Just got my TechFlash Live tickets
Please join John Cook, Todd Bishop, Eric Engleman and the rest of the TechFlash team on the evening of April 29!
Monitor the brand called YOU via Friendscall.me
So, many of you are probably familiar with Colour Lovers. Intended for colour professionals, colour obsessives and designers who want to up their palette game, this site offers entry into a subject many don’t think about much but which affects us in an infinitesimal number of ways. There are breakdowns of the colours used in magazines, movie posters and websites (all oddly interesting), plus shade matching games, advice on fluffing up your social networking and discussions on such thorny topics as “Is black a colour?”, the colour world equivalent to “Are Jaffa Cakes biscuits?”
The founder of Colour Lovers, Darius A Monsef IV, dropped in to give us the low-down on his latest project called friendscall.me I checked out the site last week and got hooked. Rather than try to describe it for you, I got Darius to write a few notes about the app.
#1: For those folks who don’t know Darius, tell us a few words about yourself
I call myself an “internet astronaut.” I’m passionate about building web startups and incubating ideas. I dream of the what the future of the web holds like young aspiring astronauts look up at the stars… and know I might crash and burn attempting to see what is our there. A few years back I transformed an uninspiring color theory class into COLOURlovers.com, an international color & design resource that now welcomes 1 million visitors a month. At the same time I started COLOURlovers I left the states to spend 5 months in Thailand organizing a tsunami volunteer relief center and co-founded www.HODR.org. I now spend my time between running COLOURlovers, incubating new ideas and bringing some community support and web vision to www.Photosynth.com at Microsoft.
#2: What prompted you to do friendscall.me over all the other ideas you surely had? (How’d you get the idea?)
First, it was a pretty simple idea so I knew we could execute it quickly (It took us 18 days from concept to launch). We’re actually right in the middle of finishing some new feature updates for COLOURlovers and we’d promised ourselves we wouldn’t work on anything else… but the idea was simple, the timing was perfect… so we jumped on it. The idea was inspired by a similar service called UsernameCheck by Jon Sykes. I actually knew about it because it was sending a good amount of traffic to COLOURlovers from people searching for their usernames. When I went back to use the service a few weeks ago to check on the saturation of a name I had for a different startup, I found out that he’d turned his service off. I’m not much for just copying an old idea though, so we evolved the service and thought about how we could add more value. 1. List more sites but break them up in to categories so it is easier to digest. 2. Let people claim the profiles that they have on one page to help them share all the places they are on the social web.
The idea we executed is only part of an larger idea I’ve been kicking around for several months now. What we have up at FriendsCall.Me now is phase one of three.
#3: So, if you had to put the description of the company into one sentence how would you summarize it?
Making sure the name you use online is yours everywhere you want it to be and that all your profiles are organized in one easy to share place.
#4: How many different sites do you actively participate in yourself? Top 5?
Being active on the web is part of my passion and my business, so I try and use as many sites / services as I can. Right now I’m moderately active on maybe 20. I’m most active on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter & (COLOURlovers obviously 
I am a content consumer, but less active on a publishing side on Flickr, YouTube & Yelp.
#5: I noticed I can easily use this service to see if my common username profile is already taken (which on Flickr it is). Does Friendcall.me still help me when things are just going to be fractured anyway? Don’t most people have to deal with 3-5 different logins as it stands?
Yes. When you claim your aggregated profile page, ie www.FriendsCall.Me/dariusmonsef you can change the usernames that deviate from your most common. My example of that would be Delicious… for some reason I didn’t get dariusmonsef which I use everywhere else.
#6: Can to talk about the community aspect of this platform? Can I learn from or share with others?
The phase we’re in right now, we’re mostly supporting external communities. The web is exploding with social features. Almost every new site / service has social networking and profiles features and this gets harder and harder to keep well connected. When a user claims their FriendsCall.Me profile they can share that link on any one of the communities they participate in, opening up that social network to all the others that they participate in. A secondary usefulness of what FriendsCall.Me offers is the discovery of new and interesting sites that match a users interests. For example if you’re really into photography and we add a new photo related site, we can send you a notification about the site and give you the opportunity to grab your name before somebody else does.
#7: So, I found 47 sites where my preferred username is available. What now?
Unfortunately now you need to go and register at each one of those sites individually. We plan to turn the ability to have a 1-click registration feature built right into our site in the coming weeks. We’ll be launching this feature with some of our partner sites, but hope to expand it to all the sites listed on FriendsCall.Me in the not so distant future. Once you’re registered with us and have filled our your basic profile, we can then step through the process on the back end with each of those sites you want to register at. You’ll still need to click a button to register and acknowledge each site’s terms of use and privacy policy, but we’re hoping this is the first step in providing some much needed organization around the fragmenting world of social profiles.
#8: Anything else you want to say about Friendscall.me?
A question a lot of people have asked us since launching FriendsCall.Me is, Why don’t you include Facebook? Unfortunately a lot of really great sites don’t support vanity urls (web addresses that include a username as the unique identifier rather than a jumble of numbers). Facebook offers vanity urls for some celebrities, but a lot of other great sites like Yelp don’t offer vanity urls at all. This makes it really hard to remember a friend’s url and not so easy for us to tie those sites into our current service. But as an extension of our current service, in the near future we will be launching a new feature that will provide “vanity urls for the entire social web.” Facebook might not give you a vanity url, but we will.
We’re big fans of Curious Office and your projects. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to share with you what we’re working on.
Cheers,
+D
Darius A Monsef IV
Executive Editor | www.COLOURlovers.com
Profile Wrangler | www.FriendsCall.Me
Internet Astronaut | www.InternetAstronauts.com
Community Organizer | www.Photosynth.com
Maybe Inkd will be an award winner?
I have the honor of being a panelist/judge for the upcoming Seattle 2.0 Awards event on May 7!
The Seattle 2.0 Awards recognizes the amazing accomplishments of the best of over 300 Seattle area technology startups (despite the challenging economy), and the exceptional people who are behind their heroic efforts. They will single out the very best of the best, as judged by the people who knows best: their peers in the startup community. Maybe even Inkd will win something! Attend the awards ceremony on May 7 if you can make it to Seattle!
Here are the categories!
Best Startup
Best Boot-strapped Startup
Best Startup CEO
Best Startup Technologist
Best Venture Capitalist
Best Angel Investor
Best Startup Product Designer
Best Service Provider to Startups
Best Blog from/about Startup
Best Social Event for Startups
Curious about the browser stats for our new company Inkd.com?
The results are amazing.
Internet Explorer is just 11%!
Check out the rest of the browser stats for Inkd.com here.
Thanks to Seattle Times for mentioning the Inkd launch!
Thanks to TechFlash for mentioning Inkd launch today!
John Cook was kind enough to make mention of our latest company Inkd on TechFlash today!
Inkd.com has launched today!
The latest project from Curious Office and Second Avenue Partners launches today! Inkd is the World’s First Market for Original Print Design. Get printing templates such as brochures and business cards for free. Thanks to everyone on the Inkd team for their hard work over the last several months! Download free brochure templates, newsletters, flyers, business cards, letterhead templates and more!
Download free brochure template
Download free letterhead template
Download free business card template
Here’s a nice write-up from TechCrunch.
Original Atari! Anyone else have one of these?
Saw this in a bar in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle yesterday.
New desks at Curious Office/Wishpot/Zooppa
Yes they look cool. No we didn’t spend a lot of money. The office is nice heh? We’re located in the Pioneer Square area of Seattle.
The new Apture Twitter Viewer
The folks over at Apture are certainly an interesting bunch. They are obviously very shrewd about how they think about the future of the web and, more specifically, content mash-ups. I’ve played with Apture here on Curious Office to embed supplemental information as shown here, where I link the respective Wikipedia entry to the actual name of one of our companies right on the Curious Office website.
Once you’ve set up your free account on Apture, you can integrate reference guides, images, video, maps, music, documents, presentations on your website simply by highlighting the text you want to link. Apture uses a fairly complex bit of javascript to enable a dashboard that hovers above the page you’ve enabled. The dashboard launches the Apture Media Hub from which you access media from a range of sources right in the DIV layer without ever leaving the site you’re working on. Just type in what you are looking for and Apture returns information from about 25-35 sources of external information though I find Wikipedia to be a particularly reliable and relevant reference to embed based on the quality of material that comes back.
I also found Apture to be a useful way to quickly add your own external URLs on your site…without having to login to your blog and edit a previous post. So, for bloggers you can see that Apture is an interesting and speedy way to get your existing content to a more valuable state. Since Apture is the intermediary, it’s also an interesting outlet for publishers looking for more distribution. Not that Twitter needs more distribution but I did need even more reasons to like Apture. They recently announced Twitter integration which allows you to embed Twitter searches that are relevant to YOUR blog and they also recognize a Twitter address on your site and display that Twitter feed for you.
Here’s a Twitter search result for SEO. Using the Apture dashboard to do this looked like this:
Apture Dashboard
Hover over this to see it in action:
#SEO
You can also hover over my twitter name to see the results:
@curiousoffice.com
The new Twitter functionality in Apture is a nice move because it allows you to have finer control over the quality and type of INCREMENTAL information that you publish in context with the rest of your blog articles.
Curious Office Twitter
Dummy Credit Card Numbers for Testing
4111-1111-1111-1111
via Dummy Credit Card Numbers for Testing.
Page-Sender: Full-featured Mac Fax Software for OS X
Page-Sender: Full-featured Mac Fax Software for OS X.
Looks very cool actually!
Seattle 2.0 Awards 2009
My good friend Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa just announced his latest creation – the Seattle 2.0 Awards for 2009. The Seattle 2.0 Awards recognizes the amazing accomplishments of the best of over 300 Seattle area technology startups (despite the challenging economy), and the exceptional people who are behind their heroic efforts.
This is a big undertaking by Marcelo and I really appreciate this effort as well as the work put in by all the other panelists involved.
Vanessa Fox
Rebecca Lovell
NWEN
Alyssa Royse
Just Cause
Danielle Morrill
Seattle 2.0/Twillio
Bill Bryant
Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Matt McIlwain
Madrona Venture Group
Jon Staenberg
Rustic Canyon
Mike Mathieu
Frontseat
Brady Forrest
O’Reilly
Marcelo Calbucci
Sampa & Seattle 2.0
Renay San Miguel
King 5/NWCN
Brier Dudley
Seattle Times
John Cook
TechFlash
Chris Pirillo
Lockergnome & Gnomedex
Tony Wright
RescueTime
Nathan Kaiser
nPost
T.A. McCann
Gist
John Maher
Lunch 2.0
Andru Edwards
Gear Live
Kevin Leneway
Microsoft
Geoff Entress
Voyager Capital
Greg Huang
Xconomy
Dusk setting in for the latest Curious Office/Second Avenue project
Great lighting in the afternoon while the team works away…
