Company Updates

At the Twiistup5 event on Feb 12, 2009, the Sun Startup Essentials team videotaped 15 start ups giving their best ‘elevator pitch’. The contest works like this:

• View the videos above
• Pick your favorite. (Pick us!)
• Vote by texting the word ‘startup’ plus the name of the company in your favorite video to 41411.
• The start up with the most votes as of March 13, 2009 wins a Flip Ultra camcorder and some serious bragging rights. I’d like to give the camcorder to one of you, so consider it a vote for you.

Ok, it’s crunch time! There’s one day left to vote for tech support site FixYa at Santa Monica’s TwiistUp event. I just got the media list and if FixYa won TwiistUp, we’d be in Forbes, LA Weekly and LA Times to name a few. Show us the love, tell your friends and make us a media darling.

VOTE FOR FIXYA HERE: http://tu5.twiistup.com/entries#1165

You already know you’re awesome. It’s obvious in the way you solve thousands of product problems every month. The confidence! The eloquence! You sir/madam are dazzling!

But remember to celebrate your own flare for repair. We’re finalists in Santa Monica’s TwiistUp event next week.

Don’t forget to vote for team FixYa HERE.

Note that this is a different contest than the Mashable contest we posted a few weeks ago. If you’re proud of what we’re building here (like I am), you should vote in both of these polls. Thanks and may the best community win. Duh, obviously that’s us.

Over the past months, our members sent in suggestions to improve our repair directory and FixYa’s employees have worked night and day to make those changes. I present to you the NEW and IMPROVED US REPAIR DIRECTORY!

FOR THE U.S. INFO SEEKER: Is your dishwasher flooding your kitchen? Don’t throw in the towel. Just visit fixya.com/repair and choose your category (dishwasher), State and City. Contacts for your local repair specialists will pop up in seconds.

FOR U.S. THE EXPERT: If you’re an expert and you’ve got your own repair business, you can also list your company in our repair directory. Just fill out this online form and we’ll list you in the local directory free of charge.

We hope you like the new directory! Keep those suggestions coming in the expert’s lounge or email our community manager Lauren at lauren[at]fixya.com. Thanks!

For those of you who don’t yet know me, my name is Lauren and I’m FixYa.com’s new community manager. I’m going to be working to make FixYa the best place it possibly can be, kicking out the riffraff, and fostering more interaction among our great group of Experts. I’ve been hanging out in the Expert Lounge the last couple of days, familiarizing myself with the issues that are most troublesome to you guys. I’m seeing the same general categories of complaints over and over again:

• The number of “BS Experts” on the site.
• The difficulty in understanding how FixYa deals with payments and refunds.
• The confusing Expert ranking system.
• The seemingly arbitrary “best solution” designation.

Eliminating the “BS Experts” is at the top of my list. We have already banned a few and I have a list of many more that will be receiving warnings. The other issues are going to take us a little longer to deal with. FixYa is a growing company that doesn’t have the manpower to immediately implement change, but we want you to know that your issues aren’t falling upon deaf ears. In the meantime, I think that it will help both you and us if I make our policies a little bit clearer.