VentureBeat

TuitionCoach is a San Mateo start-up that helps guide families through the bewildering college funding process.

It raised $250,000 in an angel round last December from Vinita Gupta and Ashok Vaish, and launches officially tomorrow.

This is a useful site, because it provides personalized help. There are other sites that provide information on the college funding process, including Finaid.org, and individual college Web sites that help with calculating costs. But Fineaid doesn’t provide the sort of personalized handholding that TuitionCoach provides, and college sites have a conflict of interest, because the more they teach you how to save, the less money they’re likely to get — so they don’t indulge too much.

TuitionCoach starts by taking you through a module that figures out how much college will cost you, depending on your own financial resources. If your high school teenager has saved up $10,000 for school, it will show you how this will hurt his or her financial aid, because it gets taxed at 35 percent by financial aid formulas. TuitionCoach does things like assess the financial aid packages schools award you by assigning it a grade (see partial screenshot here) and providing tips for how to negotiate for a better deal.

The site lets you do a basic cost calculation and do some planning for free, but most of its goodies come as part of the $59 subscription. There is a basic tour here.

Founders are Paul Wrubel, a college admissions expert, and Monisha Perkash, who has MBA and MA Education degrees from Stanford. They may consider raising a first round of venture capital after they get through the launch, Monisha said.

College costs have risen 35 percent over the past five years, according to the College Board. There’s an average of one guidance counselor for every 284 high school students in the nation, according to 2004 data from the U.S. Department of Education.

Our favorite event at the Web 2.0 Summit is the Launch Pad, where 13 new start-ups launch and give a five-minute presentation.

Richard McManus has a good, succinct review of the 13 companies, so we won’t duplicate.

We weren’t that inspired by this year’s crop, though. The AJAX magic of last year was so thrilling that we’ve gotten used to it, and crave something new. 3B looked cool, because it offered a new-age way to view Web pages — in three-dimension, with the user as an avatar walking around hallways. However, we were left wondering why anyone would use it.

Perhaps that’s why we gravitated toward the useful products. There were several niche services, for example sites that appealed to musicians and hobbyists. Overall, though, Sharpcast and Omindrive were the winners, in our view. They help you store your files more simply, from multiple sources. Sharpcast lets you save and edit data from any device and have it all synced.

If we had to anoint a winner of Launch Pad, we’d pick Omnidrive. Sharpcast’s presentation hit several snafus. Omnidrive offers something similar; it saves to Omnidrive online when you save things on your desktop. The data from multiple sources gets saved all to one place. It also gives you a folder that shows you all your files from different services like Flickr. You can drag and drop files into the Flickr folder and they will be uploaded to Flickr as well.

We say this even though we know Omnidrive has lots of competition. Fact is, simple storage of multiple files from various applications remains unsolved: We’ve seen lots of storage products, and have been frustrated by the little quirks each one seems to have.

Omnidrive also has sharing features and opened its platform for developers to build other products and tools for (open APIs). We’ve just noticed they’re opening up the service to anyone who signs up, with a 1GB free account.

Definitely a lot of hype flowing the halls, though. We met several people who hadn’t been able to get tickets to the sold-out Web 2.0 conference — so they’d taken up residence in the rooms outside the main conference rooms to avoid getting carded — and held meetings there instead.