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Convofy Turns Work Collaboration into a Visual Experience

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: Convofy

Quick Pitch: Convofy is a private social network for enterprise, designed for visual thinkers.

Genius Idea: Convofy runs on Adobe AIR and focuses on detailed annotations for images, video, links and documents, making it ideal for firms that collaborate on a lot of documents or multimedia.

Bringing social networking to businesses is, well, big business. Salesforce Chatter brings groups and news feeds to internal teams while Yammer has managed to win more than 80% of the Fortune 500.

Convofy, built by the team behind the Scrybe task manager, differentiates itself through its focus on multimedia, drag-and-drop interface and real-time information stream. These features are made possible because Convofy runs on Adobe AIR and not in the web browser. And because it’s an AIR app, it can be placed in a convenient and always available area of your desktop.

It offers the features you’d expect from a social network built for the enterprise: a newsfeed, groups and file-sharing all fleshed-out features. Its newsfeed is extraordinarily visual, displaying documents, photos, slides and links inside the stream. Adding files to your Convofy network is as simple as dragging and dropping the files onto the app. It also comes with a series of notifications for when your co-workers comment on something you’ve added.

Convofy has a few tricks up its sleeve to differentiate it from the enterprise social networking crowd. One of those tricks is the ability to markup uploaded documents and add conversational notes. It makes collaborating on documents rather simple, although it’s nowhere near as robust as Google Docs. Convofy also includes annotations for videos and photos as well, and these annotations include timestamps so it’s easy to see the history of a conversation around any given piece of multimedia.

The app takes annotations one step further than most of its competitors. A team within Convofy can even annotate the web. Say you read an interesting article and want to point out a key phrase to your co-workers; Convofy lets you comment on that item and gives everyone else in your network the chance to comment and converse on the link.

Convofy is also mobile via a mobile web application built for smartphones that can run HTML5.

If you’re already using Chatter or Yammer, you may not find a lot compelling reasons to switch to Convofy. The enterprise app really shines though if you’re a company or team that shares lots of images, videos and documents. Design, research and consulting firms are the ones who will most likely find it useful, especially if they are willing to learn the ins and outs of the system.

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, convofy, enterprise, Salesforce, spark-of-genius, startup, yammer

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Scan a QR Code & Save Your Place on the Restaurant Wait List

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: WalkIN

Quick Pitch: Take the wait list with you and get notifications when your table is ready.

Genius Idea: Scan QR codes to save your place on multiple wait lists.

Proving that nine guys can successfully launch a startup in 48 hours on a bus, WalkIN is walking away from SXSW Interactive a big winner. The now one-week-old startup, which lets users save their places on restaurant wait lists by scanning a QR code at the door, shared the top prize in the StartupBus grand finale and is on its way to becoming a legitimate company.

The WalkIN experience is straightforward. Consumers use an iPhone or Android app to scan a QR code to reserve their place on the wait list. Merchants manage the queue via an iOS or HTML5 app, adjust wait times and manually add new guests to the list.

The first version of WalkIN launched at SXSW is QR code-only, but the founders now realize they need to add an SMS option to the service to reach all consumers.

The StartupBus environment helped make WalkIN a winning idea, says co-founder Bhavin Shah. “It was magic that was occurring,” he says. Team members naturally gravitated towards each other and worked harmoniously, circumstances that helped the nine guys evolve their ideas rapidly, beating out their competitors across the six-bus fleet.

Those excited by WalkIN’s promise to keep their place in the line should temper their enthusiasm for a more few weeks. Being just days old, WalkIN ins’t accessible to consumers just yet, though Shah explains that this will soon change. The startup is already talking to a handful of restaurants in New York, San Francisco and Sydney who are interested in testing the service in the coming weeks.

WalkIN’s idea is not entirely new, and there’s a smattering of competition in the virtual line space. But, with other startups such as Textaurant securing funding and no clear standout that owns the local merchant side of the equation, there’s plenty of opportunity here.

The young startup has fielded investment offers of its own, but has turned them down. WalkIN is going through a transition phase, according to Shah. Its unusual origins mean that team members must individually determine whether they want to peruse this full-time or keep their day jobs, he says.

Still, the startup is ready to graduate from the hyper-accelerator format of the StartupBus to a real-world environment. The team’s first order of business is to add new features, get merchants signed on and improve the overall user experience of the apps.

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, walkin

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Get Paid to Teach Anything With New Online Education Platform

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: Learnable

Quick Pitch: Learnable allows anyone to create and charge for online courses.

Genius Idea: Many schools have started to take online education seriously. By 2006, 66% of postsecondary learning institutions included in federal financial aid programs were already reporting that they offered some form of Internet learning, and a 2009 report from the U.S. Department of education found that those students who studied in online learning environments performed modelstly better than peers who were receiving face-to-face instruction.

This is great news for people who are looking to work toward a college degree, but there are few affordable parallels for people who just want to pick up a skill. Where does one go for affordable online lessons on homepage design? Javascript programming? Guitar? the Irish Whistle?

For many, the answers can be found on YouTube. But these “lessons” are usually one-off demonstrations rather than consecutive instruction. They lack a community component, and provide no revenue to reward the teacher.

Learnable aims to create what YouTube lacks as an education platform. Anybody can create a course by bundling articles, documents and videos into consecutive lessons that students work through at their own pace. A Q&A section attached to each course becomes its forum, and users can see who else is enrolled in the course.

Like a similar online learning platform called Udemy, Learnable offers an option for teachers to charge their students for lessons. Most lessons are priced around $20, and Learnable collects 50% of each student’s fee. Students can see an outline of course content and a bio of the instructor before they purchase a course, and all courses are approved by the company before they launch.

Learnable was spun off from Sitepoint.com, a resource for web developers that hosts forums, blogs, and, yes, courses on web topics. But the new site, which enjoys many of the same investors but is a separate entity, aims to be more universal than the site it sprung from. Only about a quarter of the 70 courses currently being offered relate to programming or web design (and yes, the Irish Whistle is represented).

Whether or not students will find courses like Learnable’s worth paying for, continue to rely on old how-to standbys like YouTube, or instead migrate to new (but free) learning platforms like Sophia, is what will make or break the new platform. It may also shape how people learn from each other each other in the future.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke

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, education, Learnable, online education

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