Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable selects startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

This week we’ve focused on three startups that have created technological shortcuts to simple tasks.

Manpacks lets men skip the department store with subscription underwear. Snipreel edits YouTube videos within the YouTube player, and Wishgenies sources gift recommendations from people with the same interest as the intended recipient.

---

Manpacks: Subscription Essentials for Men

---

 

 

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable picks startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

Here we highlight three social applications that help friends share content and products.

SocialGift helps organize group gifts. Capsule is a private space for sharing and archiving content surrounding an event, and Thinng is a visual online pinboard for products.

---

SocialGift: Collective Gift Buying Made Easy

---

Quick Pitch: SocialGift helps coordinate group gift purchases.

Genius Idea: An easy-to-share landing page.

Mashable’s Take: Group gift-giving is an obvious pain. SocialGift makes it a bit easier by helping groups spread the word that a collective gift is being planned, helping them decide what gift to buy through a poll among paricipants, and handling payment. Users can browse items on the site to suggest one as a gift and can invite friends through Facebook, email or a link to the landing page.

A product called Let’s Gift It has similar functionality for gift buyers, but has successfully targeted brands such as 1800Flowers.com with a widget that allows them to install the functionality on their sites.

Getting collective buying widgets in front of gift-givers at prime online gift-buying locations — such as wedding registries — might be a better strategy than introducing them to a new online destination.

SocialGift says it will soon launch its own retailer widget.

---

Capsule: A Content Box for Events & Trips

---

Quick Pitch: Capsule is a platform for group event planning and communicating.

Genius Idea: An easy way to save the content surrounding an experience.

Mashable’s Take: Capsule is a private space where several people who are planning an event can chat and share content. Photos, comments and files are all saved in one streamlined conversation that is only shared with people who are a part of the “capsule.” Individuals can be notified of new posts via email or text message if they choose, but it’s not just real-time sharing and planning that the founders hope to capture.

“Every piece of content is captured and preserved within the context of who, what, when, and where — meaning revisiting those memories later is a more complete and rich experience,” explain its creators.

It’s hard to imagine too many situations in which Capsule would be significantly more useful than a Facebook group message. But if there is a demographic to whom sharing and documenting an experience across content forms is important, Capsule does make doing so easy.

---

Thinng: An Instapaper for Products

---

Quick Pitch: Thinng is an online pinboard for products.

Genius Idea: The extra “N.” (Just kidding.) A slightly more specific focus than Pinterest.

Mashable’s Take: Pinterest is a visual bookmarking site that allows users to collect photos around the web and put them on topic-specific boards. Someone could, for instance, create a board called “celebrities wearing yellow” and use a bookmarklet to add new pictures of yellow-clad celebrities either via URL or a bookmarklet. Other users can follow that board or easily add images to their own board.

Thinng works by the same concept, but specializes in lists of products (i.e. “Cool Men’s Clothing“) and is based in Australia instead of Palo Alto.

Though, like Pinterest, the site is still in private beta, the first 1,000 Mashable users who click this link can try it out.

---

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

---

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable hand-picks startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

This week we’ve chosen three new takes on established online staples: digital books, ID and shopping.

Booktrack, for instance, adds audio to digital books. Miicard provides reliable digital identity verification. And Grabio takes online classifieds local.

---

Booktrack: A Soundtrack for Books

---

Quick Pitch: Synchronized ambient sound effects for books.

Genius Idea: Technology that recognizes an individual’s reading speed and paces the soundtrack with corresponding text.

Mashable’s Take: Booktrack’s sound effects for iPad and iPhone books are designed to create a background soundscape that matches the text. Sherlock Holmes, for instance, opens with the sound of a heavy rain. At moments that match the text, there might be sounds of footsteps, an explosion or suspenseful music. A scrolling arrow keeps track of the reading speed at which the app is matching sounds to text and can be easily sped up or slowed down.

Says Booktrack founder Paul Cameron, “It makes a new and engaging way to read and really enhances the experience and enhances your imagination and keeps you in the story longer,” he recently told The New York Times.

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, the company’s lead investor, evidently agrees. HarperCollins, Penguin Books, Sony/ATV Publishing, and others have agreed to at least try the format.

Crazier concepts have succeeded, and other book platforms are experimenting with adding social networks and videos to texts — both of which are arguably even more distracting than sound.

But one thing I like about books is that they’re not movies. There’s an inherent silence on the written page that is part of the experience of reading and a pleasant departure from the constant pinging of screens.

It’s not hard to imagine that concentration on one medium at a time will become outdated. But for me, the written word is still perfectly adequate on its own.

---

MiiCard: A Digital Identity Card

---

Quick Pitch: A digital passport that proves ‘you are who you say you are’ purely online and in real time.

Genius Idea: Using verified online accounts to validate your identity.

Mashable’s Take: MiiCard is an identification “card” for the Internet.

Signing up for MiiCard involves the familiar process of verifying your email address. Before the site will vouch for your identity, however, you need to link to other accounts such as those from your bank, credit card and utility companies. Adding more links gives you a “stronger” identity verification.

After you establish your MiiCard identity, you can use it on its partner sites. When you attempt to purchase a product or service online, the “Level Of Assurance” that you need is pre-determined by the vendor or service provider and its regulator. This could be handy when buying and selling online or on an online dating profiles.

It might be hard, however, for people to hand over data about their financial accounts to a startup. The company tries to counter this hesitancy with a safety explanation: “miiCard uses bank-level security to protect your information — utilising multi-factor authentication and industry-standard encryption to ensure your data is secure.”

---

Grabio: A Location-Based Marketplace

---

Quick Pitch: A location-based marketplace that connects buyers and sellers within a predefined radius.

Genius Idea: An alternative to online listing sites like Craigslist that brings classifieds closer to their roots at local papers.

Mashable’s Take: Let’s say you want to buy tickets to a sports game at the last minute. You don’t have time to take an hour-long drive to receive them, and the tickets that people posted last month on sites like Craigslist have already been sold.

Grabio aims to be your solution. Its app lists items and services for sale near you in real-time and allows you to post things you’d like to buy (“Need two tickets to the Cubs game tonight”). Buyers and sellers can connect within the app to set up an exchange.

It’s an obviously good selling method for a number of items: tickets, textbooks on campus, dog walking services. But it’s so useful, Grabio has a slew of established competitors.

Zaarly focuses more on odd jobs and services (“Bring me an ice cream cone and I will pay you $10), Goshi hosts image-based listings and Taap.it also has a similar platform.

Grabio’s success depends largely on its ability to distinguish itself from the many other players in the space.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mbortolino

---

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

---

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable hand-picks startups that we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

This week’s selection of startups have created mobile applications for iPhone and Android that offer a twist on the expected.

EyeEm is a mobile photo-sharing application unique in its ability to surface similar photos in real time. Life Is Crime mixes up mobile gaming with location-based gameplay, and Liquid Fare, perfectly suited for barhoppers, offers an updated interpretation of the mobile reviewing app.

---

EyeEm: Photo Capture for Photo Discovery

---

Quick Pitch: EyeEm is a photo capture, sharing and discovery app that learns your tastes from the pictures you take.

Genius Idea: Photo vibes.

Mashable’s Take: Berlin-based EyeEm puts a fresh twist on mobile photo-sharing with an app for iPhone and Android that emphasizes discovery.

Yes, the app does include filters, likes, comments and social sharing — staples in nearly every mobile photo application these days — but we think you’ll like it for its more refined qualities.

Filters, for instance, are applied in your camera’s view pane, even before you snap a photo. Photos are automatically arranged into photo albums called vibes, categorizing photos by either place, people or content. Plus, the app auto-tags your photos with location and activity descriptions, making manual entry completely optional.

---

Life Is Crime: Mobile MMO Set in the Real World

---

Quick Pitch: Life Is Crime by Red Robot Labs is a location-based MMO mobile game where players commit virtual crimes in real places.

Genius Idea: Combining social and hardcore gaming elements with location-based action.

Mashable’s Take: Developed by former executives at Playdom and EA, Life Is Crime tasks mobile users on Android (and soon iOS) to commit virtual crimes, perform missions, challenge other players to take over real-world locations and become criminal masterminds.

The game takes the high-octane elements of complex, narrative-based video games for consoles and PCs, throws in social gaming standbys like virtual goods and gameplay with friends, and uniquely places all of the action in your surrounding neighborhood.

---

Liquid Fare: A Mobile Wingman

---

Quick Pitch: Liquid Fare provides an easy way to find local bars, lounges and clubs organized by age, style and attractiveness of the crowd.

Genius Idea: Mobile users crowdsource their way to a better night out on the town.

Mashable’s Take: Liquid Fare for iPhone and Android promises to be the compass that points you towards the hippest hotspots nearby, depending on your personal preferences in crowd style, age and attractiveness.

The application crowdsources its establishment assessments, encouraging users to rate the scene at venues they visit.

Liquid Fare, from the New York-based startup of the same name, was first piloted in New York and San Francisco. The application rolled out for all audiences in the U.S. in August.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Roger’s Wife

---

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

---

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable picks a few startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

This week we turn our attention to startups building applications that have impressive community appeal.

ShareMyPlaylists, for instance, is a music playlist-sharing site for Spotify users. Givvy is a gift store that wouldn’t exist without the gift ideas and contributions of Facebook users. And LifeKraze taps into the power of your personal community of friends and followers for motivational purposes.

So get in the give-a-little, take-a-little spirit and check out these interesting application and services.

---

ShareMyPlaylists: Music Discovery for Spotify Users

---

Quick Pitch: ShareMyPlaylists.com is a platform to discover new music on Spotify through playlists.

Genius Idea: The Playlist Generator auto-generates playlists based on your musical taste.

Mashable’s Take: Spotify’s music-listening experience is structured around the playlist. If you don’t want to bother building your own or are simply in the mood for something new, take a gander at ShareMyPlaylists.

ShareMyPlaylists offers a community-based, give-and-take playlist experience. You give your playlists and get access to others in turn. Use the site to search and explore playlists of interest, or turn to the Playlist Generator to pump out a playlist personalized to your tastes.

You should have plenty of music to choose from; more than 100 new playlists are uploaded to the site each day. There’s even a new iPad app to boot.

---

Givvy: Facebook App Helps With Gift-Giving

---

Quick Pitch: Givvy is a social shopping app that helps Facebook users discover, share and curate gifts online.

Genius Idea: A gift store by and for the people of Facebook.

Mashable’s Take: Facebook has become the de facto way to keep up with friends’ birthdays and anniversaries. Givvy’s Facebook application harnesses this special-occasion data and marries it to product recommendations from Facebook friends and top curators. The end result is a gift store experience entirely sourced from the Facebook community.

Follow Givvy curators for gift recommendations that come highly recommended. Post your own ideas and create gift lists to share with friends and family members. You can even shop by personality type — maybe you’re in search of a gift for a hipster or wine lover, for instance.

---

LifeKraze: Community-Based Motivation

---

Quick Pitch: A motivation platform that uses a competitive point system to encourage individuals of all ages to live actively.

Genius Idea: Get positive reinforcement and perks for being active.

Mashable’s Take: What have you done? LifeKraze gives you 160 characters to answer that prompt. You can also add links, photos and videos as visual proof. Share your activities and accomplishments, big or small, and the community will reward you with Kraze Points — everyone gets 200 points to spread around each day — if they find your feats impressive.

The startup takes a simple approach to motivate users to lead more-active lifestyles. It scraps the logistics associated with pre-planning — goals, rules, restrictions and so forth — in favor of a positive reinforcement system that rewards users for a job well done, as judged by followers. Earn enough points and you can cash them in for discounts and products from the site’s brand partners.

LifeKraze has raised $1.25 million in funding, and has 20,000 users and 16 brand partners.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, PLBernier

---

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

---

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: MusicTandem

Quick Pitch: MusicTandem is an iPad app for creating personalized music channels and discovering new artists.

Genius Idea: Endless music listening and watching on your iPad — or Apple TV via AirPlay.

---

Scour YouTube for music and you’ll find an overwhelming collection of videos to choose from. MusicTandem, a newly-released application for iPad, engineers an easy-listening environment should you wish to sit back and let the application build out custom, personalized artist and music channels, à la Pandora, for you.

Once you pay the upfront application sticker price of $0.99, you’ll gain access to MusicTandem’s all-you-can-eat music listening and watching experience. Start by entering the name of your favorite artist and the application will build out a channel of music videos with tracks from similar artists included, should you so choose.

You can also scroll over to the genre music channel screen and tell the application to build you an 80s Pop or 90s Rock channel, for instance.

For those already familiar with Pandora, MusicTandem will proffer a familiar instruction-free listening and watching experience, minus the song skip limitations.

MusicTandem bucks the track licensing issues and costs of other music applications by sourcing its music video selection from YouTube. The application slightly suffers as a result — video buffering may interrupt the flow of music play. But the application’s intuitive user interface, support or AirPlay and lack of listening restrictions will more than make up for the delays for most app users.

The iPad application is a product of upstart AppTandem, a bootstrapped Teramo, Italy-based company.

---

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

---

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable hand-picks startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

This week we’ve rounded up startups that are making new tools to help you shop, sell and run more efficiently.

Dibsie is a deal shopping site that learns your preferences, Lockboxer helps with pricing, inventory and sales, and Smashrun motivates runners with rankings and badges.

---

Dibsie

---

Quick Pitch: Dibsie is a visually pleasant shopping deals site that learns what you like.

Genius Idea: A new take on marketing discounts.

Mashable’s Take: Dibsie catalogs discounts across industries into one image-based browsing experience. As users hover, click and like items, it learns what they like and adjusts its recommendations accordingly. Users can also follow a particular business.

Many of the deals are non-exclusive sales, but it is nice to be alerted to them all in one place.

“Unlike unwanted ads in the margin of other sites, our visitors actually opt in — and want us to use their interactions on the site to make better recommendations,” explains CEO Garren Givens. “The products — which are essentially ads — become more like content (like a constantly evolving shopping catalog).”

Businesses can easily add their own deals with a self-serve dashboard (deals are reviewed by Dibsie before they are posted). It’s free for them to post up to 100 credits of deals while Dibsie is in beta, but eventually the site will charge companies either on a per-deal basis or for an unlimited membership.

---

Lockboxer

---

Quick Pitch: Lockboxer tells you how much your stuff is worth and helps you sell or donate it.

Genius Idea: Creating a log of possessions for insurance or moving purposes.

Mashable’s Take: At its core, Lockboxer is a price search engine. Users type in an item and the site returns both the prices it is selling for online. This functionality isn’t particularly handy, however, as the same can be easily accomplished on a site like Google Shopping, Amazon or eBay.

Lockboxer is aiming to take the process further by becoming an inventory management site for your stuff. As you look up prices, you can automatically add items to a master list. From here, you can select what you want to sell and post it directly to eBay or your social media accounts. You can also select items to donate and retain an estimate of their values for tax purposes.

Probably the most useful function of the site is a home inventory tool that encourages users to snap photos of each room in their houses and document their contents. This is something that can be done without Lockboxer’s aide, but the free site provides a template, cloud storage and prices for the items. Listing everything you own might seem low on the to-do list, but can become much more important if you need to use your homeowners insurance.

---

Smashrun

---

Quick Pitch: Smashrun is analytics for your running.

Genius Idea: Motivating runners with badges and rankings.

Mashable’s Take: For a relatively simple sport, running can involve a lot of data. Smashrun helps track distance, speed and duration of your runs by either connecting with a Nike+ product or inputting details about each run.

While other businesses like Runkeeper are already safely settled in a similar niche, Smashrun’s free service takes a different tone by rewarding runners with badges for milestone runs and showing them how they stack up against all other users in the database by distance, speed and frequency.

It also ranks individual runs against the user’s own history so that she knows, for instance, when she’s just run farther than ever before. Other fun data points include what day of the week and time of day a user most frequently runs and the longest break between runs.

It’s a fun way for casual runners to keep a log of their progress and share milestones.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Ed Yourdon

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable hand-picks a few startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

How we as consumers of physical and digital content view and experience the world around us is changing, and the startups highlighted here are all dedicated to helping us better find, discover and consume content.

SocialGuide, which focuses on social media ratings of broadcast television shows, gives us a real-time glimpse at how viewing audiences are reacting to content. New video search engine Smivi aims to give us better tools to shift through the troves of the web’s video library. And, Sparkatour, a mobile guide maker optimized for museums, could come in handy when we’re exploring and consuming real-world content.

---

SocialGuide: Social Media Meets TV Guide

---

Quick Pitch: SocialGuide is a social TV guide and ratings system that mines, filters and displays conversations about TV on social networks.

Genius Idea: Television show ratings that pivot around social conversations.

Mashable’s Take: Social media and armchair quarterback TV commentary seem to go hand-in-hand. Brooklyn-based SocialGuide, which launched in April, reveals much of this online chatter and makes sense of it in a TV guide-like fashion.

The service’s “Most Social Now” algorithm is a real-time ranking of TV shows generating the most online buzz. You can use SocialGuide to see which shows are super social, filter results by show genre, limit shows to just those your friends are watching or simply check out what’s on now.

SocialGuide also spits out “The Social 100″ report of the top programs across 170 different cable networks. You can view the report in daily, weekly or monthly increments and check out the social performance stats for the top 100 shows.

SocialGuide has raised $1.5 million in funding from angel investors. In addition to its web app, the startup has TV companion apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

---

Smivi: Smart Video Search

---

Quick Pitch: Smivi is a video search engine that lets you follow searches and find live events.

Genius Idea: Discover live videos as you search.

Mashable’s Take: New video search engine Smivi launched its beta application Friday to help users better search for and discover online videos across the web — not just on YouTube.

“At its present data stage, Smivi has crawled videos from many of the top websites,” explains creator Danny Witters. “Smivi searches across numerous video sources and puts all relevant results, whether they are from YouTube, TED.com or ESPN.com, in one convenient place.”

Smivi also supports categorial search to help you filter video searches (use “search query .category”), and has a follow feature so you can keep track of your queries. Smivi also has a live search marker that informs you when videos on the results page are being live streamed.

---

Sparkatour: Mobile Phone Museum Tours

---

Quick Pitch: Sparkatour enables small to medium-sized museums to easily create a mobile multimedia-guided tour of their art collections for their visitors.

Genius Idea: Giving museums and their visitors a more practical alternative to audio guide hardware.

Mashable’s Take: Carrying around bulky audio hardware while touring a museum feels unnecessary, especially considering that most of us already tote around more-capable machines in our pockets. Such is the belief of Sparkatour, a San Antonio-based startup that helps museums create mobile guides to replace antiquated audio tours.

“Museumgoers are becoming increasingly more technologically savvy and want to interact with the pieces of art in different ways,” Sparkatour co-founder Kyle Rames explains. “Museums can leverage their visitors’ devices instead of purchasing equipment.”

Museums, for a cost, can use Sparkatour to quickly create a mobile app that includes all their video, audio and image content. They can even assign guests numbers to use as visitor keys to gain access to specific tour content.

Sparkatour’s first client is the San Antonio Museum of Art. The museum created a mobile guide for the last destination on its “The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama” exhibit. San Antonio River Foundation and The National Ranching Heritage Center are also said to be soon releasing mobile guides of their own.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Ary6

---

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

---

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable handpicks a few startups that we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

This time we’re featuring three applications and services that will help you find more, faster.

Startup Brom.ly’s omniscient event-finding powers could make its web and mobile application your best friend on the weekends. With Know About It, you can sit back and relax as this web app keeps tabs on the most relevant and important updates flooding your social media accounts. And Famigo is designed to be an application-finding friend to families with young children.

---

Brom.ly: Your Local Concierge

---

Quick Pitch: Brom.ly is a personalized event recommendation engine, helping you figure out what to do.

Genius Idea: Your Facebook interests and activities help Brom.ly determine what you could be doing.

Mashable’s Take: As the Loverboy song goes, everybody’s working for the weekend. But, for those times when your weekend (or weekday) calendar seems a little too empty, startup Brom.ly could come in handy.

Brom.ly’s web and mobile applications serve as a local, personal concierge. Connect Brom.ly to your Facebook account and it will use your interests to recommend things for you do and see in your neighborhood.

“Brom.ly indexes every single event in a city using natural language processing. Then we use a proprietary recommendation engine to personalize your suggested events based on your Facebook profile, specific interests, events attended, location check-in data, popularity of event, et cetera,” co-founder Chad Gallagher says.

The AOL Ventures-backed and New York-based startup just launched an Android application and will follow that release with an iPhone application in the week ahead.

Brom.ly reminds us of Alfred, but with a focus on events. Its only real downfall is that it’s limited to six cities: New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago.

---

Know About It: Discover What You’re Missing on Social Media Sites

---

Quick Pitch: Know About It helps you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social streams.

Genius Idea: Status update discovery.

Mashable’s Take: Even if you have an ever-present eye on all your social streams, chances are you’re still missing a tweet, Facebook post or news item that’s of interest.

Know About It — co-founded by former Bit.ly engineer Kevin Marshall and Chalq fantasy sports site founder Will Cole — surfaces content relevant to you that you may be otherwise missing in all of those real-time updates flying by. It connects to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google Reader, LinkedIn and a few other social sites as sources.

“We built Know About It as users who were frustrated with trying to keep up in real time. We knew there were huge amounts of content we just never saw, drowned out in crowded dashboards,” Cole says. “With Know About It, users can relax.”

Know About It is certainly not the first startup to attempt to help users get the most out of their social streams, but the just-launched startup has a fresh take and seems to do a solid job at surfacing content.

---

Famigo: Find Family-Friendly Apps

---

Quick Pitch: Famigo aims to change the way families play together by making their mobile technology as family-friendly as possible.

Genius Idea: An application search engine just for families.

Mashable’s Take: Former Nickelodeon executive Q Beck, neuroscientist Matt Sullivan and software developer Cody Powell applied their shared passion for gadgets and family fun to create Famigo, an application curation startup that attempts to help parents and kids find great games, educational resources and ebooks that are safe to enjoy.

Famigo’s website serves up reviews on Android applications in four categories: featured, highest rated, staff favorites and most popular. The just-released Family App Review Android application also curates, recommends and reviews family-appropriate Android applications.

Created during a three-day startup event in 2009, Famigo is now a member company of the Austin Technology Incubator.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, eyeidea

---

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

---

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.