In November of last year, more than 50 people came together for Startup Weekend Los Angeles . They pitched 45 different entrepreneurial ideas, eventually narrowing them into seven teams. They spent Saturday and Sunday working around the clock to create working prototypes of these ideas with help from an expert panel of mentors, speakers and even lawyers. Then they voted, and the top vote-getter - Mingly - was born, and has since been invited to Twiistup, a showcase for hot upcoming startups in Los Angeles at the end of January. Sponsor Mingly, a self-proclaimed "social CRM," is a universal address book for your various networks of contacts the helps your prioritize and follow up on important relationships. It works with Facebook , Twitter , Google Contacts , and LinkedIn and allows you to create groups and set up alerts. The idea was the side project of founder Tyler Koblasa before he decided to pitch the idea to the crowd of entrepreneurs and coders at Startup Weekend. Their response? "I need that, I love it, let's build it," says Koblasa. "I had no expectations," Koblasa tells ReadWriteWeb. "I did think that in a perfect world, we would end up with a working, more advanced product - which we did." After the event, he not only had a product, he had a company name and a team of developers to go with it. Now, two months later, the small company forged in 48 hours has been chosen to participate in the upcoming Twiistup event, a much coveted invitation to startups because of the event's exposure to media and investors. Twiistup organizer Francisco Dao was one of the guest judges at Startup Weekend Los Angeles and rewarded Mingly with a free application to his event, and he's not surprised the judges accepted it. "It blew me away! I just love that these guys built a prototype in two days," Dao tells ReadWriteWeb. "And now they'll be on stage with these larger groups that have funding." Mingly is a great example for entrepreneurs-to-be that starting a business doesn't always mean quitting your job and spending lots of money. In this case, the Mingly founders spent $75 to attend the Startup Weekend event, and soon they will be "in front of a lot of media and a lot of money," as Dao puts it. Discuss

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From Concept to Company in 2 Days: Mingly Invited to Twiistup

FormSpring.com is a data collection and management system with a particular emphasis in online forms, registrations and surveys. And enterprise-level system, FormSpring.com might seem rather dry to anyone but an online retailer or event coordinator. FormSpring.me , on the other hand, has tapped the very essence of what makes the social web so addictive. This new application, a free and social side project, nearly has all the requisite puzzle pieces to go completely viral. It's fun, engaging, and slightly game-like, and it encourages the behaviors users love to indulge. It's only missing one critical element. Sponsor A stable back end. But more about that in a moment. First, let me tell you what makes FormSpring.me so infinitely entertaining. First, the site is user-to-user Q&A . This is the kind of formula that has populated the Web with masses of UGC on sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers . It's also the basic formula behind such highly praised startups as Aardvark , which allows users to ping one another across networks to get answers about specific topics. Q&A between end users is a growing trend on the web, without a doubt. Second, the site allows one user to anonymously ask questions of another user. Anonymity has bred some of the most interesting and varied experiments of the social web. Very often, a lack of links to users' true identities leads to bathroom-wall-of-the-Internet content such as 4chan or YouTube comments. But while anonymity breeds trollism and is actually a dying phenomenon online, having a thin veil between the asker and the answerer of a question can act as a confessional booth in a way, allowing for more frank communication or the posing of some very interesting, controversial questions that might otherwise be considered impolite or risky. Finally, one of the most enduring trends of the social web, from its inception to the present day, is our deep and insatiable love of self-reference . The provocative beginning question for the site is, "Ask me anything," which users then tweet or post to Facebook. Answering questions all about you, your preferences, your past, your thoughts, your wishes and hopes, your regrets, what you eat and where you live - nothing is more intoxicating to the average social media user. From our first LiveJournal entries to mid-2000s MySpace chain surveys to our latest tweets, we clearly love talking about ourselves. The way that FormSpring.me caters to this inherently human attribute is by giving us the impression or illusion that someone, somewhere actually cares about what we think and do enough to ask us and expect an answer. So, when you combine the power of a Q&A site with the magic of an anonymous commenting system and the addictive qualities of navel-gazing with the expectation of being noticed, you basically have on your hands the social web app of the year just waiting to happen. And if it weren't for back end - which is likely built on Ruby on Rails, according to a few sources we've consulted today - FormSpring would have not only a money-making enterprise app but also a blockbuster social app. Although the concept is fascinating, the implementation is transparently shoddy. It seems like a hastily put-together weekend project along the lines of a Startup Weekend or Rails Rumble one-off. In fact, several developers we consulted said the site bears all the marks of a Ruby on Rails product, including rampant database scalability errors . ActiveRecord is a Rails class for accessing databases, and it's been shown in past applications to be unscalable. Concurrency issues mean that a small group of geeks or judges can have a grand time with your app, but the second it catches on with the social media crowd and then - god help you - general Internet users, the app's database is unable to handle that volume of traffic over a period of seconds, and end users start seeing error messages and abandoning ship like so many faithless rats. And since FormSpring.me is in all likelihood a side project from a single staffer or a couple employees (the company blog doesn't even mention the offshoot), it might not get the executive attention for further development or resource allocation. After all, without a revenue model, why would an enterprise-focused company waste time and energy on a social application? Speculation aside, FormSpring.com support tech Ryan Dillman writes, "Eventually, we plan to rewrite the FormSpring.me code from the ground up using the same type of database as sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc., so that we can handle the load. In the meantime, the millions of calls to the database cause frequent issues during peak times." Many parts of Twitter are built on Scala , and Facebook's database abstraction layer was developed in-house. If that kind of userbase - millions upon millions of users accessing the site around the clock - is what FormSpring is preparing for, they're going to need a much more robust solution that's much closer to bare metal than whatever they're currently running. And we do suggest they find one. FormSpring should consider monetizing and quickly scaling such an addictive little application before someone else does it next and better. So, to take the site's "Ask me anything" query and pose it to the site's creators, do you plan to seriously devote resources to create a stunning and addictive social app, or is this experiment destined for the digital dustbin? Ask us anything - or give us your frank opinions - in the comments. Discuss

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Anonymity, Self-Reference & Q&A: Formspring.me's Winning Combination for the Social Web

You've probably never heard of Matt Mireles and Bjorn Liljequist but with a $4000 dollar budget and an engineering team paid in iPhones, the two already have Meebo founder Seth Sternberg as their advisor and praise from VC Fred Wilson . The duo's filtering service Speakertext will launch at tomorrow's New York Tech Meetup and the concept is a simple one - to make video interesting. Sponsor Like Tubechop , Speakertext allows users to omit the boring parts of a video; however, the service's transcription component offers a new and important twist. Says CEO Mireles, "At some point, longer videos become useless. It's the metadata and the fact that we're allowing it to be indexed that make this a great tool." The service uses the YouTube API and replaces the YouTube player with a Speakertext player. Users can search video text for relevant quotes and embed the linked quote or the Speakertext player and video into their blogs. To index your own video with the system, you can either transcribe it yourself or opt into a

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Search, Monetize and Fact Check YouTube Transcripts with Speakertext

It's no secret that we at ReadWriteWeb have a lot of love for startups that make their homes outside Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. Over the last year, we decided to make a few videos spotlighting some unique, unexpected locations where startups thrive, where tech scenes are vibrant, where cooperation outstrips competition, and where creativity runs rampant. One of the first cities we'd like to introduce you to is home to between 150 and 170 startups as well as a thriving entrepreneurial and creative community. Welcome to Boulder, Colorado. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! With the startup accelerator program at TechStars acting as a lightning rod, this area has grown from an earthy university town to a true hotbed of innovation. In certain parts of downtown, you can't throw a rock without hitting some startup's offices, and I could barely walk three blocks without bumping into at least one entrepreneur, developer, or designer working at a company such as Threadless or AOL. We interviewed a couple of local startup advisors and one startup team about the culture and community in Boulder. Watch and listen to what they have to say; there are more than a few reasons tech-minded residents love this gorgeous mountain town. Discuss

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A Startup Movie: Never Mind the Valley, Here's Boulder

It may soon be easier for foreign startup entrepreneurs to set up shop in the United States thanks to immigration reform which would create a specialized startup visa program. The proposed program would make more visas available to entrepreneurs who have at least $250,000 in funding from a U.S.-based venture capital firm, or $100,000 in angel funding. The startup must also have plans to either create five new jobs every two years, raise at least $1 million every two years, or generate at least $1 million in revenue. Sponsor The current system grants 10,000 visas each year primarily to investors that have financed over $1 million with plans to create at least 10 full-time positions. It also allows lower benchmarks for investors in less wealthy countries. However, the new requirements - which are part of a bill proposed by Colorado Congressman Jared Polis (above) - would fall far beneath the current benchmarks, making it easier for smaller companies and those from underprivileged countries to create jobs in America. The idea is the brainchild of programmer, essayist and Y Combinator partner Paul Graham who first wrote of what he called "the founder visa" in April of 2009. In some cases, inspired entrepreneurs enter the U.S., but after their ideas flourish and their visas run out they are in danger of being forced to go home to start their businesses. Investor, entrepreneur and co-founder of Foundry Group , Brad Feld experienced this first-hand at the TechStars program in Boulder, Colorado this summer as two of the ten groups had foreign founders. "Over the summer we struggled to figure out ways to get them Visas - all of the proposed approaches were expensive, risky, and tiresome," Feld says. "Both companies are still trying, but each are now seriously considering returning to their home countries to build their businesses." Along with other entrepreneurs, start-up advisors and venture capital investors, Feld has co-founded StartupVisa.com , a homepage Feld says has been a resource for the movement inspired by Paul Graham's vision. "In the next few months, we'll be expanding it aggressively to incorporate grass roots support and feedback," he told ReadWriteWeb. One of StartupVisa's contributors, Manu Kumar, helps spread the word about visa reform by recounting his own struggles. "There were multiple points at which I came very close to having to leave the United States because of the visa issues," says Kumar. As the country attempts to pull itself out of one of the largest recessions in history, it only seems logical to make it as easy as possible for foreign entrepreneurs to enter the country and create jobs for Americans. "I think this would have such a visible effect on the economy that it would make the legislator who introduced the bill famous," says Graham. "The only way to know for sure would be to try it, and that would cost practically nothing. Discuss

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Attracting Foreign Startups: Access To U.S. Could Get Easier

In 2006, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake coined the term "BizDev 2.0" when looking at the phenomenon of supplying commercial API keys to startup partners. Said Fake, traditional business development meant "trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. [It's] much, much better this way!" Three years later, many are finding that while APIs are great biz dev tools for the larger provider, startups can often suffer under the thumb of their platform keepers. Sponsor In November ReadWriteStart spoke to

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The Perils of 3rd Party APIs

There were a ton of great products launched in 2009 by big companies and startups alike, but in this post we focus on the best products released by startups. The easiest way to become a leading product in your industry is to meet a need better than anyone else. The following ten have proven themselves with great features, substantial marketplace momentum and, most importantly, a game-changing approach to solving a problem. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Real-Time Reference - Aardvark : Reinventing Q&A, ReadWriteWeb covered Aardvark's launch in March 2009 . The service allows users to ask and answer questions through a network of friends via IM, iPhone application, Twitter, email or web interface. Because the system automatically routes questions to people with the right expertise, answers are fairly accurate and there is little need to use the service's flagging system. The company claims that 90% of questions get answered in five minutes or less. Location-based Apps - Foursquare : Launched at SXSW, Foursquare is a location-based social application where users check in on their iPhone at various businesses and compete against their friend network for points. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's launch in March . Since then they've partnered with Bay Area Rapid Transit and a number of businesses to offer location-based deals to users. iPhone App Recommendation - Appsfire : In a world where iPhones seemed to saturate the earth, Appsfire offers a great way for users to share their favorites. Launched in August, ReadWriteWeb praised the convenience of the iPhone app . Four months after downloading it, many of our RWW teammates are still sharing their apps via the embeddable Appsfire widget and the iPhone application. Real-Time Search - Collecta : If you're interested in finding out the latest info on a particular product, Collecta offers real-time search with a variety of results including blog posts, photos and Twitter and Identi.ca posts. Launched in June, ReadWriteWeb covered the company's release . In September the company released its API to developers . Twitter App Discovery - OneForty : Dubbed the "unofficial Twitter app store" OneForty is a marketplace where Twitter developers add their applications for discovery. End-users can add their reviews and recommendation to be featured on the service's front page. Launched in September, Oneforty breaks down the applications into easy to understand categories and features the most popular apps and recently uploaded apps on the homepage. Next Page: Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 6-10 All-You-Can-Eat Music - MOG All Access : Although MOG has been around as a blogging network for a few years, earlier this month the company launched it's much-anticipated $5 dollar per month streaming music service. The product's unique features include a discovery bar slider where users can play streaming radio and tweak the flow of recommendations to their liking. Coupled with an iPhone app that is promised to encompass offline caching, MOG All Access is a great service rivaled only by close competitor Spotify . Web TV - Clicker : Launched in mid November Clicker is considered the TV Guide for internet television . The company indexes 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows and features a DVR-like playlist (including Netflix Instant Streaming and Amazon VOD) and integration with Facebook connect. Clicker also has a Boxee app that pulls in metadata for shows, channels and actors. Semantic Search - Evri : Evri is a semantic search engine with a matching algorithm that creates connections between people, products and concepts. Launched in mid-June, ReadWriteWeb first reported the product's ability to distinguish between subjects, verbs and objects to make connections . Conversation Aggregation - JS-Kit's Echo : While JS-Kit has been around for three years, the company' latest product Echo is a better iteration of blog comments. ReadWriteWeb first wrote about the product launch in July . The service allows users to embed a simple line of javascript in their blogs in order to gather a real-time stream of Diggs, Tweets, comments and reactions. Augmented Reality - Layar : ReadWriteWeb readers first got a glimpse of Layar in June . Created by SPRXmobile , the service places images and data on the mobile browser for a new form of location-based augmented reality discovery. In July SPRX released the company's first developer keys for the API and by August it had celebrated an Android release with an iPhone app to follow. The company currently has a gallery with several cool 3rd party applications. Discuss

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Top 10 Startup Products of 2009