2万5000ドルと12週間あったら何が出来るだろうか。LaunchBoxDigitalから資金調達したスタートアップなら、使えるアルファ版かベータ版を作る。ワシントンDCに拠点を置くLannchBoxは、「安く、早く作る」をモットーにスタートアップを立ち上げる最新のシード資金インキュベーターだ。（同じ流れに、Y Combinator、SeedCamp、TechStarsがいる）。LaunchBoxは2～4人の開発者からなる少人数チームに資金を$25,000～$40,000ずつ渡す。動作するデモサイトを作って運用するのにちょうど足りる金額だ。見返りに、各スタートアップの株式の6～8%と、今後の調達ラウンドに参加する権利を受け取る。
今年の2月に資金を受けるデベロッパーを募り、現在、第1期生のウェブスタートアップがデビューする準備が整った。以下に、画面イメージとLaunchBoxのファウンダー、 John McKinleyによる、同グループが各スタートアップに出資した理由を書いたメモを紹介する。われわれのお気に入りは、Heekya、JamLegend、ShareMemeの3つ。招待状の欲しい人はここをチェックしていて欲しい。
BuzzHubb：学生向ソーシャルネットワークの改良版
ファウンダー：Satjot Sawhney、Ashish Kundra
www.buzzhubb.com
McKinleyのメモ：殆どの人が学生のコミュニケーション市場は飽和していると思っているが、Facebookユーザーの75%が、フィード体験に不満を感じており、Twitterを使っている学生はわずか7%だということが、何か所かのキャンパスで行ったアンケートでわかった。よって、それ［飽和］はあり得ない。
BuzzHubbをわかりやすくまとめるなら、次世代Yahooグループの便利さを、クリエイディブで軽量な形で、モバイルな学生が使えるようにしたもの。BuzzHubbの根幹にあるのが、大学キャンパスの周囲に境界を作ったこと。ある大学のBuzzHubbコミュニティーに参加するためには、その大学に属していなければならない（Facebookが謳っていたすばらしきコンセプト）。参加した後は、既存のHubbに参加することも、自分でHubbを作ることもできる。
学生のソーシャルグループ間の関係は複雑で、時にはオーバーラップする。BuzzHubbはそんなグループとのコミュニケーションを簡単で参加意識の強いものにする。Hubbは個人が集まったグループで、グループメッセージをすばやく簡単に、電話やウェブ、ソーシャルネットワーク等を使って共有できる。Hubbにはいくつかの種類がある。ブロードキャストHubbに参加すると、そこにはライターがひとりだけいる（例：キャンパスのスポーツブログ、招待制Hubbは、既存のメンバーから招待されないと参加できない（勉強のグループ、チーム、同好会等）が、全員が寄稿できる。オープンHubbは学内の誰でも参加して寄稿できる（例：オバマ2008）。
UIを使って、参加しているHubbをすばやく巡回できる ― Facebookのフィードメタファに欠けていること。モバイル体験では、Hubb毎に新着記事の通知を受け取ることができるほか、SMSやBuzzHubbのWAP体験経由で、友人と意見を交換することもできる。計画では、秋までに7か所のキャンパスに参入し、意見を聞き体験を洗練した後、来春本格的にスタートする。
Heekya：お話のためのWikipedia
ファウンダー：David Adewumi、Kwasi Nti、Rasvan Orendovici、Avner Levit
www.heekya.com
McKinleyのメモ：ウェブでお話を語ることに関して現在あるモデルは実に断片的だ。個人のコレクションには良いものがあるのだが（YouTube、Flickr、Photobucket等）、決められたカテゴリー（写真、ビデオ）に特化しているものが主であるうえに、連続してお話を扱うには不便だ。ブログは可能性のひとつだが、2億近いブログがある中で、毎日更新される記事は60万本にすぎない。放置されて人知れず死んでいくブログが多すぎる。
Heekyaは、ソーシャルにお話を語ることを薦めたいと考えた。そのために、いくつか手を打った。
第一に、簡単に使えるマルチメディアストーリービルダーを作り、お話の作者がFlickr、YouTube、PhotoBucket、Facebook等にある既存のデジタル資産を元に作業できるようにした。さらに、作者は同じソースの公開／共有の魅力あるコンテンツを使用することができる。よくできたコメントや解説のツールを使って、お話に肉付けすることができ、簡単な共有ツールを使ってお話を共有することや、投稿、埋め込みすることもできる。
第二に、別の観点も推奨されている。お話のクローンを作り、追加や改良を加えることによって、繋がりがありながらも、自分の視点が反映された独自のお話を作ることができる。
さらに同サービスには、ブラウジングと発見のためのツールがいろいろ揃っていて、ユーザーがお話（および関連スレッド）をさまざまな切り口（話題、地理、ソーシャルな繋がり等）で読むことができる。
JamLegend：ギターの英雄がソーシャルに
ファウンダー：Andrew Lee、Arjun Lall、Ryan Wilson
www.jamlegend.com
McKinleyのメモ：JamLegendは新しい音楽ゲーム体験で、Rock BandやGuitar Heroaなどのサービスに破壊的サービスをひっさげて戦いを挑む。体験は楽しくてハマる。無料で、クライアントコードもなく、中心には大いに魅力のあるオンライン音楽ゲーム体験がある。既存のゲームには次のような問題点があった。
• 高価である（ゲームと楽器と楽曲のライブラリを購入するには数百ドルかかる）
• 「束縛された」体験 ― つまり、ゲーム機をベースにしたゲームであるということは、リビングルームや地下室、寮室などゲーム機の置かれている場所に縛られる。
• 楽曲の選択肢が少ない ― 既存の2サービスは、主要レーベルと英語によるロックミュージックに焦点を絞っている。ロックが音楽サイトで販売される楽曲の34%を占めている。他のジャンルやアーティスト（インディーズ）や言語圏は著しく扱いが少ない。
• ソーシャルなゲーム体験が少なく、ユーザーが新機能を入手できるリリースの頻度が低い。
JamLegendは以上の制約に真っ向から挑む。無料。いつでもどこでもプレーできる（ゲームギターを使うこともできるが、キーボードやノートパソコンで十分楽しめる）。外出先でも職場でもコーヒーショップでもプレーできる。曲目リストには、MySpaceやBeboと同じようにインディーズが入っているし、カントリーやジャズなどのジャンルもある。さらに、アーティストが自分の作品を直接JamLegendコミュニティーにアップロードできるように設計されている。そして、1対1対戦や、同時放送トーナメントを通じて、既存のゲームをはるかに凌ぐ本物の魅力あるソーシャル体験を得ることができる。
【日本語版編集部より：ジャンプ先は原文（英語）です】
Koofers: Crib Notes For Picking College Classes
Founders: Michael Rihani, Glynn LoPresti, Patrick Gartlan and Doug Feit
www.koofers.com
McKinley’s Notes: Koofers – where were you when I was in school? Koofers started at Virginia Tech, with a campus rollout in 2007. In that one year, it became the third-most visited site by students, behind Facebook and MySpace. The reason? It allows students to make the relatively opaque process of class and teacher selection fully transparent, by providing grade distributions and teacher feedback to allow a student to shape their individual class schedule, based on their own needs and style (e.g., “I am fine with exams, but I hate teachers who give tons of quizzes”).
Once a student has started the semester, Koofers provides help by offering access to a collective repository of study guides, past exams, etc. This is something schools have had for over a century, but these vaults were only available to small groups of students (e.g., a fraternity). Now, those tools are available to all students. Koofers also supports ongoing communication between students and teachers through its community tools.
The reaction at its alpha deployment at Virginia Tech, coupled with positive feedback this Spring from a quick pilot during the last week of the term at the University of Maryland (where 1000+ users signed up), gives the Koofers team confidence that they have a winner here.
Koofers will deploy to 30+ schools this fall, to provide themselves a bigger test bed, and then look to launch more broadly in the Spring.
Mpowerplayer: Marketing Mobile Games On Facebook
Founder: Michael Powers
www.mpowerplayer.com
McKinley’s Notes: Mpowerplayer is targeted to fix the discovery problem in the mobile gaming market today. Unlike ringtones, where the explosive growth and repeat buyer habits of consumers has built a multi-billion dollar market, the mobile gaming market is stalled.
The biggest issues? No way for a consumer to know what they are buying in advance of the purchase, coupled with poor provisioning processes. With ringtones, consumers know the product they are buying—they’ve heard it on the radio, on TV, or own the track. With mobile games, there is no natural discovery process. It is click and pray for the purchaser. Only 5% of people with a games-capable handset have ever played a game on their phone, and less than a third of the people who buy a game ever purchase a second game. It is a huge problem for both carriers and game publishers seeking new sources of revenue.
Mpowerplayer solves this problem in two ways: It provides a PC-based means for consumers to play mobile versions of the games they are interested in (via an emulator), and, if they like a title, simplifies the purchasing experience. Once someone becomes a member of the Mpowerplayer community, the ability of Mpowerplayer to understand their playing preferences and purchases makes it a uniquely effective marketing partner to the publishers.
Mpowerplayer has supported over 15 million demo plays to date, and powers the mobile sites of both EA and Sprint. They have now built a Web-based demo experience, and will use that to accelerate their marketing efforts more broadly.
MyGameMug: Match.com For Gamers
Founders: Raymond Lau and Erik Yao
www.mygamemug.com
McKinley’s Notes: MyGameMug is trying to return the fun to online gaming . Take one minute and search “trash talking” on YouTube, and you can sample first-hand how bad is the current model of only matching players by skill level.
MyGameMug was started by a couple of avid gamers who wanted to create the match.com for online gaming. Their goal? To create a fun and engaging way to find the “gaming style” of a person, and use it to hook them up with people who are compatible with them to play with online. The core of the MyGameMug experience is a 36-question test that draws out important information about attitude, competitiveness, gaming interests, etc. The responses are then used to slot you into one of 16 different GameMugs. Think of it as a Meyers-Briggs test for gaming.
As you take the test, MyGameMug starts surfacing potential matches for you—the further you go in the test, the higher the matching accuracy gets. Once you complete the test, you can either see those people who are good matches for you and reach out in real-time to offer immediate game play, or use the scheduling tool to offer a potential future time/day to play.
In its first week of testing, over 12,000 people completed the entire test, reporting an 85% satisfaction of where they were slotted in the 16 different categories.
The goal is to start with getting people to take the test, and then draw people into being an ongoing part of the MyGameMug community with other value-added things like user generated reviews, group contests/tournaments, a reputation system, guild management tools, etc.
Razume: Resume 2.0
Team: Sam Blum, Kyle Stoneman (founders) and Ryan Geist
www.razume.com
McKinley’s Notes: Razume is addressing the needs of job seekers in the 21-35 year old demographic. While there are lots of businesses out there to help the employer (Job boards, etc.), there is a huge under-served opportunity to focus on the needs of the job seeker, especially ones without the power of a robust LinkedIn network to help them in their job seeking journey.
The opportunity: There are over 20 million job change events happening this year, and the average 18 year old today is expected to make over 10 job changes before they hit 38 years of age.
Razume helps the job seeker along three dimensions. First, it helps a person develop a professional resume, starting with powerful authoring tools and online tips, and then making it simple for a person to reach out and get tips on fine-tuning their resume from friends, associates, and just as importantly, the Razume community itself. Simple annotation and commenting tools allow people to give very specific feedback to turn someone’s resume into a better, more effective marketing tool.
After that, Razume helps get the resume into the market. That’s done through two means: a free one-click posting of the resume to the major job boards (a service that costs $59+ at other sites), and use of the Razume Job Finder to browse and bookmark jobs of interest from over 7 million job listings on the web.
Once a user has a call-back, Razume helps them prepare for that interview with useful tips and techniques, plus tools to help research prospective employers that, ultimately, helps a person get the job and make the right decision.
ShareMeme: Evite Meets Twitter
Founders: Ahson Wardak and Luc Castera
www.sharememe.com
McKinley’s Notes: ShareMeme is an easy tool for sending messages, polls, invitations and other things to your friends and associated groups on the channels that they prefer.
ShareMeme is addressing a real problem today – inadvertent “spamming” of friends across all the channels you use to interact with people (SMS, Facebook, IM, email, Twitter, etc.). To reach our friends, we find ourselves broadcasting redundant messages across multiple channels to ensure our bases are covered. ShareMeme takes that problem head-on. It is built upon a powerful, self-learning platform that understands the nature of a given message, its priority, and recipient preferences to send the right message the right way to your targeted audience.
Interacting with ShareMeme is simple – you can use the mini-forms on the web site or its iPhone experience, or use its natural language interface via the web, SMS, Twitter, or Jott to say things like “Invite college friends to see the Opening Ceremonies at my house at 7pm on August 8″, and ShareMeme takes it from there. It understands the group “college friends”, the priority of the message, and users’ explicit or derived preference in interacting with you, and reaches out automatically via the most effective and user-respectful communications channel, be it SMS, Twitter, IM, your social network, or email.
The strategic desire of ShareMeme is to be the root location of recipient preference data on the web, as well as the place to define group relationships one time, in a manner that can then be leveraged by you anywhere you want, be it through mobile communications, email, or your social networks. Think of groups here as subsets of your social graph.
Zadby: Web Video Product Placement
Team: Tim McLaughlin (Founder), Beau Brewer (General Manager)
www.zadby.com
Zadby deals with the intersection of two phenomena: The continued lack of effectiveness of traditional advertising to reach the 18-35 year old demographic, and the poor means that independent web video producers have to monetize the value of the communities that follow them.
Zadby is a market maker for product placement in web video. It allows brand managers, agencies and others to tap into the network of independent web video producers, outline their needs and what they are willing to pay per CPM, and then producers create proposed videos, get them approved by the client, and offer them up to their communities, where they get paid on what traffic they generate.
The challenge is how to bring product placement to web video in a scalable manner. Zadby’s approach works to solve this problem (and we’ve seen it succeed with our trial efforts).
With YouTube only selling ads on 3% of its videos, producers are struggling to find a way to make their passion a real business. Yet, web producers are succeeding in building sizable communities who follow them. They may not be “Desperate Housewives”-sized communities yet, but at several hundreds of thousands of viewers, they rival the audiences of many cable TV shows. Zadby leverages the creativity and reach of these producers to create a useful pay-for-performance advertising option for them to add to their arsenal.
[原文へ]
（翻訳：Nob Takahashi）
