I recently got an email from Jim Benton informing me about his new “social guide to Chicago” (for lack of a better phrase). The site is based on the wiki model meaning anyone can come and add or edit any of the information on the website.

Jim had the idea about two years ago after being dissatisfied with the current listing options in Chicago.

I was trying to find a list of thrift stores in Chicago a few years ago, and I was unable to find a decent list anywhere on the internet- I found this surprising. Also, I have always been annoyed by most of the existing local search options, as when I search for ‘coffee’ I get about 20 Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. I found this frustrating, because in Chicago we are lucky to have lots of excellent places that roast their own beans, but they are always buried in search listings. I wanted it to be easy to find the places that make Chicago a unique, interesting place to live.

It’s really great to see startups harnessing the knowledge of groups of people to help other people, and small businesses out. The indylist does this wonderfully.

To date the only money spent has been on hosting although I was told that if someone wanted a similar site developed it would have cost roughly $15k.

Starting off on his own, Jim is now working with 3 others on the website. Justin Siddons, Jon Sestak, and Phil Kalas. Justin handles the graphic design work, Jim does the programming, and Phil and Jon are taking care of the business and marketing aspects of the site.

It’s a great little startup and they’re doing some good things that are benefiting a lot of people. If you live in or are planning on visiting Chicago check them out and give them some love.

Presdo is a new online scheduling web application that makes scheduling extremely easy. Founder Eric Ly spent $35,000 of his own money developing Presdo, while coding most of the website himself. He quit his job at Linked In on Friday, and started developing Presdo on Saturday. That was back in April, 2006. Presdo was built using technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and the LAMP stack.

The main page is a google inspired search box. It’s very simplistic, but works extremely well, and is straight forward to use. You just type in your upcoming event into the little search box, hit enter, and wait for the magic to happen.

Automatically Presdo stores the date (it knew when “next Saturday” was), and the people I’m meeting. I didn’t have to do anything – it was already there! It saved some of my precious time by not making me fill out those steps afterwords. Since Jon doesn’t wake up till 5pm, I’ll change our meeting time to 6pm. Again, very easy to do with a nice inline editor.

It’s very easy to add in a location, with the google map integration. If you’re a registered user, Presdo automatically shows public places at the location you registered with.

Presdo plans to impliment paid accounts in the future, and hopefully that will provide them with a steady revenue stream. I think Presdo hit upon a good market. Online scheduling is a competitive niche, but with the extreme ease of use, they achieved a good userbase. Without a lot of money and connections, you can’t (normally) target a niche head on. You need to put a new twist on an old idea, and that’s exactly what Presdo did.

Vi.sualize.us aims to do for images what del.icio.us did for websites. It’s the brain child of Victor Espigares and was created after a personal need to remember a particular photo within a portfolio. Not happy with the current offerings he decided to do something about it.

Built around similar features as del.icio.us, you see an image you like, you bookmark it (possibly using the firefox plugin pictured below), it’s saved to your vi.sualize.us account for future reference. You can also tag different images and share bookmarked images with your friends.

I’ve been playing around with the site for the past hour or so and there really is a lot of great content over there. I could easily sit for ages just browsing the different tag sections.

What i find most impressive is that Victor built the entire thing himself, to date spending $0, excluding his hosting bill. Almost 7 months old, at the time of writing people have posted more than 35,000 images and there are roughly 1,900 registered users. If you haven’t before heard of this started i suggest you check them out.

David Heinemeier Hansson, partner at 37signals recently gave a wonderful talk at the recently held startup school. In the video posted below he gives a refreshing talk on how so many people are blinded by raising funding and selling their startup people have forgotten how to make a solid, profitable business.

There were also some other great videos that are worth checking out. (Be warned, I spent almost an entire evening watching these so only check them out if you have some time to kill). You can check out the other videos here.

I’m sure you’ll agree, he makes some very good points. Make something people want, charge money for it, profit. Although it does make it sound frighteningly easy.

Remember: If you have any information on a bootstrapped startup please, please contact us.

FlyRig.com is a reasonably new (launched very late last year) NYC apartment rental listing service. The site has some of the best google maps API implementation i’ve ever seen.

After selecting the area you want to live in (Manhattan for example) you’re taken to a page clearly listing information on the different properties in that area. When you mouse over the different apartments google maps smoothly zooms to the apartments location on the map. It’s a wonderfully clear and concise way of looking for a place to live.

We’re trying to improve the rental process here in New York. The tight market
results in misinformation and opportunities for unscrupulous agents – things
that are frustrating to both renters and agents who work hard to build trust
with their clients. In addition, there lacks a modern solution for finding
apartments in the city – the most popular listing services either lack mapping
capabilities or supporting information commonly needed when deciding on a place
to live.

FlyRig was self funded by Adrian Liang. He works on the site full time along with one other part-time employee and two occasionally used contractors. Since launching in December 2007 they’ve signed up over 250 brokers from some of the largest agencies in the city.

It’s a really nice little service. The system could presumably be expanded into other cities without too much effort.