The other day, we were featured in both local papers here in Durham about our Earth Day promotion, and I just wanted to show you all the link from one of them. Sue Stock from the News and Observer wrote about us here. The other article in the Herald Sun requires a subscription online, but was a great story about the green initiatives of companies here in downtown Durham.
Making waves, people. Making waves.
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.
We’re used to receiving inquiries from bloggers and print media representatives who want to write about Shoeboxed, and we really enjoy every opportunity to put our message out there and reach out to existing and future members. But today we got the opportunity to spread the word of Shoeboxed via a different medium: Radio!
A few hours ago we were on our first radio show which aired on Dallas KRLD 1080. The show is a running series called CEO Spotlight, which typically interviews someone from the senior management of a publicly traded/Fortune 500 company. The episode before us was an interview with the CEO of technology giant Texas Instruments. Needless to say, it is exciting (and an honor) that Shoeboxed was asked to be on the show!
Go here to listen to the interview Online: KRLD CEO Spotlight 02/18/08
In case KRLD takes the link down at some point, we uploaded the interview as an .mp3 file as well: Downloadable .mp3
I just wanted to share with you a review of Shoeboxed in The Herald Sun, the newspaper of record here in Durham, NC.
Just in time for the tax season, Shoeboxed.com, a “Netflix for receipts” Web site by a Durham start-up, is now compatible with Quicken and TurboTax. Shoeboxed helps customers organize receipts, and compatibility with the two leading desktop programs in money management and tax preparation was a natural move for the business.
Monica Chen, Herald Sun
Thanks for the great review, Monica!
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.
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!
I just used Shoeboxed in a fantastic way, and because I am really proud of myself, I thought I’d share. What else is blogging for, anyway?
And so I continue. Cory, the fantastic author of this blog last spring and summer, is in charge of Innovation at Shoeboxed, meaning he works with lots of complicated features on the site that I don’t understand. He also happens to be my roommate.
So when he went home for a few days for the holidays, he left me to take care of his car, an oldie-but-goodie that just needs to be driven regularly to keep it working. I was obliging him, and driving it back and forth between our apartment and the Shoeboxed offices (about a 1 minute drive). As it turns out, though, I don’t pay too much attention to parking signs, and parked on the street longer than the signage allowed.
After finishing up my work one night, I was headed home, and found a parking ticket on his car. I was a little worried, because I didn’t want to seem irresponsible, or worse, have to pay a big fine. Luckily, since Durham is so awesome, the parking ticket was for 10 dollars, and I could easily pay it.
But how to tell Cory? Well, they let me pay my parking ticket online, and I Shoeboxed my receipt. Then I made a note on my receipt telling Cory what had happened, and forwarded it to Cory. The day has officially been saved…
Sorry Cory!
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.”
It’s been about a week and a half since most of us left Berlin, and we have finally settled down in Durham, NC. We spent the first week trying to find a new Shoeboxed office (that doesn’t double as an apartment, like our last two have), and expanding our team.
Our new office is located in Brightleaf Square, one of the coolest areas in Durham. When I first enrolled at Duke as a freshman, this area was kind of dead, but since then, it’s been revitalized into a vibrant and popular (not to mention beautiful) destination. There are at least 10 restaurants within 100 meters of us, and it’s cool to have all the people, entertainment, and, well, food that come along with them. Two blocks from Duke’s East Campus, it’s also very convenient for the current students working with us.
We spent the whole day yesterday getting all our new furniture set up, and now we are enjoying our fully-functional and lively workspace. Needless to say, we are very happy to be in Brightleaf, and to be located in Durham! We look forward to being actively involved in both communities.
The office we have now is larger than the last apartment we were working out of (even though 12 people lived there…) so we figured we should have more people on the team. Well, okay, that’s not the only reason we brought them on. We are excited to have this new group of talented, smart, and extremely motivated people working on everything from marketing to server administration. It’s really exciting to see the team growing so quickly!
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.
(more…)
