As the title suggests, vorolo is a new social networking website currently still in private beta.

Right now, vorolo is a one man band run by Jason Rai. Being a serial designer Jason managed to considerably keep the cost of development down designing the entire website himself. On top of that he spent $700 on the website programming. (According to Jason he would have quoted someone around $1,500 for all of the design work).

Today i was lucky enough to get an early look through the site and system.

The main problem Jason is going to face will be trying to build up the sites userbase. With the social networking market so saturated with large, established players it’ll be interesting to see how quickly this site grows.

I managed to get my hands on 20 beta invites. There is still a bit more work to be done on the site before it’s ready but when it’s good to go i’ll post the invites up here.

Edit: The updates are good to go. Leave a comment if you want one and i’ll send it over.

A few hours ago clockme.in officially launched in private beta. As promised in my last write up, I have 25 invites to give away. If you want an invite comment on this post and i’ll send one over.

The design of the user interface has significantly changed from the first screen shot I posted and now has a slightly more uniform feel to it.

I’ve been messing about with clockme.in for the past few hours and it’s a useful little service. Everything seems much simpler (following the KISS principal, Keep It Simple Stupid) compared to most other time tracking services.

Anyway, comment and i’ll send over an invite.

Software developer Jake Marsh has been working hard on an iPhone version of popular social networking website, MySpace.

The application hasn’t launched yet but from the demos he has posted it looks like it scratches a much needed itch for many myspace users. Jake says that when the app is complete it will have more or less the feature list as its big brother.

Currently heavily based off the popular facebook iPhone application, Jake is currently looking for a designer to help tweak the interface. (If you’re an interested designer his email address is posted on his sites about page).

One of the more exciting features of the app is the way it will handle streamed music on “band pages”. Unfortunately due to the current iPhone flash limitations and the way myspace uses flash to stream files, there needed to be some kind of work around. Jake is currently working on a way of pulling the music file location and including the direct link on the profile page. With it being an iPhone users will then be able to download the .mp3 straight to their music player.

According to Jake, after playing around with the myspace API he decided that it “wasn’t so great” so this app runs completely from scraping the content from myspace. Let’s hope myspace doesn’t mind.

Below is a video that shows the application in action.

I mentioned in this blogs first ever post that something we really wanted to try and push is coverage of the development process of startups and apps rather than just posting about them when they’re finished.

ClockMe.in is web application currently in development that lets you effectively track your time. Be it at work, college or wherever else you need to time and log events this app aims to be of service. I was talking to the developer earlier today and to date he has only spent $500 on the project and plans to spend only another $200(ish) more after launch for a bit of promotion. One thing that is massively in his favor when it comes to cost is that he is programming the entire thing himself. (He told me if someone requested a quote with the same features clockme.in will have he would have charged around $5k. )

ClockMe.in plans on having all the usual time tracking features separated into different projects. Unlike competitors there is no limit to the number of projects a user can have active at any specific time. There will also be ways to share projects with other users for collaborations and invoicing.

I managed to get my hands on some screen shots of the app UI. (click to enlarge)

Along with the somewhat expected features there is also a firefox plugin in the works that will let you clock in and out and manage projects without having to visit the clockme.in website.

The site will be launching in private beta by the end of the week. I managed to acquire 25 beta invites which I will post up when the system supports them.

Easyautosales.com is a new startup in the world of buying and selling cars.

Wei, one of the three current owner originally discovered the issues of online auto sales after one of his friends tried to buy a car through Craigslist and received over 30 scam responses. He figured there had to be a better way. On the web there are already a number of great destinations for finding autos but there hasn’t been one that combined the technology of large classified sites with the free to sell models. While Craigslist is free, the technology really isn’t all that great for car buyers.

EasyAutoSales.com is a free, ad-supported autos service that helps private sellers and dealers sell cars online. They want to change the way cars are offered on the web vs. current methods. On top of allowing both private sellers and dealers to list all of their cars completely free on Easy Auto Sales and post unlimited pictures, they also wanted to help advertisers segment and reach their target audience within the online automotive crowd.

For example, it’s easy to say Person X went to an autos site therefore he’s interested in buying cars – let’s throw a bunch of car related ads at him and hope it sticks. It’s much more effective to segment Person X and figure out if he’s trying to buy cars under $5,000 or a new car and present the appropriate ads.

Wei is currently living off of tax refunds and money he received from selling his last startup. His personal runway is about 5 months long (which means he has about two months left before he has to make some tough decisions). Wei and his team work from their various homes and they’re Mac based.

He had contracted the development of his UI, which took about a month to build. The actual development time for programming was about 2.5 months from mid January to March of 2008. The site just launched its beta on March 21st and they still have a lot of kinks to work out. However, it would appear the constant whipping of the team to do their very best has had some positive effect – they garnered 50,000 cars within just one week of launch.

Investments:

Each of the three co-founders have promised to put in $5,000 a piece to pool their seed money. Since they’re limited on funds, they’ve solved a number of problems using VERY creative solutions instead of just throwing money at it and hope it goes away.

They’ve spent about $5,500 on outsourced coding but their primary goal was to just get a product out – regardless of how buggy or incomplete it was.

I’ve yet to see a perfectly coded site launch that was guaranteed success. However, I have seen and worked on a number of failed startups because they never launched waiting for perfection.

About $1,000 was spent on logo design and website design. Contrary to their past startups, they found the best person for each job and only gave them that job.

It’s much better to pay a logo guru for a logo design and a guru at graphics/CSS/xhtml for UI design then to try and find someone who is mediocre at both and expect them to do a great job at everything. The same goes for programming – if you outsource, don’t limit yourself to one firm for database work, code, UI design, logo, etc. Find the best for each and give them all different tasks.

They haven’t spent a dime on promotion thus far. In total, they’ve spent less than $8,000 – a good chunk is actually for food at Panera, where they meet weekly thanks to their free Wifi.

Easy Auto Sales is currently making limited revenue, so that’s obviously something they’ll have to work out in the near future.

Feel free to check out their company blog, at ComefortheRide.com.