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"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.\nName: FellowUp\nQuick Pitch: FellowUp connects to Google, Facebook and LinkedIn to serve as a web and mobile personal assistant.\nGenius Idea: Scaling contact management for social media users.\nTomer Cohen was a bit overwhelmed when he first arrived from overseas to earn his MBA from Stanford. \"I was meeting great people and making great connections,\" the class of 2010 business school graduate told me over coffee. \"I kept building my network here \u2026 but at the same time I kept dropping the ball on those connections. I just didn't have the time or the effort to actually maintain them and follow up.\"\nLike most of us, Cohen found that the relationships he invested time in were the ones that eventually paid off professionally. With hundreds or thousands of social media and digital connections, however, the time it takes to properly invest in one's network is no longer sustainable or scaleable, he says. \nAnd so Cohen created FellowUp, a private beta website and iPhone application that plugs in to Facebook, LinkedIn and Google APIs to help users better manage their relationships. FellowUp, in Cohen's words, is a personal executive assistant that finds insights from the user's network. \nFellowUp users need only connect their third-party accounts and the startup will pull in contacts and calendar items. The website structures data into three tabs: my day, contacts and notes. The user will find the most immediate value in the \"my day\" tab, where FellowUp highlights updates \u2014 anything happening in the user's network, like a birthday or a job change \u2014 calendar events, and tasks as added by the user.\nThe user can engage with FellowUp updates from the site to post on a contact's Facebook wall and say \"happy birthday,\" message a LinkedIn connection to congratulate him or her on the job change, email a personal message or set a reminder to follow up at a later date.\n\n\n\n\nEventually, according to Cohen, FellowUp will do a better job at alerting the user to all manner of important events, with importance determined by user preference, happening around his contacts. \n\"FellowUp is going to fetch you information that is valuable,\" says Cohen, \"so you can just go through your day, and we will seek out meaningful ways for you to engage with people. And's that it.\"\nRight now, the idea is greater than the actual implementation in web form, but the user will see that FellowUp has elements of greatness. The startup is best experienced as a systematic, daily approach to personal relationship management, which means some of the appeal can only be seen through repeated usage. This usage will also teach FellowUp's algorithms which people and updates are of most importance to each user.\n\"It's really like hiring a personal assistant,\" Cohen says. \"Every day that personal assistant learns how you like to behave and becomes super valuable with time.\"\nThe just-released companion iPhone application [iTunes link] drives home the utility of FellowUp and gives users the ability to quickly reference notes, reminders and contacts, or add new ones, on the fly.\nCohen believes that FellowUp can coexist in the crowded social-intelligence-meets-personal-CRM arena \u2014 think Gist, Rapportive, Xobni or even LinkedIn \u2014 because the startup's algorithms are capable of filtering out the most important insights around contacts.\nFour week-old FellowUp has roughly 1,000 users who are a mix of students, venture capitalists and sales professionals. The latter group, says Cohen, finds FellowUp to be a perfect personal version of Salesforce and uses it to save the really important contact details they want to keep for themselves should they ever leave their current companies.\nMashable readers can get access to the private beta service by signing up here.\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, twohumans\nSeries Supported by Microsoft BizSpark\n\n\n\n\nThe Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/03/21/fellowup/>