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crowdSPRING Launches to the Public
crowdSPRING, the crowd sourcing startup that made waves by allowing users to design its homepage has fully launched to public.
Billed as an online marketplace that “brings the power of choice to individuals and businesses and creates a community for untapped creative talent,” the site is taking the interesting approach of trying to fill gaps that are left in the marketplace by niche sites like Threadless, iStockPhoto, and Pixish by dealing mainly in the market of people and companies who are looking to have specific creative services performed; aiming to simplify the process of connecting them with talented freelancers.
If at this point you’re beginning to wonder what separates this site from things like oDesk and 99Designs, the best features seem to be the quality of the protection in place for all parties involved and the guarantee of results. The site offers stringent legal protection the buyers and for the participating creatives and offers a guarantee that all requests will receive at least 25 entries.
Founded by Ross Kimbarovsky a former intellectual propery attorney and Mike Sampson a former movie producer, the site enters an already crowded and competitive space. Though if risks like crowd sourcing the design of their website are any indication of what they have in store, we look forward to seeing what else they have planned to differentiate themselves from the crowd.
thinkorswim
Thinkorswim is an online brokerage company specializing in options. They support retail and institutional traders through their custom trading platforms. They teach and execute, non-directional option strategies with single-click functionality. Thinkorswim delivers products that benefit the customer whether they are hedging, speculating or enhancing returns.
People: Tom Sosnoff and Scott Sheridan
Funding: TCVentures
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.thinkorswim.com
Location: Chicago - River North
uSphere
uSphere helps students to get their application seen by colleges and allows Colleges to find students they may not have otherwise found via the application process. With the aid of a proprietary matching tool they’ve created one central spot for interaction between colleges and students with the aim of lowering costs for everyone involved.
People: Dave Van de Walle
Funding: Founder
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.usphere.com
Blog: http://ublog.usphere.com
Location: Evanston, IL
nextPoint
Nextpoint brings together a unique blend of computer science, graphic arts and communication expertise to deliver unprecedented speed and efficiency to the significant non-legal challenges of litigation. Through a combination of Web-based technologies, seasoned professionals and innovative and predictable pricing, Nextpoint provides its customers incomparable value and strategic advantage in their legal matters.
People: Rakesh Madhava
Funding: Founder
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.nextpoint.com
Location: Chicago - Ravenswood, Los Angeles, Madison, Bangalore
Cleversafe
Cleversafe takes the best concepts of Internet data networking and applies it to data storage. Their technology, called Information Dispersal, works similarly to TCP/IP packets–that is, they store information on data slices and store these slices on a network of local or remote servers. Cleversafe’s technology then takes this well-dispersed information and reassembles it into easy to use packages.
People: Chris Gladwin and Matt England
Funding: Alsop-Louie, Harrison Street Capital, NEA, OCA Ventures, Presidio
Website: http://www.cleversafe.com
Blog: http://www.cleversafe.org/cs-weblog
Location: West Loop
Vibes Media
Vibes Media is a mobile marketing company that helps the world’s leading brands interact with their audiences through text messaging and mobile content. Vibes works with blue chip clients across the country including consumer marketers, wireless carriers, professional and college sports teams, concert promoters, advertising/promotion agencies, radio and TV stations, and retail stores. Vibes is a full-service, marketing-focused agency that partners with clients on all aspects of text messaging marketing programs, including mobile opportunity identification, setting objectives and strategies, program design, database design and management, web and WAP programming, creative development, and program management.
People: Jack Philbin and Alex Campbell
Funding: Founders
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.vibes.com
Location: Chicago - Loop
Earthcomber
Earthcomber is search for the physical world. Earthcomber provides free software, maps, and info, and also sells some name-brand mobile guides. The service can be accessed through Earthcomber.com, for getting map and info updates, as well as discovering interest groups and tweaking personal favorites to search for. You can also download maps and info directly to handheld devices using the Earthcomber mobile software itself. You can also use Earthcomber to find things like atms and gas stations via your mobile phone as your traveling.
People: Jim Brady
Funding: Founder
Website: http://www.earthcomber.com
Location: River Forest, IL
Restaurant.com
Restaurant.com is a restaurant discount marketplace. It acts as a go-between for restaurants looking for more diners and diners looking to save money at restaurants. It offers a freely browsable database of restaurant gift certificates.
People: Cary Chessick, Scott Lutwak, and Steve Savad
Funding: Angel Investors
Website: http://www.restaurant.com
Location: Arlington Heights, IL
Songza
Songza is a music search engine that allows you to play songs directly through your computer for free. The site allows you to create profiles and save your playlists. The site began as an interface design showcase from Aza Raskin of Humanized
People: Aza Raskin and Scott Robbin
Funding: Founders
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.songza.com
Location: Chicago - Ravenswood
DataBased Ads
DatabasedAds offers an Internet-based platform that allows self-service ad ordering, fulfillment, and production platform. Its main clients are newspapers, publications, and real estate companies. They also offer consulting services to companies that are using their products.
People: Joe Zekas and Michael Scotty
Funding: Founder
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.databasedads.com
Location: Chicago - Lincoln Park
RealClearPolitics
RealClearPolitics is a political news filter and aggregator. That site compiles the most pertinent links each day and also does things like poll averages and prediction markets to analyze the current political state of things.
People: Tom Bevan and John McIntyre
Funding: Founders, Participate Media
Status: 51% of company acquired by Forbes
Website: http://www.realclearpolitics.com
Location: Chicago - Lakeview
PeopleFilter
PeopleFilter is a job application management system. It allows you to search, sort, and manage incoming resumes for each job opening and analyzes each applicant to determine how good of a fit they are for your company.
People: Frank Pirri and Kevin Harrison
Funding: Cities Capital Funds and Velocity Equity Partners
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.peoplefilter.com
Location: Arlington Heights, IL
Cappex
Cappex is a free service that helps students connect with colleges and universities that want them before they apply. Students who complete a profile on Cappex may be invited to apply to certain colleges based on the college’s interest in their specific qualifications, and may also hear about other schools meeting their needs. In essence, the student will know which colleges want them before they apply. This service is also free to accredited public and private colleges seeking undergraduate US-based students, thereby enlarging the base of potential college participants.
People: Leon Heller, Mike Moyer, and Jace Mouse
Funding: Unknown
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.cappex.com
Blog: http://www.cappex.com/blog/
Location: Highland Park, IL
Interactive Mediums
Interactive Mediums connects businesses and organizations with their customers through the use of multi-channel communication solutions. Through a suite of out-of-the-box and customized solutions, Interactive Mediums provides clients large and small the technology platform, tools, support and expertise they need to create meaningful customer interactions. Their main product TextMe for Business allows companies to interact with customers via cell phone text messages in order to ask questions or get feedback.
People: Jeff Judge and Chris Watland
Funding: Unknown
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.interactivemediums.com
Blog: http://blog.interactivemediums.com
Location: Chicago - Lakeview
PerkSpot
PerkSpot manages employee discount programs for companies. They use their platform and database to create custom turn-key solutions. Clients include Fortune 500 corporations, state and local governments, school districts, and other affinity groups.
People: Chris Hill
Funding: Founder
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.perkspot.com
Blog: http://perkspot.com/site/index.php/blog/
Location: Chicago - Ravenswood
Humanized
Humanized is a small firm that develops products that change the way people interact with a computer. Their goal is to make everyday computer use simpler and more intuitive. The main product, Enso, is a command-line interface that allows you to perform complex tasks with a few simple keystrokes.
The principals of Humanized were recently acquired by the Mozilla Foundation and will be leading user interface development there.
People: Aza Raskin, Atul Varma, Andrew Wilson, Jono DiCarlo
Funding: Angel Investors
Status: Acquired by Mozilla
Website: http://www.humanized.com/
Blog: http://www.humanized.com/weblog
Location: Chicago - Ravenswood
LiquidTalk Networks
LiquidTalk provides a white label video distribution platform for businesses. The LiquidTalk platform allows an enterprise to easily push audio/video content such as sales training, product information or corporate and customer communication directly to the mobile devices of employees.
People: Dave Peak and Dan Anderson
Funding: Meakem Becker Venture Capital
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.liquidtalk.com
Location: Chicago - South Loop
BusinessPOV
BusinessPOV.com is a forum for state-of-the-art business journalism using an innovative format: online video. Viewers can watch new, completely original, locally produced video profiles of companies, people and products that fall into our three main interest areas: innovation, entrepreneurship and the creative culture (advertising, graphic design, architecture, the arts).
The site free to use and is updated up to three times a week. Segments run anywhere from 15 seconds to 6 minutes.
People: Mark & Peter Scheffler
Funding: Founders
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.businesspov.com
Location: Chicago - Loop
MetroProper
MetroProper is a group of locally focused social networks that encourage people to do things offline and learn more about their community. Imagine if you could put all off a city’s people, news, places, and businesses online and then allow people to interact and vote on things they like and don’t like and you’d have MetroProper.
People: Phil Tadros
Funding: Founder
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.metroproper.com
Location: Chicago - Rogers Park
CohesiveFT
CohesiveFT provides customers with the ability to create custom-configured, container-hardened, subscription-supported application stacks called “Elastic Servers.” Elastic Servers can be built using their Elastic Server On-Demand service which is available in a Community Edition and through Private Enterprise Portals.
The company is taking advantage of the move from single-sourced, tightly-coupled, vertically-integrated middleware to multi-sourced, loosely-coupled, vertically-aware application stacks. Elastic Servers bridge this gap by allowing integration and support of stack components from multiple vendors, regardless whether commercial source or open source.
People: Craig Heimark, Patrick Kerpan, Alexis Richardson, Dwight Koop
Funding: Murray Family Investments LP, OCA Ventures, Chess Venture Ltd, Mouli Cohen
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.cohesiveft.com
Location: Chicago - Loop
SwapSimple
By eliminating the need to buy and sell, SwapSimple.com’s exchange solution gives its users a modern and lower cost alternative to purchasing used textbooks, general literature, DVDs, and video games. Users can list items just by typing in the product’s bar code number or a book’s ISBN number. Swap fairness and equivalence is determined by a credit system that is based off of an item’s fair market value.
People: Elliot Hirsch, Eric Haszlakiewicz, David Goldblatt
Funding: Unknown
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.swapsimple.com
Blog: http://www.swapsimple.com/blog/blog/blogger.html
Location: Chicago
Menuism
Part restaurant review site and part community, Menuism ends up taking on the shape of a restaurant recommendation and search site. The site includes reviews for restaurants and specific dishes, user-contributed tags, restaurants and menus, location-based search, and social restaurant recommendations. Menuism also takes advantage of visual features like restaurant maps and user-submitted food photographs to make your choice even easier.
People: Justin Chen and John Li
Funding: Founders
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.menuism.com
Blog: http://menuism.wordpress.com/
Location: Chicago and Seattle
Planypus
Planypus is a wiki for your social life. Its a collaboration tool that allows you to make plans with your network of friends. Planypus works by notifying your friends in whatever way they prefer, be it email, sms, rss, or by integrating into your online homepages and calendaring tools, so everyone always knows what’s going on. The site also allows people to vote on what they want to do. Website owners can even integrate Planypus into their applications to allow other to spread news about events very quickly.
People: Yan Pritzker, Alex Chizhik, Alex Antonov, Anton Mostovoy, Stan Mazo
Funding: Private Investors Undisclosed Amount
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://planyp.us
Blog: http://blog.planypus.com
Location: Chicago and DC
ParkWhiz
ParkWhiz is a marketplace for paid, public parking spots. Essentially its a catalog of city parking. The site allows people to search for parking spots by location via computer or mobile phone and it enables people who own spots to create listings for them and sell spots through the site. All results get shown to you on an intuitive map. ParkWhiz also partners with business and events to handle their parking sales. Currently they handle parking for the Chicago Lyric Opera and have handled the parking for events like TechCocktail.
People: Aashish Dalal and Joe Thornton
Funding: Founders and Competition Winnings
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.parkwhiz.com
Blog: http://blog.parkwhiz.com/
Location: Chicago
Naymz
Naymz provides individuals with a way to try to manage their online reputation. Its allows people to track what is being said about them and monitor when people are searching for their name. On the site, you create a profile that acts as an aggregator of your on and offline presence. The profile is a search engine friendly page thats intended to appear in the first few slots whenever someone searches for your name in a search engine. The idea is that by controlling this page you can control what people see first about you when they look you up online.
The founders of Naymz met each other at Orbitz.
People: Nolan Bayliss, Tony Czupryna, Tom Drugan, Brian Pontarelli
Funding: Founder
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.naymz.com
Blog: http://www.naymz.com/blog/
Location: Chicago - Lincoln Park
Collectica
Collectica is an online community and marketplace for collectors that features a social auction platform where collectors can join the community to store information on their collections, meet other collectors, or buy and sell collectibles.
Collectica has allied with collecting organizations to assure the authenticity of the collections on the site and provides its members with fraud protection. A portion of the revenue from every sale goes back to these partner clubs and organizations.
People: William Thoburn, Jeremy Galen, Michael Dworecki, Tony Wilkins, Tu Huu Nguyen
Funding: University of Chicago Business Plan Competition
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.collectica.com
Location: Chicago
Viewpoints
Viewpoints is a multi-category user reviews site that allows users to post and search for reviews across more than 20 categories. Viewpoints manages review quality and encourages reviews through a system of ratings and reward points. Users can also build networks of friends on the site whose reviews than can rely on.
Viewpoints also allows other publishers to syndicate their own review content to the community with Orbitz.com being one of the main contributors.
People: Matt Moog Founder and CEO
Funding: $5 Million Series A
Status: Privately Held
Investors: Illinois Innovation Accelerator Fund, Joe Mansueto, Matt McCall, Lon Chow, J.B. Pritzker, Michael Alter
Website: http://www.viewpoints.com
Blog: http://onpoint.viewpoints.com
Location: Chicago - Loop
Inkling Markets
Inkling harnesses the “wisdom of crowds” by running online prediction markets. Anyone can create an inkling market and the site has an active community of traders who trade the prediction markets for fun. The company also manages prediction markets for businesses and organizations for things like product development, market research, and supply chain management.
Notable clients include Abbott Labs, Acxiom, Chrysler, Cisco, CNN, General Mills, Wells Fargo, Electronic Arts, the Government of Singapore, Lockheed-Martin, Viacom, ABC-KGO, and O’Reilly.
People: Nate Kontny and Adam Siegel
Funding: YCombinator
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.inklingmarkets.com
Blog: http://inklingmarkets.blogspot.com/
Location: Chicago
PrepMe
PrepMe is an online test prep company out of the University of Chicago’s business incubator. PrepMe has developed an online test prep platform using an adaptive algorithm to customize the preparation course for each student. More than just testing tips and tricks, PrepMe provides extensive learning materials to help improve students overall reading, writing, and math skills. Tied into the online test preparation is PrepMe’s one-on-one online tutoring network.
By bringing test prep and coaching online the company hopes to be able to reduce the cost and thus increase the availability of test prep services to students.
People: Karan Goel CEO, Avichal Garg CTO, Sammy Shreibati Lead Engineer
Funding: Founders
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.prepme.com
Blog: http://www.prepme.com/blog/
Location: Chicago - Hyde Park
GrubHub
GrubHub is a food delivery search engine. It contains a database of restaurants that deliver and determines the restaurants that will deliver to you when you enter your address. Making things nice and simple, the site contains the menus for each restaurant and provides you with the ability to order online through the site.
GrubHub currently operates delivery search fro Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.
People: Matt Maloney, Michael Evans
Funding: University of Chicago business plan competition winnings, Origin Ventures, Bob Zipp, and others
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.grubhub.com
Location: Chicago - Lincoln Park
EveryBlock
EveryBlock is a site that aggregates local news and information in select cities to an incredible depth. The site aims to collect all of the news and civic occurances that are happening around you in your city and present them in a simple and easy to track way. You can view and search for data at various hyper-local levels and through many different RSS feeds. They bill themselves as “a geographic filter — a “news feed” for your neighborhood, or, yes, even your block.”
The site currently aggregates data for Chicago, San Francisco, and New York and is quickly adding new cities and more data.
EveryBlock is being developed by the team that created ChicagoCrime.org and the Django Python Framework.
People: Adrian Holovaty, Paul Smith, Wilson Miner, Daniel X. O’Neil
Funding: Knight News Challenge Grant
Website: http://www.everyblock.com
Blog: http://blog.everyblock.com
Location: Chicago
SitterCity
SitterCity connects parents and pet owners with available caregivers in their area. Essentially, they have applied the online dating format to interactions between parents and caregivers, streamlining the process for both sides.
Along with maintaing their online database of sitters, they also run SpeedSitting events to allow parents to quickly interview several potential sitters and they manage and coordinate child care operations for large companies.
People: Genevieve Theirs, Dan Ratner
Funding: Founder and Angels
Status: Privately Held
Website: http://www.sittercity.com
Blog: http://babysitters.sittercity.com/blog/
Location: Chicago - River North
FeedBurner
FeedBurner is the web’s most popular RSS feed handler and feed service provider. They manage the feed distribution for a good number of the Internet’s largest content publishers and provide a variety of services to help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers track subscribers and promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.
One of the most recent Chicago startup success stories, they were acquired by Google on July 1st 2007 for approximately $100 million. They have since moved into Google’s Chicago offices at 20 W Kinzie.
People: Dick Costolo CEO, Matt Shobe, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski
Funding: Mobius Venture Capital, Portage Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Union Square Ventures
Status: Acquired by Google July 1st 2007
Website: http://www.feedburner.com
Blog: http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/
Location: Google Chicago Headquarters
Threadless / skinnyCorp
Threadless is an online tshirt design competition and community run by its parent company, skinnyCorp. Users submit designs that get voted on by the community and the highest rated shirts each week are put up for sale on the site. Designers win money and prizes if their submission is selected.
Threadless is skinnyCorp’s most successful site but they also run a variety of other communities. They bill themselves as web developers who create interesting communities for others to enjoy.
Recently they have taken the tshirt sales to the real world with a new store on Broadway in Lakeview. The company says plans for other stores around the country are in the works.
People: Jake Nickell CEO (co-founder), Jeffrey Kalmikoff CCO, Harper Reed CTO, Jacob DeHart (co-founder)
Funding: Founders and reinvested profits
Status: Privately Held
Investors: Insight Venture Partners (very late-stage)
Websites: Threadless, ExtraTasty, YayHooray, NakedandAngry, I Park Like an Idiot, and skinnyCorp.com
PodCasts: http://skinnycorp.com/podcast/
Location: Chicago - Ravenswood
37Signals
Simple online tools for everyday tasks aimed at smaller, agile businesses. Mainly focused on project management and collaboration tools. They also publish a popular blog and have written a book detailing their company’s philosophy. Based in Chicago with several other team members spread out around the country. Team members have been instrumental in the development of the widely popular Ruby on Rails framework.
People: Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
Funding: Founders
Status: Privately Held
Investors: Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com owns a small late-stage stake
Website: http://www.37signals.com
Blog: http://www.37signals.com/svn
Location: Chicago - West Loop