Academia.edu is a social network for academics, especially scientists, and a platform where they can self-publish their scholarly work.

The San Francisco startup thus is fulfilling the original vision of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web essentially to share documents and communications of these types.

“Saving money shouldn't be arduous,” says David Hehman, co-founder & CEO of GreenStack,Inc. “It should be fun and easy.” And that is what Hehman has set out to do. His product, greenstack, is a free, location-sensitive iOS app that enables you to redeem discounts and special offers at restaurants around town.

“There are lots of ways to save money, but you have to know about them when you are out on the go,” notes Hehman. “Otherwise, you're missing out on savings opportunities.

“It's staggering how many deals there are out there. We bring all the deals together in an aggregated view, so as a consumer you don't have to have ten apps, just one. After all, these deals are yours, you should be able to use them.”

A local startup that creates social networks for people managing chronic health conditions has launched a new one today for women facing breast cancer.

MyBreastCancerTeam (MyBCTeam) started beta testing with 50 San Francisco women in June and has grown quickly to over 1100 women since then.

Jybe is a social recommendation app for the iPhone that gets smarter the more you use it, somewhat like Pandora or Netflix.

Initially, it focuses on three categories – restaurants, movies and books, and there’s a good reason for that.

Unlike much of the information available online, most of the digital data about restaurants, movies and books is structured in such a way that it is relatively straightforward for a technology like Jybe's to organize and display it.