Are you dangerously ambitious? | Sparkseed Summit 2010-1

Thanks to Mike Del Ponte and the whole SparkSeed team for inviting Exygy to participate with an amazing group of changemakers, innovators, visionaries, investors, and just down-right amazing folks. Still trying to digest everything that happened.

(this writeup originally by Christine Eggers)

All of the social entrepreneurs profiled in the Social Entrepreneur API are reaching a whole new audience thanks to Anne Marie Burgoyne and her team at the Draper Richards Foundation. They’re the latest to add the Social Entrepreneur Search features, built by Social Edge and Exygy, to their site:

On their Fellows page:
http://www.draperrichards.org/resources/index.html

On their Resources page:
http://www.draperrichards.org/fellows/index.html

Beautiful!!

For all of you “shopping” for ways to feature these great entrepreneurs in your own online space, Jill Finlayson created this easy-to-remember URL that will take you right to Social Edge’s Social Entrepreneur Search widget store:

http://bit.ly/SEsearch

Many thanks to Christine, Peter, Anne Marie, Jill, and the whole circle of members
here making this entrepreneur-outreach possible!

We are excited to announce, in conjunction with Social Actions and SocialEdge a suite of Social Entrepreneur Search Widgets!

Here at Exygy we are always excited about startups, but our true passion lies at the intersection of technology and social innovation. That’s why when Jill Finlayson of SocialEdge and Peter Dietz and Christine Eggers of Social Actions approached us with an opportunity to work with the Social Entrepreneur API we jumped on it!

With Jill, Christine, Peter, and the rest of the gang we designed and produced a suite of widgets that can be embedded in any web site. They come in all shapes and colors — small ones for your sidebar search or to provide contextual search results on that blog post you just wrote about microfinance in Africa! A big one to power the search on your site.

Check out the widget in action on:

• The Skoll Foundation
• PopTech
• TakePart

Please check out the post on SocialEdge or grab the widgets now!

hello!

hello!

Exygy is happy to share some exciting news!  The launch of a new non-profit that we’ve been helping to build this past year.

EurekaFund’s Mission is to fund early stage scientific research.

Our first ambitious goal is to get the public (that’s you!) directly involved in  supporting a high-risk/high-reward CleanTech research project with transformative potential: an off-the-grid energy use project in Africa.  If successful this early stage research project could enable technologies that meet the energy needs of “bottom of the pyramid” families while also preserving energy and resources in Africa.  The technology is being developed by two engineers at Stanford and it needs a small amount of funding to prove its potential.

We’d love for you to check out the website, check out the off-the-grid energy project we’re excited about, and send me some feedback!

The EurekaFund website is easy to find at http://eurekafund.org/

Please take a moment to poke around.  I encourage you to look at the research projects we’ve listed and setup a user account.  For now we’re mostly interested in how you think we might improve upon the idea and the site.  We’ll post again in a few weeks when we’re a little further along with our pilot project to ask you to consider giving a few bucks.

Best,
-Zach @ Exygy and the EurekaFund Team

… While quality projects led by inspired young scientists abound, they often struggle to find the seed funding – $5,000 to $50,000 – needed to validate concept and produce meaningful technology. Eureka Fund gives funding power back to the people, letting the public get directly involved in projects they want to support …
- Jason Blue-Smith (Founder of EurekaFund

Introducing Wine.com for iPhone

Exygy and Wine.com present the ultimate free iPhone application for wine enthusiasts. Discover, review, share, and learn about 45,000+ wines and counting.

The free Wine.com iPhone application gives you unparalleled access to over 45,000 wines, including winemaker notes, professional ratings, and wine label images, along with an easy way to search, save and share the wine of your choosing.

Features:

• Find exactly what you are looking for: Refine lists with easy to use filters
• Learn more about the wine: Browse our extensive wine and wine gift catalog by wine type, region, appellation, varietal, professional ratings, and wine style
• Discover great values: One click access to the premier list of “90+ Point Rated Wines under $20″
• Remember what you liked, and what you didn’t: Review, rate and save wines you tried
• Keep and share your favorites: Create and edit lists of wines to send to friends, save for later or purchase from Wine.com
• Buy what you love: Add to cart and purchase from the #1 Online Wine Shop, Wine.com

Sample Screen Shots:

NomadsLand is a video publishing platform for nonprofits, social enterprises and responsible companies.  Exygy worked with NomadsLand to create tools empowering video publishers to raise awareness, boost revenue, and engage in an easy to implement viral media distribution strategy.

The NomadsLand video platform allows organizations to distribute videos across the internet with customizable buttons and links.  Organizations are able to drive links and traffic back to their site and empower their viewers to take directed action.

A traditional video embed would just link back to YouTube where you’re likely to lose the viewer of your content.  Using the NomadsLand video player publishers can customize videos with destination links of their choice – to their donation pages, volunteer sign-ups, petitions, Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter accounts, RSS feeds, and more!  These buttons appear below the video on every webpage the player is distributed — on blogs, web pages, e-mail newsletters, etc — creating links back to the publisher’s site all over the internet.

Viral growth is built in and ROI is trackable because of tight integration with Google Analytics.

To understand a bit more about NomadsLand, please check out this Video put together by Davin Hutchins, Founder and CEO of NomadsLand:

NomadsLand.com and the NomadsLand embeddable video player are both built on a customized version of WordPress.

Our own Dave Kaplan and Zach Berke went to London last month to give a talk entitled: “Building mobile quickly!” about Exygy’s strategy to rapidly and cost effectively implement cross-phone applications.

The Symbian Foundation sponsored the event.

Here’s a summary of our talk as listed in the event program:
http://www.see2009.org/page.cfm/Action=Seminars/SeminarID=147

The slides are also available:
- at Scribd
- on Symbian’s wiki

And here’s a photo of team Exygy at our booth after the conference:

Earlier this year we migrated our time tracking and invoicing system to Freshbooks.  We’ve been absolutely thrilled with it so far!  In this article, we’ll discuss briefly how our clients can use their Exygy.Freshbooks account.

1. Logging in to your Exygy.Freshbooks account

2. Looking at hours worked on your project by Exygy

3. Checking and settling invoices

(more…)

At the SEE2009 Mobile Developers conference last week we were interviewed about the mobile application we built for Wine.com. Listen to the whole interview (it’s just about a minute long) here: