October 14th, 2009

The Bootup Technology Start-up Investor Community puts startups in front of engineers and business professionals to create a forum for analysis, the technical pitch, and team building.

Poverty's Demise

PDO can be thought of as a technological road map for sustainable child poverty alleviation that is a combination of Facebook, PayPal, and eBay, except PDO is nonprofit, open-source, and pacifist. Donors and poor children receive web-based user profiles (like Facebook). Using a Donor Portal connected to support Accounts, which hold cash donations (like PayPal), donors can purchase specific social welfare related items from a simple shopping cart interface (Like eBay). The Social Welfare Shopping Cart represents the sum total of all of a child's possible needs for healthy development (food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, etc.). In the future, if every child born has a full social welfare shopping cart, from PDO tax deductible donations, poverty will end.

Background

Darryl Penrice is the Executive Director of Poverty's Demise. He has experience creating and growing organizations. He also has experience living in poverty. His life has molded him into the ideal man for ending poverty.

Startup Maturity

PDO was registered in 2007 and its prototype has been open to the public since late that year. PDO has just entered the early stages of development and is looking to have an online functional version by mid January 2010.

Blank Slate

Blank Slate Factory, Inc. is a web platform that offers acomplete set of APIs for making, sharing, monetizing, and monitoring web applications. The Blank Slate platform provides core infrastructure and application capabilities through REST style APIs, allowing our customers to focus on what's important to them, and leaving back end concerns to us.

Benefits include:

1. Development - Less coding means quicker time to market.
2. Sharing - Because applications are built on top of APIs, sharing information through APIs is inherent, no additional coding to publish APIs.
3. Deep Analytics - Because APIs sit at the core of the application, the Blank Slate platform is in a great position to capture deep real-time analytics, more than just page views.

Background

Kael Goodman (CEO)
Ning Zhou (CTO)

We founded Blank Slate in early 2008. Prior to Blank Slate, we were both in the world of heavy-weight enterprise IT where the idea to make a light web development platform was born. Along the way, we discovered that APIs provides a great balance between masking the complexities of IT and giving people the flexibility to get what they want in a web app.

Startup Maturity

We've been heads down building out our platform technology and eating our own dog food. The Blank Slate Platform is stable and supports several revenue generating products that we built over the past few months.

With the platform reaching some maturity, we are now opening Blank Slate to beta customers. Beta customers can be developers and business people -- and we're helping to match people with complementary skills.

Products built on the Blank Slate Platform
decisionads.com - Classified advertising solution for publishers
esellerads.com - One click rich media advertising for Etsy sellers
brownstoner.com/directory/ - Directory solution for the popular Brownstoner blog
feedbackslider.com - Lightweight HTML/JavaScript feedback form

PublicStuff

PublicStuff is an online platform that connects people and local governments by putting city services, information and collaboration tools online. PublicStuff's web-based solution addresses the service needs of both residents and local governments. The online consumer platform allows the public to request services and create community change. The online municipal platform allows cities to cost-effectively manage communications with constituents and better manage the service delivery processes. PublicStuff increases civic participation while also driving down costs for local governments.

Our primary benefits include:

1. Access: Residents have access to city services and other critical
   information.
2. Workflow Efficiency: Governments can better manage online requests and increase workflow efficiency.
3. Analytics: Governments have access to analytics for city-wide decision making.
4. Communication: Opening lines of communication between neighbors and governments for positive change.

Background

Lily Liu - Founder
Vincent Polidoro - Tech Guru

Lily has over 6 years of management experience in local government agencies and has worked on the implementation and rollout of a 311 system. Our CTO and COO have in-depth experience (Intuit, Napster, Excite, PP) and all members of the management team have individually launched and supported numerous community-based initiatives. Lily founded PublicStuff after working on the implementation of a 311 system that was canceled due to the high operating costs.

Startup Maturity

PublicStuff was founded in early 2009. We are releasing the front end website within the month and kicking off our pilot program with cities in November. We have channel partners, a pipeline of customers and have received media attention. We are seeking to grow our team, and bring on additional technology development staff from management to staff level.

tunesBag

tunesBag is the best way to backup your tunes collection protecting your investment (time & money). You can upload your tracks in various ways including a native uploader for iTunes and other desktop programs.

Once synchronized, you can access your playlists and tunes using multiple devices including browsers, iPhone, Desktop app or your HDTV (boxee). At a party with bad music? Just launch tunesBag and play your own playlists. Want to know what your friends are listening to? Check out the "Friend's stream" at tunesBag. Need some music in the office? Log in to tunesBag and access all your tracks. Want to share new track with friends or on twitter? Just hit the "Share" button. Your iPhone has only 8GB but your tunes collection 100 GB? Stream all tracks to your mobile with tunesBag.

tunesBag has been featured on TechCrunch, Mashable, Wired, Centernetworks, Techradar etc and several thousand users signed up for the closed beta. We'll launch in October with new features, premium services, additional languages supported and an iPhone client. Developers should check out our API for building custom clients.

We pursue a freemium business model and whitelabel approach.

Background

The conceptual work on tunesBag has started on late 2008 by the founding members Gerhard, Hannes and Hansjoerg. All three founders have a strong background in working for mobile operators and online ventures. The company is based in Vienna, Austria and 100% funded by the owners. We're currently looking for a First Round Financing and partners in the US.