I'm at the San Francisco New Tech Meetup tonight, immersed in Web 2.0 startupville. Tonight's lineup of pitches:
Conduit. A utility for making toolbars to go with your blog or site. We recently covered the tool's new capability that lets the user swap between different toolbars they've installed. The concept is interesting: It lets site publishers put their sites into toolbars. I didn't expect users to take up this idea, but the company's executives report strong growth and more than 12 million users.
SezWho. This is an interesting system that allows users to rate other users' content, like their uploaded videos and blog comments. It's distributed, so if you have a good reputation as a contributor on one site and then you go to a new site, you good reputation can go with you, as well as links to all your contributions on other sites. Requires site owners to install links or plug-ins on their site, and SezWho then gets all the data, which it distributes to member sites. Interesting, since it knocks a few bricks out of the walls that sites tend to build up around their user bases. Very good for the new media powerhouse: the blog network.
US4real. Yet another real estate mashup that combines data on cost of living, crime, school performance, etc., with real estate and rental listings. It's a bit rough at the moment, and there are several very well-funded companies in this space. Also, it returns data only by city, not neighborhood--that's not specific enough. It does appear to have a comprehensive listing of houses and rentals, though, and it has a cool feature that flags houses whose prices have dropped a lot recently. Also, it will let you draw an outline around an area you're interested in, and will e-mail you when houses on it go up for sale. Cool.
GlobalMotion. This is a wiki focused on locations, maps, and geotagged images. It's an interesting way to navigate geodata, and it reads in location-tagged images already on EveryTrail, Panoramio, and Flickr, which is kind of neat. A good question from the audience, though: Why not just contribute this functionality to Wikipedia, which already has about 200,000 entries about locations? The answer wasn't very satisfying.
CrazyMenu. This was my favorite site of the evening. It's a utility for business lunching. It helps you corral co-workers together for a lunch, decide where to go, and even create group orders that you can transmit to your restaurant before you get there. Since I love lunch, I look forward to trying this out. Great idea.
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.
I am at the SF New Tech Meetup, I've got a webcam on my laptop, and I'm not afraid to use it. I'm trying out Veodia (preview) to stream the event.
Update: I had two dropped connections and crashes, and gave up on the streaming. Here is the archive of the first segment Veodia recorded:
The San Francisco New Tech Meetup is on tonight at CNET headquarters. There are four companies presenting, two of which I have covered before: MerchantCircle and MyThings. That leaves two newbies, both interesting plays that lack only for business models.
Tellfriends: Like Digg, but for local advice.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Tellfriends is a nicely designed site for social recommendations. You can recommend a favorite local bar or restaurant to the crowd. Other people can vote your recommendation up or down, and you get standing in the community when you make good recommendations. Sounds like Digg, no? Or maybe Yelp? It's a little of both, resulting in a social-bookmarking site that's focused on local advice. Nice idea, I suppose, but maintaining the site's focus on local content is going to take some work. Also, while the site does express a somewhat different idea from other services, it's sandwiched into an overcrowded space of recommendation engines and social-bookmarking sites, and it's not yet different enough to stand out.
Readware is a 15-year-old company with a new CEO, Pierre Wolff, and a fascinating technology: a tool to perform contextual analysis of text. For example, it can tell if a story is about politics even if the word "politics" isn't in the story. And it can tell what kind of story it is: an explanation, a news story, a story about a conflict, a legal issue, and so on. The Readware engine can be used to search for stories based on concepts instead of keywords, or it can be used to assign keywords or tags to stories for automatic indexing. Both of these are powerful capabilities. Think of a search engine that's smarter than Google (a lot smarter), or a Wikipedia that automatically cross-links its articles based on concepts not just words. (See also Powerset, WordNet, Freebase, and the legendary Cyc project).
The tidbit I dig about Readware is that its structure of ideas and concepts is based on the linguistics of Classical Arabic. That's right, the ancient civilization that gave us algebra also developed a language complete enough to form the basis for a system of automatically parsing modern human thought.
Since everything that uses Readware runs through this conversion to Classical Arabic before being kicked back out in a modern language, concepts that you search for in one language can be found in another: If you search for "politics" using English keywords, you can also find French articles. It takes the company four to eight months to add languages to its system.
The problem with Readware? It lacks a sustainable business model. Though the company will soon announce a partnership with a major RSS company, it needs a product--either for enterprises or individuals--that it can sell off the shelf. The new CEO hopes to find inspiration or partners at tonight's New Tech Meetup.
The San Francisco New Tech Meetup met at our offices Wednesday. Presentations were given by four interesting companies:
Vizu's new Answers service lets anyone create a market research poll, which is distributed to various sites and blogs that have an audience of visitors the researcher wants to poll. It looks like a really fast way to get basic product research done. It's not free: You pay to distribute your poll to the sites in the network that have agreed to run polls; they, in turn, make money for running your research. In other words, it's much like Google Adwords, but for research. I shot this video demo with co-founder Dan Beltramo before the Meetup.
Neighboroo is a handy map/data mash-up for people who want to understand basic neighborhood demographics. It overlays data including unemployment rates, crime rates, and household incomes onto a U.S. map. Data are only as fine as zip codes, so while it could be useful for marketers on a budget, it might not have enough detail to decide which of two houses to buy. The team plans to offer more granular data soon, though, and to enable users to put in their own data. Plus, it will soon add dozens of new data layers. It would be cool if Zillow and Neighboroo partnered.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Rapleaf is a personal reputation system for the Web. It's very much like eBay's feedback system, but not tethered to a particular site. It's an interesting experiment. The latest news is that other services (like SwapThing and When2Date) are integrating the Rapleaf system.
Razz, formerly Phonebites, makes two pointless but really fun services. The Web service lets you mix recordings of your own voice with beat tracks and sound effects. The idea is that you can embed these sounds into your MySpace page--or wherever. There's also a downloadable mobile-phone application that lets you inject cute sounds into a live conversation--they call it "in-call entertainment." It's not available in the U.S. yet, but the Web service is available everywhere, and it is good for giggles. Here's my clip:
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