At the NewSchools Summit on Wednesday, social gaming giant Zynga and NewSchools Venture Fund said they are partnering up for an entrepreneurship program to support startups developing learning games and apps.

Zynga will host the startups at its San Francisco office, where they’ll be able to interact with game designers and product managers, and Zynga.org, the company’s nonprofit arm, has committed $1 million for the first year.

“Through the efforts of Zynga.org, we’ve shown that social games can impact peoples’ lives for the better,” said Ken Weber, executive director of Zynga.org. “[With NewSchools], we want to help entrepreneurs create high quality, scalable learning games that will enhance learning experiences for all 21st century students.”

The announcement comes during something of a boom time in ed tech. Since the start of the year, a handful of other accelerators have also launched targeting education startups. And, according to CB Insights, education technology companies raised $1.1 billion in 2012.

The first cohort of the Zynga- and NewSchools-backed program will start this summer and include learning gaming apps Kidaptive, LocoMotiveLabs and Motion Math. Education social network Edmodo will join the cohort as a charter partner.

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Earlier this year, education giant Kaplan announced a new EdTech Accelerator powered by TechStars. But it’s hardly the only one. In the past few months, no less than five accelerators have launched offering ed tech entrepreneurs money, mentors and a faster track to growth.

Earlier this month, the program announced that it had brought on Don Burton, a serial entrepreneur and investor with a deep background in for-profit education, to serve as the accelerator’s managing director. Ahead of the program’s first acceptance deadline, Burton chatted with me about opportunities and challenges for ed tech startups — and how Kaplan’s TechStars program believes it can rise above the competition.

Here’s a (lightly edited) transcript of our conversation:

GigaOM: Ed tech accelerators are popping up all over the place — why do you think now is an interesting time to be a part of one?

Burton: We’re at the very beginning of major change. We’ve had big success stories, in the sense of online education, like University of Phoenix or Wireless Generation, which was sold to News Corp. But if you look at those opportunities, they’re really more automating the way we currently do education [like] a lot of the education technology that’s been here to date.

What’s really exciting is now we’re thinking of new ways of imagining what learning can look like. Like the Maker Movement and the Quantified Self movement — I think those types of project-based, interest-based and passion-based experiences in the real world are what we can do with all of learning eventually.

GigaOM: TechStars is a big name in the startup world and Kaplan is well-known in education, but with so much competition, how will your program distinguish itself?

Burton: It’s becoming a very popular space so a lot of people are starting up accelerators, but if you think of it, they’re startups. TechStars has been doing this since 2006 and they have such a brand and platform, [including] the network, the mentors and the VC funders. It’s really tough to replicate that. And with Kaplan, we can get you customers [for testing products] right away – other startups won’t have such easy access.

Maybe a lot of startups will get into accelerators because there are so many. But, potentially, we’ll be the graduate school of accelerators, so to speak. Maybe you started at one of the smaller accelerators and, once you’ve graduated and get some traction and are really ready to catapult yourself into a Series A, that’s when you might think now I can apply to the TechStars accelerator.

GigaOM: So does that mean TechStars wants other accelerators to feed into it? Or that you’re looking for slightly more established ed tech startups?

Burton: No, we definitely would take startups that don’t have any traction if we love the idea and we love the team. But let’s say you apply to the Kaplan TechStars accelerator and couldn’t get in early. Maybe you fall back to another accelerator and once you’ve proven yourself, have developed your concept more and have a little bit of traction then you come back to the Kaplan TechStars accelerator.

[We’re casting] a very wide net. We’re trying to find the best ideas and the best teams but also [startups] that we think have the potential to be fundamentally disruptive. We want big impact, not another set of flash cards and exercises for kids to do math. [For example], can it engage kids in a much stronger way than traditional education has engaged kids? We’re looking for a broad spectrum – it could be cradle to grave.

GigaOM: What are some areas of opportunity that haven’t been tapped yet?

Burton: One is the scorecard by which we’re measuring learning. Instead of just a GPA or SAT or IQ score, who is the person that we’re looking at? You look at all the work in the positive psychology movement and Martin Seligman.

They’re talking about the profiles of people’s character strengths [like] curiosity and love of learning and grittiness.  But we don’t really measure that that well. We don’t think about a person’s dispositions or personality but that makes a big difference for how they might want to learn. It’s the same with interest and knowledge areas [and] multiple intelligences. This is a bottleneck issue because in any system, you want to know what your kids are learning and the competencies they’re building. Having a smarter scorecard that can help us profile people in more individualistic ways is going to be really important.

Digital portfolios is [another] big area. How do we represent our competencies as we move to a more competence-based system instead of just a credential or seat-time based system? We’re going to need to capture that in a more effective way.

The last one is smarter pathways. Everyone talks about adaptive learning and personalization and how important that is. But if you look at what’s going on out there today, [it's] just a scratch on the surface of personalization.

GigaOM: Where do you think the innovation will start?

Burton: [It] will probably come in the informal markets before it comes to the formal markets. There are some innovators in the school markets, for sure — the charter schools and other types of institution. If you look at the MIT Media Lab, that’s really innovative — [students] get to build their own robots or whatever they want to research, they get to build it and perform it, like the Maker movement. There are radical experiments in institutions, but those are almost like rogue departments. But can’t we see all of education looking much more like that?

GigaOM: The industry is in the midst of an investment upswing, but what are the key challenges for entrepreneurs?

Burton: One of the biggest challenges is simply creating change in the formal school systems that are not as market-driven as some other sectors. If you have the best solution, that does not guarantee you adoption in all the schools across all the systems. Even you have amazing success in some districts, how do you get that across the whole system? A lot of these districts across the country have very different ways of doing things and it’s tough to scale your opportunity. And policy — how does the government view technology and for-profit education?

GigaOM: People are already talking about an ed tech bubble – are all these accelerators fueling it?

Burton: It would be a bubble if no change happens, right? If none of this stuff starts to impact how we learn and how we develop. But if you think about where the education sector is [it’s] the second-largest sector in the world. If you think about the change that’s needed and the amount of change that’s needed, we haven’t even started yet. We’re not at a bubble but the very beginning of a new way of envisioning learning. Traction matters and you need to start seeing the impact and seeing tools being adopted, and I think we will see that. We need all of this attention and resources because we have a big issue with education. We need to put some great minds and some great money behind it.

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• The quantified self: hacking the body for better health

Nike said the 10 startups, which were culled from “thousands,” kicked off the program today in Portland, Ore. and will focus on building their products on top of the Nike+ and NikeFuel platforms.

During the program, the startups will be mentored by health and tech leaders, including Stefan Olander, Nike’s VP of digital sport; David Cohen, founder and CEO of TechStars; Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare; and quantified-self expert Tim Ferriss. In addition to the mentorship, support and work space, they’ll receive $20,000 each.

Given the rising interest in quantified self-type fitness and health tracking devices and apps (like Nike’s own Fuel band), it’s little wonder that the company spots an opportunity in supporting health startups and encouraging new ideas and applications of its platform.

“We are excited by the response to the Nike+ Accelerator and the high caliber of applicants to the program,” Olander said in a statement. “We recently celebrated the first year of NikeFuel and the Accelerator program is a natural next step to broaden and enhance the Nike+ ecosystem – allowing Nike to offer richer experiences to athletes of all levels.”

Here are the 10 companies:

• FitDeck: Digital decks of exercise playing cards that deliver ever-changing workouts for fitness and sports.
• GoRecess: Helps users find, book and review fitness activities.
• Chroma Games: An indie game studio that creates virtual worlds tied to real-world activity.
• CoachBase: Provides a digital sports coaching platform.
• GoFitCause: Leverages fitness data as a means of raising money for charities.
• HighFive: Ad network for health and fitness apps that helps people achieve their goals by rewarding them along their journey.
• Sprout At Work: Provider of corporate wellness solutions leveraging social and gamification tools to inspire employees and empower employers.
• GeoPalz: An interactive gaming and rewards platform for kids and families.
• Incomparable Things: Creates activity-driven fantasy sports leagues.
• RecBob: Offers a platform that makes recreational sports easy by organizing play.

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• 

  Abhay Jain

  Active Scaler: Active Scaler wants telecoms and other companies to try out its storage-load-balancing software. Rather than balance the load on network resources like a Citrix NetScaler, Active Scaler software works with storage to shorten latency by a factor of three to five and decrease the cost of storage per gigabyte by 60 percent, co-founder and CEO Abhay Jain said during his presentation. “The convergence of network and compute has happened before, but not network and storage,” he told me afterward.

• 

  Parin Dalal

  Xockets: Xockets is developing a computational memory fabric called a Ximm to “do with infrastructure what VMware did with compute,” CEO Parin Dalal said. The Ximm would process information (see graphic below) on a server’s memory, lowering the disparity in speed between compute and memory, said Stephen Belair, Xockets’ chief technology officer. He left Cisco after 14 years to start working full-time with Dalal earlier this week. “If we get it working — and we’re working on a prototype — something’s going to happen,” Belair said. “It could be a real game-changer.”

Whether or not its startups are destined for success, though, the trend away from consumer-facing investments and toward enterprise plays makes the Alchemist Accelerator look like a more valuable resource. Enterprise technology can be more difficult to get right and to later sell, so programs dedicated to helping startups build it could be a big help for entrepreneurs and investors alike.

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According to Monday’s announcement, the program targets companies that use Nike+ technology, including the FuelBand and Nike+ Running app, to create products and services for athletes to get help in training, coaching, and data visualization.

The accelerator, which will be based near Nike’s Portland, Ore. headquarters, will accept ten companies to participate  and be mentored by Nike executives and other tech industry leaders.  Mentors include Stefan Olander, Nike’s Vice President of Digital Sport; David Cohen, founder and CEO of TechStars; Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare; and quantified-self expert Tim Ferriss.

TechStars, which was founded in 2007 and says 120 of its companies have raised north of $200 million in venture capital to date, operates out of five cities. The new Nike accelerator and the Microsoft Accelerator are the only two programs that it powers outside of its  traditional accelerators.

Given the momentum behind quantified self fitness and health tracking gadgets and software, Nike’s interest in supporting sports and fitness innovation makes plenty of sense. In addition to Nike’s technology, companies like Fitbit, Striiv and Jawbone help people monitor their physical activity. By supporting startups in digital health and fitness, Nike can stay ahead of the curve and encourage more fitness-focused companies to use Nike technologies.

At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference last month, Nike’s Olander spoke about the opportunity in sports data. Check out a video of him speaking below.

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At the start of this year, both Startup Health and Blueprint Health – two incubator-type programs that provide funding, mentorship and connections – announced their first classes of startups.  Then, in October, the New York Digital Health Accelerator, backed by the New York eHealth Collaborative nonprofit and the private New York City Fund, introduced its own batch of health tech startups.

Now Bio & Health Tech Entrepreneurship Lab, is joining the fun. Supported by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), the new outfit began accepting applications a couple of weeks ago for its first class of health entrepreneurs.

In the past few years, health tech accelerators have popped up around the country – for example, Rock Health in San Francisco and Healthbox in Chicago. But given the concentration of top-tier hospitals, education and research institutions, not to mention drug companies like Pfizer and insurance providers like Aetna, located in New York and the surrounding areas, the city is well-positioned to be a hotbed for health innovation.

Mary Howard, program manager for the Bio & Health Tech Entrepreneurship Lab, said the new program intends to bring the growing health tech ecosystem to a new class of wannabe entrepreneurs who have strong backgrounds in the sciences and a big idea but don’t know the basics for starting a business.

“We’re targeting people who have that great idea and they’re asking themselves ‘now what?’” she said. In particular, the program is intended for graduate science students, post-docs and early-career researchers and engineers. But while most other health tech accelerators focus primarily on health software and IT, Howard said the new entrepreneurship lab plans to also focus on life science companies, including those working on drug discovery and development.

Unlike its peers, New York’s latest startup incubator for health tech companies doesn’t provide funding or space. But over the six-month program, accepted participants will receive coaching, pitch preparation, mentorship and other activities meant to connect founders with the local network of investors and entrepreneurs in healthcare.

Howard and Eric Vieiera, the program’s bio science practice leader, created the program after winning a bid from the NYCEDC. Howard said she previously launched several startups and has been active in the Boston startup community. And Vieira, who has a Ph.D. in developmental genetics, has directed several life sciences and technology projects.  The program is backed by $56,000 from the NYCEDC but Howard said they are looking for private support and sponsorships and hope that the lab can run for 10 years. It will close its application period at the end of the month and announce its first 20 participants next month.

Blueprint Health, Startup Health and Rock Health typically have acceptance rates in the low single digits, indicating demand for structured programs that support health tech startups. But, obviously, a big draw for those applying to incubators is the money (in addition to the space). Still, access to networks of investors and potential business partners, as well as guidance in navigating the complex world of healthcare are critical to a startup’s success. If the Entrepreneurship Lab can supply a strong network for its participants, it could prove to be an attractive option for emerging health startups. Vieira said the goal is to support New York’s growing health tech ecosystem and potentially become a feeder for the bigger, better-funded incubators, as well as a recipient of  startups from smaller, more academic-focused innovation labs.

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The pace of change today is simply quicker than it used to be. A great example is Finland’s paper industry, which has traditionally been a big deal. The investment period between the country’s first and most probably last paper machine was 156 years, and now there’s news about major layoffs on a weekly basis. These cutbacks leave us with an educated work force that we need to re-employ. 

It’s all part of a bigger transition that these traditional industries need to go through in order to survive. Competitors operate in countries where it’s simply more effective and cheaper to do business. So what’s the cure?

I’m going to look at examples from Northern Europe — the Nordics, Baltics and Russia — because that’s where Startup Sauna, the accelerator I help run, operates. But the same things could apply anywhere else in Europe.

Simply put, Europe needs more startups. Here’s why: jobs.

According to the Kauffman Foundation’s research about job creation and loss in the US between 1992 to 2006, “startups create an average of 3 million new jobs annually. All other ages of firms, including companies in their first full years of existence up to firms established two centuries ago, are net job destroyers, losing 1 million jobs net combined per year.” In Finland between 2007-2010 it has been calculated that there were 668 startups which accounted for 4.4 percent of companies with over 10 people. This fraction created a net of 51,000 new jobs — over half of the total number.

Of course startups will not necessarily employ the newly available workforce completely, but you get the idea.

But what do Northern European startups need to grow into these employers of the future?

Ambition, Attitude and Know-how

Since 2010 Startup Sauna has organized over 50 events in Northern Europe, spent one-on-one time with over 500 startups and coached almost a 100 companies through in our acceleration program. Here are the three things that startups from Northern Europe seem to lack:

- The ambition to be the world leader in their industry
- The attitude where people think big and strive to create something new instead of focusing in processes and rules
- The know-how to build and grow globally operating startups

Here’s an example of where it’s changing. Rovio — which is located right across the street from our offices — was founded in 2003, made over 50 games and almost went bankrupt before Angry Birds became big.

How did it stay the course? One of the major investors has been a serial entrepreneur who had already successfully built and sold a company (Trema Group, 2006, now Wall Street Systems). For him it probably became more important to see how big Rovio could become, rather than selling out quickly with a hefty profit. This attitude seemed to have spread throughout the company – the entire team wants to create the next big thing from Northern Europe.

This attitude set the bar for their ambition. If they were not going to sell the company, why wouldn’t they say that they’re going to be the biggest entertainment company in the world? You don’t become something like that with a 100 million app downloads – that’s why it makes perfect sense that they didn’t stop when they reached that number. Instead, go for the first billion and expand your business. I think their vision was something along the lines to be in real-time and direct contact with a billion users simultaneously. I don’t think they’ve forgotten this.

And then the company made strategic moves to gain the connections and know-how that they lacked. Rovio wants to get their plush toys out to the US market, and presumably chose Accel as an investor as they knew they had connections to retailers like Walmart. Rovio wants to enter the Chinese market, so they choose Atomico, where Niklas Zennström has experience with Skype of becoming one of the few European IT companies that actually achieved success in China. This know-how is now being handed down to Rovio’s employees, and some of them will switch to another startup at some point and transmit their newly acquired know-how forward.

That’s great, but one Rovio or one Skype is not enough. We can’t simply afford to sit and wait for the next big companies to pop up here in Europe, and at Startup Sauna we have felt the urge to help out our region’s founders and startups to raise their game. It’s the only way to increase their chances, and it’s why we offer our acceleration for free.

Cowboy photograph copyright Shutterstock user Outdoorsman. Angry Bird used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user bfishadow

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The San Francisco-based health tech accelerator on Thursday announced its fourth class of 14 startups, saying that it accepted less than 3 percent of the applicants.

The accelerator said this seasons’ applicant pool included more companies with hybrid hardware/software models, which is reflected in a couple of the startups selected to be part of the class.

In addition to introducing the new class, Rock Health said that Kaiser Permanente will join its roster of partners, which already includes the Mayo Clinic, GE, Genentech, Harvard Medical School, Nike and other health and investment companies.

In August, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced that it was partnering with Rock Health to raise the amount of capital provided to member startups from $20,000 to $100,000.

Aside from the capital (and other perks like office space and tech and operational support), one of the big benefits of being a part of Rock Health – as well as other programs for health tech startups, such as New York-based Startup Health and Blueprint Health – is the network of industry professionals. Given the density and complexity of the healthcare system, health tech accelerators play an important role in helping startups find mentors, navigate the sector, identify markets and forge partnerships.

Here’s an overview of the 14 new startups to join Rock Health (language from Rock Health):

Beam Technologies
Beam Technologies focuses on the convergence of technology and oral health, and makes the Beam Brush, the first app-connected toothbrush for mapping brush behavior to achieve a better understanding of oral care’s impact on overall health.

BenefitsMe
BenefitsMe helps employers more strategically manage their HR benefits approach and helps employees appreciate their HR benefits again.

CliniCast
CliniCast enables providers to improve outcomes and reduce costs through predictive analytics. Its first product, ARTO, helps providers reduce unnecessary hospital admissions in patients with chronic disease.

Eligible
Eligible is an API that streamlines insurance eligibility checks for doctors and patients.

Kit Check
Kit Check helps hospital pharmacies process medication kits faster and without error.

LabDoor
LabDoor builds report cards for supplements and over the counter medications, grading them based on their safety, efficacy, and price.

Mango Health
Mango Health makes fun and elegant mobile applications to help consumers better manage and improve their health.

Moxe Health
Moxe Health is increasing access to medical care, first through triage.me, which combines community-wide routing schemes with individualized patient data to provide optimized recommendations.

OpenPlacement
OpenPlacement empowers people on all sides of the continuing care process with real-time information and tools to more efficiently and effectively match Seniors with Senior Housing and Care Providers.

SuperBetter
SuperBetter turns your health goals into an on-the-go game, with a current focus on helping players manage mental health challenges including depression and anxiety.

Wellframe
Wellframe combines mobile technology and artificial intelligence to extend the provision of care from the hospital to the home, empowering patients to optimize their recovery and helping providers thrive in an evolving payment landscape.

Wello
Wello aims to make the world a healthier place by making fitness more personal, accessible, and affordable through an online marketplace of fitness professionals who instruct over live, 2-way video.

Wildflower Health
Wildflower Health is making pregnancy healthier, safer and lower cost through personalized mobile apps.

Zipongo
Zipongo delivers prescriptions for healthy living through its GroceryRx platform which helps families save money on personalized healthy meals and earn rewards for buying nutritious food.

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As I moved from the acceleration side back to being an entrepreneur, I wanted to systematically list what I’d learned and work out what entrepreneurs could generally benefit from. I also ran a survey and a string of interviews to find the value that startups expect from accelerators — and ask why they actually got. My findings form the backbone of my book Speed Up Your Startup: What Entrepreneurs Should Learn From Accelerators To Succeed With Their Businesses. 

What I found was there are 10 primary ways accelerators add value to startups. Breaking them down, we’re able to see how that value is produced, and come up with ways to get the same advantage elsewhere. The goal is both to demystify and examine the workings of a successful accelerator, and produce recommendations that startups can act on.

Let’s take a look.

1. Generating and validating an idea and a business model. Accelerators help through expertise in the field, knowing what has worked and what hasn’t before, and what others are doing that is similar. 

2. Investing and finding more investors. There is more to startup support than money, but it helps a lot. As well as the validation offered by the previous point, investors also like the validation provided by other investors. A startup from an accelerator program has already passed a certain vetting process and is thus likelier to be interesting. This also works in the case of co-investing: many investors like co-investing with proven accelerators and VCs.

3. Providing contacts and opening doors. A good investor can open doors for you that you wouldn’t even get to knock on yourself. This also goes for customers, partners, potential hires and media contacts. Accelerators that have proven successful in the past — or ones that have successful individuals behind them —are more interesting and thus have the strongest contacts.

4. Providing mentors, advisors and guidance. This is a key component of many programs. The startup world runs by advising and mentorship. Other founders share their own experiences on their blogs, in the talks they give, and in the mentorship sessions at accelerator programs. These are both networking opportunities and learning opportunities for startups, but primarily they are geared toward telling the startups what they should do to multiply their chances of success.

5. Providing hands-on help or education. If the startup needs to do something that they can’t do themselves, accelerators may either help them, train them or help find someone to do it for them. It is common for an early-stage accelerator to help in company formation, for example. Some have experts-in-residence for instance in marketing and recruiting. 

6. Helping in product development and testing. An accelerator can help shape the product while it is being developed. This depends much on the length of the program and on the program’s focus. It’s also key whether this is done within the accelerator’s core team, by their immediate network or by securing test or pilot customers and users externally.

7. Helping with product marketing and user acquisition. Accelerators are very concerned with getting real users and customers for their startups, and some help with this by providing hands-on resources for marketing. Without large marketing budgets, the most efficient way to ensure this is building products that have marketing built into their logic.

8. Providing a peer group in a high-pressure environment. Founders get best along with other founders — not because of their amicable personalities, but because they share a passion for doing something special that outsiders often may not understand. While that’s at least a generalization and at worst a cliché, having a peer group who face similar challenges can be highly motivating. Time pressure may seem like a bug, not a feature, but it’s a success factor in a startup accelerator. Deadlines are tangible measures of discipline — and enforcements of it.

9. Providing a physical location and support resources. A place to work from can be a co-working space, an office or a series of temporary gatherings. Physical resources like printers, chairs and coffee makers also make a startup’s life easier.

10. Negotiating and providing discounts, freebies and perks. This is slightly related to points 3–5, but worth underlining separately due to their potential impact. For example, Amazon Web Services partners with leading startup accelerators and offers free credits to their services, making the infrastructure choice effortless to many.

The survey confirmed this breakdown, but also unearthed some interesting differences between what startups expect from accelerators and what they actually receive from them.

Mentorship and advice from the core team, for example, had both high expectations and were deemed valuable by startups taking the survey — but customer and partner contacts in the industry didn’t fare as well.

Forty nine percent of respondents who had not participated in an accelerator reported that customer contacts would be very desirable. However, only 22 percent of the participants reported that the industry contacts provided by the accelerator had been excellent. Forty six percent reported these to have been “neutral” or “poor”. More detailed answers support this, with many founders pointing out that an accelerator would add the most value by providing partner or customer contacts. “Industry fit” was also mentioned as an important criteria when selecting an accelerator program in the first place. 

The lack of auxiliary business services – such as company formation, accounting or payroll processing – provided by the accelerator programs was a big letdown. 67 percent of respondents reported these as “poor” or “neutral”. At the same time, in non-accelerated startups, 65 percent of respondents placed these services in the top two categories of interest.

The survey was taken by 151 startups and supplemented with 33 additional interviews. More about the survey and the book is at the Speed Up Your Startup site.

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The 10 startups ran the gamut from marketplaces for custom goods, catering and yoga gear to companies looking to optimize online video, totally digitize paperwork processing and simplify group travel.  Here are a few of my favorites:

mxHero

Email may be decades old, but mxHero is trying to make sure it keeps up with the times. The Sao Paulo-based company has a bunch of cool services – from self destructing messages to the ability to hide email addresses from out-of-company recipients to enhanced email monitoring – to help enterprise clients improve email.  It also allows people to send attachments of any size, block or track the use of BCCs, and add email signatures to everyone in an organization. In the last six months, the startup has added 1,300 companies, and several of its apps are already ranked among the top 10 in Google Apps.

CaterCow

I wasn’t expecting to get excited about a marketplace for catering, but something about the site’s Seamless-meets-Pinterest vibe really pulled me in. CaterCow, launched by a team of former Airbnb employees, gives caterers of all kinds – from local bakeries to food trucks to independent foodmakers – a place to showcase their services. And it gives businesses and individuals an easy-to-navigate place to discover and pay for catering.  The packages range from traditional appetizers and desserts to Sno-Balls, frozen bananas, and custom cocktails. The company takes a cut of the transactions, and said that since launching earlier this summer it’s processed about $9,000 in transactions.

Juniper & Trade

Seizing on the anti-mass production movement driving artisan food, local breweries and handmade products, Juniper & Trade is a marketplace for custom-made home goods. Through the site, people who might otherwise head to retailers like Crate & Barrel can find reasonably priced custom home products and have them delivered to their door. It’s true that woodworkers and other craftsmen can already offer these kinds of products through Etsy, the biggest site for handmade goods, or CustomMade, which offers a range of custom-made items. But, unlike those sites, Juniper & Trade exclusively focuses on home goods. And, as the success of One Kings Lane is showing, the demand for home goods online is strong. The platform has not launched yet but will start with 18 makers in New York.

Houdini

Services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk can put an army of human laborers at your disposal to complete small tasks. But the problem, according to Houdini’s founders, is that there’s no quality control, no training and no assurance that you’re actually getting the best people for your needs.  Companies come to Houdini with a particular need, and then Houdini screens and trains workers to complete that task, and also reviews their work.

Citing management firm A.T. Kearny, Houdini said outsourcing as we know it will disappear in the next five years. And, as that transition takes place, companies taking advantage of web-based “cloud laborers” could be well-positioned. Since launching earlier this year, the company has seen impressive traction. It’s logged 8,000 man hours of work for over a dozen customers and has a waiting list of 380 businesses eager to use the platform once it opens out of private beta.

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