Startup Daily

I don’t know about you, but I’m an avid Dropbox user. It’s the best way to store and share files from any of your devices. With all of its features, 3rd party developers have found aweseome ways to make it even better.

dBinbox.com creates an inbox for your Dropbox folder for anyone to use. Just like you send over files by email, dBinbox lets friends and family anonymously upload files to your Dropbox folder without ever needing an account.

All you need to do is create a username and link your Dropbox account. Check mine out for an example: dbinbox.com/m.

Whenever someone uploads a file to my unique URL, either by dragging and dropping files from their computer of by clicking the “+ Choose Files” button, a folder called dinbox is updated with those files (this is found in your /Dropbox/Apps/dBinbox/ folder).

I can see myself getting my parents or friends who don’t use dropbox to upload large files like pictures and videos through dBinbox. It’ll also even let me upload my own files to my Dropbox from public computers not having to worry about logging in every time.

We all buy stuff online. Whether it being small purchases like clothing or bigger ones like a new camera. The problem is that there are way too many sites selling different deals at different times and googling what you're looking for doesn't always help.

DealScorcher is a search engine for deals online. Looking for a new Canon camera, plug it in and find the best deals online from popular services like Amazon Deals, Slickdeals, FatWallet and more. Find what you're looking for instantly or sign up and enter items you're on the lookout for. DealScorcher will then message you once a deal for the product you're looking for comes up.

Deal alerts will help manage what you're looking for so that when something pops up online with the best deal, you get notified. Setting it up is as easy as entering a few keywords and that's it.

There's a crap load of sites out there promoting what's going on now in your neighbourhood. But with so many of them, it takes longer to look for something to do than actually doing it.

Bebedo, a new web app developed by 3 ex-RIM employees, gives users the ability to see a dashboard of activities in their neighbourhoods by aggregating events from a handful of popular web sites, bringing in information like the location, time, details and more.

Vendors can equally post activities into Bebedo to let users become aware of upcoming events that they're promoting.

So I recently talked about alternative services to Craigslist where buying and selling items can be rethought and even re-invented. In the west coast, there are services like Zaarly that serves a different type of marketplace where users request things and members provide them at a price where the best one wins. Now there's something similar but even better in the east and they call themselves peddl.

Peddl is rethinking how buying and selling should be done in local neighbourhoods. Users simply post what they need and sellers get a notification on their phone when it happens. All communication, including messaging and calling is done within the app and lets both sides of the table effortlessly close the deal by paying within peddl from your credit card (coming soon).

The guys behind peddl are all MIT media lab grads and are really pushing the limits on local commerce. Making the whole process part of the service makes it an ideal choice for everyone involved. It'll be interesting to see how quickly this picks up among neighbourhoods across the country. Right now, especially with the company being based out of Boston, it seems to be getting a lot of traction in its surrounding neighbourhoods.

Ever wanted to send a file to a friend but realized that the options out there were endless and un-intuitive?

Well SendRail, a desktop app, lets you send your friends files and folders without any size constraints. Have the ability to quickly and effortlessly send videos, photos, docs and more by simply clicking one button and specifying your friends name. The recipient would then receive a facebook message that allows them to download the link securely if they are not SendRail users. 

More and more file sharing tools are becoming prominent amongst users. Dropbox for one lets you share a file with friends equally as easy, but requires for the file to upload to their servers before being able to retrive it. SendRail is different in the sense that it allows users to send files over a peer to peer network if the recipient is also using the software. This makes it that much faster when transmitting large files.

Being a fellow engineering student, I've seen the many shortcomings with textbooks and web tutorials when it comes to explaining fundamental science. Generally, having to go to to Wikipedia and course textbooks has often led me to asking even more questions.

A few days ago, Name-Reaction.com launched and its goal was to explain chemical reactions with more emphasis on design and simplicity for the academic involved. 

Scrolling through the different organic reactions, users can quickly hover over any name to preview a quick schematic. Better yet, clicking into a reaction gives users knowledge on the mechanisms involved in a beautiful color coded format.

**Note: I'm going to keep today's post short since I have an exam in a few hours.

There's Spotify, Rdio, and a dozen other paid music providers. And now there's a new one. CloudPlay is making it easy for users to quickly listen to music on their terms whenever they want and as much as they want through their FREE Mac App. 

Search any song off of youtube and other providers like Sound Cloud and create playlists for you to listen to whenever you want.

I hate selling stuff online. I generally never get a response unless I'm giving it away for a steal. Today, I found a service that was posted on Hacker News, that instantly got me interested again.

BidKat is rethinking the eBay model by letting you sell your stuff with as little as a few clicks. Post your pictures, the description and the desired price range of your product and BidKat will take care of the rest by negotiating on your behalf until that range is met.

The benefit for once, is that you get a dedicated web page without exhaustive ads or competitive products sitting alongside yours. You can even add the dedicated link to your already existing posts on Craigslist and share with friends and family on Twitter and Facebook.

So I went ahead and gave it a try by posting these bad boys and instantly saw the benefit over traditional sites like Craigslist and Kijiji. With every post, the seller gets a unique link that provides more details on how people are visiting the auction in real time.

I've had my fair share of productivity tools, especially when it comes to school, work and personal tasks. Personally, I've used Wunderlist to keep track of my everyday tasks, Asana for work at PagerDuty, and am now considering ThetaBoard to take over my every day items.

ThetaBoard was built with the idea of Kanban Boards in mind, allowing for developers and general every day people to prioritize tasks by specifying the following: To Do,  In Progress, and whats Done.

With ThetaBoard, you can easily track tasks by dragging items between columns at ease and simply add cards (tasks) as they come in. This approach, similar to Trello, is really intuitive and simple to any user and gives you the ability to approach your day to day tasks with lean processes in mind. 

If you have a team or an organization that needs a better tool for project management, ThetaBoard also offers group plans where users are able to collaborate in real time allowing you to assign specific tasks to different members of the team and see when they're done as they happen.

A few weeks back, my team and I from Unlockly were pitching for UWDemoDay sponsored by Velocity. From the bunch that pitched, there were a few that stuck to me as great products I saw myself using.

One of them was Peer Collider, a web app that lets event attendees join local chat rooms to discuss the days events and topics. Built in less than 48 hours, the guys at Peer Collider really amazed the crowd with the level of interactivity the product had once used by multiple people.

As much as there is Twitter, a big channel used during tech conferences and events, Peer Collider showed a new alternative that could easily create more connectivity with attendees world wide.

We've all had this happen to us before, we're using facebook groups or messaging apps like Kik or GroupMe on our phones, and theres always these different topics within one group of people involved. I find that there are some topics I wish to contribute to with my friends, but others that I really wish I could unsubscribe to.

That's where Eko comes in. After downloading the app from the App Store, users are able create groups of people after inviting them, and from there have the ability to build separate topics around those groups.

With Eko, your friends and family will be able to discuss different topics all while keeping it organized and threaded between conversations.

With the latest push towards meeting new people through virtual channels, the guys over at Hubchilla have given us the ability to do just that, but from our mobile phone with SMS.

Airtime, most famously cofounded by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning from Napster, is similar in the sense that it matches you with another person that has similar facebook interests anonymously through video. Even with all the celebrity endorsements, the video medium, a good one albeit, doesn't seem to bring people to come back and use it again since it seems to be more personal than people would like it to be.

Now, with HubChilla, users can quickly login with Facebook and have the ability to chat anonymously with others who have similar interests all from SMS. Using commands like #play, #pause, and #next, HubChila users can control who they want to talk to and when without having to ever install an application. 

From the comments on Hacker News, 100's of college students from around the US are loving the service and even the CEO of Twilio, Jeff Lawon, seems to agree in its "awsomesause(ness)":

Ha, SMS chat roulette. Awesomesauce hubchilla.com

— jeffiel (@jeffiel) August 3, 2012

Rewardling, the latest payments startup from Winnipeg plans on giving e-commerce merchants the ability to reward customers with store credit for future use right after completing a transaction. 

Merchants do this by integrating Rewardling's payment gateway with existing e-commerce stores. Once a customer decides to purchase something, they are presented with the option to pay with Rewardling where in return, 8% of the transaction will be rewarded in the form of store credit. Customers would then have to use the store credit within 7 days in order to take advantage of the credit.

With e-commerce on the rise, merchants need to able to drive customer acquisition through new and innovative channels to help grow their revenue and dually provide customers with a motive to return. Rewardling is not yet available to the public but you can sign up on their site to know when they launch.

Businesses are quickly making the shift to the cloud, using tools like Salesforce.com, Yammer, Box, and another dozen or so to help stay productive and cost efficient. As a result, more and more of your data is piling on and it's getting really difficult to manage all of it.

Navideo pegs themselves "solving the big data problem for the little person," making information from everywhere easily accessible from one app. Now you may think Navideo is just like Cue (formerly known as Greplin - YC10) but they're not. They bring enterprise sharing and collaboration features so that you can bring in your entire organization.

UniRadar, an app built by four Aussies, is the events aggregator every student needs on campus. They make it easy for students to import events from facebook, create events and see what's happening around campus.

Diving right into the app, UniRadar requests users to first log in through Facebook to gather simple details about yourself. Right after granting Facebook access, users will select their school from the few that they support and right away have the ability to follow groups and clubs around campus and know what events are planned during the term. Once you follow a group/club, you'll have access to all the different events that they're hosting and know which of your friends from Facebook are attending. 

With students crowding small campuses around the world, UniRadar has a huge opportunity to take campuses at large and will need to continually build up momentum to let anyone anywhere make use of the app from their own campus.

First off, thanks for coming to my first blog, ever. My goal is simple, connect the startups that get limited exposure to the world. Everyday, I will cover a different company focused on fixing a problem that I feel is important. 

Before getting ahead of myself, let me tell you why I'm doing this. I'm currently in my last year in EE at uWaterloo and have spent the majority of my time reading day-in-day-out about new startups from SV, Toronto, and beyond. The one thing I kept noticing time and time again is the lack of good PR for young startups that don't (yet) have the YCs or the TechStars, or Sequoias behind them. Why? Well that's the problem, they don't generally have enough traction to be covered. 

How will I do this? I've made my best attempts in first researching which startups haven't been mentioned by the press with the help of AngelList and CrunchBase. I've started with a list of 7 companies that I want to talk about in the next 7 days that I think deserve some attention.