By: Co-Editor, Bobby B:

When I was in college dealing with bills was a major headache. We had one roommate who never had any money and was always late with getting it in. Also, no one in our house wanted the chore of collecting every month and keeping track of all of the house’s expenses.

To help with that chore comes Beezang.com, a new site out of India, launched in August 2009 and currently in alpha.

Beezang.com is a free, simple to use web application that helps people manage and keep track of bills they split with friends, roommates and office colleagues. You can use Beezang.com to stay on the top of your apartment shared expenses with your roommate, you can also track bills associated with weekend get away trips.

The site does one thing and does it good. The folks at Beezang.com have worked hard on the usability so that its users do not have to spend hours figuring out how to use the app. They are working towards constantly improving the application.

You can also track debts and informal IOUs using Beezang.com, and it helps you know where you are spending your money and it analyses your spending habits.

Starting in December of 2009, the site added some extra features. You can now enter your personal bills by clicking on ‘Add Bill‘ tab on the side navigation bar and then by clicking the ‘Add Personal Expense‘ tab, you can enter the bill by filling in some simple details and assigning a category.

They have also added a new tab on the Home Page titled ‘Personal Expense‘ . This tab shows you a neat pie chart that gives you an idea about where you have spent your money in the current month. If you want to dig further into the details, just click on “More Details” and you will be able to see the data and your spending pattern of the last three months.

There is a demo video on the site, so check it out and give it a try.

Post from: GreatStartups.com

By: Co-Editor, Bobby B:

Ice cream trucks are part of the quintessential American summer. The sound of the Good Humor man or here in the Northeast Mister Softee were part of your child, if you are of a certain age.

High gas prices, noise restrictions and media accounts of ice cream trucks being used for nefarious purposes  have made the sight of an ice cream truck is a rare occurrence in most neighborhoods.

Captain Ice Cream, a Los Angeles based start-up aims to change all that. Captain Ice Cream is a franchise of 3-wheeled, moped-powered, novelty ice cream vending trucks. The unique size of Captain Ice Cream’s ice cream mopeds allow the franchisee to go where the other ice cream trucks can’t go: deep into parks, farmer’s market booths, parades and other places that are simply impractical for trucks.

The 2010 Ice Cream Mopeds feature a cold-plate freezer that holds approximately 500-600 novelty ice cream treats. You can plug the freezer into any standard 110-volt outlet at night and its internal temperature will drop down to -15°F. The freezer will maintain 0°F for 6 to 8 hours in 100°+F temperatures.

The 2010 Ice Cream Moped models are based on the Tomos ST moped. Tomos ST models feature an oil injection system.
Every 2010 Ice Cream Moped model comes custom-painted in “Ice Cream White”, including front wheel.

$12,495.00 cost is Freight On Board (F.O.B.) Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. The buyer pays all shipping costs and must make own shipping arrangements. Shipping can be handled by any of the many motorcycle shippers available. The company provides a rough estimate of shipping cost in the $750 range to ship one ice cream moped from California to New York.

The price includes a one-year Captain Ice Cream franchise fee (a $2495.00 value – a franchise contract will be supplied before delivery of your ice cream moped), four Captain Ice Cream billboards (one for each side of the freezer box) and one sheet of blue reflective-vinyl stars.

The owner of Captain Ice Cream, Tim Gavern, is about to pitch the company on ABC’s popular reality television show, “Shark Tank.” The Captain Ice Cream episode airs on Jan. 22, 2010.

Post from: GreatStartups.com

By: Co-Editor, Bobby B:

If you are getting any belated holiday gifts or someone’s birthday is coming up, you should consider a relatively new site called BookSwim.com.

Just like NetFlix.com, you pay a monthly fee and rent up to 11 books at a time. BookSwim.com has just unveiled new plans at reduced prices.
The new plans feature:

• Price reduction to $9.95 monthly: The old $15 starter plan changed to become $9.95 for any book
• “Exclusive at BookSwim”: BookSwim is the only rental club offering newly released novels and nonfiction bestsellers published in hardcover format.
• UPS-integrated shipping: Speedier delivery, dramatically reducing outbound transit times to members’ homes at no additional cost.

The $9.95 charge is a starter charge, and you pay from $23.95 (for 3 books at a time) to $59.95 (for 11 books at a time). BookSwim.com offers all types of books including hardcover new releases, mystery/thrillers and modern nonfiction all the way to cookbooks, chick lit, self-help, contemporary romance, classics and even textbooks. Given the fact they are shipping books (and in a lot of cases hardcovers) as opposed to DVDs as with NetFlix.com their prices are extraordinarily reasonable.

College friends, George Burke and Shamoon Siddiqui, founded BookSwim in 2006 because they shared both a love for reading and a desire not to spend so much money on it. Prior to going online, BookSwim earned the Rutgers Business School’s 2006-2007 Business Plan Competition Finalist Award.

Since launching the subscription service, BookSwim has grown rapidly, breaking all one-year projections in fewer than six months, and tripling by the end of that first year. Burke and Siddiqui brought an improved version of BookSwim, already in business, back to the Rutgers competition for the 2007-2008 edition, and won the grand prize.

BookSwim.com also likes to trumpet its green credentials. Renting books, rather than purchasing, helps lower the number of trees cut down each year for virgin paper. BookSwim also plants trees for every gift card it sells. As a combination of these efforts, BookSwim states that it has planted or otherwise saved enough trees to reduce 10 TONS of carbon emissions.

While many of the sites we review are conceptual in nature, BookSwim requires no mindbending exercise to understand how it works nor does it require a change in well- established behavior to flourish. It simply is an easier way to access books, while saving money and trees. What could be better than that?

Post from: GreatStartups.com

By: Co-Editor, Bobby B:

While Facebook searched for ways to monetize its behemoth of a site. Other business are seeking ways to use the power of Facebook to create their own businesses

Launched on November 12, 2009, a Cape Town, South Africa startup called Personera.com is seeking to use Facebook for its own purposes.

Personera.com allows people around the world to design and order print products personalized with their Facebook content. You can use your Facebook account to sign in, customize and order your product.

Personera’s service allows people to use their Facebook accounts to log in through Facebook Connect, and make their entire social network content instantly available for product personalization. Users are able to choose a theme, automatically add their friend’s birthdays and events each day, and drag and drop their favorite photos into the monthly layout.

A high quality 12-month, 32-page printed calendar then is delivered to their mailbox. The service itself costs $24.95, but that includes shipping to anywhere in the world.

Personera.com feels that there offerings mark a significant shift for the mainstream calendar market, because their fast and easy individual personalization becomes available to more than 300 million mainstream Facebook users worldwide.

The ideas behind Personera.com were dreamed up by co-founders Sheraan Amod and Jaco de Wet, self-described “evangelists” in the radically separate worlds of web and print.

“By combining our passion for old and new media, we looked to find the best of both worlds – a simple way to customize print to the same level that people have come to expect online” the pair said in a joint statement announcing the launch of the site.

The site is real simple to use and with the launch behind them, Personera.com looks forward to creating new markets in old media.

Post from: GreatStartups.com

By: Co-Editor, Bobby B:

Technology can be a wonderful thing or a ponderous thing, depending on how it is deployed and who deploys it. A new website that is creating quite a bit of controversy is eliciting opinions across a broad spectrum.

Youtego.com, a Bay Area based start-up launched on September 30, 2009, describes itself as a new visual tool for self-visualization on the Internet. As stated on their website and in their releases, Youtego.com believes in the mantra “recognize yourself to recognize the world around you”. They think that the concept of self-visualization represents what you believe, feel, know, taught or capable of doing.

The process of self-visualization in Youtego.com is a combination of semantics (words and phrases) and visual representation (pictures and photos) that the user defines (words and phrases) and selects (picture). Ultimately, the user gets the combination or matrix of visual objects that they personally defined and visualized. The elements of that matrix (the company calls them Tegos) may match with people’s Tegos anywhere in the world.

Once you sign up for an account, you start by creating a ‘Tegoset’. If you are a golf nut you presumably would post pictures relating to that interest. With a Tegoset you have the ability to explain what you like and enjoy without to having to write anything — it’s all done through pictures.

The Company describes the experience this way: “Youtego makes self-recognition simple and visually attractive. You recognize your feelings and emotions, knowledge and capabilities. By recognizing and visualizing yourself – you recognize people around you, around the world based on the idea of self-similarity and visual semantics. Moreover, Youtego provokes your imagination and creativity.”

Some of you will read this and think wow that’s really cool and others will think this is a bunch of pretentious nonsense. Not surprisingly, the reaction by reviewers has been passionate but mixed.

TechCrunch.com thought Youtego.com was similar to iMindi.com.

iMindi.com was once referred to by Mark Cuban as the “biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard in my life.”

A VentureBeat.com writer stated  that “Youtego is bringing a new experience to social networking. It’s all about using images to define yourself, your life, and your interests, and in the little while that I’ve been playing with my account, I’m already having more fun than Facebook ever provided.”

I think the enjoyment one will get from Youtego.com will depend on your sensibility. With Youtego.com it is less about “Seeing Is Believing” and more about “You must believe it, to see it”.

Post from: GreatStartups.com