Advise.me, the new and rapidly expanding startup accelerator and incubator, is working on its first startup. The company is still in stealth mode, and all we know about it is that it’s a social communication service of some sort, but definitely not another social network. It will, however, use existing social networks. And given the name and the landing page (chirping? mobile? the color blue?), our guess is that the new app has something to do with Twitter.
What’s perhaps more interesting than speculating on the app itself, is looking at the team behind it and the process by which it’s being built. Although normally Advise.me will be working with companies that apply to its accelerator program, in this case, the team decided to pass some ideas around and build something on their own. I guess that’s just what happens when you get this many successful entrepreneurs to come together.
Explains Advise.me CEO Solomon Engel, this is something that makes his group different from other programs out there. “Some folks on the team will act in an advisory capacity, others will act more operational and sometimes they could act as both,” he says. “So alongside working with companies that apply to our program, we’ll occasionally build something ourselves.”
Hence, Chirpr.
Specifically, the Advise.me team members working on the Chirpr app incude Advise.me Co-Founder and CEO Engel, Chief Scientist at Proximic (and previously Founder of AltaVista and Co-Founder at Qwiki) Louis Monier, VP of Product at SimpleGeo Jeffrey Kalmikoff, GM and Head of Product at Plaxo Preston Smalley, Principal at Galpin Industries Tyler Galpin, Senior iOS Lead Developer at Apple Geppy Parziale and Senior Cocoa Architect at Apple Eva Diaz-Santana. The only non-Advise.me team member on Chirpr is CEO at Audiobox.fm Claudio Poli.
Poli will serve as a lead engineer for Chirpr, while Apple’s Parziale and Diaz-Santana have the titles of Head of iOS Engineering and iOS Engineer, respectively. Galpin is Head of Design, Monier is the Data Scientist Advisor and Kalmikoff and Smalley are Product Advisors.
Advise.me’s program is offering a slightly different take on startup advising than some of the others in the space. Instead of a classroom approach, each startup receives one-on-one support from a team of 2 to 7 industry experts who have experience that’s relevant to the startup they’re paired with. That not only improves the quality of the advice the team can give, but the advisors can also help startups by connecting founders to the appropriate industry contracts.