It's Rishi

I’m lucky to have many friends who are entrepreneurs. Some are starting companies for the first time, while others are successful serial entrepreneurs. Here’s a quick run down of some of their latest endeavors:

Voyij is the creation of Nick Atkins and Paul Kim, friends and former co-workers of mine at SideStep. Voyij is the best search engine for travel deals on the Web. The great thing about Voyij is that you don’t need to know exactly where you want to go. If you have some ideas about what you want to do on your vacation (e.g. skiing, gambling, beaches, etc..), Voyij will find you deals based on that criteria. The team has still got some wrinkles to iron out but the site is absolutely worth checking out next time you book travel.

If it’s just a hotel that you need then check out DealBase. My former manager, Sam Shank, continues his reign on the hotel deals & reviews space after he sold TravelPost.com to SideStep (now Kayak). Like TravelPost, DealBase offers consumers honest, comprehensive hotel information. This is in contrast to some of the market-leading travel sites which may encourage you to book the wrong hotel because it earns them the most commission.

If you play the guitar, then you need to check out FretBase. (The *Base.com thing is a coincidence..) The site is the brainchild of another of my former managers at SideStep, Brian Stolte. Recently launched, FretBase has already grown to include an impressive amount of information on everything guitar-related, from music to artists to the guitars themselves. With the passion that Brian and the rest of his founding team has, I’m very excited to see what they do with the site.

Finally, my long-time buddy, Rob Poitras has just embarked on a new project called FashionLuvr. Rob has proven himself to be an online marketing expert in the fashion world. He’s leveraging that expertise to create the defacto website for the latest sales at online clothing boutiques. Rob’s got an intriguing strategy to grow FashionLuvr and particularly given the lull in demand for high-priced clothing, he may just have exactly what the market needs.

Btw, come on guys, make proper linkable logos!!

There’s a new networking event for local folks in the tech entrepreneur community called Stirr. I’m usually not a big fan of going to such events, not because I don’t like talking with people (anyone that knows me knows that if there’s one thing I absolutely do like is to talk) but because loud, crowded environments such as these don’t usually promote much meaningful conversation. By the end of the night, I have a bunch of business cards and a voice that’s shot to hell. Some people probably think that a stack of business cards equals victory but for me the only thing tangible I get out of going to these types of events is meeting other entrepreneurs who share the same spark that I have. It’s inspiring to me and often serves as that extra glass of Kool-aid that I need to stay optimistic about entrepreneurship. Anyways…. one thing unique about Stirr is that they allow a few companies at each events 60 seconds to pitch their company and live demo their product(s) throughout the night. The companies that participated tonight were:

3Jam – Text message a group of friends at once. Definitely a nifty tool when you need to engage in a conversation with multiple contacts on your cell phone. The problem is that this is a feature, not a business. They can either charge users a nominal fee per use or add advertising to the messages. A lot of people text message so this should be good revenue right? Wrong. If this becomes popular, you can bet that carriers will implement this simple functionality on their own and add it to their own list of paid services. It’s unlikely that carriers, who are notoriously snobby, will agree to some sort of joint marketing/revenue partnership. Carriers also have the resources to better integrate such functionality into the phones themselves.

Accomplice – According to Accomplice, their product is “a simple, intuitive application that integrates an efficient personal organizational tool with the ability to quickly pull together a team. With Accomplice, busy professionals can be effective, save time, and execute on all of their personal and work activities using a single system.” Ummm.. Yeah. Your guess is mine. I did see a demo of their product from a distance and it seemed polished but from what I’ve seen, most people end up sticking with very simple – often crude- solutions to organizing their personal information rather than using fancy PIM’s. I’m not saying Accomplice is bad but if I can’t understand what it is and how it’ll simplify my life in 15 seconds, that’s a problem. But who knows, maybe my life just isn’t busy enough?

JumpCut – Edit videos online. I haven’t personally used their service yet but I was impressed by the demo they were showing. I don’t see these guys surviving as a standalone service. They will need to be able to integrate with other video services such as YouTube to directly access, modify and then save videos stored elsewhere. Otherwise, it’ll be too much of a pain in the ass to upload your video to JumpCut, modify it, download it back and then upload it to YouTube. And this is when the service is free. Presumably, JumpCut will want to earn some money so that will further deter users. Video sharing communities like YouTube will either build thier own tool (which of course will have much better adoption even if it’s not as good) or buy JumpCut. I could definitely see a big player like Y!, Google, MS, Fox Interactive buying these guys to bolster their respective video sharing offerings. Again, I have not actually used JumpCut so I don’t know how good it is.

LogSavvy – The dude who spoke about LogSavvy roused the most interest from the audience by talking about how relational DB’s do not allow applications to easily mine the data to discover relationships between …. eh, I sort of lost him in the middle. Their website is similarly vague. From what I can tell they have software/systems to analyze web server logs, db logs, and other logs to form custom reports and views. Being able to poke and prod your data to optimize your product for your customers is becoming ever-more essential to success especially as not only user data but also user behavior is logged. So, I could imagine the demand for this type of software is high. I guess we’ll have to wait for something more tangible to understand what they’re up to.

TheMintPages – Review site for female beauty products. As the host of Stirr reminded the audience, the female beauty product market is huge. Review sites for every day products don’t really exist so I could definitely see a niche site focused exclusively on the needs of this consumer catching on. Of course, this is basically a social content play so the key to success is all about not only reeling users into the site, but hooking them into creating content for the site – whether that means writing a product review or replying to other user’s comments. I personally did not like their site design though. It’s way too Web2.0 which gets the thumbs-up from the geeks but geeks (usually) don’t buy makeup.