Our next local 93Startup profile, TotSpot is a very well designed application (it’s a Ruby app!) that strives to make it easy to spread the news of juniors latest achievement through the web. Although I have not had the chance to dive deeply into TotSpot yet, I plan a review soon.

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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View Profile
on Genotrope

If you have been to many of the local technology events in the area, you probably have run into Genotrope CPO Thomas Summit.  Genotrope, out of Newburyport, is using an interesting visualization technology to deliver a picture of a companies “DNA” as seen through the founders past companies and investors.  It’s user-generated database is being marketed as a recruiting resource but I have found great value as a corporate research tool as well.

Do you have a local startup? Submit your 93Startup Profile today.

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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View Profile

on Genotrope

I’ve decided to launch a new feature and allow local entrepreneurs to post a profile of their companies on 93south. These posts would be a “in their own words” type article that will enable companies to present their businesses through a series of standard questions.

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

Thank you!

Finally back in the saddle and ready to start writing again after my extended hiatus from the blog.  As if anyone actually cares…I spent the past week in Paris visiting the rest of the 3DVIA team (the current day job) to get ready for some upcoming projects and product releases.

If you have an interest anywhere in the 3D industry you can check out some of the current releases including 3dvia.com (a 3D “Flickr” community), Virtools (3D interactive development platform) and the alpha version of TVnima (produce your own 3D news shows…early, but very cool).

Now back to Boston Web 2.o…