Social network, Youmeo is brain child of 19 year old entrepreneur Calum Brannan. Calum started the site back in 2005 as “pplparty.com” then recently rebranded as the much nicer (in my opinion) Youmeo.

What I find most impressive is how much Calum has achieved in such a short space of time. Starting pplparty when he was just 15 he now heads up a 10 man team in his London office.

At 17 I went to work for Doug Richard (one of BBC2’s Dragons from Dragons Den) and his team for mobile texting company Trutap. I was working alongside world-class people with backgrounds ranging in companies such as Yahoo, Ebay and T-mobile.

When I first started the business I was working from my bedroom at my parents house whilst doing my GCSEs, then I had our whole team working from my front room until just a few months ago when we moved into office space.

In the time since the pplparty launch in 2005 the site has gained a fair bit of traction currently boasting over 400,000 members. Whilst it still has a fair way to go to make a dent in some of the big boys it seems to have a thriving community and should continue to grow with the recent sexy rebrand.

Founded on December 1st 2007, DealQUE‘s focus is on social bargain hunting, where users generate dealQUE’s deal content and share it with he community.

Similar to social book marking sites DealQUE’s users not only submit deals, but depending on their popularity they control the ranking of these deals.

The main page has a nice design, with an easy to use interface. DealQUE has it’s own algorithm which is determined by various factors such as the amount of times a deal is clicked, the frequency of clicks, and “the distance from the earth to the moon relative to DealQUE headquarters”! Deals with a higher rating are displayed before others.

26 year old Emmanuel and his two friends Marie and Peter were always on a lookout for deals on the internet, and figured “why not share their great finds with a community of users who are like minded!”

It took them two and a half months from idea to launch to get DealQUE up and running. They had an alpha stage before the website was complete, which was a basic daily deal aggregator. The entire website was built by the 3 of them, so not a penny was spent on the development process. Marie has an background in art, and everyone is a software engineer. They work out of their home offices, surviving purely on Roman noodles (Oriental flavor is the best)

Since launch, they spent a minimal amount of money on servers, google ads, and facebook ads. Their revenue model is based on direct advertisements and revenue sharing through affiliations.

DealQUE is teaming up with Price Grabber, and by the end of the month hope to have Price Grabber’s features fully integrated on DealQUE.com. This will allow for a better user experience such as price comparisons and showing related products.

If you’re constantly on the lookout for new deals, make sure to check out DealQUE’s RSS feed to stay updated on the latest and greatest deals!

Next time you’re looking for something to buy, make sure to head over to DealQUE and find it for less.

No More Notebooks is an online wishlist website with a social aspect. Twenty year old Luke Harrison, the owner of No More Notebooks is currently in his final year of studying New Media at the University of Leeds, UK. He built the entire website from the ground up himself, which means low to no development costs!

The App

You start off by adding a the plugin they provide you with to your browser. This gives you the ability to add items to your wishlist from the item page you’re browsing (amazon, etc) . Since this method isn’t quite 100% full proof, there’s also the ability to add in items manually.

You’re also not limited to having just one wishlist. You can have wishlists for different categories such as “Books I want for my birthday” or “Things that make me giggle”.

The second part of No More Notebooks is the social aspect. You can view other members wishlists, add them as a friend and comment on their “notepad”.

Another nice feature is that they have a built in price comparison system (kelkoo.co.uk) to help members find the best deals available. Two other notable features are the ability to subscribe to other users wishlists via RSS feeds, and the option to take another user’s wishlist and use it as your own.

Over the next couple of months there will be more features added, and the existing features will continue to be perfected. I think integrating No More Notebooks into existing social networking sites could be extremely beneficial for them. This looks like a promising young startup, and I’ll be curious to see how everything pans out.

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.

Study Curve launched last August, after a year of development and beta testing. It is the brainchild of a Aaron Allina, a recent college graduate who had the idea when he was asked to do some computer programming on software that he had never heard of, and it took him weeks to finally find someone to help.

Allina thought it would be great to create a network where help was easy to find and the platform was equally easy to use. He began the development of Study Curve with the help of some students from a local university. The initial funding was between 50 – 100k, which came from years of savings, and from a couple family members. It seems quite steep, but what kind of things can you get for that kind of money? A Study Curve car for instance!

Since launch, schools have started using Study Curve as a student aid, and Study Curve has been recognized by the National School Board Association, the media, and are a finalist as “Educational Newcomer of the Year”.

We tried out Study Curve for ourselves, and we found extremely beneficial. During the signup process, you include courses that you have or are currently taken, as well as your general interests. Upon completion, you get prompted to your main page where it displays questions you can answer based on the information filled out. We didn’t have to dig through subjects we didn’t care about – we just got sent right there. The discussions were great, and everyone was very helpful. Study Curve also gives you the ability to rate other peoples answers, which is a great way to weed out the inaccurate answers. There’s also various social networking aspects, such as profiles, photo galleries, and groups.

Although startup costs seemed quite high, Study Curve looks like a promising site, and a fantastic resource for anyone in school.