entrepreneur27.org

“Gruuve”:http://www.gruuve.com is a music search and discovery engine. Gruuve offers users personalized recommendations based on the music they like. Daya is the founder of Gruuve, and he oversees the strategic initiatives for the company. Previously, he was the founder of Accencia, an internet appliance for voice recognition and storage. Before that, he was the founder of TRISTAR, an internet investment fund. He also runs the “WebGuild.org”:http://www.webguild.org, which is the largest professional web organization in Silicon Valley – WebGuild is backed by Google.

How does Gruuve differentiate itself from Pandora?

Gruuve is the intersection of “Google”:http://www.google.com and “MySpace”:http://www.myspace.com. Our content in organized in two ways: traditional search and user generated. Users contribute to our library, rate songs, and build our recommendation information. Based on user generated data, our recommendation engine perceives which songs users might be interested in. For example, let’s say you like U2 and Britney Spears. I like Jessica Simpson and U2. The system will recommend Jessica Simpson to you and Britney Spears to me. Gruuve is proactive and it grows daily.

What are the advantages of user generated ratings? Is anyone employed at the headquarters to add to the primarily user-generated library?

We are moving from a broadcast with narrow selections and to a universal cast, multi-selection, time shiftable model. Consumers are determining consumption – when, what and where they want it. The major advantage is that it happens online with thousands of artists and hundreds of users globally, 24 hours a day – far outpacing the efficiency or resources of any corporation. That is the power of Gruuve.

Let’s talk about the compatibility of your widget. Is MySpace the only platform with which your widget it compatible or have you also considered sites like Google and Netvibes?

We support “MySpace”:http://www.myspace.com and over 300 additional websites like “Friendster”:http://www.friendster.com and “Facebook”:http://www.facebook.com. You name it and our widget plugs into it.

Bonus: What’s your favorite song?

Favorite song at the moment is “Homeboy by Jojo”:http://www.gruuve.com/searchresults.php?r=1169756054&a=1235980747&ri=&q=JoJo.

Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal

What gap did you want to fill when you created Vyew?

The first-generation of web collaboration offerings, including and especially web conferencing, are limited by the need to download and/or install client software. These installs are often cumbersome and most importantly don’t allow for immediate, on-the-fly collaboration. Vyew was created with a vision to give users the power to instantly start a collaboration session. The only requirement is the ubiquitous Flash plug-in, which 97% of personal computers already have.

How does Vyew differentiate itself from the “WebEx’s”:http://www.webex.com of the world?

In addition to Vyew’s ad-hoc capabilities, Vyew is unique from the likes of WebEx in a couple key ways. First, Vyew is really much more than a real-time web conferencing product. Vyew also allows users to work on projects asynchronously over time. For example, users can create a session with project content, let their co-workers access that content anytime to review, comment or add to, then go back and see who added what, when. This means Vyew is much more relevant as a workflow tool, not just when a live meeting is necessary. Analysts covering collaboration estimate that only 10-15% of the addressable market is currently being served. We believe the difference is made up largely by small-to-medium sized businesses that have shied away from the WebEx’s of the world because of their inherent complexity and prohibitive pricing. We’ve built Vyew to be powerful yet incredibly easy to use, and the price is right to start using the product: FREE.

What is your strategy for moving Vyew from the beta release into Vyew 1.0?

As we move from beta to full release, we’ll continue offering a fully functional version of Vyew available for FREE, supported by light advertising. Vyew users that want to turn-off the ads, add capacity, and/or customize their collaboration environment will be able to subscribe at various levels. Our starter subscriptions will be priced very aggressively, helping to remove price as a barrier to entry into the world of web collaboration.

As we move forward, we’ll be adding new features and complementary products that will give users unprecedented collaboration capabilities. Vyew is also ripe for partnerships, so expect to see some motion on that font as well.

Bonus: What has been the most rewarding feature that you have developed for the site?

The most rewarding aspect of Vyew has been our ability to develop a scalable, powerful, yet easy-to-use product that’s making a difference. Vyew is already being used in over 110 countries and we receive frequent feedback about how Vyew is helping people work and communicate better around the world.

Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal

*Email*: lynn | webprodigy | com
*Company*: “webprodigy.com”:http://webprodigy.com
*Interests*: Continuos innovation. The changing social structures on the web. Preserving self-governance on the Web and helping to educate families about Internet safety.
*Looking for*: 2-Part Purpose: (1) Bantering with like-minded people. (2) Opportunities to bring businesses to the next level on the Web, moving beyond brochure sites and making their sites produce results.

“CareSquare”:http://www.caresquare.com connects parents and caregivers in a social network, allowing for peer-review, feedback, and real-time booking of care. Ariel is a serial entrepreneur, a geek, and the mother of a two-year old boy with another one on the way this spring. She has been passionately involved in all things internet since the early 90’s and is driven to build community wherever she can. More on Ariel “here.”:http://www.caresquare.com/about/team

What strategies are you employing to increase the number of users on CareSquare?

CareSquare is by nature a word-of-mouth operation. If we cannot make this succeed virally, it won’t succeed. We rely heavily on the recommendations of our community to spread the word, primarily through our caregivers. We believe we have an advantage over many other social networking sites out there in the family space because it behooves our caregivers to invite families into the system in order to increase their ratings, thereby enjoying more job opportunities. We are constantly trying to address new ways to incent and allow our members to spread the word.

What have been the biggest obstacles to moving online caregiver advertising into the web 2.0 realm? How did you address them?

Childcare is a very hands-on job, and it is of tantamount importance that a parent feels totally comfortable with a caregiver before allowing them to meet and care for their children. Our challenge is to continually re-assure parents that finding caregivers online is a safe and trusted method of making this hire, especially since they are all coming from recommendations within their community. Sometimes transactions on the web can be a bit impersonal, and we always encourage parents to take the connections they make online with CareSquare offline before the caregiver begins to work for them.

Are there any new features in development stages? What do you hope to do next?

We are hard at work porting our existing application onto a much broader social networking platform for release this coming spring. Some key features will include job boards, areas for share-care postings, better community building featuers, translation of the whole service to cater to the Spanish-speaking market, and discussion boards.

Bonus: What’s your number one qualification for a caregiver?

Passion for kids – not all of us are born with the innate ability to communicate well with children. Caregivers who are able to communicate this skill effectively on their profiles are enjoying the maximum benefits of CareSquare.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal

What gap were you hoping to fill when you started Matador?

We believe there are hundreds of thousands of incredible people out there, doing amazing things in the world. They are writers, photographers, musicians, film makers, adventurers, NGO workers and people who care deeply about issues that will matter to all of us in the next 50 years. We wanted to give these people a single place to call home on the Internet, and a chance to share information and advice about the things that fire them up. We wanted to give them a space to collaborate on trips, projects and adventures big and small.

How have you gotten the message out to expand your user base?

We haven’t done much marketing at all. People in the Closed Beta have the ability to invite contacts with special invite links, and these have been sent all over the world by our users. I honestly don’t know exactly how most of our users got on the site…which is really encouraging.

Which section of the Matador site is most important to you? Why?

The Articles section is most important to me because our five core categories (People, Art&Music, Sport, Element, and Evolution) define what we’re all about – and the values that make the community so special are articulated through the stories people write for this section.

Bonus: What’s your favorite spot in the world?

Favorite spot in the world…that is tough. I’d say either Buenos Aires or Rio in January…

Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal

How did Pandora get started? What was the atmosphere like when you were launching?

To give you some background, I came from rock bands and film composing – I had been trying to make a living as a musician for ten years before we started the music genome project. While composing scores for films, I would sit down with each film’s director and we would go back and forth playing music for each other to see if we could constitute a musical taste.

Two experiences came together to generate the idea for the music genome project. First – while I was in the band, I learned that finding an audience is the biggest problem facing indie musicians. And second – when I was composing film scores, I realized that there was no way to formally categorize someone’s musical taste.

So two co-founders and I decided to tackle those problems by starting the music genome project. Unfortunately, we started the company just a few weeks before the dot com collapse. It was a rocky journey – the money we had raised for the project lasted us about a year. After that, we were broke for three years and couldn’t raise any money; the music business was in chaos. After facing eviction notices, we finally got some real money in 2004 and that’s when we started Pandora.

So basically there were two distinct chapters: everything before 2004 was really about survival whereas now it’s the entirely opposite experience – we’ve had several rounds of funding and gained five million users without advertising our service anywhere.

How does Pandora manage to stay on top of the newest music?

Keeping up with the music industry’s evolution is a substantial operation. We get music from a lot of different places but the single largest source is the thousands of recommendations that we receive from our listeners. We also have a huge catalog of music sent to us from bands, managers, and music labels. Also, Pandora employs two people full-time to turn over every stone and find the newest music.

Where do you find your musically talented team?

Our team of trained musicians all have four-year degrees in music. They’re all practicing musicians with a deep grounding in music theory. They are playing music all the time and many are music teachers.

We have 45 musicians looking at songs in hundreds of musical dimensions each day in order to reach our goal of analyzing 15,000 songs every month.

What are your thoughts on the short audio commercials that Pandora has recently introduced?

Right now we’re just running a test to see how the commercials will be received. We have heard a fair number of complaints but we wanted to try it out to see how we could optimize the business aspect of the site while maintaining the integrity of the listening experience. We’re testing a once-a-day ad that goes out to ten percent of listeners, but the jury is still out on whether we’ll use audio commercials at all.

Bonus: Pandora is a pretty loaded name…how did you decide what to call the site?

Pandora is known for her curiosity and her box full of surprises, but she was also a gifted musician. Even though her box didn’t let out the most desirable things, hope was at the bottom. When we thought about her story, it just felt like us – full of surprises and for the curious.

Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal

It has been said that online photo editing was impossible. What was the biggest challenge you faced in making it happen?

Browsers. It’s almost as if they’ve conspired to make it difficult to
build something this powerful. That said, I remind myself that a web browser is a much better environment to work with than what was available to my peers 20 years ago. Programmers have always pushed the limits of their platforms. I’m sure the folks who built VisiCalc and the original Mac OS fought many problems with their platforms to bring their software to market.

How do you differentiate from your competitors?

We take extra care to make editing pictures easy. The user is our
number one priority. Every feature is carefully reviewed. Do we need this? Is the extra complexity – the extra click – worth it?

What has been the most fun about developing the site? What
inspires you?

The challenges and constant learning. I love that. Our goal is to
have every image posted to the web go through Snipshot first. It’s
impossibly ambitious, but that’s what keeps us going.

Bonus: What’s your favorite photo that you edited with Snipshot? How does it look now compared to the original?

I took a photo of the Vancouver skyline on a gloomy day after a
snowstorm. It’s one of our sample pictures. One click with “Enhance” turns the snow white, and when you max out the saturation the colors jump out.

Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal

In your words, how does Zaptix work? I see that you have an online directory of upcoming shows – do you provide other suggestions for how small performance groups can get the word out to their audience members about your service?

ZapTix makes it easy for groups to sell tickets online. They simply sign up, list their events, and spread the word through their website and mailing list. They can check their sales at any point before or after the event, and prepare accordingly.

This business seems like it would require a uniquely grassroots effort – how are you getting the word out about your service to small performance groups?

We’re growing the company one venue at a time. We spend a lot of time on the phone talking with groups, event organizers, and performing arts organizations. Eventually we hope to hire a full-time sales force to assist in outreach to more organizations.

I see that you have some experience with other online entrepreneurial activities. What is your number one piece of advice to someone hoping to start up a business online?

Be patient. Starting up a web company takes five times as long and costs five times as much as you originally expect.

Bonus: What was the best event that you have seen thanks to tickets from Zaptix?

Last year, the Summer Breeze concert in Chicago, which featured Dar Williams, Parliament, and some great local acts.

Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal

*Email*: hykoomedia | gmail | com
*Phone*: 646-734-4707
*Company*: “Hykoo”:http://Hykoo.com
*Interests*: social media, performance marketing, web 2.0, Ruby on Rails, AJAX, politics, community building, music, film and basketball!
*Looking for*: Networking with social media, performance marketing and web 2.0 entrepreneurs, funding/investment opportunities, business development alliances with other entrepreneurs, link/publicity exchanges, friends, basketball players.

Talk to me about the mission of Learn Out Loud – what does the site hope to accomplish?

We hope to help inspire people to turn their “dead time” into “learning time.” Each person spends hundreds of hours each year commuting, exercising, cleaning up around the house, etc. and a good chunk of that time can be spent learning. Whether it’s something to help them get the edge professionally or make them more fulfilled personally we aim to provide them with a one-stop resource to find tons of material to use in the learning process.

How has Learn Out Loud’s decision to include DRM-free audio affected the company?

We’re actually the only major site only that sells DRM-free spoken word audio. We also don’t sell any content that has DRM applied to it, something I’m very proud of. Like “eMusic”:http://www.emusic.com, the challenge with selling DRM-free is that it’s an uphill battle to get the latest and greatest content. However, the bonus to our customers is that they know they’ll always be able to play our content on any device. That’s something that none of competitors can say.

Where is Learn Out Loud going next?

There is a lot planned for 2007. We’re going to launch kids.learnoutloud.com soon which will give parents a great place to buy audio learning material for their children. Our podcasts are doing really well right now too so we plan to launch more of them. And our download library should at least double this year. We’re really bullish on this audio learning thing – especially given that several billion people are going to be downloading audio to their phones in a few years and we’re the only site selling universally compatible content with which they can learn.

Bonus: What’s your personal favorite Learn Out Loud podcast?

In terms of podcasts we’ve produced, I’m a big fan of The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson podcast. As for other podcasts, my personal favorite of late is Calacanis Cast although close runners-up are Steve Pavlina’s podcast and Venture Voice.

Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal