtually. It's actually a very interesting story.

Two German entrepreneurs in Germany who had been involved in prior startups, in sort of the first gen of the web, hooked up with a guy from Bangladesh and so all these guys hooked up via the web and started Pageflakes probably a little over a year ago.

The interesting thing they always had in their minds was once again taking this concept of a personalized page. I worked at MyYahoo right before this and that is probably one of the oldest personalized pages on the web, its about 10 years plus old. Then you got maybe applying Ajax to a personalized page and calling modules widgets, I mean that stuff has always been around.

But their idea was to make it social.

It was to take a personalized page and flip it around and allow people to sort of look at what you’re looking at. So the things you are interested in and things you find compelling and share that with other people and so that was really I think the unique idea that these guys pioneered.

I came on board January few months after they thought and relaunched the first version and been here about close to 7 months. Its gone by very quickly and having the ability to sort of really push the envelope of what personalized pages can do is just a thrill for me cause I been working on it for so long so its just great.

With the personalized startpage space being as competitive as it is, how did you come to the decision that quitting Yahoo and joining Pageflakes as CEO was a wise career move?

Well, I been a startup CEO. This is my third time. One was in enterprise, it was called USConnect Enterprise software for small medium businesses. This was back in the day. After that, I did a startup called Personity and this was mobile telecommunications infrastructure, to do “push-to-talk," presence, and instant messaging for mobile carriers.
Did a stint at Google running personalized products including iGoogle. Then, went to Yahoo to run MyYahoo.

So the opportunity came along and as far as a career move goes I love startups, and I just love being in a startup. I am a startup guy and everybody who knows me knows I am a startup guy.

I really enjoyed my experiences at Google and Yahoo and had the opportunity to work with some great people and on some great things. This is what I really wanted to do - be a CEO of a top-tier backed Silicon Valley startup pushing the envelope for something that I think is gonna be really really really big and that is exactly what I’m doing so I think it’s a great fit.

I mean I know personalized pages inside out and am the only person that I know who has worked on both iGoogle and MyYahoo in the world. I am a startup CEO, we got great VC backers, and a great management team. What more could you ask for? Anybody would be stupid not to do this.

For the sake of our readers who don’t know about Pageflakes, can you share with us, some of the new features being offered that differentiate you from your competitors?

Absolutely! You know I think we alluded to this before, but when I was sort of looking at Pageflakes to come out of MyYahoo and part of that Google, and take a look and see what was special about Pageflakes, I sort of had to ask myself the same question. I was looking at startups in this space and looking at what people were doing and I felt that Pageflakes had a great potential to be a very mainstream product.

I mean personalized pages, although they are very popular, the real hardcore users of those pages are still what you would consider to be the early adopter types. The vision that I had and Pageflakes sort of lined up as real differentiators – how do you make this a really entertaining mass market product as opposed to another RSS reader or news aggregator which is what most of these products have historically been?

For example MyYahoo is the #1 RSS reader in the world. People don’t think of it as the #1 Personalized homepage in the world right, they think of it as this RSS reader so that was one main differentiator - Our focus is on trying to do this for everybody and that’s evidence in the fact that we don’t even call them widgets, we don’t talk about RSS, we talk about flakes. Flakes, that go on your page. A page of flakes. And flakes of course are like snowflakes. That’s where we got the name “Blizzard” by the way for the snowstorm. They are really lightweight applications that go on a page. So people just need to know there’s a flake for dogs, cats, or whatever they are really interested in. And they’ll be able to find it.

The thing is this social aspect. Although they’ve been many attempts and discussions around doing this stuff, we are going to be the first company that is a major player in this market to have a social personalized page. Having a profile behind your personalized page that has your name, your interests, and that type of thing. The ability to find other people that have similar interests.

I’ve already done this with our demo users. I’ve actually already met some people that have similar interests to me. I like road cycling, rock bands, alternative music, and indie music. I’ve lived in Pittsburg for a while so I’m a huge Pittsburg Stealers fan. I mean there’s not many people with that exact same combination, but I found a couple of people on Pageflakes that way and now I’ve formed a network with these people. This differentiates us from a lot of the other social networks out there.

A social network kinda requires that you belong and publish yourself on day one. You need a profile and you need to be kinda out there. With a personalized page, what you’re doing is you’re starting off as an individual consuming your own content. You don’t have to join the social network to be part of it, but if you do, you’re gonna connect with people on a very different level.

You know, I think that most social networks, to break it down are about meeting people for social, perhaps romantic pursuits, or finding a job right. I mean everybody says a lot of social networks is about finding a job and there’s certain social networks out there that you don’t visit once you’re done finding a job.

Pageflakes is more what I think is gonna resonate with people that want to connect along whats in their head, what their interested in, or what they know about and connect with people in that way. It may not be about finding a job, it may not be about romantic relationships, but it certainly will be about the fact that you share common interests with people and I think its gonna be really exciting. So those things in general, the mass market and the intersection of personalized pages with social media are two huge differentiators for Pageflakes.

So you mentioned about finding a job, for the benefit of our readers, is Pageflakes hiring?

Oh yes, we are very much hiring and thank you for asking. Yes. If you love Pageflakes and you kinda wanna push the envelope of what you can do with AJAX, personalized pages, and social media, we’re the place for you. Feel free to email me directly and I’ll ensure your resume gets to the right place.

Going on the assumption that the vast majority of users today still do not use personalized homepage services yet, what is Pageflakes plan in the next 3-5 years to persuade more users to adopt its service?

That’s a great question. Think that most of these Web 2.0 companies rely on organic growth, viral growth, and those kinds of things. We’re no exception. We have that aspect as well.

I think that a lot of companies that start off being social networks to begin with, obviously, have an advantage in that respect. And by definition, you need to invite another 10 or 20 more people to make it useful. Personalized pages tend to grow a little bit more slowly. Think that once we launch this grand experiment of launching the social network intertwined with personalized pages that will change the dynamics of that quite a bit.

The second thing is this “pagecasting” thing. We talked about the social aspects of pages and we called it “pagecasting.” So when you take a page and show it to the world, you’re making a “pagecast.” And a lot of people are taking “pagecasts” and publishing it. Like I published one on a band called “Weem” so you can go to my pagecast and you’ll see my Weem page. And there are actual people that like the band, Weem, that come to my page. Now that is a webpage so you don’t have to be a Pageflakes user, just like you’re roaming the web like any other site. So what we’re finding is that for each of those "pagecasts" whether it be ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, hundreds, or even thousands we see people visiting each other's site. Its sort of like a network of user generated websites in that way sort of like a next generation Yahoo or something like that which has different properties and services. In our case, the "pagecast."

So that is causing a lot of people to visit Pageflakes and whether they use a personalized page or not, I mean they are technically a user of our product. We think that we got a lot of interesting ways to attract users. In addition to that, in the coming months, you’ll hear us talking about some pretty exciting partnerships that we think will have a huge impact on that as well.

Congratulations on your growth, I read somewhere your users have created 100,000+ Pagecasts already?

We have approximately 120,000 users that have gone to publishing a "pagecast." The things they are doing is just amazing. One of my favorite ones is “adoption of Ethiopian children” page that we have and its kinda great to be working on a product that you kinda have an impact on people’s lives. If somebody adopts a child as a result of this page, you know that’s something that may not have happened before. That’s pretty rewarding for me and everybody in the company.

Sometimes things are for fun like intellectual exercises, comedy jokes, or whatever. But there’s also serious stuff like this and its all over the map. One thing I’ll point out to you about the “pagecast” thing you remind me of is one of the new features that we have is called the random “pagecast.” If you go to the "pagecast" and click what looks like a little “ipod shuffle” icon it will literally spin the directory and just land on a “pagecast” that somebody made. And so if you really want to spend a couple minutes or a few hours to get inside people’s heads to find out what they’re doing, try the random “pagecast” feature, its just awesome!

On the note of user adoption, in terms of long-term strategic goals, do you plan to focus on converting users or is Pageflakes targeting new adopters?

That is a great question. Both. I mean certainly in the U.S. there is more of a saturation of personalized page users than anywhere else in the world. And so I think that in the U.S. there is more of a converting existing page users and we’re doing a pretty good job of it. A lot of our users are coming from other products and that’s great. And obviously, I used to work at some of these other products and in some cases, I’d like to think they were coming with me. In Europe and elsewhere in the world, people are coming to us that have never used a personalized page before so the short answer, Sian is its both.

How many people consist of the Pageflakes team worldwide today?

Our offices are in the U.S., London, Germany, and Malaysia. I think we have a few people scattered in other places but that’s the main concentration. We don’t like to talk specifically about employee counts, but its under 50, like a typical startup.

In this highly competitive market, what is Pageflakes strategy to hire and retain talent?

That’s a great question too. I mean in a lot of cases the people that are coming to work for us are users of the product themselves and they love it. Like Benjamin over here, he publishes a blog and a “pagecast” called “All the marmalade” which is a cooking blog and “pagecast” and he approached us. He’s a product manager and really wanted to work for Pageflakes. So we talked to him and he’s obviously very passionate about what we do and that’s a big part of it.

One of the interesting angles that we have is that we are based on .NET so we are based on Microsoft technology as opposed to the LAMP stack, and things like that which makes us unique. There aren’t many companies that are pushing the envelope of this scale with .NET technology so if you are a .NET or Microsoft guy this is going to be an incredible place to work because we are doing some great things. By the way, the last company that was massively successful with .NET technology of that scale was MySpace. So we think we have a very interesting proposition for certain types of people that want to work on this kinda technology and its just a lot of fun to work on a product like this.

You were the founder and CEO of two technology companies, can you please share your experiences of how the skill one should possess as “startup CEO” has evolved over the years?

Yeah sure. I think that’s a great question. I started my first company when I was 21. I was undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon so I been around long enough to work on some of those ancient Internet technologies before the World Wide Web. I basically started a consulting company out of that and over the next 9 years, I converted from being a pure tech geek to being able to understand how to be a business person. I like to say, I kinda went to the business school of Hard Knox. I made a lot of mistakes. I mean, if you’re 21/22 years old and an engineer you don’t know a lot about lot of things. You may think that you do but you don’t.

So to answer your question, making mistakes in a continual learning process, some good mentors, and having some people that I was fortunate to hire and work with on my teams, all had a huge impact on me and what I’ve done.

You know we’re all still learning, but when you get to your third startup, you got some great experiences and some great things. I relied a lot on our board of directors, investors, ad visors, and the management team here.

It’s kinda funny because when I was the young kid, people used to say, “I needed adult supervision,” but now I am the adult supervision. I never thought I’d see that day but here I am.

For the benefit of our learning hungry readers, could you please share what you would think is the greatest obstacle Pageflakes has encountered up to today?

Well, lets see, that’s a good question. I think there’s so much opportunity for us. There’s so much interesting things that we could be doing that I think the challenge is always going to be that we focus on things and not get distracted by a lot of great opportunities that might not be in our sweet spot.

Two, just scaling fast enough to handle the opportunity. That’s everything from hosting, to employees, to management, all the way up and down the scale. One analogy is trying to build the race car when its on the track and that’s what we’re doing and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

What do you do for leisure and relaxation?

I try to get some sleep which is far in between these days. I have a young daughter, she’s 22 months old so literally any amount of leisure time I get which is pretty limited, I try to spend it with the family and go on bike rides. I am a road cyclist. I don’t ride as much as I used to but I like to get my bike out and ride when I can. The SF bay area is one of most tremendous places to ride a road bike.

I shouldn't say I play drums because I haven’t played in a long time but I do play drums and like to jam occasionally. It’s been a long time but I do like to see live music. Of course, everything else in my life is about gadgets and technology, but that’s the work side.

Message to leave with:

Of course there’s the shameless plug. Try the new version of Pageflakes launching July 19 2007! And thanks for being an open-minded group of folks that are really interested in entrepreneurship and how companies get started. And of course you and your insightful questions. It’s fantastic to talk to people that really get it and really have some insight into it and thanks for the support. Rock on!

Greg Boesel is the co-founder and CEO of Swaptree.

What is your personal history in business and entrepreneurship?

I have always worked for start-ups and small companies, so my entrepreneurial spirit has definitely evolved from those experiences. It's very rewarding to be able to identify a problem or opportunity that exists in a business or better yet, everyday life, and being able to start with a blank slate and come up with a potentially new or unique solution.

Swaptree is actually the second software company that Mark Hexamer and I have founded together. Our first company, which we started during our last year of graduate school at Boston College developed software that assists attorneys with legal research. It is a great niche business, but since EVERYONE has books, CDs, DVDs and video games and not everyone spends their time sweating over legal research, the universal appeal of Swaptree is one of the reasons we enjoy working on it so much.

How long did it take for Swaptree to evolve from an idea to a functional service?

When most people think of swapping, they think envision two people exchanging items. While Swaptree does set up trades between just two users, we have actually developed fairly complex algorithms that can set up multi-way trades between users. This allows the number of items that a user can receive in trade for an item to increase exponentially.

So when a user adds a copy of Freakonomics or their White Stripes' CD to their "trade list", we have refined our algorithms to the point were it only takes us a few milliseconds to calculate all of the multi-way trades available and then we can instantly show the user the thousands of items that they could receive in trade for that book or CD.

With this level of complexity going on behind the scenes, it took us two years from the genesis of the idea and initial prototype until we were ready to start having the system generate trades for "real" users.

Why did you choose ASP.NET over other frameworks and programming languages?

The initial impetus was that .NET was the framework and language that I personally felt most comfortable with, so it was easy for me to prototype different sections of the site as we were fleshing out the idea. Secondly, we did the initial development of the site in India and at that point, the vast majority of the web developers were working in ASP.NET, so it made it easier to round up a team of developers to get development started.

Finally, given the complexity of our back-end mentioned in the previous question, the close integration between the .NET framework and SQL Server, and some of the advanced scalability and reliability features of SQL Server 2005 have really helped us as we have ramped up the site.

What has Swaptree done to ensure smooth and reliable swaps?

We use the eBay "trust model" so every user in a transaction rates every other user and before you enter into a transaction you can review the other user's transaction history. In addition, because our system is setting up the trades, we have implemented a number of additional safeguards for our users. For example, we can automatically identify users that have not had successful trades and exclude those users from our trading algorithm so that they won't receive trades in the future. All of this offers an additional layer of protection.

Also the fact that we are dealing with relatively "small value" items (no one is trading plasma television sets!) and no money is exchanging hands between users so there is less incentive for fraud means the percentage of transactions where a user ends up unhappy has been miniscule compared to some of the other sites where users and buying and selling from other users.

In addition, we have an automated system which allows a user to print a mailing label right from our website that actually includes the proper amount of U.S. postage, because we know the weight of all the items. Not only is it very convenient for users, but those labels provide us with tracking during the shipping process, so everyone in the transaction knows that the item has been sent and can follow the item as it makes it way to its new owner.

Who are your major competitors and what advantages do you have over them?

For starters, Swaptree is unique in that we allow users to do "cross-media" swaps, in that a user can trade a book for a CD, a DVD for a video game, a CD for a DVD, etc. This obviously makes Swaptree an useful site for really anyone, because everyone has a bunch of at least one of those types of items, and lots of households, especially with kids have lots of each.

It works out very well, and let's take myself as an example: I have bookshelves full of books and before Swaptree, I only owned a handful of DVDs, but would probably rent a couple of DVDs a month. I just put a bunch of books on my "have list" and DVDs on my "want list" and in a couple of weeks time, I had a great selection of movies that I can watch anytime. And the best part is that when I am done watching those movies, I can trade them again for other movies that I want to see. This way, I was able to get rid of a pile of books (which I had been telling myself for months that I needed to do anyway!) and I now have a great selection of movies that I own, and I know that I'll never hassle with renting movies ever again. We hear that a lot from our users: "It's amazing that I have more new media than I've ever had, yet I haven't purchased a single item."

Secondly, we are the only true trading site in that every time you trade an item, you will receive an item at the same time. A number of the other swapping sites use a "currency" or point system. In our opinion, these types of systems don't pass the "Can my mom easily understand the system?" test, and they require a leap of faith when you send your item off, because there's no promise that in the future there will be an item that you are interested in receiving for the number of points in your account.

Lastly, Swaptree is completely free for our users, we do not charge a fee for trading on the site. This is important because not only does this save our customers money, but it allows us to create a sense of community, since we can encourage users to trade informally, without trying to figure out how Swaptree can collect a transaction fee.

The swapping space is just now starting to gather a lot of attention and at this point, Peerflix, LaLa and PaperbackSwap are probably the leaders in the swapping space for their particular media type.

Jason English is the founder of IHeartMovies. Visit the company blog here.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your service?

My name is Jason English. I currently work for a small web design company where I live. Two years a go, being unhappy with the current DVD/video online organizational tools, I decided to learn PHP/SQL and write my own. It was originally called Movie DB, but later renamed to I Heart Movies. It's essentially a place to come discuss and organize you're collection.

How did your two partners join into this project?

I've known Matt Newton since high school. We took computer classes together and he's one of the co-founders. I couldn't of started it with out him. He's given me a lot of the ideas for IHM. I also would like to mention Dan Smith, who did all the paper work to make us an actual company. He's recently leaving us to further his college career at George Mason University in Virginia. Mike Davis was hired where I work. He ran FileAnchor.com which was a very popular and successful image/file hosting web site at the time. It's currently been shut down to some hosting issues. He joined IHM around Christmas, and has been a huge asset in helping with programming and ideas.

What makes IHeartMovies stand out among all the movie services available?

I believe it's our focus and ideas which will set us apart from similar sites. Our focus is to make a web site, where it's easy to use and get the information you want most as quickly as possible. We're currently working on a contribution system which will allow users to contribute not only titles, but information for almost every aspect of IHM, including photos, information

and titles. Users won't have free reign right away like some systems. You must earn the right to edit the information; however anyone can submit the information. The people who have worked hard at adding information to IHM will be given special rights to approve these submissions. Aside from the site's information for Titles, we want to be more than that. Many sites focus on information, there is so many more things you can do with that information, which many site's haven't done, or have done very poorly. We're looking to remedy that.

How is the company funded?

It's been funded out of pocket the entire time. The three of us have all contributed to the hosting and other fees.

We recently purchased a dedicated server.

How much time do you put into this service on a daily basis?

After work, I spend a good portion of my nights working on it, if nothing else comes up. I'd say about 4-5 hours a day. It's a struggle at times. Only having so much time to work on it. I wish I could work on it as if it were a job, 9-5.

What do you do full time?

I am a web designer for Commercial Software, Inc. A local company where I live. I handle all of our new clients and I also do design work on IRA 2000, a online real estate application.

What is the current state of your IHeartMovies?

Right now we have 750+ users. We get about 3,500+ hits and 32,000+ page views per month. We've only advertised a couple times, and small advertising. A small text ad on yahoo, just to see results. Most of our traffic comes from word of mouth. We were mentioned in an AP article along side Spout.com and IMDb.com, which was exciting.

Is that 750 visitors or 750 registered members?

Registered accounts.

How do you plan on making money?

Smart advertising placement.

We've got big plans for additions to IHM, people will be able to buy ad spaces. Right now we have Amazon and Google ads on our site. It pays for most of the hosting.

Do you mean Amazon's affiliate program?

Yes.

How does that perform compared to Google Adsense?

To be honest, not nearly as well as we'd like. Google's Ad Sense is the big revenue maker for us. The issue with Amazon's affiliate program is that people actually have to purchase something. We plan on integrating Amazon's products into our titles, so someone could purchase toys, posters, the actual movie right from the title page. However, it's not our main focus yet. There are a lot of features were wrapping up (Dashboard, which will have selectable widgets, drag and drop interface that will keep users informed about what's hot on IHM).

Where is your company headquartered?

We're located in Midland, Michigan.

Did you have any programming or entrepreneurship experience prior to making IHeartMovies?

I had little programming experience. I use Coldfusion at my day job. I've learned PHP and JavaScript since then for IHM. I had no entrepreneurship experience. This is my first company. We're all trying to learn as much as we can as we go. If anything it's an exciting learning experience.

How did you go about learning PHP and Javascript?

I bought Learning PHP 5 by David Sklar and learned as I went, making a lot of mistakes a long the way, but I learned quickly over a few months. I learned the basics of JavaScript at Commercial Software, Inc. and expended on that in my free time, when I needed to do something, I had to learn it.

Do you have any parting words?

Keep checking back, we've got some great things in store!

Rajan Dwivedi is the founder of Syntraxis.

Tell us a little about yourself and your company

My Name is Rajan Dwivedi. I have over 12 years of experience managing multi-million dollar premier alliances and customer accounts such as IBM, Microfocus, AcNielsen, E&Y and MySpace.com.

I started Syntraxis in Nov'2005 with a very small concept based on online quizzes at HelloChampion.com.

Later, this concept evolved into a new niche that we call "Aspirational Networking" - it's logical extension of Social Networking . It empowers and enable youth to network based on common aspirations and shared strategic objectives.

We are a technology company with collaboration platform that supports Aspirational Networking. It allows you to build focused and purposeful
communities that provide a heightened motivation to all members to participate, interact and engage.

We have experimented in education-to-employment space and the results are very encouraging through our vocal communities of ten thousands of people.

How large is the company currently, and how many users do you have?

We are a private company with 7 members. Additionally we have few part-time contributors who run our prototype and experimental portals. As of today, we have a focus group of over 26,000 users without any marketing spend or advertising. We have used the focus group to incorporate innovation and feedback provided by them into our platform.

How are you funded?

We are a self funded company from last 18 months. Now, we have been approached by few VCs and Angels. But we have not made any decisions yet as we will require serious funding and contributions in terms of resources and infrastructure to go to the next level.

We have sufficient funds to continue further with our plans.

Who do you consider your competitors?

Syntraxis sees some initial challenges due to popularity of blogs; social networking sites such as MySpace.com, Facebook.com; subscription based sites; companies in eLearning space such as Saba, Blackboard, Learnlinc; internet companies such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN; big collaborative software companies; and content providers such as Pearson, Thomson, McGraw Hill, Kaplan, Princeton etc.

Despite the competition, Syntraxis sees clear competitive differentiators for itself based on uniqueness of the concept of Aspirational Networking, innovation and its natural social acceptance. Our portals, products and services in many ways complement the solutions of incumbents, in many ways offsetting direct competition, instead setting the tone for collaboration and cooperation.

What programming languages and technologies have you used in developing your service?

Our flagship platform, Synergy Matrix, consists of modules and gadgets that help in collaboration, competition, self-expression, engagement and self‐development of aspirants for who desire clear success. The suite is built on Microsoft technology

There are a lot of start up companies that are normally in idea stage. Syntraxis, on the other hand, already has market tested stable products and services that are being used by ten of thousands of learners.

Social Networking has been big for last 2 years, but we believe that Aspirational Networking, will be a logical progression to Social Networking and niche networks will derive the internet in next wave (Web 3.0)

David Altschul (on right, with co-founder Rob Howard) is the co-founder of DivShare. Visit the company blog here.

Can you tell me a little about yourself?

I'm the co-founder of DivShare.com, and I handle everything from design to support. I've been creating sites since I was a kid, and have a passion for making quality applications that everyone can easily use. I also enjoy long walks on the beach.

What distinguishes DivShare from other file hosting solutions?

Simplicity, ease of use, and not limiting our users to a certain amount of disk space or expiration dates on files. We take pride in listening and helping our users as much as possible to ensure that have a great experience. We have a lot of loyal users that contact us all the time to tell us how much they enjoy the straight forward, no frills service we provide. We're also all about forging new ground. DivShare was the first hosting solution to release an innovative Wordpress plug-in, and the first site on the web to offer fully branded Flash video, audio and slideshow players. And this is just the beginning. We have several innovative and revolutionary products in the works.

You've released a Facebook application for DivShare?

That's correct. We launched the DivShare Facebook App a few days ago. It's an easy way for Facebook users to quickly upload files and send them to their friends or co-workers without needing to know their email address. The app also allows users to post files to their news feed and profile.

How long did it take to develop the application, and how difficult was it?

It was completed over a single weekend. The Facebook Markup Language makes development easy and straight forward. We'll continue to hone the application based on user feedback, but it's pretty solid as is.

What has been your biggest challenge so far in running a file hosting service?

We've seen phenomenal growth in the seven months we've been live. Keeping up with that growth, adding servers and perfecting our setup has been priority number one and is always keeping us busy, but nothing we haven't been able to handle.

How many servers is DivShare currently using?

Many. We have a very efficient setup though.

Where is the company located?

We operate out of sandy Dewey Beach, Delaware.

Do you think there are advantages to your location over a place like Silicon Valley?

Absolutey. Most startups believe Silicon Valley is a must for their company to succeed. The nature of our business allows us to be located anywhere and still get the job done. Being here helps keep overhead low and allows us to concentrate on growing a profitable and sustainable business.

How is the company funded?

We're self funded.

Are you hoping to bootstrap your way to success, or do you plan on raising venture capital?

We've considered investors, but are generating enough revenue that we don't need to turn to them at the moment. We believe bootstrapping is the way to go.

How have you marketed the service? Have you used any viral marketing techniques you could share with us?

Our growth has been completely organic. We haven't spent a dime on advertising, and we haven't used any aggressive marketing tactics. We have a strong user base that has been amazing in spreading the word and many who have been with us since day one. It's all about building a strong product and constantly evolving. It's not necessarily build it and they will come. But build something great and they'll come. Evolve and hone your product and listen to your users, and they'll stay.

How many registered members does your service have? How many pageviews and unique visits per month?

We currently have a six figure registered user base, and that number is growing fast. Several million visitors monthly, and significantly more pageviews.

Is your business model based only on advertising?

Advertising is our main source of revenue. We also have a premium plan called DivShare Direct that starts under five bucks a month and allows users to upload huge files (up to 2 GB), link directly to all their files, and brand all their streaming Flash players with their link and logo.

Do you have any parting thoughts or comments?

Keep an eye on DivShare. We have some really cool products in the works that's going to change the way sites, blogs, forums, and individuals host files. And it's always going to be free and easy to use.

Doyon Kim is the founder of Spotplex. Visit the company blog here.

What is Spotplex and why should people use it?

Spotplex is a real-time online content ranking service based on impression count. In short, people can find out what the most popular articles are today or in any given time frame. There are a few other services available, but our list is based on what people read most, not how many people vote for the article.

Obvious competitors are digg, stumbleupon, reddit, etc... They are all great services, but they also have limitations.

Such as?

They only reflect opinions of active contributors and core users of the services. For example, Digg has millions of viewers, but what they see is basically submitted by a few hundred people.

According to Hitwise's new research, only 2% of people contribute to the most popular web 2.0 services. Can this 2%, or a few hundred people, represent the total population? I don't think so.

Instead of using the contribution based system, we are trying to reflect majority general public's opinions by using impression count of each article. By doing so, I believe we can present an unbiased, impartial article ranking not just in technology oriented subjects, but in everything and anything the general Internet public would be interested in.

What type of funding have you raised so far?

We had small seed round from angels in the area and are about to start fund raising for series A.

Where is the company headquartered?

Santa Clara.

How many people are working on this service?

3 full time and 2 contractors.

What is your personal role in this company? What do you do in a typical day?

I am a CEO. At the same time, I am the only non-engineer here. I answer customer support emails, contact bloggers and reporters, accounting, finance, hr, etc...

I guess it is easier to think of what i don't do. I don't do coding.

However, this is not my first start-up, so I'm used to this kind of setting.

What is your personal background, education history, and prior experience in entrepreneurship?

Got my MBA from the University of Michigan. I co-founded Dialpad, a voice over ip company. We got 1 million users in 3 month after launch and had 14 million registered users at the peak. It was quite a roller coaster ride, but was eventually acquired by Yahoo. The next one was Opinity, a online reputation service company. Spotplex is my third.

What is the Spotplex business model?

Mainly two revenue sources. An obvious one is advertising. We also have a plan to offer some premium service for bloggers. I guess i did not fully explain our service yet. One other difference we have over our competitors is, in a way, who does the work. For example, people digg or recommend articles for other services. However, for us, bloggers do the work. Bloggers generate Spotplex code and insert the code into their site. Then, the code reports Spotplex server whenever the article is read.

As an extra benefit for bloggers, they get a blog traffic analytics page at Spotplex. Not just typical traffic analytics: it is a very much blogger tailored traffic analytics.

We provide the service for free, but have plans to add more in-depth analytic features and offer premium service to bloggers

So bloggers can use Spotplex as an analytics tool while readers use it as a popular news aggregation service?

Correct.

What specific advantages do your analytics have over tools like Google Analytics?

As you can see, we show what are the most popular articles (not some html file) in the blog, and in real-time. Also, Google analytics does not give you more readers.

You can go down to the last one hour level. Most popular articles in the last one hour.

By the way, this can be a reader service too. Everything we have is widgetized. You can put a widget that shows a list of popular articles of your own blog, or popular articles in Spotplex. By doing so, bloggers guide viewers better and retain them a little longer.

What are some current figures?

We have around 4000 bloggers so far in our network, and around 80,000 visits a month. We just launched, so we do not have a lot of traffic yet.

Any parting words?

I just want to thank you for having me today, and hope you like our service. If you or your readers have any suggestions or issues, you can contact me at any time.