Webware

It's a little late, but I want to wrap up the Stirr event I emceed last week. As with all other Stirr gatherings I've been to, this event included four carefully chosen presenters pitching their new Web companies. These were the companies we heard from last week:

MetaWeb, makers of Freebase, had the most popular presentation, judging by the silence of the audience during the pitch and the applause meter at the end of it. The MetaWeb database platform underpins the Freebase application and is designed to be a shared repository of structured knowledge. The blogosphere loves it, since it's ambitious, really interesting, and very open. Think of it as Wikipedia with structure. For instance, Freebase knows that an entry for an airport should contain a list of airlines that use it, and if you click on an airline from the airport entry you'll automatically see other airports it serves. It sounds simple, but building a semantic web of knowledge like that has been a dream of academics for decades. MetaWeb might just do it. The MetaWeb site has an explanatory Freebase video that's so understated, you might not understand what a powerful platform Freebase is when you watch it.

Practical tidbit: When I asked MetaWeb co-founder Jamie Taylor what important real-world applications he had in mind when the company built the system, he refused (or couldn't) name one. Usually, when a platform is built without an application in mind, it's an early indicator that the product will have a short lifespan. These products may be critical successes, but without traction in the real world, they don't last. I'm not yet sure if Freebase is different, but I really like it. It could be big, and it should be.

Criteo was the only company at the Stirr event that was new to me. This company makes recommendation engines for all kinds of Web sites. An engine can show site visitors what other products or services it calculates that they will like and thus help online retailers to sell their back catalogs of content and products. The company also has a new "AutoRoll" tool, which is targeted to bloggers and automatically creates a list of blogs based on users' behavior across sites. It's an interesting idea, but for a site to appear on an AutoRoll, it's got to be part of the AutoRoll network. That's limiting, especially during the launch phase. The example shown here is a live demo. If the links don't look all that good, mind this caveat from the company: "It can take up to a few days before the links displayed on your AutoRoll are fully relevant."

Wrike is a neat little service that helps you organize group tasks. You just cc: your project-oriented e-mails to write@wrike.com, and the service adds some intelligence to the e-mail thread to keep people on top of things. I covered this company back in December, and I still like it.

Buxfer is an entry-level accounting service that launched last year as a tool to help roommates manage split bills for rent and other shared expenses. Now it's evolving into a more general-purpose cash-flow tracking package for people with simple finances. Essentially, it's a very basic Quicken-like product for young people. It doesn't have enough depth to replace Quicken for anyone halfway serious about tracking and controlling money, but it keeps getting better and can provide insight into your cash flow, which is the first step towards controlling it. The newest feature: importing your bank statements.

Finally, our apologies for Webware's earlier post about what we called YouTube's "new" Streams and Audio Mixer products. They're not new, just updated.

Presenters for the post-lunch session today focused on two challenges. First was how to help people simultaneously collaborate on projects. Equally important was how to keep a room full of sleepy bloggers, analysts, and venture capitalists awake and alert after a lunch of turkey sandwiches. Luckily, we've played with all four of these applications before, and so we stuck with the roast beef.

Editgrid kicked off the round of presentations. Instead of PowerPoint, they used a tabbed spreadsheet in Editgrid to present. One of the really great features of Editgrid, which we've discussed before, is the option to archive and roll-back various versions of your work--something you don't get in Excel without managing a folder of file back-ups. Also notable is an Editgrid spreadsheet containing a feature comparison between Editgrid to Google Spreadsheets. It's one the most popularly shared spreadsheets on the service.

SmartSheet is another shared spreadsheet application, but it is aimed at small teams. Smartsheet has a handy feature for tracking and easily pulling the history for each individual cell in a spreadsheet. This provides several extended possibilities beyond just entering data. You still have to hit a button to save your work, which is something we've griped about in the past.

Wrike was a good follower to SmartSheet's presentation. Wrike is similar to SmartSheet, but has the added benefit of giving users the option to push tasks to the Wrike project tool whenever they get cc'd via e-mail. See our hands-on demo here..

Xcellery is the only tool presenting today that uses Microsoft Excel. In fact, it does something that--even 11 versions later--you still can't do with the industry standard application. The one thing Xcellery doesn't do is real-time viewing of another person while he or she is typing on a cell--something we've gushed about with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Luckily, the service will alert you if the other person is working on it and will give you the option to choose which person gets the edit. Previous coverage here.

Stay tuned as the next group up handles sharing through the Web, which should be interesting to watch after Zoho's announcement yesterday of their new meeting application..