Gawker: valleywag, cute startup alert

Get Satisfaction all about customers pleasing themselves

Melissa Gira Grant — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:20:00 EDT

Cra-zazy customers hardly need to be told where they can take their complaints: They just need an outlet. Get Satisfaction aims to automate the bitchfest. Bonus: Its president is Lane Becker, one of Valleywag's most lovably lubricated crush objects — clothed, bespectacled and interviewed in this clip from Web 2.0 in New York. Becker's founding cohotties are Thor Muller and Amy Muller. The "frictionless" solution to demanding customers, who will blog about your inadequate service as soon as look at you, was hatched out of the mayhem caused by their mail-order grab bag business for previously free conference tchotchkes, Valleyschwag.

Causecast gives away publicity to the Hollywood stars who need it most

Melissa Gira Grant — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:20:00 EDT

Awwwww! Darling little "microphilanthropy" social site Causecast didn't nab the grand prize at this week's big San Francisco startup beauty pageant. So we love it even more. Pictured here is the main reason why: Causecast's director of business development, Sloane Berrent, who's eye-catching in a way even the most granola of nonprofit crusaders can feel good about. Causecast's approach may be glossed-up and Hollywood — Berrent and company livestreamed onetime Playmate Jenny McCarthy for their demo. We just don't know who's more deserving of Causecast's charity: washed-up starlets aiming to prove they're more than just a pretty face, or their supposed beneficiaries. (Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

Tumbltape = Tumblr + Muxtape - Jakob Lodwick

Melissa Gira Grant — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:40:00 EDT

It's not quite a startup, is it, but it's cute anyway: Tumbltape. Why open an account at a site like Muxtape that's going to get shut down for exceeding their bandwidth costs or getting in trouble with the RIAA or having even the vaguest association with trouble-prone entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick? Tumbltape makes a playlist from the songs you've already uploaded to your Tumblr blog. The site was made by Adam Gotterer and John Zanussi (in the hoodie, left), both of Connected Ventures — Lodwick's former stomping ground. Those MP3s aren't going to play themselves, so get to it. (Photo via The Daily Zanoose, a Tumblr devoted to photos of nothing but John Zanussi)

Hype Machine, totally adorable, and this week's Cute Startup Alert

Melissa Gira Grant — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:40:00 EDT

The Hype Machine is cool even if you aren't. The music startup seems really simple: index MP3s linked from popular music blogs and make them easy to find and listen to and brag about to people who haven't found whatever the Youngs will be sick of before they even hear it. Blame it on cofounder Taylor McKnight (pictured here at Lollapalooza, how retro!) for being so blonde and damn easy to talk to, and for designer Zoya Feldman for the gorgeous little logo. Because you can't buy cred, but you can buy cute. (Photo by Kaela Hill)

Tumblr — our very first Cute Startup Alert!

Melissa Gira Grant — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:20:00 EDT

[Editor's note: You probably didn't read Sassy magazine's Cute Band Alert back in the '90s. But that girl in your campus lab, the one who made her own zines and wore slips as outerwear? She did. In homage, we give you Cute Startup Alert!] Tumblr is at the apex of blog cute right now. We blame founder David Karp and his short pants. There's something indierock about the way Karp avoided Silicon Valley to found his company in Manhattan and stock it with Williamsburg residents.

You won't find Tumblr in your sysadmin's RSS feeds. Tumblr bloggers follow one another on the site's internal Dashboard system. By design, the site limits bloggers to a few formats, gracefully styling their most self-aggrandizing prose into tasty niblets. It's like the beauty of a three-chord postpunk love song packaged as a middle-school love note: "Do you want to / Follow me? / Yes/No"

New York's chattering classes — the new old media kids, the new new media kids, and the even newer kids who want to be the new new kids — have gleefully hopped aboard Tumblr. Karp's ladylove, CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy, is there. So are a raft of current and former Gawker editors and their hangers-on, drunklinking one another late into the night, thanks to Tumblr's one-click reblogging tool.

"In one particular social circle," Karp explained recently, "we've collected a lot of New York users. It's a clique like any other where you'll see a lot of negativity." True, and what cuddly, darling negativity it is.

(Photo by Rex Sorgatz)