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3 Terrific Tools for Social & Mobile Viewing Audiences





The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable hand-picks a few startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

How we as consumers of physical and digital content view and experience the world around us is changing, and the startups highlighted here are all dedicated to helping us better find, discover and consume content.

SocialGuide, which focuses on social media ratings of broadcast television shows, gives us a real-time glimpse at how viewing audiences are reacting to content. New video search engine Smivi aims to give us better tools to shift through the troves of the web’s video library. And, Sparkatour, a mobile guide maker optimized for museums, could come in handy when we’re exploring and consuming real-world content.

SocialGuide: Social Media Meets TV Guide

Quick Pitch: SocialGuide is a social TV guide and ratings system that mines, filters and displays conversations about TV on social networks.

Genius Idea: Television show ratings that pivot around social conversations.

Mashable’s Take: Social media and armchair quarterback TV commentary seem to go hand-in-hand. Brooklyn-based SocialGuide, which launched in April, reveals much of this online chatter and makes sense of it in a TV guide-like fashion.

The service’s “Most Social Now” algorithm is a real-time ranking of TV shows generating the most online buzz. You can use SocialGuide to see which shows are super social, filter results by show genre, limit shows to just those your friends are watching or simply check out what’s on now.

SocialGuide also spits out “The Social 100″ report of the top programs across 170 different cable networks. You can view the report in daily, weekly or monthly increments and check out the social performance stats for the top 100 shows.

SocialGuide has raised $1.5 million in funding from angel investors. In addition to its web app, the startup has TV companion apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

Smivi: Smart Video Search

Quick Pitch: Smivi is a video search engine that lets you follow searches and find live events.

Genius Idea: Discover live videos as you search.

Mashable’s Take: New video search engine Smivi launched its beta application Friday to help users better search for and discover online videos across the web — not just on YouTube.

“At its present data stage, Smivi has crawled videos from many of the top websites,” explains creator Danny Witters. “Smivi searches across numerous video sources and puts all relevant results, whether they are from YouTube, TED.com or ESPN.com, in one convenient place.”

Smivi also supports categorial search to help you filter video searches (use “search query .category”), and has a follow feature so you can keep track of your queries. Smivi also has a live search marker that informs you when videos on the results page are being live streamed.

Sparkatour: Mobile Phone Museum Tours

Quick Pitch: Sparkatour enables small to medium-sized museums to easily create a mobile multimedia-guided tour of their art collections for their visitors.

Genius Idea: Giving museums and their visitors a more practical alternative to audio guide hardware.

Mashable’s Take: Carrying around bulky audio hardware while touring a museum feels unnecessary, especially considering that most of us already tote around more-capable machines in our pockets. Such is the belief of Sparkatour, a San Antonio-based startup that helps museums create mobile guides to replace antiquated audio tours.

“Museumgoers are becoming increasingly more technologically savvy and want to interact with the pieces of art in different ways,” Sparkatour co-founder Kyle Rames explains. “Museums can leverage their visitors’ devices instead of purchasing equipment.”

Museums, for a cost, can use Sparkatour to quickly create a mobile app that includes all their video, audio and image content. They can even assign guests numbers to use as visitor keys to gain access to specific tour content.

Sparkatour’s first client is the San Antonio Museum of Art. The museum created a mobile guide for the last destination on its “The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama” exhibit. San Antonio River Foundation and The National Ranching Heritage Center are also said to be soon releasing mobile guides of their own.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Ary6

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, Smivi, SocialGuide, spark-of-genius, Sparkatour, Startup Weekend Roundup

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Wristband + iOS App = Silent Alarm System

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: LARK

Quick Pitch: LARK is a silent “un-alarm” clock, sleep sensor and personal sleep coach designed by sleep experts.

Genius Idea: Wake up in silence.

A few years ago, Julia Hu was sleep deprived. She was attending MIT for grad school and had recently moved in with her boyfriend. Each morning, he would unintentionally wake her when his alarm would go off an hour-and-a-half before she needed to be up.

Hu’s sleep deprivation inspired her to use her engineering education to create a product that could make the world happier and healthier through better sleep.

One week ago, Hu’s mission came to fruition with the release of LARK, a wireless wristband, device dock, online portal and iOS silent alarm system.

Sleepers don the wristband at night; it wirelessly talks to the iOS application to track your sleep patterns across thousands of data points as you sleep. You’ll wake up to a gentle nudge from the vibration of the wristband, and be greeted with data on how well you slept and how often you awoke in the night.

“Our goal is to help people realize how critical sleep is to their health and well-being,” Hu says.

Hu, LARK’s CEO and founder, spent more than 1.5 years developing the patent-pending system with a team of sleep scientists and fellow classmates. The business was moved to Palo Alto, incubated and later backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The self-motivated types can buy the basic package for $129, but those that need a little more encouragement and sleep development will need to shell out an additional $60. For $189, LARK Pro buyers get the seven-day sleep assessment and Personal Sleep Coach to track their sleep goals and change their bad habits.

“Giving people an understanding of how they sleep naturally motivates them to sleep better,” says Hu. “Competitive feelings arise, so people will make small adjustments and later see the effects of these behaviors on their sleep. We think you can be personally coached to better sleep,” she asserts.

LARK, available for purchase online, will also be sold in every Apple store in North America beginning June 14.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: Alarm Clock, bizspark, iOS app, LARK, lightspeed venture partners, spark-of-genius, startup, technology

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Startup Publisher Gives Readers Control Over What Books Get Printed

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

readName: Unbound

Quick Pitch: Unbound crowdsources funding for books.

Genius Idea: Ending the hunt for the next bestseller and the innovation bottleneck that comes with it.

The book publishing industry, says Unbound co-founder Dan Kieran, is broken.

“Publishers spend huge amounts to secure potential bestsellers, but only a very small number of those work out,” he says.

In the quest for the next big seller, authors who are known for one kind of book are encouraged to continue publishing that kind of book. Covers are designed to be eye-catching rather than beautiful. And innovative ideas that haven’t yet proven themselves as sellers can get left in the dust.

Kieran and his two co-founders, who are all authors and/or publishers, decided to rethink publishing in a way that shifts its focus from what might sell onto what readers have already declared they will read. Unbound, which launched on Sunday, allows authors to pitch their ideas directly to readers instead of editors. If enough readers support it — usually between 1,500 and 5,000 — the book will be published. If not, they get their money back.

Readers can pledge their support in different denominations. At the first level, they’ll receive an ebook edition of the book if it is published. At the most expensive, they’ll receive two invites to the launch party, lunch with the author, two signed first editions of the book and two ebook editions.

All supporters get their names printed in the back of the book and access to the author’s “shed,” where they can read updates about the book’s progress, draft chapters and other extras.


So far the platform only has five book proposals listed on it. Former Monty Python team member Terry Jones has pitched a comic book of “cautionary fables” involving machines and novelist Tibor Fischer has pitched two stories. Less than a week in, none of the proposals are anywhere close to gathering enough support to publish. Jones and Fischer have had the most success, each achieving 2% of their goals.

All of the proposals are from somewhat established authors with fan bases that have provided much of the support. Eventually, however, the platform hopes to be more like Kickstarter, which allows anyone to post a project for potential crowdfunding. But then why don’t authors just take advantage of Kickstarter’s already established user base and put their book pitches there?

Kieran says that Unbound provides all of the editing and distribution services of a publishing house, which the more broadly focused Kickstarter obviously doesn’t. That makes forking over 50% of book profits — much less than Kickstarter project leaders take home (95%), but much more than the typical publishing house pays its writers (about 7% to 15%) — worth signing up for. That, and the creative freedom that advance sales create.

“The difference is that because the books have already been sold, it gives an opportunity to change the way they’re made,” Kieran says.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, books, publishing, startups, unbound

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Photos Come Alive: Thinglink Tags Music, People & Products in Images

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Thinglink

Quick Pitch: Thinglink changes how people interact with photos by transforming them into a navigational surface for search, commerce, and social connection.

Genius Idea: Turning photos into interactive stories.

“Every image has a story,” says Ulla-Maaria Engeström. Engeström is the design blogger-turned-entrepreneur behind Thinglink, a Helsinki-based startup that makes image interaction tools. These tools help bloggers, photographers, bands, creatives and companies tell stories by tagging photos with music, people, places and products.

Thinglink’s image-tagging tool can be enabled on WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal and Typepad sites. Users add a small snippet of code to their websites to enable Thinglink tagging. Then, they’ll be able to revisit photos to tag content with links, music tracks, Amazon products and even Twitter users.

The music piece is part of a recently inked partnership with SoundCloud. Users need only copy SoundCloud track URLs and paste them in the appropriate field to add music to their photos.

“Images and sounds make a natural and powerful combination. Both online and offline, they create inspiration and context for consumption,” Engeström writes on the SoundCloud integration. “We make decisions about what to buy, where to go and who to see, based on images. Music inspires fashion designers to create collections, and visual stories inspire those who make music.”

Thinglink for personal use, especially if for Tumblr or WordPress users, is an interesting experiment in image storytelling. Adding the required code is a simple exercise of copy-and-paste, and adding tags is merely a point-click-and-type process.

In testing, I tagged an image with a SoundCloud track and tagged my friends with their Twitter handles. In both cases, I simply pasted URLs into the “Link URL” field (as seen above). The original image simply showed two friends signing karaoke. The Thinglink tagged-photo became akin to an interactive story complete with music and context.

Professionals, retailers and publishers might find more business opportunities than storytelling in the image-tagging practice. Thinglink promises to help convert image viewers into product buyers. Atlantic Records, Paper Garden Records and Elle Magazine have each experimented with the startup’s image-tagging technology.

Thinglink has raised $1 million in funding from Nordic investors Inventure and Lifeline Ventures. The startup competes with companies such as Pixazza, GumGum, Stipple and Thingd in an ever-expanding image-tagging space that’s been slowly evolving for the past few years. These technologies have not yet become widely adopted by consumers or companies, although venture capitalists continue to make investments in the space.

Thinglink serves more than 30 million image views monthly for its clients.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, spark-of-genius, startup, tags, thinglink

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Startup Uses SMS for Research & Advertising in Developing Countries

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: txteagle

Quick Pitch: Txteagle engages 2.1 billion emerging-market consumers via mobile phones.

Genius Idea: Compensating consumers in developing nations with prepaid mobile airtime for participating in surveys or branded advertising campaigns.

Advertisers and marketers looking for a way to survey consumers or run branded campaigns in developing countries are limited in their abilities to reach these audiences.

Txteagle seeks to change that and boasts a database of more than 2.1 billion prepaid mobile subscribers across 220 operators in 80 countries. It can use the mobile phone to serve as conduit between advertiser and consumer.

The startup uses airtime compensation to sugarcoat its survey and campaign solicitation attempts. Txteagle founder Nathan Eagle says this is because airtime is equivalent to — if not greater than — cash in these countries. Ten percent of an individual’s annual income in emerging markets is spent on purchasing prepaid airtime, Eagle says.

Eagle learned about the research incentive accidentally in 2006 when he was a research faculty member at MIT, and moved to East Africa to teach students at the University of Nairobi how to program applications. While working in the district hospital of Kilifi, he soon found a disconnect between Kenya’s centralized blood bank and rural hospitals that often led to blood shortages.

In 2007, his University of Nairobi students developed a simple SMS application that gave nurses at rural hospitals the ability to text updates of blood supply levels. The system also supplied blood bank officials with a real-time visualization on the status of supplies. The system solved the shortage challenge, for about a week.

In a month’s time, nurses had stopped texting updates altogether. Why? Eagle had overlooked an important cog in the larger machine: The price of a text message. “Asking nurses to send text messages everyday was essentially asking them to take a pay cut,” he says.

“So we modified the software,” he explains. “Upon receiving an SMS message with the day’s blood supplies, the system would automatically transfer a small amount of airtime back to the nurse who sent the message. A switch flipped; the nurses began enthusiastically sending daily updates.”

Eagle’s existing telecommunications research projects at MIT had netted him relationships with operators that he was able to parlay into this airtime compensation system for the Kenyan blood bank SMS project.

As it turns out, the airtime compensation model he uncovered has far-greater implications for market research and advertising in emerging markets. In 2009, Eagle founded txteagle to explore these opportunities.

Today, txteagle has Nokia and the United Nations in its client Rolodex. The United Nations conducts an annual disaster-preparedness survey and used txteagle for its most recent survey to recruit, survey and compensate respondents in 50 counties.

Txteagle has received more than 250 unsolicited requests for proposals, because it can provide a service that no one else can, Eagle says. It’s a demand that far exceeds its current capabilities.

Txteagle plans to use a recently closed $8.5 million funding round to expand its team from six to 20 by year’s end. Its next steps include working to create replete profiles on its 2.1 billion respondent pool so it can help advertisers send targeted advertising messages under the same airtime compensation model.

“Advertising in developing worlds is a $120-billion-a-year business,” Eagle says, who believes his company is best positioned to provide targeted advertising to these audiences.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, Mobile 2.0, Nathan Eagle, SMS, spark-of-genius, startup, txteagle

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