monetary policy—issuing more shares to meet demand. But StarStreet will be a zero-sum game, he says: Every time one trader makes money, it means another trader is losing. (But StarStreet will win by keeping 2 percent of each transaction.) Levine thinks word about the StarStreet market will spread virally as traders broadcast their win-lose stats over social media.
Tutorial Tab
CEO: Greg Belote
Seeking: $200,000
Contact: [email protected]
Many popular websites, such as LinkedIn, are actually so complicated that they can scare away first-time users, says former TripAdvisor engineer Greg Belote. He founded Tutorial Tab with Gabe Warshauer-Baker to make it easy for non-programmers at Web-based companies to build interactive tutorials that explain things like how to sign up for a social-networking, stock-trading, or other type of site and how to get the most out of it. Using a Web-based, drag-and-drop interface, tutorial builders can specify where pop-up dialogue boxes should appear and what they should say, without having to write any code. Belote says Tutorial Tab is a better way to introduce users to complex sites than traditional solutions like FAQ sections or live webinars, because the startup’s tutorials don’t take users away from the actual pages at hand. “They’re right there on the page, not off-page, out of context,” he says.
UserMojo
CEO: Stephen Sprinkle
Seeking: $300,000
Contact: [email protected]
UserMojo is introducing the idea of “emotional analytics” to the practice of Web design and development. It’s easy to track what Web users do while they’re on a site—what links they click on—but it’s harder to figure out why they do what they do, or how they feel about it, points out CEO Stephen Sprinkle, the former director of e-commerce for Diet.com. UserMojo’s software makes custom commenting tools appear on top of an existing website. By clicking on a “feedback” tab near the bottom of any page on the site, visitors can activate a feedback interface that offers them a range of pictures of smiling, frowning, puzzled, or frustrated faces to indicate how they felt about something on the site. (If users discovered that Amazon was charging $575 for the same model of iPad that they could buy direct from Apple for $499, for example, they might leave a frowney-face on the price portion of the Amazon page.) Behind-the-scenes tools let site owners see what comments users left, which can help them figure out what to change to keep users browsing or buying.
