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Projeqt Is an Online Storytelling Engine for Creatives [INVITES]

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: Projeqt

Quick Pitch: Projeqt is a creative storytelling platform.

Genius Idea: The art of online storytelling is all about presentation. As a non-linear storytelling engine, Projeqt gives creatives the ability to weave together stories dripping with style and personality from Flickr photos, RSS feeds, tweets, YouTube or Vimeo videos, and any media stored on their own computers.

The accidental startup came to be after creative director and co-founder David Lee was tasked with redesigning creative advertising agency TBWA‘s website to better display client work and do so in a Flash-free fashion that would work across any device. Projeqt was born then as a device agnostic web-publishing tool for TBWA and later spun off as its own entity.

Today, Projeqt is a private beta startup for the creative community with two primary use cases: a simple portfolio tool for artists to showcase their work and a presentation tool for brands and business users.

The service’s 2,700 beta testers have been using the platform for said purposes since its release in December. Projeqt users are also repurposing the experience for personal start pages, press rooms, virtual classrooms and even company websites, says Lee.

Users can craft “projeqts,” whatever their purpose may be, by adding content in the form of slides. Create a slide, name it, add tags, and fill the slide with a photo, text, video or feed. Slides are published to create the web story and be can reordered via drag and drop. Users can also create a projeqt within a projeqt to serve as a story inside a story.

More advanced users can tinker with the branding and design tools to adjust the appearance of the projeqt and add footer links and social network buttons.

In the coming months, Projeqt hopes to tap into additional social APIs — Instagram integration, for instance, is in the works and will allow users to display their Instagram photos in their projeqts. Also coming soon are theme options, though Lee insists that the startup won’t exactly follow the theme direction of WordPress or Tumblr.

Projeqt remains free for now, though the startup’s long-term plan is to develop a freemium model that would charge users for more advanced features.

Projeqt is graciously giving interested Mashable readers invites. Want in? Send an email to [email protected] with “Mashable” in the subject line.

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.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DaveBolton

More About: creatives, portfolio, presentations, projeqt, spark-of-genius, story, storytelling

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Do You Need a Credit Report for Your Online Life?

This post is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark as a new part of the Spark of Genius series that focuses on a new and innovative startup each day. Every Thursday, the program focuses on startups within the BizSpark program and what they’re doing to grow.

Your credit score carries significant weight in your financial life. Want to rent an apartment or buy a car? Good luck doing so with a bad credit score. The same logic applies to landing a job if you have a negative online reputation.

So says MyWebCareer, an early stage startup that has developed algorithms to run your “Career Score,” a credit check for your professional web persona. The service analyzes your Facebook profile, LinkedIn network, Twitter account and Google juice — evaluating more than 200 different variables in the process — and spits out a score between 350 to 850.

Where you fall could be an indicator of how employable you are and indicate your overall professional attractiveness.

Credit Check

Once you grant MyWebCareer access to Facebook and/or LinkedIn, the service works to retrieve employment history and searches Google for references to you in any of the positions you’ve claimed to have held. The startup is also running semantic analysis on your Facebook updates, checking out your Stack Overflow profile, if you have one, and factoring in your Klout score, among other things.

The resulting score — which remains private until you opt to share it publicly — is evaluated against your peers in three areas: your connectedness, professional online brand and internet search footprint. The service will highlight potentially offending status updates and make specific recommendations for how you can improve your score.

If a search query doesn’t bring up results, for instance, relating to past jobs, MyWebCareer will call your attention to these eyebrow-raising issues.

The public beta service, only having launched in February, is far from complete. Co-founders Greg Coyle and Nip Zalavadia say they want to make the Career Score as reflective of your online reputation as possible. This means they’ll continue to add data sources — like Quora once there’s a publicly accessible API — in the future.

The Credit Bureau of the Web?

If MyWebCareer’s calculation is meant to be a credit score for your digital life, then the startup aims to be like an Experian or Equifax.

This presents it with the challenge of convincing consumers, and eventually business users, that its score means something significant, beyond the novelty of the site itself. Because other startups also traffic in reputation management (Brand-Yourself) and online influence scoring (Klout), this will not be an easy sell.

In a month’s time, the startup has acquired more than 4,000 users, according to Coyle and Zavaladia. Not overly impressive numbers, and more interesting, perhaps, is that a significant subset of users are openly sharing their scores via Facebook or Twitter and helping to bring in new members — 20% of new users sign-up through this network effect.

In the product pipeline are new features that could better drive home the utility of the service. A premium version is slated for early April release and should offer the full breadth of everything that MyWebCareer evaluates for a small monthly or yearly fee.

Also in the works is an enterprise version that will allow employers to evaluate content without giving them direct access to a candidate’s Facebook or LinkedIn profile, says Coyle and Zalavadia. This will eventually be positioned as a recruitment tool that employers can use to discover potential talent with high Career Scores in certain industries.

So long as MyWebCareer can figure out what their score really means, it could have bright future. Employers are socially screening candidates and employees are more likely than ever to have blemished online records, so there is an audience for the product.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sdominick

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: career score, facebook, influence, mywebcareer, online reputation, reputation, spark-of-genius, twitter

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Lanyrd Keeps Your Conference Life On Track, Via Twitter

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: Lanyrd

Quick Pitch: Lanyrd helps you get more out of conferences.

Genius Idea: Via Twitter, track event sessions and keep up with favorite speakers — at all stages in the conference lifecycle.

Some newlywed couples work to produce an offspring on their honeymoon. Most don’t labor towards birthing a startup. But that’s exactly what British entrepreneurs Natalie Downe and Simon Willison did on their post-nuptial adventure. After traveling in Europe and Africa, the couple caught ill in Casablanca and extended their stay and booked an apartment to recover.

The pair have a shared love for building projects in their spare time — which is why, with all that extra time in a bedroom, they managed to create and release an early build of Lanyrd. Within two hours of its launch, Downe and Willison saw the site generate more than 14,000 visits.

After finding immediate success with social media denizens, the couple applied to Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Lanyrd was accepted and has since relocated to Mountain View, California to complete it. The site remains a largely bootstrapped effort, though the couple did accept the $150,000 in convertible debt offered up by Start Fund.

Willison calls Lanyrd “the IMDb of conferences” — except that its content is crowdsourced. The site asks its users to do the heavy lifting for them by filling in the blanks on each conference: sessions, speakers and content. The incentive? The same as at any conference: self-aggrandizement. Organizers will go to any lengths to promote their events. Speakers want to flesh out their profiles by adding past, present and future engagements. And everyone wants to see useful conference content.

“Conferences are traditionally insufficient for transferring knowledge,” says Willinson. “Longer term, this is about capturing the value of what’s shared.”

Lanyrd’s tie-in with Twitter is ingenious — and almost spooky. Sign in with your Twitter handle, and you’ll automatically be greeted with a smorgasbord of contacts and upcoming conferences, drawn from your Twitter relationships. You may see that Lanyrd knows you spoke at a trade show last month, or that you’re on a panel this fall. The site already lists 6,000 crowdsourced conferences and 30,000 user profiles.

Downe and Willison opted to use Twitter’s social graph — rather than Facebook’s, say — because they believe the “follow” has more aspirational value than the “friend.” You likely already follow the people you’d like to know, the speakers you’d like to see talk. According to Lanyrd, you’ve already composed a list of the thought leaders you’d like to bump into at an upcoming conference. So Lanyard is well positioned to find the sessions of social relevance to you.

Since users are encouraged to add speakers and their Twitter names to sessions, the speaker need not be a Lanyrd user to have a Lanyrd presence. On signing up, you may notice your conference history has already been charted for you by your Twitter followers, organizers or fellow attendees.

Next up, Lanyrd has its sights set on South by Southwest, held in Austin next month. The startup launched its unofficial guide to the show Tuesday to help users find which sessions their Twitter friends are attending, and stay current on slides, videos and notes.

The SXSW tool marks Lanyrd’s first real test at a major conference. At worst, the event will provide a trove of data and real-world experiences that Downe and Willison can use to better determine how to serve users while they’re attending conferences.

Downe and Willison describe the chain of events following their June 2010 nuptials to their present day found status as an unexpected, whirlwind affair. Their story, and their startup, are still in their nascent stages. The couple will graduate from the Y Combinator program in March, and may be forced to return to the UK when their visas expire. But location may matter little to a startup that has successfully leveraged the power of an international hit like Twitter.

Image courtesy of SimonWillison.net

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: conferences, lanyrd, spark-of-genius, startup, sxsw, twitter

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Just How Offensive Is Your Facebook Profile?

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: Socioclean

Quick Pitch: Socioclean crawls through your Facebook profile photos, groups and wall posts, and alerts you to anything inappropriate.

Genius Idea: In a 2009 Harris Interactive study for CareerBuilder.com, 45% of employers questioned had used social networks to screen job candidates. Thirty-five percent of them decided not to hire a candidate based on what they found.

When this study started to generate press, Priyanshu Harshavat started to think about a way to help job candidates get their social profiles in shape before they were virtually audited by potential employers. The result is Socioclean, a program that scans social profiles for 5,000 words and phrases that are racial, profane, drug-related or alcohol-related.

After a user gives permission for the program to assess his Facebook profile (for now Socioclean is only offered for Facebook — other social networks are on the way), he receives a letter grade and a list of inappropriate items from his profile. Each item has a link to that item on Facebook so that he can easily delete it.

As a generally inoffensive person, I was shocked at how many flagged terms that Socioclean dug up from my profile. Wall messages left by other people were my biggest offense (I got demerits for “beer,” “booze cone” and “hell,” among others). The program also reminded me about the “Aaron Burr, you son of a b**ch” group I had joined sometime during my freshman year of college. I posted one mildly offensive status message to my profile before testing the program, naively thinking that it wouldn’t have much to find otherwise, and it found that as well. Most of my infractions were things that I would never have noticed, and many were innocent — discussing about a bon “fire,” for instance, was flagged as “aggressive.” But it definitely didn’t miss anything. There were enough flags to earn an overall grade of a “D.”

Businesses like Reputation.com and Brand-Yourself also help polish online reputations, but these startups are taking an SEO approach that helps push down negative and pull up positive search results for your name. Socioclean is the only service we know of that focuses on deleting offensive items from your social profiles.

About 5,000 other people and I have run our profiles through the program at no cost. To help make it profitable, the company is currently courting job website and dating website partners. The hope is to offer a social profile scrub as an option to applicants and daters to make them more successful on their respective online services. Socioclean’s developers also created a version of the product for employers who want their employees to self-monitor their social profiles.

Yet another potential revenue source is to sell site licenses to universities to use in their career services departments. Some universities have already expressed interest in helping spruce up their graduates’ online resumes — Syracuse University, for instance, purchased subscriptions to Brand-Yourself for 4,100 of its graduating seniors.

Even if schools decide to teach students to set their Facebook privacy settings instead of similarly embracing Socioclean, there are likely enough situations in which a squeaky clean profile is necessary — college applications, job applications, dating and professional networking included — to keep Socioclean in business.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, thesuperph.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSparkThe 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: digital profile, online reputation, Socioclean, trending

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