New Tech Meetup: From Talking Llamas to Taming Teamwork

The llama, he speaks.

(Credit: Blabberize)

I'm sitting on the exquisitely uncomfortable benches in the San Francisco Metreon, listening to companies at the New Tech Meetup give their pitches. Two of them we've covered recently: AdPerk and Truemors. The news about Truemors: a Facebook port is forthcoming. The other three companies are also worth some bits:

Blabberize is a freaky little product that makes Monty Python-like animated graphics of faces from photos you upload. Then you upload a recording of your (or someone else's) voice. It syncs the audio or recorded speech to the moving mouth. Good for a laugh. Likewise the pitch. The presenter, Mo, spent 4 minutes and 45 seconds (of his alloted five minutes) on a killer comedy routine before the demo. Anyway, check it out. Also: Facebook? Yes, coming.

JuggleMyStuff is a site for organizing teams. It's based on lists, and it's easy to reorder items, group them, and assign them to people. Looks pretty smart. We'll check it out in more depth soon. A lot of start-ups have tackled this problem. See also BaseCamp, SmartSheet, and dToDoist.

RateItAll is a site where users can rate products and leave reviews. It has the potential to become a nice, lighter-weight version of what Epinions is, although it still takes two steps to enter a rating rather than just one. But, launching tonight, RateItAll is adding a rating widget that you can embed in your blog, to collect ratings on it. If you dare.

Like Epinions, RateItAll pays its users, by sharing a portion of AdSense revenues on pages that they contribute.