Shoeboxed has moved! Our new offices are just a couple of blocks down the same street in downtown Durham, North Carolina. We’re excited about the move, as we have a great new colorful space in the Suntrust building, one of the tallest and most recognizable buildings in Durham. We needed to move into a more functional space, and we are much happier with the layout and size of our new office. It will allow us to more efficiently and effectively serve you as we keep growing.

For all our Durham fans who know the area, we’re just down Main Street further into downtown. We are right next to the amazing American Tobacco Complex and the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, not to mention Locopops, a local favorite.

Our new address officially is:

Shoeboxed.com
212 W. Main Street, Suite 104
Durham, NC 27701

For mail, please send everything to:

P.O. Box 1411
Durham, NC 27702

So are there any implications for you with this address change? Well, there are a couple of things probably worth noting, but nothing to stress about.

There is no need to worry about your receipts getting to us as a result of our move. Shoeboxed intercepts mail from the United States Postal Service before the carrier level to ensure the security and speed of our service. This means that once your receipts arrive in Durham, we collect them, and do not wait for them to be delivered to us. Because of this special relationship with USPS, the exact address on your envelopes does not matter all that much.

For Receipt Mail-In Classic and Receipt Mail-In Express members, you can still use your bright blue envelopes even though the address is old. They will still come to us.

For Receipt Mail-In Basic members, you can use the new address since you have to address your envelopes yourself anyway. Don’t stress if you accidentally use the old address though; your receipts will still come to us.

Let us know if you have any questions, and feel free to stop by if you are from the area!

Shoeboxed has been nominated for an Industry Standard 100 Award in their Productivity category. The awards are to recognize the most innovative companies out there. And best of all, the community chooses the winner. Make sure to vote for Shoeboxed!

From their website:

The Industry Standard Innovation 100 Awards — or the TIS 100 for short — is a community-driven awards program that showcases the top 100 Internet innovators across 10 categories. There is a multistage process to determine the TIS 100 and the winners for each of the ten categories. Readers, users, and company founders and executives can nominate and vote on the most innovative sites, services, and companies on the Web.

There are plenty of good reasons to save receipts, but in Taiwan, you can actually get paid cold, hard cash for saving receipts you get from retailers.

Forget reimbursements, taxes, budgeting and insurance. I want the cash. So if I ever move to Taiwan, I am definitely going to participate. Here’s how it works:

In order to encourage people to ask for receipts from retailers, all receipts are printed with special number codes. Every so often, the government releases lists of numbers. If they match the ones that you have on your receipts, you can win money.

Big props to Taiwan. I smell a Shoeboxed partnership!

Thanks to Doug Nienhuis for tipping me off!

I’m going to need some cake and candles immediately. Also, a party hat would be great. Why? Not that I need a reason, but Shoeboxed is celebrating its first birthday today!

We’ve been working on this idea since 2006, but we finally launched our original open beta version of Shoeboxed one year ago today.

Thanks to everyone who has supported us over the last year: our users, investors, friends, family, and late-night security guards! We couldn’t have done it without you!

To celebrate, we starting a free trial of Shoeboxed today. Sign up now and you’ll get 30 days free to try out Shoeboxed Receipt Mail-In!

We should have birthdays more often.

Shoeboxed has been going extremely well as of late, with many new people signing up and enjoying our mail-in service. We’re happy to see so many people take advantage of this thing we’ve put together. All you new members: you can expect a little something extra in the mail from yours truly this week. Just because.

Anyway, although we spend basically our entire lives chugging away at our computers trying to make Shoeboxed into the success we know it will be, we also like to take a step back every once in a while. Recently, we evaluated our marketing and messaging so that we could come up with a new tag line. We had used some sort of random ones in the past, but now I think we’re going to stick with this one for a while.

So without further build up, our new tag line is:

Shoeboxed: Where Receipts Go.

Simple right? Well, we think it captures pretty well what we do here. Your receipts come to us (through several channels), so (by corollary) this is also where they come. And we thought we would point that out.

Anyway, you’ll probably start seeing it around more, so that’s what that is.

Shoeboxed has returned to its roots, at least for a couple of days.

Taylor and Tobi had some meetings in Frankfurt this week, and were able to snap some shots of their trip. I’m their lackey today back in Durham, just forwarding along their adventures. When you’re in Frankfurt, you don’t have time to blog.

Typical random Internet cafe

Taylor in Frankfurt

Autobahn!

If you haven’t been following our history for very long, you might not know  that although Shoeboxed was founded here in North Carolina, we developed the final versions our software and business model while living in Berlin during the summer of 2007. We’ve got a bunch of German-speakers on the team (not to mention a German), so we don’t really mind hopping over the Pond to spend a few days in the Vaterland.

We have received generous seed capital from well known German entrepreneurs and have many friends and advisors from the burgeoning German start-up scene.

Though we have strong ties to Germany, we’re still scanning your receipts from North Carolina in the old US of A and still base our entire operation out of our Durham office, near Duke University.

I just wanted to welcome two people to the Shoeboxed team. Nothing really counts until you blog about it, and I felt like we should at least talk about them. And now, without further adieu, I introduce Radu Rosu and Tobi Walter.

Radu brings tons of experience and a sense of humor that’s, well, Romanian. He was a senior developer for Extensibility, a local company that sold for $100 million in late-nineties tech boom. Most recently, he was a project manager and consultant for Eloquentix, another local company. There, he did development work with John Deere, GE, Radarfind and MyStoreRewards, among others. Bringing extensive experience in web development and online security, Radu is a perfect fit for developing Shoeboxed.

Tobi’s doing our finances, but also does a lot for business development and marketing, and we’re very excited he’s back with us full time after just finishing up business school. Tobi studied business administration at top private business schools in Germany, France and the United States. Having gained extensive knowledge of investment banking through 12 months working in capital markets for Société Générale in Paris and experience in mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley in Frankfurt, Tobi joined studiVZ.net, now the largest website in continental Europe, in 2006. Acting as vice president for international markets, Tobi planned, implemented and supervised the company’s roll out to eight foreign markets, leading a team of 60 people and managing a one-digit million Euro budget. The company now has an English-language version that you can check out, meinVZ.net.

Welcome, guys!

There was a study that came out a few days ago that we found kind of interesting. Duke researchers found that the majority of tech entrepreneurs are not the 20-something wunderkinds that seem to be the stereotype these days. We, as 20-somethings, have something to say about THAT.

Most U.S.-born technology and engineering company founders are middle-aged and well educated, and have degrees from a wide range of universities, the study found. Elite, highly ranked schools are over-represented in the ranks of these founders, and Ivy-League graduates achieve the greatest business success.

I think the young ones have still got the upper hand here. Young, and armed with laptops and angel funding, I think we can change the world, and not just create another technology company. Driven by the desire to change the archaic process of eliminating paper clutter seems like just the job for a bunch of talented young people. We’re all tech-savvy, Duke-educated, and ready, willing, and able to never sleep until you’ve got the best receipt organization experience possible.

Plus, we have a good time.

One great thing about being next to Duke University is that we get to sit in on a lot of national and international conferences about topics relevant to Shoeboxed. Today, I am sitting in on a conference about intellectual property and ecommerce, two things we are obviously interested in over here.

Conference website.

The people involved in the conference are:

Iain M. Cockburn, Professor of Finance and Economics and Everett W. Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar in the School of Management at Boston University.

Wesley Cohen, Faculty Director, Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the former Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM.

Lew Zaretzki, Vice President of Consulting Services at ThinkFire

Tony Tramontin, an Associate Principal in McKinsey & Company’s New York office.

James E. Malackowski, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Ocean Tomo, LLC, an integrated Intellectual Capital Merchant Banc firm.

They are talking pretty theoretically right now about what defines and determines markets. Will there be a more efficient and and pure market for intellectual property somewhere in the future? Right now, we are seeing a lot of “patent trolls” for example, that buy up a lot of IP, but do not use them right away, causing the market to be less efficient. Is this bad? Should it change? Will it?

More to come in the comments section…

Well, we’ve never been shy about our obsession with Duke University. Most of us are Duke graduates, and some of us are current students there. So it made a lot of sense that when we wanted to get some photos taken of the team that we turned to Duke students. I mean, it was without question that we’d find a talented photographer from the obscenely talented and involved Duke student body. We were very impressed with what we found. Chase Olivieri, a freshman at Duke, took us all around downtown Durham today and took some great shots of us.

To check out some more of our photos, check out our Flickr account. There are photos from pretty much our whole history, including our summer in Berlin and our team trip to Jordan.

First of all, I just wanted to say Happy New Year, as this is our first entry of 2008!

In the first few days of this year, lots of people in the U.S. will be focusing their attention to Iowa, watching with great interest what will happen in Thursday’s caucuses. But today, I’m thinking more about Idaho. And North Carolina of course.

According to the Idaho Statesman (”Idaho’s #1 website for news and information”), Boise has had a hard time attracting businesses to the area because of what one businessman called “the lack of entrepreneurial culture” there. In this particular piece, the author says that Boise needs some entrepreneurial spark in order to attract new business and stimulate the economy.

So why am I talking about it here? Well, the author gives a shout out to Durham, Shoeboxed’s home base.

What does it take to build the culture? Look a the Stanford/Silicon Valley connection or Highway 128 around Boston and Harvard University. The Research Triangle in Raleigh/Durham near Duke University has that intangible culture… “It” is a combination of a strong university, either engineering or management oriented; an incubator area for new technical ideas to develop economically; and venture capital to fund it. You also need like-minded, competitive, risk-taking individuals who want to do their own thing and who are willing to share experiences and knowledge.

Durham is an awesome place to start up a company, and we’re happy to be a part of the “it.”

Over here at Shoeboxed, we’ve always been dedicated to the personal approach. We talk with users face-to-face, over the phone, and via e-mail everyday. We recognize how important it is to give you whatever help you need to get the most out of our service.

For a while there, all the calls that came into Shoeboxed forwarded to my personal cell phone. That resulted in some VERY early mornings, which I guess is understandable when you consider that Shoeboxed users organize receipts from all over the world, across time zones.

I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time answering e-mails from everyone who sends us one. We have a lot of users, and even a small percentage of them e-mailing us can be a heavy load, but I’ve always really enjoyed interacting with the people that use our service.

As we’ve grown, though, the volume of people contacting us–for whatever reason, from people who forgot their passwords, to people who want to tell us that we’ve come up with “the single most incredible idea I’ve ever heard” (Nic from Mississippi)–has greatly increased over time.

In order to offer the same personalized responses that you all have come to love, we are upgrading to a state-of-the-art support system, so that you can have the best possible Shoeboxed experience. We should be rolling this out over the next couple of days. Please feel free to keep contacting us at help@team.shoeboxed.com!

Being a college student, it’s hard for me to know what’s “in” outside of the campus. How do I know that those sweet pink striped dress shirts I bought in New York City over the summer are still the go-to Friday night apparel? I guess I wouldn’t find out until a trend-setter on campus, who spends his entire day staying informed of fashion trends, called me out about it at a local club for being a total loser.

I guess I could read about fashion trends, book, and movie reviews, and music ratings online to stay informed about the popular stuff out there. But, each blog entry or comment would only give me one person’s opinion on the topic and would require me to spend countless hours online checking out different websites to get a better picture of how each individual opinion’s creates a general trend.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a better way?

Shoeboxed is going green! If you aren’t convinced yet, check out my video. Being environmentally-conscious is a high priority for the entire team. We’ve made a lot of changes to our work environment and our lifestyles as we embark on our long mission to be a sustainable start-up company. Here are some of the latest green developments in the Shoequarters:

1. Recycling—Flyers adorn the walls of every room reminding everyone to recycle paper, cardboard, plastic, and aluminum products. Some team members made special containers to help separate out recyclables from the trash.

2. Energy efficiency—As an Internet start-up company, we use computers all day and all night. There are certain guidelines we all follow to cut down on our computers’ energy use. Here are some of those tips:
a. Turn off or set computers to a lower power setting anytime we do not use them.
b. Do not use screen savers, but rather use screen/monitor shutdown options.
c. Turn on printers and scanners only when they need to be used.
d. Use only products with ENERGY STAR labels.
3. Utensils—We use silverware and dishes that we clean after each use to avoid resorting to plastic utensils and paper plates.

4. Water use—Water use in the Shoequarters is limited; however, all team members make efforts to avoid keeping the water running when washing dishes or washing their hands.

5. Electricity—It is a rule in the office to turn off lights in rooms that are no longer in use.

6. Commuting—Some of us live within walking distance of the office and others live on the nearby Duke campus. Walking, biking, and carpooling are the ways we encourage team members to come to the Shoequarters every day.

Shoeboxed is moving in the right direction. The changes we are making in the Shoequarters and in our personal lives are significant. We are proud to display our environmentally-conscious efforts and hope to inspire others to follow our lead.

This summer in Berlin, we worked all the time. Days would go by when I didn’t leave our apartment/office. I usually worked straight from 11 a.m. to 4 a.m. Those precious hours of sleep were spent on an IKEA cot. Needless to say, I was tired for most of the summer.

Now with some pesky classes that weaseled their way into my daily schedule back at Duke, I seem to have less time that ever. Other people on the team are feeling the pinch too, and we’re looking for anything and everything to make the day longer and more productive.

I’m more of a traditional coffee and Pepsi fan for staying awake and alert. And it goes without saying that if you leave a Red Bull lying around the office, I’ll probably steal it.

But other people on the team are a little more desperate for feeling more alert. Matt, Tomas, and Justin are all trying a much-hyped sleeping schedule called polyphasic sleeping. This is where you get a couple of hours of “core” sleep at night, which usually lasts 2-3 hours. Then you take a 15-20 minute nap every 2 hours during the day. This series of short naps is supposed to make you feel really awake throughout the day.

The three of them have had a hard time in the beginning getting onto this insane schedule, but they all claim to feel amazing. They are writing a blog about their experience. Read it here.

And me? I think I’ll just go put on a pot of coffee.