Start-Ups.Co

EWC Presenter: A Web Content Creation and Management Platform that Simplifies the Way Users Develop and Maintain Content for Web and Mobile

April 17, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

EWC Presenter is a web content creation and management platform that simplifies the way users develop and maintain content for web and mobile.

We had a very insightful and interesting interview with Mr. ‘Payman Taei‘; Founder and President of the US (Frederick)-based start-up “EWC Presenter”.

“EWC Presenter” is a web based platform to create, edit and enhance thousands of users web presence.

Below is the full interview that we have conducted with Mr. ‘Taei’ regarding his internet start-up company “EWC Presenter”;

1. What is it exactly that you do and what “EWC Presenter” is all about?

I am the Founder and President of EWC Presenter (www.ewcPresenter.com), a web content creation and management platform that simplifies the way users develop and maintain content for web and mobile. We’re all about creating efficiency and simplifying the way users interact and manage their web presence. Our service is geared towards anyone with little to no technical knowledge who wants to take charge of their website be it creating, editing or adding engaging features to their websites.

2. When has “EWC Presenter” been founded? And what stage is “EWC Presenter” currently at?

EWC Presenter is an extension of Easy WebContent which was founded in late 2008 as a simple website editor geared towards anyone who wanted to easily manage the content of their websites without coding knowledge or changes to their existing website. In 2010 we extended our system to allow site owners to add various interactive features to their site and today we have leaped into creating an easy to use yet powerful site builder that gives non technical users the ability to develop and maintain their web presence.

And today with EWC Presenter we are changing the way engaging content is created.

3. What is “EWC Presenter”‘s business model and how does it work?

EWC Presenter is currently free to everyone; We aim to continue supporting our freemium model long-term and offer an extended version of the service under a premium subscription plan as we have already done for our HTML Editor and Site Builder.

EWC Presenter is a cloud based system; giving us the ability to scale and serve our users growing needs deploying regular upgrades and features to users without the need to manually update or pay upgrade fees for new version releases.

4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?

Our team comes from different walks of life. I would say that we are extremely diverse both in culture and skill. It’s a great cohesion with each member and whenever we conduct meetings it’s always a creative mission. Our team met at our Web Development company HindSite Interactive, an award winning web consulting company which incubated and supported Easy WebContent from the start. Without HindSite Interactive we likely wouldn’t be here today.

We have members that work in the Easy WebContent office and some that work from the comforts of their home, so communication is key to our functionality and success.

We use a few different modes of communication depending on the task at hand. Design oriented tasks are often done in person between our design team; while development oriented tasks are handled through our CRM system, email and sometimes skype or chat. We’re quite open and flexible and open to all communication means; whichever best serves the purpose.

5. What, exactly, makes you different from existing options, what will make your product and/or service stand out in the marketplace? In other words what’s unique about you and what’s new about what you make?

Our goal is not to give users every possible feature you can imagine. It’s about giving them features and capabilities that most users need in a easy to use and user friendly manner.

Additionally although some users want out of the box solutions, we find that many also want to have a certain level of control and flexibility. For example you may like a certain theme we offer but you want to make it your own by changing colors, graphics and even minute adjustment such as border, spacing and margins.

Our offering give you these abilities while eliminating the headache of any coding and design experience.

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Filed Under: Creative Arts, Design, Development, Marketing And Advertising, Publishing, Web Based Applications, Websites Tagged With: cloud, design, ewc presenter, flash, graphics, html5, infographics, Payman Taei, presentations, Web

Airwalk-Design.com: A Creative Social Platform for Sharing Design Inspiration

April 9, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

Airwalk-Design.com

Airwalk Design is like Pinterest for designers, a creative platform for sharing design inspiration.

We had an insightful and in-depth interview with the young entrepreneur Mr. ‘Daniel Schwarz‘; Founder & CEO of the England (London)-based start-up “Airwalk Design”.

“Airwalk Design“ is a creative social platform for sharing design inspiration.

Below is the full interview that we have conducted with Mr. ‘Schwarz’ regarding his start-up company “Airwalk Design”;

1. What is it exactly that you do and what “Airwalk Design” is all about?

Airwalk Design is like Pinterest for designers, a creative platform for sharing design inspiration. We also have fresh, undiscovered writers with specialist knowledge in certain genres of digital design. We call them our ambassadors! Our mission is to inspire and spark thought-provoking reactions in the minds of designers worldwide. The very best of the user-submissions will be published in our magazine.

2. When has “Airwalk Design” been founded? And what stage is “Airwalk Design” currently at?

We began right at the beginning of 2013, and we have already launched our website this spring, including Dropbox integration and our new Google Chrome app that lets you share design inspiration with no more fuss than a single click. We are currently accepting sign-ups and encourage users to submit their favourite design inspirations.

3. What is “Airwalk Design”‘s business model and how does it work?

We plan to monetize our platform with niche-topic advertising using the BuySellAds network and also through the sales of our monthly e-magazine. If the inspiration strikes us, we will also publish books by either myself or our onboard, handpicked writers specializing in specific topics such as dark-art and surrealism.

4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?

I am the only person in my team! I do everything, from design to development to marketing! It’s a tiring role, but an exciting and fulfilling one. Not too much cost-effective! We do have onboard writers, however they have signed up as volunteers. Their benefits include discovery, experience and reputation.

We don’t really have many competitors, or you could say that we have a lot. Photoshop blogs, Pinterest, the Behance network or deviantArt…we’re taken inspiration from so many things but we like to think that we’re unique and incomparable. We’ve integrated with Dropbox, we have a Chrome App, really put the effort in. Our writing focuses on intense, thought-provoking topics that are sure to inspire. [Continue reading]

Filed Under: Creative Arts, Design, Online Social Networks, Web Based Applications, Websites Tagged With: art, creativity, Daniel Schwarz, design, inspiration, Social

Pollfish: A Survey Web Platform that Allows Anyone to Create a Survey, Select Audience from Pollfish Distribution and Get Answers

April 1, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

Pollfish.com

Pollfish is a survey web platform that allows anyone to create a survey, select audience from Pollfish distribution and get answers.

Start-Ups.Co had an in-depth and intuitive interview with Mr. ‘Giannis Zaoudis‘; Co-Founder and CTO of the Cyprus-based start-up “Pollfish”.

“Pollfish“ is a survey platform which provides access to millions of targeted users.

Below is the full interview that we have conducted with Mr. ‘Zaoudis’ regarding his start-up company “Pollfish”;

1. What is it exactly that you do and what “Pollfish” is all about?

Pollfish is a survey web platform that allows anyone to create a survey, select audience from Pollfish distribution and get answers. Pollfish builds its distribution with mobile app developers who embed Pollfish SDK into their apps, in order to gain revenue.

Pollfish can be considered as a marketplace similar to the mobile ad marketplaces that already exist.

2. When has “Pollfish” been founded? And what stage is “Pollfish” currently at?

Pollfish has been founded on March 2013 and it has already over 150,000 users and two paying customers. Currently we are expanding our network in England and we are in discussion with well known research companies for the next surveys. The next goal is to hit 1,000,000 users and be able to make worldwide surveys for big firms.

3. What is “Pollfish”‘s business model and how does it work?

Pollfish potential clients are anyone that wishes to create a survey and get some answers. Clients can be individuals, market research companies, advertising agencies, firms and others. Pollfish focuses on the online surveys market, while re-channeling it through existing mobile apps!

Pollfish provides a one-stop solution from survey creation to delivery of results. Pollfish introduces survey distribution and targeting as a service! Distribution is built through partnerships with mobile app developers who embed Pollfish SDK into their apps. Clients pay per completed survey and revenue is shared with the developers.

Every day thousands of mobile applications are released to the different app stores around the world. Different monetization methods are used on these apps following the successful ad model. Pollfish is taking advantage of this model to deliver more revenue and happy users to the developers! Users responding to Pollfish surveys can win prizes or discounts through Pollfish partnered retailers, something which brings in additional revenue to Pollfish as users are channeled towards the retailers and get commission on the sales while simultaneously keeping users engaged.

4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?

Pollfish team started working in January 2013 with the vision to change the global landscape of how mobile surveys are conducted! Pollfish has 5 founders, which are spread, in two different countries (Cyprus and Greece). The team is working remotely though Skype for the last three months and managed to take the project from an idea to a minimum valuable product with 150k users on the platform and two paying customers!

Pollfish team members know each other for a long time and has previously founded other startups and worked together in different projects in the past!

John Papadakis – Founder and CEO: John is responsible for the team coordination and sales. He is also building the back-end of Pollfish platform.

Andreas Vourkos – Founder and COO: Andreas is responsible for the operations of Pollfish and sales. He is keeping the balance in this group of fellows. He is building and supporting the Pollfish Android SDK.

Giannis Zaoudis – Founder and CTO: Giannis is responsible for the technology of Pollfish. He is dealing with the server side issues and he is developing the front-end of the platform.

Vasileios Mitrousis – Founder and Head of Mobile: Vasileios is responsible for anything regarding the mobile part of Pollfish. He is dealing with the fragmentation issues and he is building and supporting the Pollfish iOS SDK.

Zissis Bellas – Founder and Art Director: Zissis is responsible for the user interface, brand development and anything else related to the image of Pollfish. He is building the mobile UI, the website, the promo videos and other.

John, Giannis and Andreas have graduated from the same University and have been friends for more than 9 years! John and Giannis have co-founded a San Francisco registered startup (http://www.pajap.com) in the past. John and Giannis have won different competitions around mobile and web development.

Andreas and Vasileios have co-founded Wajee Mobile Ltd (http://www.wajeemobile.com), a mobile software house startup. They built their own augmented reality SDK libraries from scratch, being among the few companies in the world with that kind of ownership and won different competitions such as Cyprus Microsoft Imagine Cup 2012, Cyprus Hackathon 2012 and others.

Zissis was introduced to the team later on and became a perfect match! Zissis took part in many of the most well known advertising campaigns at Greece during the last two years! All member teams have been working full time on this project for the last 3 months.

Pollfish introduces a new innovative way of monetization of mobile apps in the global scene and additionally exposes and targets the elusive mobile user to survey! Below we highlight some of the most important advantages of Pollfish platform:

• Pollfish is following the widely spread and successive mobile advertising model. Pollfish builds its distribution with mobile apps developers who embed Pollfish SDK into their apps, in order to gain revenue. Each completed survey can provide 10-20 times more revenue than ad clicks! SDK integration is easy, fast and does not reserve any extra space to the developer’s app. Therefore, Pollfish can bring monetization to mobile developers in a complete different way than ads and with much more higher rates!

• By 2015 there will be more mobile users than web users. Mobile users are a very attractive segment, not easily accessible for market research. Pollfish brings full survey experience to engaged mobile users in an easy and not intrusive way! Pollfish builds its distribution through partnerships with mobile app developers who embed Pollfish SDK into their apps. Clients pay per completed survey and revenue is shared with the developers.

• One of the most important things in market research is targeting. Pollfish provides access to its clients; to the audience they really want. Pollfish ongoing targeting system continuously learns and improves by fully taking advantage of its user base. Pollfish is a distribution and targeting service for surveys, with access to a specific and hard to access audience, mobile users. Pollfish is a scalable product that can grow and expand to an international level.

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Filed Under: Marketing And Advertising, Web Based Applications, Websites Tagged With: Giannis Zaoudis, mobile, Pollfish, survey

Linkody: A web based application that provides useful intelligence about the quality of your links, anchor phrases analytics, and more

March 23, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

Linkody.com

Linkody is a backlink management and monitoring webapp for SEO agencies and site owners.

We had a very interesting and insightful interview with Mr. ‘François Mommens‘; Co-Founder of the Netherlands (Amsterdam)-based start-up “Linkody”.

“Linkody” is a web based application that monitors your hard-earned SEO backlinks 24/7.

Below is the full interview that we have conducted with Mr. ‘Mommens’ regarding his start-up company “Linkody”;

1. What is it exactly that you do and what “Linkody” is all about?

Linkody is a backlink management and monitoring webapp for SEO agencies and site owners.

Linkody looks for the links to your domains and monitors them 24/7. If any link is removed or its source page fails, you get an email alert.

Linkody’s users save a lot of time by not having to check their links themselves, either manually or by using desktop applications which don’t have all the advantages of a web application. With Linkody, the old way of using Excel sheets to manage backlinks is over.

2. When has “Linkody” been founded? And what stage is “Linkody” currently at?

The 1st version of the product was launched in February 2011 as an experiment and because we needed such a tool for ourselves. Then my partner and I had to dedicate our time on other things. About 1 year later, 2 SEO oriented (French) blogs noticed the tool and wrote 2 very good reviews. People tweeted and commented about the service and it started to get some traction. We realized that a lot of people were looking for such a service and that there was the opportunity to develop a tool not only useful to ourselves but to other people too.

3. What is “Linkody”‘s business model and how does it work?

Our business model is based on a monthly fee for premium users. Premium users get additional features on top of a bigger volume of links and domains. There is a free package with a volume of 50 links for 1 domain. Although the premium plans are really cheap I still want to keep if possible this free plan to help small websites.

4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?

A few years ago, Tom and I worked together in Barcelona for the same company. At that time I was the CTO and he was the Product Director. We saw very quickly that we were on the same wavelength professionally. We knew we could trust each other to get the job done. Both of us also had a lot of things in common like wanting to be an entrepreneur. Tom and I left the company around the same time. Tom founded his startup, lovehabibi.com, while I went living in another country. We kept talking about ideas and possible services we could develop together. Then I got the idea for Linkody.

Tom worked on the product, design and frontend development. I worked mostly on the backend. Now I am mostly doing everything myself as Tom had to take on a daily job for the time being.

There is a lot of SEO tools and services out there. They got in an arms race with each other that got them to build as many features as possible. The result is that they are quite expensive. We have decided to focus on one specific service, backlink management and monitoring, and do it well. For the people who are looking in exactly that feature, we are way cheaper and better.

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Filed Under: Web Based Applications, Websites Tagged With: anchor analytics, backlinks, François Mommens, Free, inbound links, link monitoring, linkody, marketing, seo, seo tools

Gozoop: A Digital Services and Products Provider Agency Based in Mumbai and Dubai

March 12, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

Gozoop.com

Gozoop, a young and entrepreneurial digital services and products provider with presence in India and UAE has created a niche for itself in the ecommerce space

Start-Ups.Co had an insightful interview with Mr. ‘Rohan Bhansali‘; CEO of the India (Mumbai) and the UAE (Dubai)-based start-up “Gozoop”.

“Gozoop” is a web marketing agency based in Mumbai and Dubai.

Below is the full interview that we have conducted with Mr. ‘Bhansali’ regarding his start-up company ”Gozoop”;

1. What is it exactly that you do and what “Gozoop” is all about?

Gozoop is a young an entrepreneurial web marketing agency based in Mumbai and Dubai.

We are young in the sense that the average age of our 50 member team is 22. We are entrepreneurial in the sense that we run our own in-house online businesses, blog networks and even make investments in other online businesses.

2. When has “Gozoop” been founded? And what stage is “Gozoop” currently at?

Gozoop started in April 2010. We like looking at ourselves as a start up.

Since we started we have grown to a team size of 50+ with presence in India and Dubai. We are pursuing starting off in Singapore soon.

We are also simultaneously investing in our product businesses – Zozolo and Decidebuddy.

3. What is “Gozoop”‘s business model and how does it work?

From the service point of view – We help companies and brands optimize their digital presence. 70% of our business is on retainer model.

As far as our products go we have Zozolo and Decidebuddy.

Zozolo.com which works on a SaaS model. Decidebuddy.com is a review portal which is still in pre monetization stage.

4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?

Ahmed, Dushyant and I used to work at JPMorgan where we met. Initially Ahmed and I started a venture called RaAstudios. Dushyant was RaA’s first client wherein we helped him with his venture Blogertize.

Dushyant joint us in April 2010 to form Gozoop. Gozoop bought over RaAstudios in October 2010.

Am going to try not to give a cliche answer. I think what makes us different is our culture. This translates into quality and transparent service to our clients.

Other than that we look at our clients’ business from a business point of view, not just a service point of view. We can do this because we heavily invest in our own product businesses.

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Filed Under: Design, Development, E-Commerce, Marketing And Advertising, Mobile Applications, Online Social Networks, Web Based Applications, Websites Tagged With: Ahmed Naqvi, Digital Marketing, Dushyant Bhatia, gozoop, Rohan Bhansali, social media

Blossom.io: A Lightweight Project and Product Management Tool for Startups that Ship Early and Often

March 2, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

Blossom.io

Blossom.io provides a very lightweight project management tool for mobile and web application development.

We had a fantastic interview with Mr. ‘Thomas Schranz‘; Co-founder & CEO of the US (San Francisco)-based start-up “Blossom”.

“Blossom” is a lightweight project management tool.

Below is the full interview that we have conducted with Mr. ‘Schranz’ regarding his start-up company “Blossom”;

1. What is it exactly that you do and what “Blossom” is all about?

We provide a very lightweight project management tool for mobile and web application development.

Our tool is ideal for people who ship early and often and really love the products they create.

At Blossom we truly strive to understand the needs of product teams better than any other company.

If you are working on a mobile or web application we’d love to get you on board.

2. When has “Blossom” been founded? And what stage is “Blossom” currently at?

We started in Spring 2011, joined Seedcamp (Europe’s leading startup accelerator program) later that year and are making first revenue since mid 2012.

We are growing steadily ever since and are always looking for people who deeply care about crafting products to join us on our journey.

Ping us if you are interested or know someone who might be a great fit for us.

3. What is “Blossom”‘s business model and how does it work?

Our business model is very simple actually. We charge money for our tool on a monthly basis (SaaS).

What I especially like about SaaS is that it alignes the financial incentives of the company with the philosophy of building a great relationship with your customers.

It puts emphasize on delivering value on a continuous basis.

If people like what we do they stay and our revenue grows. As simple as that.

4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?

We actually know each other for a few years. The first time all three of us met in the same place was back in January 2008 at a BarCamp in Vienna.

While all of us have a background in engineering we like to think of ourselves as all-rounders. We dig programming as well as UX, design, marketing and many other things.

That said we currently have different areas of focus.

Nik’s main focus is architecture as well as frontend and backend code.

Allan is mainly responsible for user experience, corporate identity and design.

My personal focus is on marketing, customer support and product.

While many project management tools for software products are built solely with engineers in mind we care a lot about getting the whole product team on the same page.

That’s the reason why we deeply care about a lightweight look & feel which works as well for engineers as it does for designers, marketers and product managers.

It is a small change in focus but it has huge implications in terms of wording, interaction design and data visualization.

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