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.

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.

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.