I'm in the Connected Innovators session of the SuperNova conference. This is where thirteen start-ups are going to pitch to the audience. I hear that one of these companies is a fake, and that conference organizer Kevin Werbach is going to announce that fact after the last presentation. I'm going to liveblog the presentations as they happen. Let's see if we can spot the faux one.
These are the 13 companies. More as they come on stage.
Adap.tv. I just covered these guys yesterday. It's a video-advertising company. Not fake.
AdaptiveBlue is a semantic Web company. It makes a very interesting and useful plug-in, "BlueOrganizer," that makes browser pages personalized with special shortcuts based on the content. A new service, "SmartLinks," lets site publishers and bloggers insert smart links in their own content. I've talked to the CEO several times.
Aggregate Knowledge. This company launched at Demo six months ago, so not fake (too easy). It makes a service that site managers can use to insert relevant, customized links on pages. Useful for online retail and also for news sites.
CastTV makes video search. Just met with them a few minutes ago. Looks very promising, but I don't have access to the site yet so can't evaluate. Not fake, but not live either, so fake-ish.
Critical Metrics. This one is new to me. It's a site where people recommend music. Like we need another music discovery system. But the site is live and quite functional, so not fake, even if it is.
Jangl. A very interesting company that assigns phone numbers to relationships, not people. We've covered Jangl before. News: Company is launching Facebook integration very shortly.
Pando Networks makes a personal file transfer system. Good for sending your videos to your mum. We have covered Pando before. Real. CEO is talking about a new technology that uses BitTorrent-like distributed transfer technology to make sending popular files much less expensive.
SodaHead. New to me. Maybe the fakester? I don't think so. It's a "social voting" service (since when is voting not social?). It lets you create polls and insert them as widgets on your own site. Looks pretty useful, actually. You know how much Webware loves voting. SodaHead does a bit more, by allowing users who vote to see other polls that they might also like to participate in.
Spock. Previously covered. A very interesting people search engine that competes with Wink.
Wize is a reviews aggregator (review). It parses Web content that evaluates products, and assigns a numerical score to the reviews it reads, so it can present to the user a single score for products that may have been reviewed hundreds of times. Real, but this quote from the CEO makes it sound fake: "Commerce is where the money is."
ZapMeals. A service that delivers home-cooked meals from people and restaurants with excess capacity. Almost plausible. But fake. The Powerpoint (on the site) is worth checking out, though--it's a textbook example of a Web 2.0 pitch. Your business 101 exercise: find the flaws.
ZenZui makes a cool iPhone-like user interface for mobile phones. We covered ZenZui in March.
Zing makes technology behind Wi-Fi-enabled music players. Not new. Latest news is that the company powers Sirius Radio's Stiletto player.
And that's it. Nice lineup of start-ups. I would have liked to see more new companies. It would have made the spot-the-fakester challenge more fun. Here's the SuperNova voting page.
At a SuperNova mixer yesterday, I met with Jyri Engestrom, founder of the often-compared-to-Twitter nanoblogging service, Jaiku. He told me that the service has a new feature that just went into public beta: Channels. These are like standard personal Jaiku feeds, but shared by groups. Here's the Webware channel. As of this writing, it's pretty spare (being that I just set it up and nobody knew about it until this moment), but you can also check out the Buzz out Loud channel, which has a bit more going on.
Webware's new Jaiku channel.
Jaiku's group nanoblogs are very much like chat rooms or message boards, but everyone is limited to 140 characters per post. Jaiku allows some other content to be fed in, though: You can put an RSS feed into a channel, or a Flickr feed, or even Twitter updates. Channels are good ways for fans or groups to keep in touch with each other and with the data feeds they all care about.
On Jaiku, the channels are ridiculously easy to set up. Once you're logged in, you can set one up through a simple form, or just go to the jaiku.com/channel/{groupname}. If the group doesn't exist, Jaiku will set it up for you on the spot. Very nice. All channels also get their own embeddable widgets (see below).
Jaiku is leading the pack
I hear rumors that Twitter is soon to roll out a similar service, as are some other publishing systems. In other words, the whole nanoblog space is about to become a commodity market. Every online service with a social component will eventually have one.
That's good, because the format works for people who are passionate about a topic or who want to remain actively involved in their groups. But it will be bad if all these different group nanoblog systems don't interoperate. Engestrom and I talked a bit about the need for open standards in nanoblogging. Jaiku, he says, is open. Twitter has APIs (this is why you can follow my Twitter updates on Jaiku). But the whole space will get very confusing if emerging nanoblog services try to lock people in the way the instant messaging services did and the way social network sites still do.
I'm not saying there's an easy solution to this, but the last thing we need is another set of similar but disconnected communication services that each require separate logins. If I'm nanoblogging on Facebook, you should be able to read my feed on Twitter if that's where you prefer to hang out, and vice versa (which, actually, does work). As the social networks roll out their own nanoblogging services to serve their specific communities, I dearly hope they don't take a short-sighted view and try to lock users in to their own platforms. But I won't be surprised if they do.
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