miko mercer

Launch Pad highlights: Earth Aid & Foodspotting

This week’s Web 2.0 Expo New York’s Launch Pad featured a lot of cool companies and was actually one of my favorite parts of the entire conference (but I guess I never tire hearing about new startups). apstrata, Neighborhoodr and SetJam were all fun to see present, but the other 2 of the 5 finalist presenters were companies that I found particularly interesting and could see myself using.

Earth Aid is the Mint.com for utilities and energy efficiency. This was a company that I thought was particularly fascinating because I have experimented with carbon calculators and energy tracking sites before, but have never really felt compelled to keep logging in and reducing my carbon footprint. Earth Aid incentivizes users with rewards for saving energy and also makes it social. People love to share how green they are (I do, at least), and Earth Aid is taking the approach of empowering users to save, share and receive rewards.

This is a clear distinction because a huge barrier for other energy software startups is the necessity to partner with utility companies, which are known to be inefficient and slow in adopting new technologies. Earth Aid gets around this by going straight to the consumer and is already compatible with 106 utilities, while companies like Microsoft’s Hohm are very slowly rolling out utility partners.

They are also incentivizing their users with data. Sharing and pushing out data to users is a great way to get them engaged and has translated into a 72% return rate for Earth Aid. Their revenue model is primarily around things like lead gen for projects, product sales through affiliates, and/or helping users find cleaner, better utilities (sort of how Mint.com helps you find better credit cards or insurance). Earth Aid, along with SetJam, was selected as People’s Choice Winners of Launch Pad.

Foodspotting is a site that let’s you search for and find food dishes. Sites like Yelp, Citysearch and MenuPages help us find restaurants, but it’s really hard to search by dish. When you want to find the “best ___  in NYC,” you have to search through little food blogs, in forums and through people’s lists on Yelp - it’s hard to get a clear winner and it’s so time consuming. Foodspotting makes it easy for people (“foodspotters”) to tag and submit photos of dishes and rate dishes up or down, sort of like a Digg for foodies. You are awarded reputation points based on your submissions and ratings, which builds credibility into the system. Ideally, down the line, they’ll be approaching restaurants to post photos of dish specials so that users can see real-time photos of new dishes that they might want to try.

One of the questions that one of the panelists, Baratunde Thurston, brought up was, (something like) “do we have time in our lives for another app like this?” It’s a good point - if FourSquare enables some sort of photo sharing by location/check-in, which I think I overheard might be coming soon via Good Morning Interwebs, it could trump some of Foodspotting’s utility. People do love to take photos of their food, though, I think this is a passion point that resonates with a lot of restaurant goers. So, calling all “foodspotters” and “foodseekers,” you can sign up for the alpha here.

Last night’s nextNY Community Conversation, Doing Business with Big Companies, got me thinking about how lucky I am to be working with startups. Part of the discussion focused on the frustrations of how slow big companies do business and how patient startups have to be in working with them. I’m no stranger to this frustration on the PR side, as I’ve had to work with corporate communications departments that move at a sloth’s pace compared to how we work at LaunchSquad. But day-to-day, we get to work directly with passionate founders and startup executives that are building the products and services that they (and we, as an extension of their team) hope will change the future. I think that the big difference, which one of the organizers, Phin Barnes, called out in the discussion, was that for an executive at a big corporation, that company and that work is a job. For an entrepreneur, it’s his or her life.

The ING NYC Marathon is today

Everyone probably had a busy and late night yesterday, but I’m up bright n’ early this morning for the ING NYC Marathon.

Between 8:20 and 10:20am, entrants will begin the race in wave starts in Staten Island and run through all five boroughs to end in Manhattan. Here is the entire Course Map. I’m not running, but I’ll be volunteering along the Course Entertainment in Brooklyn. More than 100 live bands total will be stationed along parts of the course to motivate and entertain participants and spectators.

Here’s the Spectator Guide to see where to watch it live, including on WNBC Channel 4. I encourage everyone to come out and support the runners, especially in Manhattan at the finish line in Central Park.

Central Park is an ideal place to watch the race; just be aware that moving around the park can be difficult on race day. Good spots include: East Park Drive between 90th and 86th Streets; Park Drive below 72nd is often more crowded. You can cross the park on either the 85th Street or 65th Street transverse roads. You cannot cross Park Drive, but you can go under it: Try the arches at 80th Street, 73rd Street, 67th Street, and 62nd Street.

Twitter lists, do they replace RSS?

I was just reading Robert Scoble’s posterous post, Why I don’t use Google Reader anymore, and thought it was interesting to think of lists as a way to replace RSS.

I haven’t spent a lot of time messing around with Twitter lists yet, mainly because I find building lists to be tedious. It’s sort of like creating and maintaining Facebook groups so you can customize your newsfeed. I already have groups within my Seesmic desktop client and I doubt I will spend much time putting together my own lists.

Right now, I’m still using my desktop NetNewsWire (yeah, old school, I like Mail.app too) at work to read blogs consistently. I already have the RSS feeds I want in my reader, and adding or deleting a feed takes seconds. Deciding whether or not to follow or unfollow someone is a little more complicated.

That said, I did find this post via Twitter and agree that more are finding news that way, from the people they follow. There are plenty of lists that have already been created or are building built that I can simply follow with one click. The question will be whether or not these will be filtered/curated enough to be useful to me personally or if I’ll have to build my own in the end. I’m not sure that people are leaving RSS readers for lists feature specifically - rather, lists is increasing Twitter’s filtering and curating capabilities (like search), which helping the valuable content/tweets bubble up for us.

Momofuku Bo Ssäm Thanksgiving Take-out

$350 for whole slow-roasted pork shoulder, 5 sides and dessert! Who needs turkey?