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Check out the shoeboxed.com blog and remember to sign up to be contacted about the launch if you haven’t already!

Get ready to shoebox.

Word.

As many of you already know, I am heavily involved in the Duke Internet startup www.shoeboxed.com. The idea behind shoeboxed.com is long in the making. After daily discussions and brainstorming sessions over the course of the last two semesters, Jeremy and I have finally decided to launch the site. We chose the name shoeboxed.com primarily because I had already purchased that domain for a different, but sort of related, project.

We have brought ten Duke students on board and are operating in stealth mode for the time being. But don’t let our secrecy fool you. We are working around the clock to bring shoeboxed.com to life.

I blogged a little while back ago about a German web site’s pre-launch marketing strategy and we have decided to launch something similar. We have put up a page so that you can sign up to be contacted when we launch the beta version for phase one of our idea.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who has signed up already!

More updates to follow.

At work today I was surfing and came across this article which unearths yet another new web 2.0 social-networking site. The website is currently in a closed testing phase but I am nevertheless working on getting an invite to check it out. Paul of StrikingShots.com labels the site “Like Myspace Only Good” and points to a turn-off-profile-customizations feature as a distinguishing factor between titan MySpace and Virb. One way that MySpace has distinguished itself from Facebook (or StudiVZ in Germany) is that MySpace allows a high level of profile customization with HTML code. Anyone that has used MySpace knows that the customizations can get a little out of hand, so Virb seems to be positioning itself in the middle ground between the two competing ideologies.

I like the clean look of Virb.com and am eager to see if they have any killer features that will afford them any competitive advantage in the saturating social-networking space.

More to come.

One thing that has been nagging at me lately is what precisely the self-dubbed “next big German Web 2.0 startup” is.

Currently (as of February) the only contents of the the-next-big-web-2-0.de is a teaser page with absolutely no information about the upcoming website. The domain name borders on arrogant, but is nevertheless quite intriguing. One reason I am particularly interested in this startup is because a few of my contacts in the Berlin startup scene have heard through the grapevine that these guys have a good team and are well financed. They have a team co-led (or led?) by a Mato Peric of Frankfurt.

Here’s a still-shot of the teaser page as it currently stands:

Apparently, though, the teaser page shouln’t be up for too much longer if they are on track with their application development. A few minutes of Googling resulted in finding this Job Description which states that the company is looking for a marketing intern to start no later than March 1.

On a subconscious level, I am pretty sure me falling for their pre-launch marketing ploy is bugging me more than the secrecy around the idea.