Cambridge on 93South



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

.

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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hubspot Congratulations to our own HubSpot for pulling down $12M in funding as reported on TechCrunch.  The Series B round led by Matrix Partners is in addition to the $5M the company raised last September in a round led by General Catalyst.

This may give the HubSpot team another reason to celebrate at tonight’s PopCocktail…I mean PopSignal event!

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StyleFeeder, the local social shopping startup, announced partnerships with both Shopping.com and The Glam Network today. The company will extend it’s reach and technology to Shopping.com users and the Glam Publisher Network of more than 400 popular lifestyle websites and blogs targeting women.

StyleFeeder recently announced a new open API initiative for social media developers and since last year has grown significantly with more than four million page views each month and more than 800,000 unique visitors per month. StyleFeeder is currently the largest shopping application on Facebook with nearly one million installs.

Is it me, or does the team image on their management page look like the back cover of a 90s-era rock band?

team-vignette

Which one is the bass player? Is Shergul on the phone and his celly?

Congratulations!

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gamerDNA_Logo_Color1 Jon Radoff and the team over at GuildCafe (now in posh Central Square) announced another round of funding today and the launch of their new brand gamerDNA.  The new $3 million of funding was led by Flybridge Capital Partners.

The current GuildCafe.com site, a social network built to organizing groups within MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, will still operate and continue to improve as the company focuses on building out the new gamerDNA service.

Congratulations!

Courtesy of Xconomy & FLYBRIDGE.

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93South is a blog covering Boston and New England area start-ups, technology, web 2.0 and funding news, announcements and news.