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August 1, 2007 4:24 PM PDT

Start-ups batting cleanup at AO

by Rafe Needleman

Here are the last of the notable start-ups from today's Always On conference.

  • GroupSystems is a collaboration service that works on desktops and mobiles. Pitched here: the company's ThinkTank product. It's supposed to replace or augment meetings, and record the decisions made in them. The CEO claims that NASA, the CIA, and other giant organizations use the service. The company, which is backed by the nation of Sweden, is supposed to support complex polling and brainstorming--enough for the nuance in financial due diligence, for example. This is an enterprise play.
  • Wookah is a multi-engine search tool, pitched as a solution to all the problems search has. I call B.S. on this one. It just looks like another layer on top of "the best sites on the Internet," as the CEO explained it. It's not useless, but there's nothing innovative here that I can see. It doesn't even aggregate search results from multiple engines together into one page, which would be both not hard to do and actually useful. Skip this one.
  • Storm Exchange sells information on weather, aimed at every business affected by it--retail, travel, energy, you name it. It's a consultancy, as far as I can tell. But if you need someone to talk to about the weather, you can give these guys a ring. See also WeatherBill, previously covered on TechCrunch.
  • Spigit "measures and quantifies interactions on group platforms." In other words, they try to extract the wisdom of the crowds, automatically. That's how the pitch started. Then we heard that corporate customers can use the system to set up games for their employees to play with competing ideas. Which makes it a prediction market. I'll look into this one a bit more.

Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
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