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’ve curated a collection of applications that should come in handy the next time you’re planning a hotel stay, interested in promoting your digital prowess or looking to list your events calendar in a social way.
We like Infostripe as a simple way to create a mobile-friendly microsite that represents our web presences, and FYi Fly is a nifty interactive calendar app for the social butterflies among us. Then there’s Bedmap, a hotel search engine that makes mapping out future road trips a breeze.
Infostripe: Mobile-Friendly Personal Landing Pages
Quick Pitch: Create customizable infostripes to show off your tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates, YouTube videos and more.
Genius Idea: Simple, mobile-friendly personal splash pages..
Mashable’s Take: Infostripe is a slightly different interpretation of a personal landing page tool, similar in nature to About.me or Flavors. Where Infostripe differs is in its focus on simplicity and mobile.
“The founding motivation for Infostripe was to create a unique mobile-ready and shareable website that anyone could set up regardless of their skill level,” creator Harold Fudge tells Mashable.
You can use your Infostripe to represent your entire presence on the web by including linked icons for as many as 200 social sites, or by featuring your recent status updates, videos and photos.
You can also optionally include contact information and turn your Infostripe into a digital business card, or choose to collect web content on any subject matter in a notebook-like fashion.
Bedmap: Map-Based Hotel Search
Quick Pitch: Bedmap is a map-based search tool for finding hotels.
Genius Idea: Making finding hotels for road trips more manageable.
Mashable’s Take: Many hotel sites tack maps on to their search result pages to highlight hotel locations, but Bedmap makes the map the focus of its site.
Bedmap offers users a simple, fast and elegant map-based interface — with appropriate filters for desired amenities — for viewing hotels and rates by destination. Because of its map-centric approach, Bedmap could prove especially useful for those in search of road-side hotels on their summer road trips.
The Toronto-based startup was founded in January and gets its listings and reviews from global hotel database partners Hotels.com and TripAdvisor.
FYi Fly: Facebook-Infused Social Calendar for Your Site
Quick Pitch: FYi Fly is a social event listing site and calendar widget for your site with Facebook integration.
Genius Idea: A slick social calendar for your website or blog.
Mashable’s Take: FYi Fly is a convenient little calendar application designed for event organizers and attendees alike.
Use the tool to build out your social calendar, customize the size and look of the widget and then grab the embed code to list your upcoming events on your site.
Visitors who mark that they’re attending your events via the widget will also post their attendance to their Facebook walls, further promoting your events. You can even encourage event attendees to add their own photos and comments to your events.
Altogether, FYi Fly is as pretty and functional as anything we’ve seen in the social events startup category.
Posting Source: http://mashable.com/2011/06/19/apps-weekend-roundup/
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