Reviews

Moreganize is a Swiss-based startup that looks to help you organize groups using surveys. Example uses would be to find the perfect time for a group meeting or which movie everyone in the group is interested in viewing. There are also some basic project management services including a to-do list.

The site is easy-to-use and if the survey is used for an event, schedule invites can be automatically sent to the attendees. The service is available in German and English although I would suggest they make sure all of the content is available in English. I see a good bit of words and phrases in German even on the English version.

They also need to look at making it easier to create a survey. There's no link to create on the homepage and while the text says "no registration required" the only link to get started is for "free registration".

Update: Our Switzerland connection Corsin Camichel tells me that the biggest competition for Moreganize comes from switzerland itself: doodle.

Here's a Moreganize sample where John Sample attempts to get feedback on which type of movie his guests would like to watch:

Check out Mark Gibbs' review of Moreganize at NetworkWorld. And check out our coverage of other event-planning services including MyPunchbowl, Renkoo, Center'd, Coordinatr and GoLark.

TravelMob is a new startup doing for group travel what Evite does for group events. TravelMob CEO Adam Smith notes that the service includes customized trip homepage, the ability to invite people and manage RSVPs, upload important trip-related files, create a photo gallery, see top tours for your destination, and plan via message board. Going with the 2008 flow, TravelMob has a Facebook-style newsfeed so that trip attendees can be updated as others add information to the site.

I planned a trip using TravelMob to Las Vegas and found it the service easy-to-use. TravelMob is tied into the Sabre travel booking system so you can book air, hotel, car directly inside of TravelMob. If you book outside of TravelMob, there's an option to add booking details. There's an option to, "Jump on this Flight" so you can fly with other members of your travel group. I love Web apps that launch with a business plan. Selling bookings is just one way TravelMob can generate revenue.

TravelMob needs to go through the app and spell check and tidy up -- no reason to lose points on the dismount when the execution was good. I would also vote for linking to other sites for information on the selected destination. This will help the entire group get familiar with the location before arriving plus it can help with marketing as well. I'd also recommend that TravelMob work with conferences - this would be a great tool for people to coordinate conference trips.

NewsCred is a new cross-web newspaper site launching today in beta. What makes NewsCred different from the other "breaking news" sites like Digg, Slashdot, Techmeme, etc. is that NewsCred uses a credibility algorithm for indexing the sources and determining what should rise to the top. Currently the site lists about 100 news sources.

I spoke with NewsCred co-founder Shafqat and I asked him how he describes NewsCred. He replied, "NewsCred is a digital newspaper that will give you all the world's credible news in one place. We aggregate news from hundreds of mainstream media sources, as well as established blogs, and let our users personalize their digital newspaper within seconds, without any fuss. Our community votes on the credibility of articles, authors and news sources. Our algorithms analyze this data, and unlike other social news sites, we use the data to present the news based on quality, not popularity. The credibility data that we collects is an essential metric for measuring the quality of a new source, and the journalistic credibility and integrity of its writers. We are also building an online track record for journalists. So in summary, we give news readers a platform to voice their opinions about the quality of news and the people writing about the news."

Here's my take - NewsCred looks nice and could be a good start page for breaking news across the Web. But it's another full-feed scraper and if they even so much as attempt to put an ad next to the content, all bets are off. What is with these sites scraping full feeds lately? Same thing with fav.or.it. There's no reason why NewsCred needs to scrape full feeds - they can easily link out to the sites that they are indexing. The scraped stories on NewsCred don't pull in any formatting so they are very difficult to read.

The other concern I have is similar to one I have with the Outbrain rating widget we have installed on CN. With NewsCred, what makes a story "credible"? There are so many rumors that float around blogs everyday, do people really care what's credible? From my conversations over the past year, the answer is no. In fact, if you look at some of the more popular blogs, stories that are factually inaccurate or biased have done very well for those blogs. What really makes a story credible?

I like the concept of NewsCred but they need to stop the full-feed scraping and define for their users specifically what makes a story credible.

Svetlana believes NewsCred has potential but the 100 sources will need to grow for the site to work at a broad level. Jason notes that the site has a better ranking algorithm than when it launched in private alpha last year.

BienSimple is a new Spanish-language wiki produced by Fox and their Fox International division. BienSimple combines editor produced content with a open wiki format to allow site visitors to contribute as well. An account is required to contribute.

The content on BienSimple is wide in variety including the following categories: kitchen, autos, money, relationships, beauty and technology. In addition to the text-based wiki, there's video from the BienSimple editors.

Hector Costa, SVP FOX Networks Americas said, "Bien Simple's content has a natural affinity with US Hispanics' inclination towards finding their own solutions to everyday problems." The ads on BienSimple are in Spanish which is different than the strategy AOL is using with their Fanaticos spanish-language sports site.

Pagealizer is a new startup that aims to help create more effective Web pages by providing details on how site visitors are currently utilizing specific pages. The service reminds me of CrazyEgg for the click heatmaps and ClickTale for the time and scroll analysis.

Pagealizer tracks time spent on a given page, where users clicked on the page, and how far down on the page users scrolled. Pagealizer points out that Nielsen is now using "time spent" as a metric and by optimizing pages to increase the time users spend on them, you can increase your reportable metrics.

I found Pagealizer easy-to-setup and the charts (shown above) easy to read. I like the comparison of time to click with page visit length. Page scroll distance can give content creators an excellent view into whether users are reading the full content. For ecommerce sites, the page scroll can tell you whether vital information needs to be shifted on the page.

Pagealizer offers a freemium pricing model and while normally I think startups give too much free, Pagealizer has a good mix of free and paid. The free model allows you to track 200 visits a month. Pricing ranges from $9-49/month depending on usage and SSL options. One interesting note, no matter which plan you select, Pagealizer will always show you the most current users for the selected plan. Most other services give you the first x users until you hit your limit.

This evening I spent some time in a newly updated invoicing application named Invotrack. Christina at DownloadSquad has some info on the new features that launched this week. When I think of online invoicing for freelancers, consultants and small businesses, the first company that I think of is FreshBooks.

Invotrak's invoicing solution is very basic. Like if you got any more basic, it would be a pen and a piece of paper. This is not a bad thing - there's room for simple Web apps. I am currently using the free Quickbooks version and it's worked like a champ. When you login to Invotrak, the first thing you are asked to setup is your client list. Then you can setup invoices for clients which is a bit different than other invoicing systems I have worked with. You setup a total invoice price, then head inside the invoice folder to add line items.

Invoices can be printed in pdf or text and can also be emailed to the client. There are a variety of email options which I like - you can customize the email to make it more personal to the specific client. Invotrak also offers reports which are quite nice looking.

The other portion of Invotrak focuses on time tracking. You select a client and then can "clock in" and "clock out" when you begin and end work. This is great for hourly workers. I'd love to see it as an Adobe Air application that sits on the desktop rather than inside a Web page. If the browser crashes or you accidentally hit the close button, the time is gone.

The pricing model has changed with the new version of Invotrak. There's a free model where you can manage two invoices a month. From there, pricing runs between $9-45 a month depending on usage. While I don't think Invotrak needs to offer as robust a solution as what FreshBooks (and others) provide, they need to offer more selections. I'd also suggest they do some user testing to see how their clients are using the application or how they would like to use Invotrak.

Invotrak has a product and informational blog and while most of the blog entries focus on the Invotrak product, there are some good posts regarding how to get paid from the perspective of a freelancer.

BgPatterns is a neat tool which allows you to create different patterns that you can use for your wallpaper or on your blog or website. It’s free to use and you don’t even need to register in order to create and download your patterns.

You can start from scratch with one of their images which can be resized, rotated, and made more transparent. You can also select a texture for the background and customize the colors. If you’ve signed up for an account, you can save your patterns so you can find them later. You can also just download them if you don’t want to be bothered signing up for an account. There is also a BgPatterns gallery that displays recent and popular patterns. You can vote on them, view them, and even download them for yourself. To see BgPatterns in action, watch the screencast below:

This startup review and screencast was authored by Molly McDonald who is better known as DemoGirl. DemoGirl has created hundreds of complimentary startup video reviews and she is also available for custom screencast creation.

Recently launched Tatango provides a one-to-many SMS text messaging service. Tatango reminds me of another startup, Chatterous. With the growing popularity of Twitter and its inability to target groups, services like Tatango and Chatterous could become acquisition targets. Tatango is perfect for getting help from your friends when you are out and about. It could also work well for work teams to make sure everyone is up-to-date on project and meeting status.

Here's how it works. You setup your friends mobile phone numbers in Tatango, Then you create a message to send. Tatango then sends out the message via SMS to all members of your group.

Assuming they can handle the volume, Tatango could offer their service to companies wanting to provide SMS text alerts on product news and advertising. This method could be more effective than email marketing.

If you'd like an invite, we were able to grab some - just register here. Below is an overview of Tatango from founder Derek Johnson.

A new task and project management Web app launched a couple of months ago named No Kahuna. No Kahuna provides a simple interface for keeping tabs on projects and their associated tasks. You can easily invite others to a project so a team can manage and view the current real-time status. There's also a news-style feed in the dashboard to see status on all projects at one time.

I spoke with co-founder Duff OMelia regarding the No Kahuna pricing structure. Duff explains, "you get unlimited projects and unlimited users on those projects. Only the projects that *really* take off need an upgrade. ($9 gets you 3 project upgrades). Only projects with more than 30 open tasks will ever need upgrading. Since closed tasks do not count, most projects never reach that limit." Open source projects are also free. I'd like to see the pricing page changed to make it easier to understand.

If most projects won't hit the upgrade minimum, how will they generate revenue? There are no ads on the site. I still believe that if you are using the freemium model as the main business model, it's critical that you don't give away so much for free that no one needs to upgrade!

No Kahuna won't replace Microsoft Project or other enterprise-level project management systems but for small-to-medium teams, it could be a good way to keep projects on track. In my testing and after managing teams of several hundred on multiple continents, I found No Kahuna to be simple and had no unneeded bells and whistles. Get in, report your task or project status and get out.

As for suggestions, I'd vote for an export option on the main status feed so that it can be added to Facebook, Twitter, mobile, etc. This will let the project manager monitor what's going on from anywhere. A simple mobile app would also make No Kahuna even more useful.

No Kahuna reminds me of a couple off the first applications we reviewed on CN, Toggl and Tick. Toggl and Tick focus more on time management around tasks while No Kahuna focuses on the task itself.

Cameesa is a recently launched startup that wants to do for fashion what IndieGoGo is doing for movies. Unlike crowdsourcing where you get free labor, crowdfunding is where people "support" an idea and help is move to fruition.

Here's how Cameesa works:

• Artists upload their fashion designs into the Cameesa system
• Supporters then provide funding to help the fashion design turn into a real product
• Assuming the product gets fully supported (100%), the fashion becomes an actual item for ordering in the Cameesa system
• At that point, the artist gets paid, the supporters get paid and buyers can place orders for the fashion item

Kristen Nicole reviewed Cameesa last month and noted, "Some could argue that such a model for fronting money isn’t necessarily worth the rewards, unless sales become scalable on a large scale. The question remains whether or not it’s worth it to artists and supporters in the long run. Part of that answer could be boiled down to promotional options provided by Cameesa, and the drive of both artists and supporters. Some widgets, badges and third-party applications on social media sites could begin to help out towards this end."

I agree with Kristen around the need for strong marketing. While I assume that the artists will be pushing their designs to their friends and family, Cameesa's success lies in their ability to draw in enough supporters to bring enough fashions to catalog products.