For all of you who, like me, cringe every time you have to look at Craig's List and think, geez, there has to be a better experience — well, listen up: there is. Fred Krueger (at right in the photo, with Joey Harward, cofounder) has been hard at work with his team in LA for some some time building Needly. It's a great-looking site for all your stuff — yes, selling it and acquiring more of it, which we all love to do — but more than that: keeping track of the whole shebang, too (think for insurance valuation purposes, which is a great side benefit). Needly makes it as easy to get all your stuff and needs online as it could possibly be. One key way they let you do that is with a very nicely designed iPhone app. You just shoot a picture, add a price and a quick description, click submit, and it's up on the Needly site in seconds. 
A key part of Needly's offering is an escrow payment service, which protects both buyer and seller. Fred is a three-time presenter at DEMO. He knows how to attract millions of people to sites — and how to raise money. I'm betting we hear a lot more about Needly, and I can't wait to get my hands on the iPhone app as soon as it's approved on iTunes.
Tag: iPhone app
I traveled to Silicon Valley last week and, shortly after I arrived, stopped in to see Steve Larsen at PhoneTell in Menlo Park. I've known Steve for more than 12 years, through several startups he's helped launch and build. He joined this firm as CEO this past fall and recently relaunched the startup with a new name and branding at the TechCrunch "Disrupt" conference, held last month in New York City. Steve is just an amazing startup guy. The Energizer Bunny has nothing on this dude — trust me. Great team builder, excellent communicator, and pitchman extraordinaire. No better combo for a startup CEO in my book.
What's PhoneTell about? It its own words, it creates "intelligent, relevant smartphone
solutions to help users manage high-quality
connections with friends, colleagues, customers, and providers of goods and
services while they're on the move."
Beyond that, "by connecting PhoneTell users to merchants close to them,
when the user is searching for that particular merchant’s product or
service, we deliver high-quality leads."
So, that's Steve above holding his Android phone showing the cool PhoneTell app. It just came out for Android 2.0-2.1 OS. He was jokingly holding it up to my "camera" so everyone could see it… :-) But, alas, it's just a studio-grade handheld digital audio recorder — so we, uh, were simply left to describe it for all of you in my audio interview below. 
Thus, I'm including a couple of screenshots here, so you don't have to rely on our bad acting.
You can download PhoneTell for Android here. Me? I'll be all over it once the iPhone app is available. Probably when I get my new iPhone 4 (soon).
The link to our chat is below. I think it's about 18 minutes, but I have no idea. I just hit the start and stop buttons. Thanks, Steve! And good luck with PhoneTell.
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