is what I would call an enhanced social Q & A site, the idea is that you ask questions to the community and get answers back. They are based in Santa Monica, California and are part of parent company Demand Media. If Demand Media does not ring a bell their CEO Richard Rosenblatt has had a hand in some major internet acquisitions in the last 10 years including but not limited to Myspace and iMall.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a site with an extremely active community dedicated to answering one another's questions? It is a great idea that answerbag is executing as well as I can imagine but that being said answerbag is far from perfect.

The Good: Well if you are an investor or just a speculator Answerbag has just about everything going for it, they have money from their parent corporation, strong management (see above), and a very strong growth pattern. As for the site the utility is high, they do a nice job of letting everyone rate both the questioners and the answerers so you get a sense of who you can trust on the site. More importantly they only archive unique questions with good answers which means that you do not have to sift through 15 similar posts to find the best answer. Finally the community responds to most questions rather efficiently (however I have been waiting over and hour with no answer to my question).

The Bad: To harness the power, energy, and utility of their many thousands of users there will be some evil and this evil takes the form of endless opinions. One thing I do not want on a site dedicated to answers are endless opinions about religion and politics. If there is factual information that one can contribute to a political or religious question that is great but there is a whole lot of annoying (and useless) opinions on the site about democrats, conservatives, immigration, and everything in between.

Summary: Although it can be a pain sorting through all of the opinions when I am looking for an answer they do a good job of having an easily searchable archive of questions and answers which can provide a high level of utility to just about anyone (I found out the best way to remove dog poop from a carpet in seconds!) so I will not be surprised if Answerbag's strong growth continues.

A lot of startups we've been reviewing are new companys that are still looking to break out, and haven't received a lot of mainstream coverage, so we have to do a bit of research first.  Veoh, is a San Diego based video sharing site that I actually use.  Although Veoh has been out for nearly 2 years, they just added video content from Hulu (who we reviewed here) and are beginning to really show their strategy of going beyond Youtube.

Veoh is fast turning into one of the best video site out there because they hyperaggregate official content from the networks as well rely on user generated content (and all the grey areas that that implies).  They have legitimate TV shows from their CBS deal as well as now having semi official shows from Fox and NBC via Hulu. They also are more liberal with taking down unofficial user uploaded content from networks that they don't have agreements with (like the way youtube USED to be), so if your savvy, your likely to find shows from the rest of the networks.  While I'm sure that this strategy is largely unspoken, it's incredibly smart, because it gives the consumers what their looking for until dumb TV lawyers finally begin to wizen up with how they handle Internet distribution.   A great example is that I used to watch 'unofficial' episodes of 24 on Veoh, last year, because it was one of better places to get it on the Internet.  Now I can officially watch 24 via Hulu/Veoh.  I don't care that there are ads now through the official channel, because it was never about not wanting the networks to get paid, I just wanted to watch 24 on the Internet, freely, on my own time.  Its basically a win-win-win, I benefit from getting the content I wanted, Veoh gets another user, and the networks now get the revenue they deserve from making the content.  

Veoh has high level of funding (24M to date from big names like Michael Eisner and Time Warner) giving them great flexibility to work out official deals with content providers, so I'm sure CBS, FOX, and NBC are just the first of even more official content we'll see on Veoh.  Then couple that thought with a track record that shows that Veoh in general gets what consumers want, and you'll see why Veoh is proving that Youtube is not the only new video distribution platform that can shake up the industry.

Website: http://www.veoh.com

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Yet another entry into local search popped up last year (wow its 2008 now) without a lot of press coverage.  Santa Monica Burbank based YellowBot bills itself as "yellow pages meets del.icio.us".  And while the local search space is incredibly crowded (hence why we gave a relatively harsh review of mojopages), YellowBot has a fairly attractive implementation that makes me think they have a good chance.  

Website: http://www.yellowbot.com

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Yes thats right, multilevel marketing now is set to take on online book and CD sales/reviews. What they say is that Fanista (based in LA) is the first place "that fans can share their opinions and discover new entertainment with a community of like-minded enthusiasts, purchasing products, inviting others to join, and getting rewarded for the value they create". This all sounds well and good, but this isn't your traditional social network/review site. Instead, Fanista is a startup funded entirely by Amway...and you know what that means...pseudo pyramid scheme (not the illegal type, but a gray area none the less).

The Good
Its Amway, there can't possibly be any good in that, right?

Actually/Unfortunately these Multi Level Marketing Schemes work in real life by getting people to think they are going to get rich; by applying the concept to social reviews, where its less of "scheme" and more of a semi-smart way to build user generated content, Fanista may actually be on to something.

The Bad
First off I'm not a fan of Fanista of multilevel marketting plans because it basically encourages you to sell stuff to your friends. This is just morally annoying. Couple this with Amway's bad reputation (they've been sued by multiple governments for fraud) and you've already got a PR problem.

Also considering Fanista has deep pockets, I wasn't at all impressed with their site. In fact, I can only see the top half of any of Fanista's pages, because for some reason the page doesn't scroll down. There are also some other basic user interface problems that made my browsing experience less than ideal.

Conclusion
Fanista is user generated content meets multi level marketing, which seems like a good match (at least from a business standpoint). But, with a more detailed look, one realizes that user generated content is still just barely beyond the early adopter phase. The mass Internet world, just isn't (yet) flocking to get active with adding their opinion online. Yet multi level marketing schemes generally feed on the ignorance of someone wanting to get rich. And at this stage in the game, I don't think the early adopter tech savvy market overlaps all that much with the ignorant guy who falls prey to these pitches and thinks he's going to get rich. Besides even if the market does overlaps, and Fanista become wildly successful, I'd give them a thumbs down on principle alone.

Website: http://www.fanista.com

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Clupedia is a Santa Ana based startup that is trying to take a hybrid wiki concept and apply it to semantically marking up websites. They've received at least 1.3M in Series A funding from the Tech Coast Angels, the Pasedena Angels, and the Frontiera Group as well as 2M in funding from their founder Dr. David Saad .

The Good
Clupedia has an interesting concept on their hands that, at the very least, it is a sort of web2.0 model that hasn't been beaten to death. The metag everything idea has been around for a long time and we are just now getting around to realizing it, with things like semantic user generated layers on Google earth, the new Yahoo/Flickr geotagging map photo explorer, etc, etc. Clupedia is taking it to another level by letting you tag and review anything on the Internet; your reviews for one site/product you write about then get displayed on any other relevant website you visit.

Clupedia also apparently has a strong pitch as they've received good response from the early stage investment community. Besides the money, their pitch has been well received on the popular entrepreneur video site vator.tv. Clupedia's vator.tv success alone has generated a lot of their user interest and downloads.

Finally they have a pretty good scheme for building their community (which is always the hardest part in making a service built on user generated content). They give iphones and other gifts for contributions and referrals. From what I can tell the requirements to get things seem quite high (100 clues and 100 referrrals), but I guess its working, so thats a good thing.

The Bad
Despite my comment that their pitch has been well received, my personal opinion after seeing their Vator.tv video is that their pitch was not at all impressive. The whole clue thing is confusing, if I wasn't TRYING to figure out what Clupedia was for this review, I would have checked out long ago. It took me a bit of time to really get what clupedia was trying to do, and I follow this stuff daily, I honestly don't think the mass consumer is going to latch on to what the heck Cluepedia's "clue" concept is.

If anything I think, I think the strong investment support is probably less about a mind blowing business and more that they have confidence in the founder's background. With a PhD in Computer Science and a successful background launching a company previously, the leadership seems like a good safe bet. I'm not so sure of this, especially since I'm usually leery about "safe bets" but then again, I've never met Dr Saad, so I could certainly be wrong.

The biggest gripe I have with Clupedia was actually using it. I was expecting a slick toolbar like del.icio.us that integrated simply and cleany with a nice web 2.0 style website. My experience was nothing like that. First, the toolbar layout seemed to lack a clear thought on the user interface experience for discovering "clues". I'm sure if someone showed me what I was looking at it would have been obvious, but using it like most users (just downloading it and blindly trying it) finding clues was not easy or addictive. In fact the entire time I felt like I was missing something, even after reading through the FAQs. Whatever clues I did find just seemed like useless bantor. When I went to add clues it was also buggy, as selecting a category would not scroll beyond the first few entries, then when I actually submitted a clue about good ole Tech Coast Review nothing happened. So I'm not sure if that meant that the review was submitted or what.

Finally, beyond the Clupedias toolbar, the website itself highly bothered me. The look and feel of clupedia.com reminded me of some annoying flash site, not a hip web 2.0 company. Besides the asthetics, I could never get the actual website to work. Although I was logged in, and the clucast toolbar was working, I could never search, add, or look at any clues on the site directly. I tried on both Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Maybe it would have worked in IE, but I didn't have much interest in changing browses just to see if I could view clues. And frankly even if it did work, Im pretty sure that my hope of slick, simple del.icio.us like experience of tooolbar to website integration would not have been seen. This of course is troubling to me, as I use the website version of del.icio.us as much, if not more than the toolbar version of del.icio.us, and if Clupedia actually interested me, my behavior would probably be the same.

The Overall
Theoretically Clupedia could become a more evolved version of StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is highly addicting, very useful, has great traction, and has a good business model. By adding a more intelligent semantic engine for reviews, and a slightly more evolved twist, Clupedia has the potential to be even better and become highly sucessful. Do I think they'll pull that off? Frankly, no, but might as well give them a chance. In the end I'd rather review a startup that may be rather bad in its current implementation but has a vision that COULD beat the industry leader if all the right things happen, then a startup that may be more polished but in the longterm really has nothing innovative to differentiate it from the competitors. Clupedia is the former.

Website: http://www.clupedia.com

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A Los Angeles based company has just announced the reception of an angel round of funding. TechCrunch reports that the funding is in at right around $750,000. The main idea of the company is to have not only book reviews but to base the book reviews (via social network) around friends.With the main premise that you would find a book review from a friend more useful than from a stranger.

The Good
There premise makes sense, in taking the time to read a book these days I couldn't care less what random people think about it, I would only take advice from friends, family, or just pick a book out of my own choosing. Secondly we all know the possibilities when 2 Stanford Graduates get together on an online project. In all seriousness there are some real good signs for this company; in around one year they have over 600,000 users and 10,000,000 book reviews, they are close to profitable, and best of all they have done all this without any formal funding.

The Bad
GoodReads has some stiff competition in Shelfari and Library Thing, and while I cannot claim that I am a member of any of these book networks I actually think that Shelfari looks a bit sleeker in terms of design. However that could easily be attributed to their association with Amazon and there plethora of funding. Also while I did find Goodreads easy to use I did not like seeing the reviews being pulled directly from a data base and having no personal oversight of this. What I mean by this is that you will have "Old Man and the Sea" reviews separated because some people are reviewing the paperback and others the hardcover even though they are the same book. What I found annoying about this is to get a good number of reviews you have to take the extra step of looking up 2 "different books" even though the story is identical.

The Overall
All in all GoodReads shows a whole lot of promise, they have accomplished more in one year without funding than many companies with years and millions. They are rapidly growing and I believe that if they use their funding wisely they will be in an excellent position to be the dominant book review social networking site.