Cozi was co-founded by Robbie Cape and Jan Miksovsky after the two of them left Microsoft. Most of the company’s employees worked previously at Amazon.com, Expedia, or Microsoft. The company’s first product was called Cozi Central and released on September 25, 2006, and includes a family calendar, shopping lists, family messaging, and a photo collage screensaver. Cozi was relaunched as a web-oriented company on June 3, 2008.

Corporate Culture

Cozi uses Tupperware-style events called Mom’s parties to conduct market research.

The company is unusual among technology start-ups in that it employs a roughly equal balance of men and women.

From Cozi Website

Cozi is a free web service that helps families manage crazy schedules, track shopping and to do lists, organize household chores, stay in communication and share memories—all in one place.

People have accused us of being fanatically family focused, and you know what? They’re right. From our very beginning in 2005, we’ve been all about families. When we started Cozi, we were just a small group of Microsoft, Expedia, and Amazon veterans—all with kids of our own—looking for a way to balance our busy schedules and create more harmony at home. So we pooled our collective knowledge and experience to create something special. Something that would make it easy and fun for families to juggle everything they have to do. Not just our families, but families everywhere.

We know every family is different, but we all have one thing in common: we’re crazy-busy. Cozi is designed to make it easier to manage everything we have to do. Cozi tracks appointments and activities, simplifies shopping lists and chores, and makes it easy for everyone to communicate with each other. Even when schedules change, Cozi is there making sure all the moving pieces fit together at the end of the day.

Users have the opportunity to meet new people and make friends within the context of a flirting environment. Features include an online chat facility, personal profiles, photos, and videos. Flirtomatic also offer a viral video game, FlirtQuest. Users make public challenges for other users to film and submit.

Also on offer is a comprehensive test of flirting skills. The “flirt test” was specially developed by Dr. Lenny Kristal, author of ‘The Great British Sex Survey’ and allows members and casual users the opportunity to assess their flirting skills based on a number of criteria.

Flirtomatic also features an online search engine and both web and 3G gateways for access to the service. The 3G gateway is currently only available to users with a UK mobile contract.

Partners

On the 12 February 2007, as the result of a new partnership with the British newspaper, the News of the World, Flirtomatic launched a re-branded version of its service, News Of The World Flirtomatic.

Through a growing network of partnerships with UK mobile operators, such as Hutchison Whampoa’s 3, Flirtomatic offers regular mobile operator portal integration.

Flirtomatic were first to partner with Microsoft UK’s on their AdMob text-advertising service.

Links

• visit Flirtomatic

Connectingsingles.com is a completely free site, making it a nice option for those curious about the world of online dating. There are no hidden fees or binding contracts to sign. The site is easily navigable and offers members the chance to get involved and mingle via forums and blog postings.

Links

• Visit Connectingsingles.com
• more Free Dating Websites

Person.com offers many unique features to all of their members. They have chat rooms, forums that discuss any topic imaginable, web cams, flirt games, member ratings, favorites list and audio greetings. Any member can contact another member for free – as long as you have created your own profile. Profile creation is easy and only takes a few minutes to compete. There are no options to become a premium member as of yet – everything is free for every registered user.

Whether you are looking for a soul mate or just a new chat friend, you can find them on person.com’s user friendly website. Go and start your search – you may be surprised who you find!

Links

• visit person.com
• more free dating sites

Backed by Niklas Zennstrom’s (Skype Founder) Atomico Investments, the original investors in Skype (Mangrove Capital), and Klaus Hommels (Europe’s Investor of the Year, 2006), WooMe is catapulting the $1 billion+ speed dating market into the online world. With WooMe, meeting people online is transformed into a live interactive experience that makes sifting through contrived profiles a thing of the past.

Founded in 2006, WooMe’s management team has experience in bringing innovative web applications to market for companies including: AltaVista, CMGI, BT, Accenture, Qwest, Shopzilla, Trilogy. Stephen Stokols, Co-Founder/CEO, successfully sold an internet start-up and went on to become BT’s youngest VP, growing their eCommerce revenues over 300% to over $1bn in his first 12 months. George Berkowski, Co-Founder/Product Director, brings extensive technical and marketing experience in the online space and in outer space (he played a role in sending the first tourist to the Space Station).

Links

• visit woome
• more free dating sites

Reunited Dating is well laid out and everything is easy to find and simple to use. The site is designing for singles looking for the basics of a dating service. The thing is, this is where there may be a problem for some singles. If you want really detailed profiles or to be able to search on more than a select few parts of the profile then this dating site may not be for you. That being said, Friends Reunited Dating will fit most users needs.

Links

Visit Friends Reunited Dating

Mingle2.com offers free online dating plus a chance to sign up for various bonuses such as identity theft services, online coupons, product information and various other goods and services. The site also offers simple features and a format that is easy to navigate. Handy emails filters allow one to restrict contact based on age range, proximity and even smoking or drinking preferences.

Links

• mingle2.com

OkCupid users are presented with questions (most of which are authored, submitted, and vetted by members) about various topics such as politics and tastes page by page, and given a list of up to four answers per question to choose from. They are also asked “How would your Ideal Match answer this question?”, and then “How important is their answer to you?”, with degrees of importance for the latter listed as “irrelevant”, “a little important”, “somewhat important”, “very important”, and “mandatory”, each respectively assigned a greater numerical value. The site uses the numerical values to calculate “friend”, “enemy”, and “match” percentages between any two members of the site based on how many answered questions those two users have in common (referred to as their “intersection”), with higher intersections supposedly producing more accurate percentages.

There is a very active journaling/blogging community on OkCupid as well. Members have the option of saving favorite users’ profiles and then “stalking” them, which allows them to view all of their new journal entries, as well as comments on others’ entries. The journaling community frequently arranges meet-ups of OkCupid users in various areas of the world and people travel, sometimes from as far away as other countries or continents, to meet. Sites of past meet-ups include London, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York City, and Ann Arbor.

OkCupid is a service of Humor Rainbow, Inc. OkCupid’s founders, (Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder, Sam Yagan, and Max Krohn) were students at Harvard University when they gained notoriety from their creation of TheSpark and, later, SparkNotes. Among other things, TheSpark.com featured a number of humorous self-quizzes and personality tests, including the four-variable Meyers-Briggs style Match Test. SparkMatch debuted as a beta experiment of allowing registered users who had taken the Match Test to search for and contact each other based on their Match Test types. The popularity of SparkMatch took off and it was launched as its own site, later being renamed OkCupid. The current OkCupid Dating Persona Test is still largely identical, in question and text blurb content and order, to the original Match Test. In 2001, they sold SparkNotes to Barnes & Noble, and began work on OkCupid.

In 2008 OkCupid spun off its test-design portion under the name Hello Quizzy (HQ), while keeping it indelibly linked to OkCupid and reserving existent OkCupid users’ names on HQ.

Links

• visit OkCupid

Socialcast brings many powerful, first-time features, offering a simple and quick way for colleagues to learn about each other and share knowledge. The platform enables project managers to monitor work in progress, regardless of geographic boundaries, and document milestones and day-to-day achievements of employees. Specific features include:

• Mini user profiles – highlights name, latest status post, connection, links to external services and co-worker’s contacts

Self Service Solution Sign Up Online

* First 5 users are always free
* $5 per user, per month for additional users
* No set up fees, contract, or cancellation fee

Links

• Visit Website

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Competitors

• uberVU – Democratizing buzz tracking, uberVU tracks the buzz from all over the Web around a story. uberVU gets comments, reactions, mentions around a story from a dozen services, puts them on a timeline and shows the relationships between them, so you have a more complete image of the conversation that’s going on all over the Web.
• coComment
• Disqus
• SezWho
• JS-Kit
• IntenseDebate

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