Oh, simple enough, a wonderful service called LunchBoxPal.
Have you ever been on a business trip, at a conference, or even in some city on vacation, and yearned to meet-up with somebody for a lunch break? A morning coffee, maybe? You know how it is, you’re sitting in your hotel room alone and wish you just had something to do before your flight back home.

Well, LunchBoxPal is here to help. Think of it as a more mature and targeted craigslist, and cross that with some common social networking features you’d find at facebook. 

“LunchBoxPal is going to be a new form of professional networking geared towards bringing people together in the physical world, rather than just in cyberspace.  With most social networking tools, it just allows people to become friends with others that you currently know, or have met once or twice.  We’re looking to create professional relationships that won’t exist online, but actually where people get out and connect.”

To this date, founder Brandon Dohman has paid a single $200 towards all development and work on LunchBoxPal. The now-tech-consultant-gone-serial-entrepreneur estimates future expenses of $3-5,000 to get LBP into the spotlight. When asked, Dohman replied he’ll either be making these investments himself, or possibly seeking a strategic partner to help out.

So far, Dohman hopes to connect colleagues and people meeting up through the site with restaurant and cafes, which I think is a wise and strategic model. Take a look at their advertising page to learn more about it.

The idea popped into Dohman’s head when, “…one day while I was sitting bored at my desk during my lunch break.  Many times, I end up sitting at my desk reading through some blogs, or reading up on new business concepts, which after a month got boring.  And one day I realized… It would be nice if I had a way to connect with someone who wouldn’t mind catching a lunch and talking some business, or politics, or the most recent Family Guy episode.”

Still in pre-beta development stages, Dohman reports a hopeful launch date of May 31st. We couldn’t get our hands on any invites or screenshots just yet, but Brandon said the service will be based (though very heavily modified) off popular open-source networking platform Elgg. Hopefully we’ll be able to send out a few beta invites once things come closer to being ready. Look out for more coverage on LunchBoxPal as it unwraps.

Tim Hussey sent me an email this morning telling me about a project he is working on called Pixifi.

Tim is a part time wedding photographer (as well as being a professional designer/developer) and after getting sick of using a combination of Outlook, Excell and Word to manage his clients he thought something needed to be done. Strangely enough this is how most really useful web applications come about, someone is in need of it, so they make it.

Tim was nice enough to let me have a look around an early version of Pixifi today and I was generally impressed. I could see how it would be a valuable resource for any freelance photographer looking fir an easy way to manage their work load. What impressed me even more was that Tim has designed and developed this entire thing himself. From the ground up. It’s very rare to find someone who can both design and program exceptionally well. So, to date he has spent $0 on the website. Although… (and this is a wonderful quote)

I had to sacrifice time with my wife and friends to start building it…
You can’t put a price on that kind of startup funding… it’s expensive unless you’re
willing to make the sacrifice in the beginning.

Below is a quick look at the app itself.

Not too long ago, a friend of mine (coincidentally a partner of mine, and what’s more, part of the indiestartups team) embarked on a wonderful journey through lands far and vast – more commonly known as the development phase. He decided, (not verbatim, I can only guess as to what was running through that imprudent man’s mind):

“Why are there no [well off] middle-class web-hosts?”

Some of you maybe confused, but before I dissect this, think about what this statement symbolizes. Yes! That’s right! Exploring the internet-pool-o’-niches. Here are a few questions to ask yourself the next time you may be trying to come up with a niche to strap your idea into:

• “Why does this service not exist?”
• “Well, it exists, but its not worthy of a mention. Can I out-do them?”
• “Would the competition in this market really be all that competitive?”

Et cetera… Great, hopefully I’ve stamped some meaning into a simple thought. Let’s move on to what the sentence denotes. The web is filled with web-hosts, everywhere you look, but typically there are two parts to this. (a) Large company or corporation that has lost track of caring for supreme quality because of the dollar being taken in, or (b) Small startup running a HostDime reseller account and marking up the invoice by 500%. Neither of these options are incredible, nor am I saying that these are the only two types of providers around, rather, I am simply opting that these are the two typical webhosting providers you will find.

David wanted to enter the growing, yet fairly unexplored, ‘option (c)’ or ‘mid-class’ hosting market. After some work, preparation, testing, and a four figure variable ($xxxx,-), it was finally launched. Its called This* Webhost, and its the new trendsetter host. Indie Startups is hosted with This*, and we’re loving it so far. And what’s better? As an IndieStartups exclusive, anyone who signs up with This* can receive a 50% lifetime price-slash off their order, just type in ” INDIE ” when ordering.

Now please, don’t take this as unwarranted advertisement. I’ve mentioned David is part of the indiestartups team, but let me put some thought into this kind of promotion (even more than the quick advise I gave just above). If you have little funds to pump through and into your startup, you may be trying to spend less money to get things done (IE, guerilla marketing)… and I have a micro-tip for you, seemingly a quite obvious one, though I’ve seen it overlooked too many time. If you have a relevant source of traffic on a property you own, or a friend or colleague owns, that you may be able to tap into (even if its at a discount), use it.

Enjoy the discount code, and be on the lookout for more start-ups and advice coming your way. 🙂

Simplebucket is a site taking a shot at the image hosting throne. After playing around with the system for a few minutes I can say that i honestly think is stands a very good chance of making some waves within the space.

Along with having all the generic features that we’ve come to expect from image hosts it has a few real “killer” features that are worth checking out. One of the main benefits with this service is the ability to “tag” your pictures facebook / flickr style. While this itself is nothing new, SimpleBucket allows you to embed this tagged picture in blogs and websites.

This will be an incredibility useful feature for any blogger who posts images on a regular basis. I exchanged a few emails with the Khang, the owner today and he told me that soon you will also be able to record voice clips and include them in your embedded image (using the snapvine API).

To date Khang has only spent $180 on this for the domain name and web hosting. However developing and designing the entire thing yourself can help you save a lot of startup capital. 😉

This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Launched a few hours ago, TwitLinks.com is a nice little resource for hot tech news.

The site pulls all its information and links from twitter using their API. They follow (what they call) “the worlds top tech twitter users”. That full list of people is available to view here.

What’s nice about it is news usually breaks on twitter before anywhere else. If you’re not an overly active twitter user or not a twitter user at all and don’t like the idea of following hundreds of people just for the off chance they might break some news this site is for you.

It’s a wonderfully simple idea and it’s definitely useful. It’s already got a decent amount of coverage. I asked my PHP buddy how much it would cost to develop such a website and he quoted me $250.

Just goes to show, if you have a bit of free cash and an idea, you can make things happen.