Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads
Late last month, Amazon announced its intent to acquire Goodreads, a social reading service at which Kyusik Chung (InSITE ’08) serves as VP of Operations and Business Development. Since launching in January 2007, Goodreads has grown to over 17 million users, 23 million reviews, and 525 million books cataloged. The company seeks to increase user engagement with books by allowing users to recommend books, compare what they are reading, keep track of what they have read and would like to read, form book clubs and find new books in genres of interest based on proprietary algorithms. ...
Read MoreInSITE Georgetown Fellows take 1st Place at VCIC
InSITE DC Fellows and Georgetown MBA students Sara Zulkosky and Sherief Khalil teamed with three Georgetown MBA colleagues Neal Foley, Ryan Hill and Selman Altun, to claim the International Championship this past weekend at the 2013 Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) at UNC. The team analyzed startup companies, interviewed Entrepreneurs, structured a deal and negotiated the terms. After a question and answer session with the panel of venture capitalist judges, they were voted the team that did the best job playing the role of venture capitalists. Sixty of the best business schools...
Read MoreInSITE Project Update: WeeSpring
Can you imagine the frustration new parents experience when considering what baby gear to purchase? A frustration that is certainly not alleviated by going to the usual retailers such as buybuy Baby or Babies “R” Us, but rather exacerbated by their litany of options. weeSpring is a social shopping network for expecting and new parents. It allows expecting parents to view and share product reviews with their friends, through a rating system of love, regret, have or want. By centralizing the advice and exchange process through a social platform, weeSpring personalizes the baby gear...
Read MoreInSITE Project Update: Applique
This semester we teamed up with Applique, which is trying to transform the mobile application development space. Applique has developed software that allows non-technical users to “drag-and-drop” common plug-ins and design features into their own app so that making a mobile app is as easy as PowerPoint. Applique allows users to develop their own apps at a low cost and as quickly as they are needed. Right now, developing an application requires technical know-how, is costly, and can take months. Of course, the field is never clear in the mobile app world. It seems that many...
Read MoreInSITE Fellows Launch Street Beacon to Re-Invent NYC Payphones
Once a staple in New York City communications, the payphone is living a much lonelier existence these days. Outside of emergencies (like Hurricane Sandy), payphones have essentially become urban clutter — rarely used and crowding scarce public space. To hopefully solve this problem, earlier this year New York City challenged techies and designers to reinvent, reimagine and repurpose the city’s 11,000 payphone kiosks. The way New Yorkers consume information has changed, and the City challenged the tech community to design a payphone that fits this new era of communications. A...
Read More