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.
- Google rolls out pay-per-action. Google's got a new advertising scheme, and it's set up to help small-time advertisers avoid the dangers of click fraud. Instead of just paying by the click, advertisers can set up predetermined actions the user must go through, such as purchasing an item or browsing a certain section of the site. The new system has sparked controversy in the blogosphere as a potential destroyer of smaller affiliate marketing services.
- Congoo launches News Portals. Premium news content distributor Congoo (previous coverage) has rolled out a customizable single-page-aggregation service that pulls stories from user-selected topics. Users can also create their own newsfeed by using keywords that filter upcoming stories.
- RateItAll and MuseStorm team up to make MySpace list widgets. MuseStorm makes widgets and various ways to track their activity, and RateItAll lets users rate things. The two have teamed up to create sharable widgets for MySpace profiles that let people share interesting lists they find on RateItAll in a scrolling top-10 format. Users can then track widget statistics using MuseStorm. (via SexyWidget)
- Mashable rolls out in-house Techmeme competitor. Dubbed "Mashtracker," the new service combines Megite story aggregation technology with stories on Mashable to provide users with related stories and discussion from around the Internet. It's a neat way to see similar news items, as well as alternate takes from various bloggers and news services. See also Techmeme and Tailrank.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
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