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LiveScore – Soccer Results in Real Time

LiveScore Soccer Sports ResultsLiveScore.com offers scores from recent sport events, updated in real time as they take place. On the site’s main page users can find soccer results from matches taking place today, and by using the links on the sidebars, users can navigate to past or future matches from the current week, or to results from other sports such as hockey, basketball and tennis. For each match the site presents information such as the current time in the match, who’s playing and in what minutes was the score previously changed.

The site focuses on soccer and succeeds in being fairly comprehensive in this area: it includes more than 50 countries for which it presents up-to-date results from their soccer national leagues and cups. For the other sports, it includes in a similar manner comprehensive results about the most important current events.

On average, LiveScore attracts around 100’000 monthly unique visitors. This success is in no small way due to the reliability built into the site: no matter if it’s day or night, people can find most of the time the score they’re interested in, up to the current minute of the match.

The domain was registered in July 1998; nowadays it earns most of its income by hosting betting ads from third party publishers. The legality of these online betting services came into question lately in some countries. The evolution of the law in this area might impact in the future the revenue and sustainability model of LiveScore as a free service, but for now it seems to be live, opened to the public and up to date, 24/7.

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SnapNames – The Domain Names You Want

SnapNames - Get the domain name you wantSnapNames.com is an online auction and marketplace site which allows users to purchase thousands of available domain names or to list their own domain names for sale. The domain names available on the site belong either to private owners or they can be expired domains that were no longer renewed by their original holders.

The site offers several methods for trading domain names. Buy It Now (also called BIN) is a method where the seller establishes a fixed sale price, and the first buyer willing to pay it gets the domain (once the payment is completed, the transfer happens automatically in the background, risk-free). Alternatively, domains can be sold via time-limited legally-binding auctions or by direct negotiations (“make an offer”).

Prices can get as low as $10 USD for a domain name sold via the auction system, while the premium names can reach millions of dollars. The site is well known in the domain gurus community and enjoys around 20’000 unique monthly visitors, which adds liquidity to the market and facilitates a speedy conversion between domains and cold hard cash. The site’s commission varies, depending on the type of sale, between 15% and 25% of the final sale price.

In november 2009 it was revealed that a SnapNames employee placed bids in the site’s domain auctions over a time-span of 4 years. As this violated SnapNames’ policy, the employee got fired. The company refunded all customers affected by paying the difference in the price hike attributed to the employee’s participation in the auctions (plus interest). The site seems to have recovered after the incident, in no small part due to their upfront disclosure and fast action once the issue was discovered.

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Symcat – Free Online Diagnostics

Symcat: Possible diseases based on the probabilities of the symptomsSymcat is an online diagnostic tool that, based on a collection of specified symptoms, presents a list of possible diseases (together with their likelihood), .

The site collects information about the user’s symptoms in a comprehensive way; for example, it displays a list of alternative suggestions when a specified symptom is not recognized; it also prompts the user to specify for how long was the symptom previously present. The list of possible diseases is displayed up-front, but it is fine-tuned as the user fills out more details about what he’s experiencing.

The accuracy of possible diseases based on the specified symptoms is what makes this app great. In March 2012, the site was reviewed in LifeHacker, and overall it received a positive review in the articles where it was mentioned.

Symcat was developed by two medical student entrepreneurs from Johns Hopkins, Craig Monsen and David Do. The webapp is currently free of charge, and anyone can use it anonymously.

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OpenSource CMS Demos and Listings

Open Source CMS - Demos and Listings OpenSourceCMS.com includes hundreds of content management systems, organized in different categories based on their specialization. These open source tools are generic apps that can be used in order to add, manage and delete content on a website. Their market is expected to reach US$12.8 Billion by 2017.

The site has a policy of tracking only open-source apps, guaranteeing in this way that any listed tool can be downloaded, installed and customized on any website free of charge. In addition, each listed CMS app has a demo install that can be used in order to preview its functionality and the features it offers.

The project was first launched to the public in 2002. Currently it averages 10’000+ unique visitors each month, according to Compete.

Scott Goodwin, the original founder, is no longer involved nowadays with the project. The site is currently operated by AOE media, a company which focuses primarily on Enterprise CMS and E-Commerce projects.

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Coursera – Education, Everywhere

Coursera - Education, EverywhereCoursera is a new e-learning platform offering courses from the top universities, for free. Quality lectures are streamlined using hi-resolution videos; participating students can achieve mastery via interactive assignments and collaborate with a global community of peers. At the end of the course, qualifying participants get a certificate of achievement signed by the professors.

Coursera was founded by professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University. Initially the platform has been used internally inside Stanford and then opened to the public via Andrew Ng’s ml-class.org site. The first course available as part of the Coursera platform was Model Thinking, taught by Scott E. Page from University of Michigan; it officially launched to the public in February 2012.

The project faces difficult competition: almost at the same time, Stanford faculty member Sebastian Thurn teamed up with David Stavens (also at Stanford) and researcher Michael Sokolsky to start Udacity. Their aim is to provide high quality, university-level education at a low cost.

Currently the site has around 10’000 unique visitors in February 2012, but numbers are expected to evolve as the learning platform completes its first set of course offerings in late April / early May 2012.

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Leaky – Compare Car Insurance Prices

Leaky - Compare Car Insurance PricesLeaky is a car insurance comparator for the US market (initially they’re starting out with California). As people fill in details about their car and their driving habits, they are able to see in real time how much would insurance cost them at different providers.

In August 2011 the company launched an earlier version of the webapp that used to scrape data from the websites of the insurance companies. They received cease and desist letters and they had to shut down their site 4 days after the launch. Since then, Leaky developed a predictor algorithm based on the public fillings that insurance companies are required to fill periodically. The new model is making predictions that are within 3 percent of the actual prices.

During the process of building the model the Leaky team discovered some interesting trivia facts about insurance costs, such as the fact that a divorce costs the same as getting a hybrid, or that driving with a suspended/revoked license has the same weight as vehicular manslaughter.

Leaky received initial seed funding as part of its participation in the YCombinator program. The company is located in San Francisco, California; it was originally founded in September 2010.

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Flippa – Buy and Sell Websites

Flippa - Buy and Sell WebsitesFlippa facilitates buying and selling websites on the Internet. By using this service, buyers and sellers around the world can transaction fully-fledged websites or only the corresponding domain name, by using an auction-based model where the parties involved can bid up the site’s price during a time period established initially by the seller.

The site accepts PayPal and credit-cards as payment methods, and for some countries an escrow option is also available. To help the buyers do due diligence, Flippa automatically retrieves site data such as whois records, length of time since the domain was registered and search engine rankings data. In addition, the sellers are required to confirm their identity via an unique phone number, and reputation grades from their previous transactions help identify the bad ones quickly.

The site is maintained by a company located in Victoria, Australia. Their traffic seems to have stabilized around 100’000 monthly unique visitors.

The website was founded by Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz; it had revenues of $1.816 million in the 2011 financial year, 10 employees, and in 2012 it received one of the StartupSmart Awards.

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Trello – Organize Anything, Together

Trello - Organize Anything, Together

Trello is a collaboration tool for teams which organizes pending tasks and keeps a big-picture overview on a project’s remaining tasks.

The service is innovative due to its special use of configurable lists (that can be named at the discretion of the user). Each list contains cards describing the tasks required to be performed; these cards can be dragged from one list to another, have people added or assigned, and the changes made to them are automatically synchronized everywhere if there are other opened browsers displaying them.

According to the Compete.com data, the site gets at least 10’000 unique visitors per month.

Trello was launched in September 2011 by Joel Spolsky. Joel is a rather popular figure whose beginnings can be traced back in 2000 when he founded Fogcreek together with Michael Pryor. Since then he has launched a range of successful services, including FogBugz and StackOverflow. In September 2011 the Wired magazine named Trello as one of “The 7 Coolest Startups You Haven’t Heard of Yet”.

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Lanyrd – Social Conference Directory

Lanyrd

Lanyrd is a conference directory searchable by geographical locations which offers a layer of social and collaborative features to easily share and track conferences online.

The service allows users to sign-up using a Twitter account. In addition to searching conferences by location or ordered by date, Lanyrd allows users to follow-up participants or speakers, discover trends or catch up on potential materials they might have missed.

The site currently gets 10’000 monthly unique visitors according to Compete.com.

The company was founded in August 2010 by Simon Willison, a co-creator of the Django Web Framework, together with his wife, Natalie Downe. The company got accepted in the YCombinator funding program after flying from Cairo (where they were having their honeymoon) to San Francisco for their interview. In September 2011 the company secured $1.4 millions in funding from several angels as well as Index Ventures Seed and PROfounders Capital.

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Google+ For Businesses and Organizations

Google+ for Businesses and Organizations

Google+ announced on 7th of November 2011 the immediate availability of Google+ Pages, a feature enabling businesses and organizations to create their own “space” on the Google+ network. The name of this feature has the potential to create some confusion among those that remember the now-defunct Google Page Creator, but for most people it won’t be an issue as they probably didn’t hear about it in the first place.

Since the initial launch of the service on 28th of June 2011, the ability of organizations to create their own space on the network has been a saga for corporations and social media professionals as they initially created company accounts only to be disabled by the Google Policy team (by stating that those accounts are forbidden in the initial phase of the service). Now anyone can create a page in the name of his organization, without restrictions.

In connection with this launch Google announced Direct Connect – a feature due to which brand names entered in search queries with the + sign as a prefix will return the Google+ Pages associated with the respective terms. This is currently working only in a limited number of instances but the company plans to make it more universal in the near future.

By enabling organizations to connect with their followers, Google+ addressed one of the service’s main missing features. Its continued success now largely depends on the array of benefits that both organizations and individual users will perceive once they’re connected via their favorite pages. For small business owners, this has the potential to become their first online presence by replacing the need for a website, especially if Google achieves seemingly integration of the feature with Google Maps, Google Sites and its other related services.

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