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.

Last week I had a great conversation with Sharon McLoone, who writes about small businesses for the Washington Post. She wrote about us today in a great story that you can read here:

Here is an excerpt:

Shoeboxed’s goal is to make it easy for a consumer to digitize, organize, analyze and export receipts, which the company says can cause stress and harm the environment. Customers can organize receipts themselves for free online on the Shoeboxed Web site or try out a premium service that allows them to send in receipts to the company, which scans and uploads them to an account where they can be imported into a spreadsheet or exported to different programs like Quicken.

Also, we wanted to give a shout-out to Vivimedia, one of our small business clients who was also interviewed in the story. They are a creative services agency, and you can check out their website here.

This is what they had to say about Shoeboxed:

Reconciling receipts and accounts was the worst job I was doing on a regular basis as a small business owner. We’re not accountants. We’re artists. And now we can work on the stuff we like to work on.

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.

Taylor and Rolf spent a good deal of time over at the CED Venture Conference that was hosted at Duke’s on-campus hotel, The Washington Duke. They met lots of great people this weekend.

We hung out with the team from Grooveshark, a legal music sharing website that looks to have gotten their hands on a great idea. They even made it over to the Shoeboxed office.

Also, Digital Smiths, another local company, does some pretty cool video ad matching.

And as always, Square 1, Shoeboxed’s bank was there.

I know Shoeboxed had a great time there, and we hope to see everybody there next year!

I always enjoy it when journalists write about the emerging innovative economy that we have here in Durham. We’re certainly excited to be a part of it here, and we hope it continues to expand! One particular article was written today in the Miami Herald, where Shoeboxed was featured a few months ago. The article was written by Jerry Haar and details the steps needed for Florida to revive its economy to avoid slipping into the recession looming on the country as a whole.

If we survey the nation’s most competitive regional economies, we find Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, Seattle, San Diego and Raleigh-Durham. All are characterized by emerging, innovation-based businesses and highly skilled knowledge workers.

Great article; just wanted to share it with you.

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…

I like finding stuff on the internet about Duke and its burgeoning entrepreneurship scene. Shoeboxed is certainly a part of this movement toward encouraging entrepreneurship, so I like spreading the news as well.

Jim Roberts, the founding executive director of the Blue Ridge Entrepreneurial Council and the Blue Ridge Angel Investors Network, wrote a column the other day for WRAL, a local news source here in Durham. He was talking about the organizations and technologies that he thought were creating buzz in the Southeast tech community as 2008 begins.

In his write-up he gave a shout-out to Duke and the growing entrepreneurship economy in the area surrounding the university. Shoeboxed is definitely a part of this, and we are happy to see people talking about this great area!

Duke University will have a bigger influence on the Triangle entrepreneurial economy. Duke has expanded its entrepreneur program with the addition of a friendly face, Howie Rhee, formerly of the CED. Of course we all know Duke has the potential to be even more of an economic powerhouse with the brains and the resources. Will the university put it all together in 2008?

Hopefully Shoeboxed will get a mention in the Top 10 Buzz Creator list for next year!

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.”

 Shoeboxed is a whole new website, baby.

We’ve worked on our receipt organization, and made it better than ever. With Friday’s upgrade, it’s easier to put receipts into your account, sort them once you’re here, and put those receipts to work.

This is what we were wondering back in January. What if receipts started giving back? What if by organizing your receipts, you weren’t just making sure to get reimbursements, or prove to Target that you actually DID buy that blender? What if your receipts did more? What if they allowed you to organize specific items that you bought, instead of just when and where you bought a bunch of stuff? What if they told you what was cool, and what was lame? What if your friends could see what you were buying, so that you could shop smarter, together?

And what if this whole process wasn’t a pain, but was actually… wait for it…. fun? If you’re anything like me, you been impatiently awaiting the day when you could tell your friend that she’s a shopaholic, or that he’s not shopping within the confines of what’s acceptable this decade.

Well if you are like me, then you’ll love the new Shoeboxed. We’ve taken the concept of receipts and ran with it. Once you have all your information in one place, you can do extraordinarily useful things with it, and we’re here to help that information be as useful as possible.

Get organized, shop smarter, and love what you buy.

Someone e-mailed our help account today with a simple complaint. It’s kind of a pain to write in the price and store for each receipt that you upload to Shoeboxed. Yeah, we get that. But you know what’s great? With new technology that we’ve developed, that small annoyance will soon be a thing of the past.

Shoeboxed is about to become more automated than it ever has been. We’re one step closer to eliminating lost receipts. Woo.

In other news, if you think our login page for Shoeboxed could use some spice, then you too will soon be dazzled and amazed. Not just one. Both. Dazzled AND amazed.

So we’re working really hard to bring these awesome new things (and more!) very, very soon. I found some inspiration in The New York Times today in an article about PayPal founder Max Levchin. “I enjoy sitting on nice beaches and hanging out with my girlfriend and playing with my dog, but that’s three hours a day,” Mr. Levchin said. “What about the remaining 18 hours I’m awake?”

That’s incredibly baller.

Shoeboxed.com has launched! It’s a great day for everyone on the Shoeboxed team, and for everyone who is ready to make their life easier.

From day one we’ve said, “there’s a better way”, and today you will have the chance to experience it. Nobody likes to spend countless hours organizing their financial information. It’s about time somebody made it really simple. Nobody likes getting hundreds of unwanted spam e-mails in their personal inboxes. It’s about time somebody gave you the power to get rid of them. Nobody likes to give out their credit card or Social Security numbers. It’s about time you were able to track your purchases and receipts without releasing your sensitive information. Nobody likes an overwhelming amount of communication from businesses in their personal e-mail inbox. Shoeboxed is a secure, free, and fun solution to all these problems.

It’s not everyday that I have the privilege to write on the Shoeboxed blog. But at Shoeboxed it’s about the team, and I’m proud that we have such a great lineup of talented and dedicated individuals who will do anything and everything for Shoeboxed. After all, it takes a unique group of twelve students to survive working and living out of a small apartment in West Berlin.

So today I want to personally invite everyone to see what the Shoeboxed team has been able to accomplish. It’s new, it’s different, and it has the potential to change the way you live your life. I also want to invite everyone to keep reading the blog, which will continue to give informative, relevant, and entertaining updates as time goes on.

We are hard at work making sure the site runs as smoothly as possible. If you have any suggestions, we would greatly appreciate feedback. You can contact the whole team at help (at) team (dot) shoeboxed (dot) com or me personally at taylor (at) team (dot) shoeboxed (dot) com.

Take a look, let us know what you think, and stay tuned for what is to come. After all, this is just the first phase for shoeboxed.com.

Earlier today I had the opportunity to read a particularly insightful interview with Richard Brodhead, President of Duke University. It originally aired on June 16th on China Radio International (CRI), China’s only worldwide radio station.[link] The interview was conducted by Xing Zong, a fourth year Ph.D. student at Duke University. He had the opportunity to ask Brodhead about his unique life as an academic and administrator and about his long-term vision for Duke.

Some people have criticized Brodhead for his lack of business experience, but in the interview, the president made it clear that entrepreneurship is a priority at Duke. Here is what he had to say:

Xing Zong: Once students are admitted, one of the big goals of a great university is to cultivate their independent thinking. It is far from enough to just learn what the textbooks give to the students. How do you think Duke has done in this aspect, so that students can keep learning for the rest of their lives?

Brodhead: First of all, the majority of our classes are small and the majority of classes are based on discussion, rather than allowing the teacher the final word. Therefore mental activity and independence are cultivated at an early stage. Right now we are also expanding the opportunities for independent research. For graduate students, needless to say, you already have to start your own research, but it is also important for undergraduate students. On the teacher’s side, it is important for teachers to realize, when you teach the students, the students also have something to teach you. So I think the real question is that whether the culture of a university favors independence, favors students taking initiatives, and favors students raising their own questions and trying to find the answers. Fortunately, the answer to these questions for Duke is “Yes”.

Xing Zong: I agreed that Duke has improved a lot in this aspect. Still I have a friend who studies in Stanford. He told me that Stanford encourages students to drop out of school and start their own businesses. How do you think Duke would treat situations like this?

Brodhead: This is a very interesting thing. When you think about Stanford, you always think about Yahoo and Google. If you study in Stanford, you will never get your physics Ph.D. (laugh) You will become a billionaire before that happens. We have a lot of students who study engineering, or biomedical engineering and from very early on, the school teaches the elements of design. You also learn entrepreneurship; how to solve the problem. So we are now consciously trying to develop the skills of entrepreneurship. We haven’t had our first Google yet, but just wait.

There’s not much more that I can say other than GO DUKE!

Shoeboxed.com. We’re looking to change the Duke start-up scene in a big way. Although we are currently in Berlin, Germany focusing on our launch, we will be moving to Durham in the fall - and there’s so much to be excited about. Soon we will offer a free service to help people automatically organize their purchase histories online. We know that people deserve a website that automatically makes their lives simpler. We also know that Duke University deserves a start-up that can unite the community and bring The Triangle Area the positive national attention that it deserves. Shoeboxed.com will be looking for talented members of the Duke and Raleigh-Durham community who are interested in getting involved. If you feel like you have what it takes, email help@team.shoeboxed.com and tell us why you’re awesome. Shoeboxed.com isn’t your ordinary company - we work hard and have fun doing it.

Duke’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization (CERC). The purpose of the center is to “bring knowledge and technology into the service of society”. CERC does it’s best to help bring ideas to the market. By helping to organize teams of talented individuals from diverse backgrounds and by providing these groups with resources from Duke and beyond, CERC has created strong and successful networks of entrepreneurs.

Fuqua Research Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The mission of the center is to advance the scholarship, teaching, and practice of entrepreneurship and innovation. It was created to expand the focus of the Fuqua School of Business so that it would include entrepreneurship and innovation. Focusing on research in these fields, the center looks to contribute to both the knowledge and practice of pioneering business. Even though the center is still new to the Duke community, it plans to leverage the position of the university and the interest of its students and faculty to establish a world-class research program.
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The fact that Duke University is so quaintly located in Durham, NC was probably a deterrent for most students who were considering enrolling. However, four years later, chances are that this average Duke student will proudly claim their loyalty to Durham and display no sign of regret. The area is simply awesome.

Corporations, entrepreneurs, and anyone who is considering a job in business: consider the Raleigh-Durham metro area. This year, Forbes Magazine, everyone’s go-to source for financial literature and rankings, chose Raleigh-Durham as the number one best place for business and careers in the United States. Entrepreneur.com rated the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area as the third best metro area for entrepreneurs, and allbusiness.com declared the area as the best in the nation for female entrepreneurs.

The Raleigh Economic Development group sums up the appeal of the triangle area:

A growing number of companies — from start-ups to the Fortune 250 — are choosing to locate their corporate headquarters here in Raleigh. Why? They’ve found a dynamic hub of technology and innovation that puts them in the heart of world-class academic institutions and pioneering research. They know they can count on a highly skilled workforce, and the quality of life makes recruiting a breeze.

Further evidence in support of the Raleigh-Durham region can be found in a new legislative document, Article 3J. Designed to better the business climate in the area, Article 3J will give us significant breaks on taxes through credits. Basically, job creation and investment in business property will be eased through tax credits. As a thank you for migration into the area by multiple corporations, the triangle has put together multiple public financing, human capital development, and public investment mechanisms to make our lives easier.

So you might want to listen to Forbes, Money, FORTUNE, and the Employment review when they say that the triangle area is the number one place for people to live and work in America.

Click here to see what some of the major presidents and CEOs of corporations in the area have to say about business in the triangle.

I’m the first to admit that I’m proud to be a student of Duke University. A first-class education, a strong community of talented individuals, the opportunity to excel in any field you choose—you couldn’t ask for much more. Except maybe good sports teams. But we’ve got that covered.

I’m especially impressed with Duke’s ability to focus on what’s really important, when it’s important. When biomedical research was identified as a leading research discipline with the potential to make meaningful advances worldwide, the university made it a priority to establish a top-notch engineering program. When Duke made an effort to enhance sportsmanship and school spirit, they established what has become one of the strongest athletic programs in the country. And now it seems as though Duke may be making entrepreneurship its next project—encouraging students to think beyond the boundaries of contemporary ideas and solve problems in creative and innovative ways.

On graduation weekend, Richard Brodhead, President of Duke University, spoke to graduates about the importance of entrepreneurship. He suggested that the only way to assure success in the future is to “strengthen the culture of inventiveness, versatility, entrepreneurship, and creativity such that, whatever the future turns out to hold, smart minds will be here to seize the opportunities of that time,” adding that the most prepared individuals will “meet the future in imaginative, constructive ways”.

It’s those moments that make us feel good about what we’re doing here at shoeboxed.com. We’re proud of our university, and hopefully not too long from now, they’ll be proud of us.