5 Companies I'm Excited About

A couple companies that I’m into:

• Turf : An app from an incredible
  designer from NYC, Michael Tseng, Turf is a iOS game that combines
  foursquare with monopoly. You checkin to get points, buy and sell
  properties, and maintain them. I’d love to see more games that take into
  account a real world component like location and Turf does this well. He
  has been thinking about this game for a while and its great to see this
  passion project come alive over the last year. Check out the
  kickstarter
  that launched it.

• Everlane : An online clothing merchandiser that
  produces high quality apparel for reasonable prices. Started by my TA in
  college, this site is quietly killing with awesome shirts and
  accessories without the crazy markups that other brands have because of
  their retail requirements. As people become more comfortable ordering
  clothing online, sites like Everlane will flourish. Its still early for
  them, but I can see this site doing well in the next few years.

• uBeam : Wireless charging. If
  this works as advertised, its going to be everywhere. Check the video:
  http://allthingsd.com/20110602/demo-at-d9-ubeam/
  . First done in 3 weeks (!) by two female students at Upenn. Really hope
  this makes it to market!

• Kinobi: Motion capture based learning. A startup
  out of Startup Weekend EDU NYC, Kinobi makes it simple to create and
  partake in Kinect based learning applications. Think doing yoga poses or
  dance moves with the application letting you know exactly how to
  position yourself. I dreamed about doing this for dance classes when I
  did motion capture for games back at Carnegie Mellon. Kinobi is making
  it happen.

• Amicus : Social outreach for non-profits.
  Having worked with Habitat for Humanity for years, it was easy to tell
  that even some of the best non-profits need a massive change in thinking
  about how they do outreach and build an audience for their causes.
  Amicus gives them a platform to do this. In the future, I envision the
  platform expanding to a consumer facing platform for engaging with the
  causes people care about. The founder, Seth’s, fashion taste is also
  unmatched.

Bonus: RapGenius: A site that lets you write
definitions of lyrics. I’ve been a fan of this site for a while, as they
are an awesome example of how to do social media marketing / community
right; their readers are engaged and respond well to most things they
post. They also kill it on SEO for new tracks since they are the first
to publish lyrics for new tracks, and the definitions give you the exact
search terms that people will remember and search for. They also have
sick startup
t-shirts.