The service is currently in private beta but Adam from TotSpot has arranged for special set of invites for 93south readers. If you are interested, please click here to sign up.

What do you think of TotSpot? Let Boston Know.

TotSpot
Location: Cambridge, MA
Funding: Self-Funded
# of Employees: 9
URL: http://www.totspot.com
Blog: http://blog.totspot.com
Submitted By: Adam Katz

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What’s your elevator pitch?
TotSpot is a place for parents to publish a page about their kids and share with family and friends. It’s part online babybook, parent journal, and social network.

Who is your target market?
TotSpot is designed for parents of children aged 0-10. Initially, our focus was on parents with kids 0-4, but (in our private beta) we noticed that a lot of parents were using TotSpot as something they did “for” their young kids (0-4) and “with” their older kids (4-10)

What makes you different or stand out?
TotSpot is uniquely designed around the needs and wants of parents. On TotSpot parents can create lifestage-oriented content such as Firsts (milestones), Growth Charts, and more. All content on TotSpot is time-tagged (we want to know when things actually happened) so that everything can be organized into an elegant and compelling narrative. Furthermore, everything on TotSpot is structured to ensure easy data portability, both online and off – we will enable parents to easily take their TotSpot pages and turn them into personalized parent journals or DVDs.

Who are the founders / key people?

• Michael Broukhim (co-Founder) – Michael is the former Editorial Chair of the Harvard Crimson. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in June of 2007. Mike manages product development.
• Adam Katz (co-Founder) – Adam graduated from Harvard in June of 2007 – my focus is on the business development side.
• Fred Oliveira (CTO) – Fred was an early editor at TechCrunch and is a noted Web 2.0 guru, he co-manages the product development with Michael

What is your startup story?
Both Michael and I come from large but close-knit families. Coincidentally, our youngest cousins are both named Max (his was 3 months when we started, mine 2 years old) and we both noticed how much “stuff” (photos, videos, notes) their parents sent out and we noticed how poor the existing tools were, so we decided to try and make something that was better and that enabled parents to share their children’s story in much a simpler and more compelling way.

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Ben, who I am currently working with on professional projects, also gets the award for being brief and to the point.  Learn from Ben’s lesson, submit your 93Startup profile today.

What do you think of Templamatic? Let Boston Know.

Templamatic
Location: Medford MA
Funding: Self-Funded
# of Employees: 1- 3
URL: templamatic.com
Blog: Templamatic Blog
Submitted By: Ben Harper

What’s your elevator pitch?
We sell premium web templates and html products made by industry leading web designers using a community based marketplace approach.

Who is your target market?
Our market is still a bit of a moving target. But, we are geared towards businesses who are savvy enough to get their feet wet when it comes to web design and want to leverage an existing design for their new site. Our products are also great for bloggers, or others looking to get a site up quick and easy.

What makes you different or stand out?
We focus only on high quality products. We offer great support to our customers. Our community model ensures fresh and relevant products.

Who are the founders / key people?
When it comes to inspiration and support, there have been lots of key people involved in getting this project off the ground. But officially speaking, there is just Ben Harper, a local web designer who wanted to try his hand as an entrepreneur

What is your startup story?
This startup was born out of the frustrations of trying to run a service business and constantly having to reinvent the wheel.  After months of talking and researching, it was time to try a product based business with a defined deliverable and a clear vision. I was also highly inspired by my genius friend, Osi Peters, an Engineer currently working at Vista Print.

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What do you think of Mzinga? Let Boston Know.

Mzinga
Location: Burlington, MA
Funding: $32.5 million in early 2008
# of Employees: 150
URL: http://www.mzinga.com
Blog: Mzinga Blog
Careers: Mzinga Career Page
Submitted By: Perkett PR

What’s your elevator pitch?

At Mzinga, we believe that companies can harness the wisdom of their existing communities of people – their employees, customers, their partners, and their shareholders – to help solve their business needs and provide tangible value to the business.

To do this, we combine the richest suite of social media applications with advanced, interactive social networking tools—all powered by software-as-a-service, enterprise community platform. We also offer a fully integrated comprehensive on-demand learning 2.0 suite to give customers the benefits of both formal and informal knowledge sharing. And with our best practice community management and moderation services bundled in, we can ensure that your community thrives as a safe, welcoming environment that delivers business results.

And the proof is in our results. Today, we have 14,000 communities under management and support 27 million users across the globe. Some of the world’s leading brands—including AOL, ESPN, Chevron & ABC to name just a few— all rely on Mzinga solutions to help them increase revenue, improve workplace satisfaction and drive service and support improvements through community

Who is your target market?

Mzinga has three target audiences:

· Workplace communities & Learning 2.0 Solutions: HR & Training

· Marketplace Communities: Marketing

· Extended Enterprise (customers/partner support): Customer Service, IT & CIOs

What makes you different or stand out?

Mzinga is focused on helping our customers achieve growth, innovation, learning, and essentially, competitive advantage, through online community solutions. And we’ve designed our business and our solutions to give our customers the ease of use, flexibility and scalability to do so effectively.

• Single source provider: Mzinga offers complete, integrated solutions that include all of the best-in-class tools and technologies, services and best practices to design, launch, manage, moderate and track successful online communities.
• Targeted solution sets: We target our community solutions to address common workplace, marketing, and customer and partner support challenges—the areas that we believe online communities can have the greatest impact. Each solution brings the capabilities that have the most relevance and impact on solving particular needs in those areas to the forefront.
• Robust, flexible technology suite: Our solutions include the broadest suite of social media applications with the most flexible deployment capabilities. You can leverage our capabilities to create complete destination communities, or to embed our capabilities within their existing or third-party sites.
• In-depth community management and moderation services
  Mzinga’s solution sets include ongoing community management and moderation services to ensure that your community is a welcoming, safe and thriving environment within your business. Our community managers and moderators are supported by advanced administration and moderation tools that enable them to address your needs efficiently and effectively.
• Proven success
  Many of the biggest brands in business rely on Mzinga for online community and social media solutions, including ABC, AOL, ESPN, CBS.com, iVillage, and Chevron Corporation. Our proven success and credibility in the marketplace is a testament to our partnership approach to every client relationship.

Who are the founders / key people?

• Rick Faulk, President & CEO: Rick’s role as President & CEO of Mzinga represents a natural progression in a career that has long revolved around software-as-a-service solutions, on-demand collaboration, and innovation in executive leadership positions at companies such as Cisco, WebEx, Intranets.com and PictureTel.
• Barry Libert, Chairman: As the founder and CEO of one of Mzinga’s predecessor companies, Shared Insights, Barry Libert was one of the first in the industry to recognize and promote the value of communities and Web 2.0 technologies in enabling enterprises to communicate and collaborate to make better decisions based on the experience of peers, experts, and leading industry vendors. As the co-author of the critically acclaimed book "We Are Smarter Than Me," Barry and his co-authors used the power of Web 2.0 technologies and the Wiki-based contributions of more than 4,000 people to illustrate how businesses could profit from the wisdom of crowds
• Dan Bruns EVP, Social Media Solutions: One of the first pioneers of the Internet to lead the way in social media, Dan Bruns brings to Mzinga almost two decades of entrepreneurial experience in online technology innovation. Prior to joining Mzinga, Dan was co-founder and CEO of Prospero Technologies, where he was instrumental in developing the company’s secure, reliable platform and custom-branded, high-performance community applications and moderation tools

What is your startup story?

Mzinga is the culmination of three organizations with a heritage of innovation, proven success, and thought leadership. The company’s predecessor organizations—KnowledgePlanet, Shared Insights, and Prospero Technologies— were recognized pioneers in their own right for developing award-winning SaaS technologies, spearheading visionary initiatives, and creating the blueprint for the business social media world. The subsequent rapid emergence and rise of Mzinga as a market-leading online community and business social media solutions provider is a testament to the company’s leadership and strategic vision.

When we began the process of launching the combined entity, we knew we needed a name that would reflect not only our business, but the values we wanted to establish and the company we wanted to create.

In our brainstorming sessions, we kept coming back to beehives, which have long been used as a symbol of industry, teamwork, perseverance, and community. As a company whose focus would be enabling businesses to harness the intrinsic power of their communities, we knew we couldn’t find a more apt symbol to represent us to the world. In our research, we discovered that in Swahili, the word for "beehive" is mzinga. It was perfect for us – memorable, evocative, and as unique as we are.

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What do you think of Genotrope? Let Boston Know.

Genotrope
Location: Newburyport, MA
Funding: Self Funded
# of Employees: 5
URL: http://www.genotrope.com
Blog: http://genotrope.wordpress.com/,
http://buzzboston.wordpress.com/
Submitted By: Thomas Summit

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What’s your elevator pitch?

Genotrope is “Where experience leads to opportunity”. People interested in local start-ups and emerging technology anonymously use Genotrope to discover and monitor companies. When they are ready they can pursue opportunities directly with the company rather than going through a third party recruiter via a posted a job. Companies use our marketing channel to communicate with targeted users to develop their candidate pool. Genotrope is a more efficient approach to discovering opportunities at new companies.

Who is your target market?

Anyone interested in the Startup and Emerging Technology Market. Our current launch is for the Boston area, but we have plans to scale to all cities that support an emerging technology ecosystem. Genotrope aggregates a lot of information focused on the startup market, including advice from VC’s and entrepreneurs as well as career advice and profiles of new companies. We serve both Companies and Candidates with our novel recruiting application that uses the concept of Company Genealogy to match candidates with compatible opportunities.

What makes you different or stand out?

We help users find a compatible company first, the job comes after that. Eliminating keywords, resume/job postings and third party recruiters, Genotrope provides a more efficient and personalized way to discover career opportunities that addresses cultural issues as well as skills. Genotrope matches users and companies based upon the users work history. One of the major features of Genotrope is the user generated database of startup company profiles, connections to previous companies and Investors. This Company Genealogy database creates the “professional graph” that we use to match companies and users. Also, our business model, pay for performance is at the forefront of the trend in online recruiting.

Founder: Tom Summit 1st job in technology with Intel sales, 19 years recruiting for Boston startup companies.

What is your startup story?

One day I searched on the term recruit in google and I found that it occurs in another domain.

Microbiology uses the term recruit to describe how cells organize themselves. From there I made the biological analogy to building companies and then wrote a thought piece outlining the high level concept.

That is how I got started on the idea. The rest is distilling what a recruiter does, match candidates to companies and marketing to a targeted candidate pool, into a simple web application.

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What do you think of StyleFeeder? Let Boston Know.

StyleFeeder
Location: Cambridge, MA
Funding: VC – ($2M Series A in Jan. 08 plus an earlier round)
# of Employees: 7
URL: http://www.stylefeeder.com
Blog: http://blog.stylefeeder.com,
http://blog.tech.stylefeeder.com
Submitted By: Dina Pradel

What’s your elevator pitch?

StyleFeeder combines the best of Web 2.0’s social and personalization aspects in the Web’s only personal shopping engine. By learning about each person’s unique sense of style, StyleFeeder helps shoppers discover new products they’ll love and others who share their tastes. Even search results are returned with the user’s predicted order of preference in mind, providing a much more efficient way to find products like clothes, furniture and gadgets. StyleFeeder has also created the largest shopping application on Facebook, helping social networkers share their latest shopping finds and access their personal recommendations within the Facebook experience.

Who is your target market?

StyleFeeder can help anyone shop better, as our recommendation engine is designed to show users only the people and products we think are going to appeal to them. That being said, we’re really popular among 18-to-30-year-old female power shoppers!

What makes you different or stand out?

There are a lot of sites that say they offer “recommendations” to users…but often, the recommendations are extremely generic, or the onus remains on the user to browse other people’s finds. Current search engines work well if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but what if you only have a vague idea of what you want? We’ve used technology to cut through the clutter and make it much easier to discover products that the unique individual that is you is going to like. Our preference algorithm allows us to recommend not only products from around the web, from major retailers to long-tail boutiques, but also people who share your similar sense of style. Our site is social, in the sense that we’re drawing on the wisdom of the many, but it’s the combination of that social data as interpreted by our preference technology that is really powerful in providing actual utility to shoppers. We’ve also managed to crack the “cold start” problem that has plagued other recommendation engines based on collaborative filtering techniques – we can incorporate new data from users in real time.

Who are the founders?

Philip Jacob, a software architect, technology consultant and veteran of several Boston-area startups, created the initial version of StyleFeeder in 2005 and now serves as the CTO.

The management team is rounded out by VP of Business Development, Shergul Arshad, an e-commerce veteran with experience at companies like eBay and Fairmarket, and VP of Marketing, Dina Pradel, who had a background in targeting young web-savvy users at companies including MTV/Viacom and Y2M: Youth Media and Marketing Networks.

What is your startup story?
(Where did the idea come from, inspiration, funny anecdote, etc., etc.)

The story is actually one of the sections of our site that gets the most comments from users: http://www.stylefeeder.com/about.html! The short version is that Phil noticed that his wife was having a difficult time Christmas shopping with her friends — they were finding great stuff online, but losing track of the links when they tried to email or IM them to each other. Phil developed a site that would allow users to bookmark the items they were shopping for, and that’s how StyleFeeder became the first site in what is now called the “social shopping” space.

But it soon became apparent that shoppers were hungry for more powerful product discovery methods; hence the hiring of Jason Rennie, who holds a PhD from MIT in collaborative filtering. Rennie developed various data analysis techniques to create a sophisticated recommendation algorithm that powers the personalization aspects of the site.

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Related posts:

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What do you think of Marathon? Let Boston Know.

Marathon Technologies
Location: Littleton, MA
Funding: VC-Backed
# of Employees: 80
URL: www.marathontechnologies.com
Blog: www.marathontechnologies.net
Submitted By: Brian Mullins

What’s your elevator pitch?

Why Respond to Failure? PREVENT IT.

What if you were able to prevent business interruption instead of merely
planning for the recovery when a failure (inevitably) occurs?

Marathon Technologies prevents outages and data loss in physical and
virtual infrastructures – without requiring an army of IT people or
specialized IT skills. More than 1800 companies around the globe use
everRun(r) software to achieve uninterrupted availability, 100% data
protection and rapid recovery – all with “one-click” operation.

Who is your target market?

Mid-market customers with very limited IT resources and enterprise
customers who need to improve the resiliency of their IT systems.

What makes you different or stand out?

Five “First and Only’s”

1. FIRST AND ONLY FAULT-TOLERANT, HIGH AVAILABILITY SOFTWARE FOR
PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL SERVERS everRun VM provides Compute-Thru(r)
protection without the use of specialized hardware. The fault-tolerant
redundancy of everRun VM ensures no outages and zero data loss.
Companies can reliably run production applications in virtual machines -
gain virtualization benefits across much broader range of applications.

2. FIRST AND ONLY FULLY AUTOMATED HA SOLUTION FOR PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL SERVERS everRun VM has completely automated setup, configuration, fault
detection and policy management. Fully deployable in 30 minutes or less.
Removes traditional availability burden for IT. Brings automated HA and
DR to mid-market and F500 remote facilities.

3. FIRST AND ONLY AVAILABILITY SOFTWARE THAT ALLOWS AVAILABILITY TO BE
SELECTED BY VM Users have the ability to dial-in different availability
levels – from true high availability and fault tolerance to disaster
recovery and remote availability – based on specific application
requirements. Companies only pay for the protection needed – get the
best price/performance.

4. FIRST AND ONLY GEOGRAPHIC FAULT-TOLERANCE SOFTWARE FOR PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL SERVERS – everRun VM goes beyond local server-level protection
by enabling fault tolerance between geographically disperse locations to
maintain system availability even through more serious environmental and
regional outages. Production applications running in VMs available even
when entire data center is down. Compliance & production requirements
met even if disaster.

5. FIRST AND ONLY AVAILABILITY SOFTWARE DESIGNED AND PRICED FOR BROAD
ADOPTION everRun VM is the first software that combines the
availability benefits of server virtualization with simple automated
availability software. Companies can afford to protect applications they
aren’t protecting today.

Who are the founders?

Marathon Technologies was founded by senior executives and engineers
responsible for developing Digital’s VAX FT fault-tolerant systems. The
team used this experience to create the first software and networking
technology that allowed multiple Windows/Intel servers to operate as a
single fault-tolerant system.

What is your startup story?
(Where did the idea come from, inspiration, funny anecdote, etc., etc.)

Marathon’s original name, Marathon Computer Company, was chosen because
of the association of running with incredible endurance and resiliency -
two core components of the company’s high availability technology. Also
as a New England-based company with strong ties to the region, it was
fitting to be associated with The Boston Marathon, the world’s
longest-running marathon.

Marathon didn’t want to be seen as just another computer company, but as
a company with an enabling technology that protected businesses from
downtime, so they quickly changed the name to Marathon Technologies -
still highlighting their ability to keep customers’ systems and
applications up and running.

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93Startup Profiles are submitted by the companies themselves. If you would like to have your startup profile on the site, please read this post.

What do you think of Bizak? Let Boston Know.

BIZAK
Location: Brookline, MA
Funding: Self funded
# of Employees: 1
URL: www.bizak.com
Blog: www.tomokeefe.com
Submitted By: Tom O’Keefe

What’s your elevator pitch?

Bizak is a business network which computes the profitability and valuation of Internet startups. Startups can compare their visitors, revenues, costs and valuation to their competitors and industry benchmarks. Investors use this analysis to discover new funding opportunities and professionals utilize Bizak’s traffic analysis to form new business partnerships.

Who is your target market?

Bizak’s geared specifically for Internet entrepreneurs and investors interested in funding their startups.

What makes you different or stand out?

Bizak is different from most web analytics firms in that if you tell us what your statistics are then we’ll tell you how you stack up against your competition.

Who are the founders?

Bizak is founded by Tom O’Keefe. Tom is the president of TOKiBiz, Inc. which helps entrepreneurs create profitably startups and will also launch infoMedMD in June.

What is your startup story?
(Where did the idea come from, inspiration, funny anecdote, etc., etc.)

I was a financial analyst out of college (BC) and I’m very familiar with the benchmarks used to analyze public companies. With Bizak I thought why don’t we create a benchmark to analyze and value internet startups?

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I’ll post profiles from interesting New England startups ranging from the individual entrepreneur launching a micro-business to the larger tech startups with buckets of funding. I plan on posting 1 – 2 profiles per week depending upon what I receive. I’ve already received a few profiles from some local startups and some of the finalists from the 2008 MITX awards. Please submit your profile today.

Interested in Having Your Company Profiled?

Companies interested in having a profile up on 93osuth should answer the following questions and email it to dave [aht] 93south {dot} net. Please keep it brief – just a few sentences per question.

PROFILE QUESTIONS
- What is your elevator pitch?
- Who is your target market?
- What makes you different or stand out?
- Who are the founders / key people? (Name & 1 sentence on each)
- What is your startup story? (Where did the idea come from, inspiration,
funny anecdote, etc., etc.)

OTHER BASIC QUESTIONS:
- City, State
- Funding Status & Amount (if public)
- # of Employees
- Site URL
- Blog URL (if you have one)
- Career Page URL
- Screenshots: A good representative image(s) of the product – please send .JPG or PNG formats.

View The Current 93Startup Profile

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