Google+, the social layer that Google introduced almost two years ago, has evolved quite a bit since its launch. Today, the company announced a complete redesign, taking cues from the mobile experience that has drawn positive feedback from those who don’t even use the service. In total, Google has launched 41 new features for Google+, including a completely revamped Photo product, Hangouts app and the stream that people interact with on a daily basis.

There are currently 390M monthly active users over the web and 190M directly on the stream.

The stream changes will be familiar to Google+ users on iOS and Android, but have a few new wrinkles. The first noticeable item is the stream, which has been given the three-column treatment that the iPad version of the service presents so well. This is a huge departure from the Twitter and Facebook feed approach, which presents everything in one column. The multi-column design lets you scan items quicker, rather than scrolling endlessly for something to interact with.

I sat down with Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, and he walked me through some of the new features. He was quick to point out that Google’s new approach to “feeds” will bring more attention to content:

We’re fixing a longstanding problem with these feeds, they’re flat. Other sites let you scroll through posts that have been shared with you. You can’t go through and read on more topics. You can’t go deeper on an interest on topic.

Just in case you haven’t used Google+ at all, or want to see the quick contrast between the two designs, here’s what the stream looked like before today, complete with that awkward white space on the right:

The toolbar has been simplified, looking like the toolbar you see on search and every other property. The days of left-hand navigation is gone, and good riddance.

You’ll also notice that pieces of content in the stream stand out much more, and that’s because they’re interactive “Cards” a la Google Now. One of the new features of Google+ is that whenever you post a new piece of content, it will automatically get a hashtag. You can remove it if you like, but Google’s massive processing power goes to work to try and categorize all of the content being shared:

When you click the hashtag, the “card” will flip around to help you discover similar content. In the example of the Giants post, Gundotra showed me that Google automatically figured out that the post was about Buster Posey, since the company has deployed its photo-recognition technology on posted items. The image shared with the Giants post is of Buster Posey, naturally. By not taking you to a new stream of content when clicking around, Gundotra says that the context of what you’re interested in learning more about is preserved.

Another example of this automatic categorization is this picture of the Eiffel Tower. Gundotra explained that even though there was no text within the post that stated the origin of the photo, Google was able to figure out what it was, thus giving it the hashtag #EiffelTower. Greyed out hashtags are the ones automatically assigned by Google, and blue ones are the ones added by the sharer themselves:

For content like photos and videos, they will get the same treatment that they do on mobile, which is spread across multiple columns:

There are other interactive animations, like a bounce when you share someone’s post. Again, these are things that the Google+ mobile apps do well, and it’s meant to get you more engaged within the stream. I’m not sure if an animation will do that for me, but it’s fun the first few times that you see it.

From what I can gather, Google wants you spend more time consuming information and less time navigating a site. This new look, including Google’s favorite new font, Robot, fits in with the design of most of Google’s other products. This familiarity will encourage people to pay more attention to the content, but not necessarily share more.

Some of what Gundotra said about this new approach to a stream makes sense. When you use Facebook’s newly redesigned News Feed, you’re still shown a single column of items, allowing you to switch between content types. While that might work on a smartphone, it might not be the best use of real estate for the desktop. At least, that’s what Google is betting on with this overhaul.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

500 Startups today is announcing the next 28 companies to take part in its Accelerator program, unleashing a largely international class of startups who have come to Mountain View to accelerate their startup progress. There are 28 companies in this Accelerator class, and as usual there’s a bunch of diversity there. (And, as has become tradition, the class made a ghetto fabulous music video to accompany the announcement.)

The group is more than 70 percent international, with 20 companies coming from outside the U.S. That’s no big surprise, as about 15 percent of the 500 Startups portfolio in general is made up of companies outside the U.S., but over the last several batches, the accelerator has skewed heavily toward overseas and non-Silicon Valley companies.

This class includes startups from Brazil, Chile, China, Ghana, India, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine and Vietnam. With Dropifi (Ghana), as well as Dakwak and Tamatem (both from Jordan), the 500 Startups Accelerator has added its first companies from Africa and the Middle East.

Notably, this batch was the first which was chosen entirely through applications posted to AngelList, so it no doubt includes a few startups that 500 Startups founding partner and Sith Lord Dave McClure probably wouldn’t have heard about otherwise.

The program began mid-April, and 500 Startups expects to have its Demo Days in Mountain View, San Francisco, and New York City sometime in July. In the meantime, enjoy the music video they put together to announce themselves, below. Oh, and here’s the list of startups:

• AppSocially – Make your app’s Viral Loop awesome with an API that lets you track activity and conversion – allowing you to take action using customer data.
• BinPress – We increase adoption of open source in SMBs and enterprises.
• BoxC – We make buying directly from sellers in China as fast and safe as buying from Amazon.
• Credii – We arm businesses with all the intelligence they need to make smart software and service choices.
• Dakwak – Effortless website translation technology.
• Dropifi – An intelligent replacement for mailtos
  and dumb contact forms. It makes customer support more effective, increases lead generation and generates valuable business insights.
• Feast – The online cooking school for the common man. It offers simple cooking guides that teach impressive techniques and recipes with an online community where you can ask questions and get feedback as you cook.
• Floqq – Makes it easy for anyone anywhere to learn the skills they need.
• Flyer – We empower commercial real estate agencies to create beautiful property flyers online.
• Geekatoo – We offer local and onsite tech support at a great value. Customers receive competing bids on tech support needs from verified providers.
• GreenGar – Seamless realtime collaboration on mobile devices. We’re building a platform that enables apps to intuitively connect people together.
• InstaGIS – Geographic information system that allows retail stores to target their audiences.
• KiteReaders – Publishing platform for publishers & authors to create, distribute, and market their children’s picture books for iBooks, Kindle, and Nook.
• Koemei – Algorithmic transcription of videos for search and accessibility, helping education and large enterprises gain value from their video investments.
• Mayvenn – Empowers the 95 percent of African American salons that do not retail products. Our mobile commerce solution eliminates a salons inventory cost and opens a new revenue stream for their business.
• PinMyPet – Social-based software for monitoring and improving the experience between pets and owners. It works with powerful, small and low-cost hardware for realtime health and location detection.
• POPAPP – App to fast sketch app prototypes.
• PriceBaba – PriceBaba is a product (re)search engine that lets you shop in your vicinity.
• Reesio – Turns the real estate transaction process into one beautiful flow for agents, clients, and third parties.
• School Admissions – Making school admissions and education tension-free. Disrupting the process of choosing the right school for your child and parents.
• Seat 14A – A complete and affordable ensemble for the discerning man every week.
• SeMeAntoja – We empower restaurants to accept orders online.
• Sverve – Sverve is a self-service influencer marketing platform for small businesses. We connect small businesses with female social media influencers to promote their products and services on the social web.
• Tamatem – Tamatem is a mobile gaming development studio and publisher focused on creating culturally relevant games for the huge unaddressed Arabic gaming market.
• TRDATA – We are the Bloomberg for emerging markets. We collect accurate real-time market information from remote places from scattered and illiquid markets.
• Tushky – Self-service online platform to monetize free time by offering interesting activities.
• WHILL – Next generation of personal mobility for wheelchair users and the elderly.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When you’re spreading like wildfire, why douse the flames to make a few bucks? Facebook’s willingness to wait on advertising helped its site and mobile apps grow massive, and now it’s applying the same strategy to Instagram. Wall Street is clamoring for Facebook to earn back the $700+ million it spent buying the photo app, but Mark Zuckerberg refuses to trade tomorrow’s dollars for today’s dimes.

It took Facebook years to get serious about ads. That’s because it was serious about growth and the user experience from day one. Facebook’s first ads were actually called “flyers” and promoted on-campus events. They fit right in rather than detracting from the value of the social network. When Facebook started selling to more traditional advertisers, the units it offered were tiny, and relegated to the sidebar so organic content could stay front and center. Compared to the loud flash banners and pop-ups found elsewhere, Facebook seemed like a sanctuary. The strategy helped it quickly grow to hundreds of millions of users.

Facebook launched its iPhone app in July 2008. For over three years, not a single ad was shown. The world was starting to go mobile, and Facebook wanted to welcome it with open arms, not greed. In 2010 and 2011, Facebook’s smartphone apps were growing at a stunning pace to become the most popular things on mobile. Clogging them with ads could have stunted growth when it had the most momentum.

By the end of 2011, both Facebook for iOS and Android had over 57 million daily users, and almost twice as many monthly users. There was no guilt in telling a friend to go download the apps. They weren’t necessarily the fastest thanks to their reliance on HTML5, but they didn’t waste limited real estate on squeezing money out of advertisers.

It wasn’t until early 2012 that Facebook finally announced it would start showing ads on mobile and the desktop news feed. By then an overwhelming percentage of people in the developed world were already using its site and smartphone apps. User growth in its most important markets like the US, UK, and Canada had slowed to a trickle. Growth was predominantly coming from the developing world where people use Facebook’s feature phone apps.

When it finally started showing ads on the web feed, iOS, and Android, Facebook had a lot less to lose. It didn’t need its apps to be as viral and add as many users in the first-world any more. It just needed to make sure not to drive people away from them. Ads started appearing, slowly at first as Facebook gauged reactions, and faster as it saw people weren’t browsing the feed significantly less because there were a few ads in the middle.

Long story long, the strategy has worked. Facebook could surely have an extra billion in the bank if it monetized earlier. But it might have sacrificed millions of users and positive connotation to get that money. Still, it’s been a bit of a surprise that a year after acquiring Instagram, Facebook said on this week’s earnings call that there’s no plan yet to show ads on the photo app. That’s not for lack of demand, Zuckerberg said:

“Instagram, they’re really doing well and growing really quickly, and I think that that is the right focus for them. And they have this opportunity to capture and basically build off this huge community and I think that that should be 100% of the focus right now. I am really optimistic about the business opportunity there, too. You already have a lot of brand from folks who advertise with Facebook putting content into Instagram, getting huge engagement rates. So people are coming to us and asking for ways to make that even richer and it’s something that we’re thinking about. But right now, I think that – I’m just really proud of the team and excited about how quickly they’re growing. They’re growing a lot faster now and were faster to get to 100 million than Facebook even.”

Perhaps when Facebook’s given Instagram enough time to grow, and it figures out how it wants to the advertising experience to work, we’ll see it monetize the acquisition. It has plenty of options for how.

Instagram could show glossy photo brand ads in the feed, but might try to avoid forcing users to click out to a browser to follow the ads. That’s why I’d expect Instagram to start with ads that help businesses get more followers and keep users bouncing around the app.

Businesses might pay to get the photos they post to their accounts showed to people who don’t currently follow them. A social version of these follow ads might target friends of or people who follow people who follow a brand. Yes, that’s a mouthful. Another option would be allowing brands to amplify the reach of user posts that tag them using Instagram’s new photo tagging feature. If I tagged Nike in a photo of my shoes, Nike might pay to show that post at the top of my friends’ feeds or show it again a week after I originally posted it in hopes of attracting more followers.

Instagram could also try Suggested Accounts that ask people to follow certain brands similar to Twitter’s Promoted Accounts ad unit. App install ads which let developers pay to get their apps shown in the feed and downloaded have become Facebook’s new darling, so they could make their way to Instagram too.

Facebook and Instagram can afford this growth > ads strategy because its thinking long-term. Not long-term like Google with its moonshots, but Facebook is confident they’ll be dominant in their fields for at least a few years. Their large userbases and network effects luckily afford them a bit of a moat. It’s still a gamble, though. There’s always the risk that by the time Instagram starts advertising, something new in the media capture space will be stealing the attention of its users. It’s a tightrope to walk, but one that leads to a healthy community, quality experience, and a sustainable business model.

[Image Credits: Metrowest, MacStories]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When was the last time you talked about Acer? Never? Me too. The company, which is the fourth largest PC maker in the world by the way, announced the Acer Aspire R7 this morning. It’s a mighty morphing Windows 8 portable. Like the Lenovo Yoga, it features versatile hinges that allow the computer to take different forms.

The Aspire R7 is not the next big thing. No one is going to buy this thing. But that’s probably just fine.

The Acer Aspire R7 is a halo device. It’s an attention grabber. It’s advertising in the form of product. It’s Acer’s proof to the other big players and startups alike that the company can still hang. It’s designed to sit pretty in the showroom window and entice buyers to come inside to the dealership. It is, in automotive terms, the Chevy Corvette of Acer’s lineup.

Dealerships prominently position the Corvette outside their doors. It’s not around back with the Chevy Econoboxes. It’s right out front. It draws attention. It gets buyers near the door and talking about the brand. It will never outsell the Impala. In fact it’s designed to help sell the Impala.

Expect to see the Acer Aspire R7 on electronic store retailers’ end-caps and nowhere else. Just maybe, with this hot portable occupying prime real estate in Best Buy, more buyers will view Acer as a serious computer company rather than a list of competitive specs available at good price.

Every company produces these high-end products to get the blood moving again. Remember the Dell Adamo XPS? That $2,200 netbook was once displayed at CES on a turntable protected by a bulletproof cube of glass. It was “technically” available for sale, but Dell didn’t expect it to sell en masse. Sony had the uber-high end Qualia line from 2003 to 2005. With prices ranging from $1,400 (MiniDisc player) to $25,000 (SXRD video projector), these products were more of a design exercise than legitimate push into the upper echelon of consumer electronics.

Back to Acer.

The company’s Wikipedia page says it best: Acer sells “inexpensively-targeted” computer electronics. The products are available from nearly every retailer. Acer is, in short, the Lee Jeans of computer: They’re perfectly acceptable, available at Walmart but not a brand that generates excitement.

Now there’s the Acer Aspire R7. The Internet is excited about this computer. Gizmodo says they’re not ready for its level of crazy. But crazy is good. Crazy gets attention. And crazy sells.

Acer is losing marketshare. The company was the second most prolific computer maker in 2009, second to only HP in global sales. It ended 2012 in fourth place, after HP, Lenovo, and Dell. Worse yet, sales and shipments are still trending down.

The consumer marketplace has changed a lot since Acer was near the top. Like Giz said, we’re not ready for the R7′s radical design. But I for one can’t wait to see what else the firm is capable of producing. I would be totally on board with a similar Windows 8 computer albeit one that’s a touch less crazy. And now I’m looking to Acer to provide that where I wouldn’t have even considered the company before.

Oh, and Acer did announce new lower-end notebooks today. Engadget covered them. They’re good, but nothing exciting — which is just about right for Acer.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last month Skimlinks, the platform that allows publishers full control over affiliate links and content monetization, completed a growth financing round led by Greycroft Partners and others, while expanding into Asia. This month it has new products to roll out, launching two major initiatives. The question is, how does it stand up to the competition?

The first new product is called Showcases, which is a visual alternative to the in-line-text offering its had for some time.

Showcases are ad units that sit alongside content and populate automatically based on the products mentioned in an article, geo-targeted to the user. It means publishers don’t have to manually add an image to illustrate an article, like this.

Secondly, Fashion Engine, instead of identifying products that include model numbers or brand names, finds product references that use entirely normal English words, e.g. “Kim Kardashian was seen wearing a black leather dress.” This vertical-optimized semantic engine is thus aimed at fashion publishers, such as here and here.

Alicia Navarro, co-founder and CEO, says competitors don’t offer these kinds of products: “Both VigLink and RewardStyle don’t offer an accurate automated in-text/near-text solution geared towards fashion publishers. It is really hard to do well in non-techy verticals, and we have built the means to do it, at scale, in real-time.”

They also plan to expose the API behind this new service. It sounds bold but Navarro says they want to become the “Twilio of e-commerce with our path towards open APIs for all our products.”

But competitors have a few words to say about these moves.

When asked, Oliver Deighton, VP of marketing of Viglink, takes slight issue with this. He says VigLink Insert has been optimized since 2012 for over a dozen categories and the VigLink catalog API already enables publishers to “create custom and highly visual shopping experiences.”

Oliver Krohne, Founder & CEO of Yieldkit says “Alicia is right that verticals beside tech are different as you don’t have proper names like “iphone” or “galaxy tab”… However, approaching the standard ad spaces means also facing harder competition in terms of CPM rates, which you receive from all ad networks or Adsense. So it will be a challenge to exceed those.”

Navarro, however, has words for these guys. “VigLink Insert was launched a while after our SkimWords product, but their solution has never been real-time… and it is a simple word match solution, rather than ours which is a trained natural language processing engine… we don’t know of a single fashion site running VigLink Insert.”

“YieldKit’s comments are true, some publishers do place us in standard ad unit places, but we encourage publishers to create new real estate for Showcases alongside content, rather than placing them in peripheral ‘ad’ spots. As we evolve Showcases we will weave in behavioural optimization and even richer content so we achieve comparable earnings to traditional ‘ads.’”

Whatever the case, the race is on to capture this market, and Skimlinks seems to be making most of the running right now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Redfin is launching a new feature today that allows prospective home buyers and sellers to better estimate a home’s value. Anybody who has ever searched for a house or tried to sell one is probably aware of Zillow’s Zestimates – even though they are mostly automated and can’t quite take aspects like locations, view, noise, neighborhood and other details of a house into account. With its new “Home Value Tool,” Redfin aims to bring the human element back into the equation by allowing users to select a number of homes that they believe best compare with the home they are trying to get an estimate for.

Redfin is mostly aiming this tool at home owners who are trying to sell their houses, but there is no reason why home buyers couldn’t also use it to get an estimate for the house they are trying to buy. As Redfin told me, the reason the company is mostly focusing its marketing efforts on sellers right now is due to the fact that, with the real estate market picking up again, so many people are thinking about selling their homes for the first time in years. Obviously, though, the Home Value Tool will also be very useful for buyers.

Redfin notes that giving users more input into the evaluation process allows them to “select the homes that best compare to their own, which is important because a home’s actual value is often affected by factors that are difficult for computers to capture, such as a certain view, traffic noise, or unique architectural features.”

Users simply enter the address of the home and confirm a number of details about the house (bedrooms, bathrooms, etc.). After that, Redfin will automatically show two comparable homes, but – most importantly – users will be able to select five comparable homes that have recently sold nearby. Redfin previously offered home estimates, too. The company, however, believes that this new tool is easier to use, and while the previous version asked users to remove homes from an original list of 10 homes, the new tool allows users to build up a list of comparables. The new tool also homes in on a single price estimate instead of giving the home owner just a range.

The company stresses that this is obviously not an official appraisal, but rather meant to give its customers a starting point to understand their home’s value.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

More than 2,000 people have filled up the historic Manhattan Center with our biggest hackathon and Startup Alley yet, and a set of incisive discussions with tech leaders. Now it’s time for the battlefield finals, and we have our seven finalists picked out.

But first, tomorrow will feature Ashton Kutcher, Joe Lonsdale, a big panel on transportation, an interview with hardware startup leader Limor Fried, the Rap Genius guys, and more.

Finals judges include Nancy Peretsman (Allen & Company), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), David Lee (SV Angel), Michael Arrington (CrunchFund), and Chi-Hua Chien (Kleiner Perkins).

Enigma.io makes it easy to analyze data from more than 100,000 data sources, and is already being used by journalists to break stories and financial firms and companies to make smarter business decisions.

Floored scans office spaces, apartments and houses using 3D camera technology and proprietary software to build customizable 3D models for real estate purposes.

Glide lets you enjoy video chat on your own schedule, and has made it into the finals round from our Startup Alley.

Handle helps you manage your email overload via a rich web app as well as a companion native iOS app that integrates with Gmail (and soon Microsoft Exchange and Yahoo).

HealthyOut provides users with personalized menus of food from local restaurants, set up as a subscription delivery service to help them lose weight or just eat better overall.

SupplyShift is an enterprise tool that lets companies and organizations track everything that’s going on with suppliers around world, collecting sustainability data to help them reduce risk exposure.

Zenefits helps small businesses manage payroll, health care and other human-resources services for employees.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After launching out of TechStars Boston back in 2011, Cambridge-based real estate marketing platform Placester has raised $2.5 million in seed financing in a round led by new Boston seed fund, Romulus Capital, with participation from other angel investors. Founded in 2009 by a former real estate agent, Matt Barba, the service helps realtors launch their own websites.

During TechStars, the startup was originally designed to help realtors with online advertising, but that soon changed. “Helping real estate professionals promote their listings online through syndication was our initial focus,” explains Barba. “However, we quickly learned that the vast majority of real estate professionals don’t have anything to promote,” he says. “Essentially, they didn’t have a website. We learned there was a much more fundamental problem to be solved: Helping real estate professionals establish themselves online.”

Barba understood first-hand the difficulties realtors faced in putting their data online, including data access fees, paperwork, technical challenges, and more, because of his own background in real estate. Realtors have to pull their data from MLS (Multiple Listing Service – the regional entity where real estate professionals enter and store homes that are available for sale or rent), then pay for an IDX integration allowing customers to search their listings. This can be expensive because there are 900 U.S. MLSes, and the information retrieval methods for these are not standardized.

“This difference is one of the main contributing factors to the cost of creating a platform that allows real estate professionals to establish an online presence,” Barba says. “Additionally, most MLS’s charge fees to help offset the cost of purchasing the MLS software from third party vendors, and to provide additional services to the MLS’s agent membership. These fee’s aren’t overly burdensome to large brokerages, but can often be in the hundreds of dollars, which can be overwhelming for individual agents who are just starting to invest online,” he adds.

These challenges lead to customers finding that a lot of realtors’ websites had out-of-date listings, which is a poor experience. Meanwhile, the existing website providers often caused problems of their own: they were slow to deliver, or used out-of-date technology, for example.

Built alongside co-founder Frederick Townes, formerly the CTO at Mashable.com, Placester addresses these problems by offering a platform where realtors can create their own maintenance-free websites in around five minutes. The sites are based on WordPress, optimized for SEO, and are mobile and tablet-friendly.

For individual real estate agents, a single package includes set up, hosting, and MLS fees. Instead of relying on a third-party solution, Placester built its own technology to retrieve and update the MLS data on the fly, which helps keep the websites current.

Offered as a freemium service, paid users ($45/month) also have access to the MLS search capability, search-indexed listing pages, premium themes, customer support (phone and email), and more. Today, the company covers around 85 percent of the MLSes across the U.S., and is expanding. There are “tens of thousands” of realtors on Placester, Barba says, but declined to provide exact figures. Hundreds have converted to the paid product launched around five months ago, and user growth is 20 percent month-over-month.

Also participating in the financing round were David Anderson, David Cohen, Angel Street Capital, Adam Berrey, Bob Mason, Josh Summers, Jennifer Lum, TechStars, and other Boston investors. The round was raised in three tranches with $800,000 closed right after TechStars, $650,000 about six months later, and another $1 million closed today.

Now a sixteen-person team, the company plans to use the additional funding to add more themes as well as grow its MLS coverage to 95 percent. Also in the works is a formal partner program, which will open up the platform for others to build on.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At first sight, Suitey looks like nothing more than a run-of-the-mill real estate website. But while sites like Trulia and Zillow merely provide a listing of available properties from a large assortment of brokerages and owners, all the properties on Suitey are being directly offered by Suitey itself.

That’s because Suitey is a fully fledged real estate brokerage, and they believe they’re the first software-powered brokerage that offers a better, more transparent home buying experience.

At their core, Trulia and Zillow are really nothing more than virtualized billboards. They provide a centralized location for brokers and owners to advertise their for-sale properties.

Let’s say you’re looking for a new apartment, and you’ve narrowed down your list to five places. That means you’ll probably have to deal with five different real estate brokers, which from experience can be a total nightmare.

With Suitey, everything is simplified. Once again, let’s say you’re looking for an apartment in Manhattan (for now, Suitey only offers listings in New York City). Once you narrow things down to five options on their website, you can contact a Suitey agent who will set a time to view all the properties with you. In the future, you’ll be able to video chat with the agent directly from the website.

This face-to-face experience with Suitey’s agents is key to the company’s ethos. “We want to ensure that our agents are people you’d feel comfortable buying a home from,” says David Walker, CEO of Suitey. He tells me that Suitey’s agents are heavily vetted by the company before they are hired in a process that ensures their competence and general likability.

Once you’ve agreed to buy the home, Suitey gives you a one percent discount to sweeten the deal. That may not seem like much, but if you’re buying property for several million dollars, that rebate ends up being a couple thousand dollars you can put towards your deposit.

“I’ve never heard of anything quite like it, and it would interesting to see what happens,” says Laura Goldstein, Managing Editor of AOL Real Estate. “People have such a bad association with real estate agents, and the customer service approach feels very appealing.”

Suitey was one of the ten companies featured at the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator’s Demo Day today. You can check out a roundup of startups from our coverage of the event here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Another year has come and gone, and with it a brand new class of Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator graduates. At demo day today, we saw ten companies launch out of development and into the public eye. Yes, all of them are interesting, disrupting industries from real estate to big data to financial services. But a handful of companies truly stand out as potential game-changers in the tech world.

So without any further ado, these are TechCrunch’s picks for the ERA Accelerator spring class:

Acquaintable

Online dating is more than a trend these days; it’s how young people make connections. Acquaintable focuses on some sort of common thread, connecting people who have mutual friends. According to the company, Acquaintable has a much lower cost for user acquisition because the friend-of-friends model offers natural virality. Plus, it has a better shot at actually creating relationships that last, as the company says that 70 percent of couples have met through friends.

Using Acquaintable is easy. You hit up the website, give the service Facebook access, and then see pictures of those you might be interested in. It has a similar set up to HotOrNot.com or FaceMash, letting you approve or disapprove of someone’s picture and basic info before moving on to another suitor.

All your “likes” and “passes” are completely anonymous. Only after you and your suitor show a mutual interest can you begin communicating via messaging. Acquantainable has had an Alpha out for a while now, with 15 percent of users returning daily, and 35 percent of users sharing and inviting an average of four people. Plus, since Acquaintable focuses on friends-of-friends, it’s less of a sausage fest than online dating services that don’t ensure that this is a real, normal human being and not a creepy stranger.

Acquaintable is available now here.

Consignd

Consignd is trying to give power back to the social influencers who determine shopping habits, while still providing perks to big brand retailers and businesses. Anyone with a web presence, like bloggers, pinners, and website owners can open up a store on their site. Founder Neil Parikh explained that you can do this without ever having to source or ship inventory. Sounds weird, right? But wait.

Consignd believes that inspiration and discovery play integral roles in shopping. In fact, 48 percent of products that were bought last year were discovered socially. The breakdown between big brand retailers, affiliates, and independent retailers causes problems for all of them. Retailers lose track of where their product is sold, whereas independent retailers can’t focus on their product because of the stresses of SEO and discovery.

The idea behind Consignd is that the responsibility of bringing an audience to a retailer no longer falls on the shoulders of the retailer, thanks to sites like Pinterest and Tumblr. So as pinners and bloggers have more and more influence over shopping habits, Consignd wants to give them the credit, and the cash, by letting them open up their own store front.

Easy Pairings

When you think of NYC, it’s hard not to imagine the thousands of wannabe actresses, singer/songwriters and models who are moonlighting as waitresses until their career takes off. The problem, however, is that their careers do take off, and they leave the restaurant. In fact, most restaurants have an annual turnover rate greater than 50 percent.

Easy Pairings, one of our favorites out of ERA, is changing the way restaurants find their staff. The Easy Pairings service is available as an app, so you don’t have to run to your desktop the second you need to make a hire. Once you download the app, you can choose from the type of worker you need (server, bartender, hostess) and see who’s available for an interview.

So far, Easy Pairings has scheduled 200 interviews, and led to the hire of over 50 workers at restaurants. According to the founders Darren Wan and Peter Lada, restaurants are just the beginning, as the service can work in any industry that experiences high turnover. The company is looking to raise $500k with over $190k committed.

Startist

Startist is a platform that lets professional creatives connect and collaborate on projects with a rich-media experience. Yet, unlike most creative collaboration platforms that focus on a certain genre of artistry, Startist doesn’t discriminate. Projects can range from film and music to games and technology.

The big idea behind Startist isn’t just that creative professionals can work on projects together, but that creative professionals can form meaningful connections. Looking for bandmates or directors for your film project or models for your photography is a tough task. It isn’t just a job, it’s a relationship, and an important one at that.

Classified ads are the alternative. There are 20,000 classified ads posted by musicians every day, yet creatives aren’t able to truly express themselves in this format. Startist lets you showcase your work and search for other interesting creatives with all the originality and creativity you can muster.

Startist is opening up their private beta today, which you can check out here.

The Square Foot

The Square Foot is a real estate platform that focuses on the commercial space. It lets prospective tenants, brokers, and landlords connect quickly and easily. Searching for commercial real estate isn’t easy, especially without a lot of cash to put behind a broker.

But The Square Foot helps small businesses find the right space by aggregating available office spaces. But the Square Foot goes even further than that. For one, the service doesn’t hand you off at the browser. The Square Foot follows the transaction all the way through to completion to make sure you have everything you need to get to business.

Plus, the service connects users with service and product providers to help set up the space for work, buy furniture, move, etc. As of now, the Houston-based company has over 75 percent of the Houston area searchable on the site. The team is now working on expanding this service to the wild world of New York City.

So far, the company has raised $400k, but they’re still looking for strategic angel investors.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch