This weeks 93Startup profile, currently in Alpha, brings a crowdsourcing approach to sourcing vendors for your business.  We all know that finding a new service provider can be a risky and frustrating process.  VendorCity is looking to make that process easier through customer recommendations.

I met founder Craig Gillespie at the recent PopSignal event in Boston and look forward to using the service for my next sourcing project.  VendorCity will start a public beta in the Boston and New Hampshire markets soon.

What do you think of VendorCity? Let Boston Know.

VendorCity
Location: Hampstead, NH
Funding: Self-Funded
# of Employees: 3
URL: VendorCity.com

Submitted By: JC Cameron

What is your elevator pitch?
At VendorCity, we have two core business beliefs that drive us forward every day:

· Vendors and service providers are critical partners in running a successful business

· The best way of finding highly recommended and trusted vendors is through word-of-mouth referrals

Working with the wrong vendor can be very costly but finding the right one is like finding a needle in a haystack.  Thus, we built VendorCity, a proprietary recommendation engine that leverages the power of social and professional networking to provide businesses with 24-7 access to word-of-mouth referrals.

Who is your target market?
Our target market is the small and medium-sized business sector.  Until now, most small businesses have not had compelling reasons to participate in the online social and professional networking sites because there was little to no direct value to their bottom line.  However, every company needs good outside vendors as they are critical partners in running a successful business. Now, with VendorCity, the B2B marketplace has a crowdsourcing tool that allows them to find the best vendors and, from a “good karma” perspective, allows them to reward good vendors with great recommendations.

What makes you different or stand out?
VendorCity is unique in that it turns the online vendor search process completely around.  A standard Google or Yahoo search returns a long list of far too many companies all of which appear provide the same service. Our approach eliminates the needle in the haystack problem, because our engine is stocked with the most highly recommended vendors within each industry. Unlike traditional online models, where top placement in search results is influenced by technical trickery or, more often, bought outright with marketing dollars, the only way a vendor can rise to the top in our engine is by positive recommendations from their clients.

The VendorCity recommendation engine:

· Provides immediate access to the short list of peer-reviewed and top-ranked vendors in a city

· Rewards the best vendors with more business opportunities and allows them to rise to the top

Our community of users enable the best vendors to be highlighted and to ensure that bad vendors cannot simply buy their way to new business.

Who are the founders?
· JC Cameron, President & Co-Founder, is a serial entrepreneur with 20+ years of software development experience and has built a number of successful businesses including WebEvent, a venture-funded scheduling company whose software is still being used and sold nearly 15 years after it was first launched.

· Craig Gillespie, CFO & Co-Founder, is a senior financial executive with more than 15 years experience in financial roles in technology companies including overseeing all financial aspects of a $25M+ software company.

· Tom Harms, Director of Technology & Co-Founder, is a well-rounded technology and software developer with a specialty in higher mathematics who has been building world-class software solutions for almost a decade.

What is your startup story? (Where did the idea come from, inspiration, funny anecdote, etc., etc.)
As startup veterans, we are always looking for good ideas to build a successful new business.  The idea behind the company was initiated by a conversation that Craig, our CFO, had with a colleague of ours.  They were discussing how difficult and time consuming it was for startups to find vendors and how they were constantly being asked by people if they could recommend a company that did X, Y, or Z.   As we discussed the concept, it was clear the problem wasn’t limited to startups in high-growth mode and that just about every small and medium-sized business needs a way to find good vendors.Many times, companies continue to use bad or mediocre vendors simply because it is too much effort to find better ones.  Thus, VendorCity was born to solve this universal business challenge.

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Our next 93Startup Profile is from another MITX finalist that is taking on the task of managing social communities for top brands including AOL and ESPN.  It looks like they have been doing quite well with "14,000 communities under management".

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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Our next 93Startup Profile is from another MITX finalist and a company that I have covered on 93South before - StyleFeeder, the web 2.0 “personal shopping site”.

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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I guess it is a whole new world - it used to be the norm to have your parents post the news of your engagement (no…this is not a post about Facebook user engagement) in the local newspaper but not anymore.  I logged into my neglected Facebook account to find the engagement announcement of 2 close friends Steve and Katerina!

The couple purposely publicized the announcement of their engagement through Facebook as the easiest way to spread the news.  Here is the question - what is the most unexpected item that you found out about on Facebook (or other social site)?

I will save my "top-10 new things to announce on Facebook" for another post and just say congratulations! 

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