Does your site need a fresh new look?  Medford’s Templamatic is looking to help.  The business, started by local designer Ben Harper,  is building a marketplace for  high quality web templates supplied by a community of graphic designers.

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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on Genotrope

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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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

.

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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on Genotrope

It was a great turnout for the PopSignal event last night in Boston. All of the usual suspects were out in force and the registration table claimed they had close to the 600 registered attendees there at the event.

I also spoke with quite a few small startups either are launched or just about to get going including 2 "wisdom of the crowd" (love the buzzwords) plays that were interesting.  There first person I talked with was Craig from a NH based startup called Vendorcity.  Vendorcity will create a new way for SMBs to source services. There was also micro-entrepreneur James who is working on a stealth way for open source projects to "crowd source" (buzzword again) their project management ideas.  I’ll keep you updated on both startups as they develop.

And not to be outdone, tripadvisor pulled out their full-sized mascot. I wonder what the executive meeting was like when they debuted this costumed character?  Who pulled the short straw to where this last night?

Cheers!