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.

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.

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.