Webware

Trying to weed through the 50 companies that launched over the past two days is overwhelming for you, and us. As done in years past, we've picked five of our favorites from TechCrunch50. These are all consumer-oriented services that bring innovative ideas to the table and have a good chance at succeeding.

Note: CNET's judges for this article were Josh Lowensohn (me) and Caroline McCarthy, both of whom watched all 50 on-stage pitches.

Story Something

Story Something is one of the few kid-oriented products we've seen in the past few years that doesn't have some crazy scheme with virtual worlds, virtual currency, or a way to suck kids dry of their hard-earned allowances. Instead, Story Something is set up to create personalized stories for kids that the parent can set up and read with minimal effort.

Much like Mad Libs, parents can insert the name of their child, and things they can relate to (like their friends, or parent's names) into an existing work. The service then goes through existing stories and inserts the names. Children also have the option of picking what happens next if it's a multipart story, akin to the Choose Your Own Adventure series.

Stories can be printed, and e-mailed for reading on mobile devices and e-readers like the Kindle. It even includes illustrations in these copies. As a time saver, the service can also be set up to e-mail you new stories as they come in, using information about your family that you set up in previous sessions.

The service is currently in private beta, and is planning to have a free version with a handful of sample stories, as well as a premium version which includes a full library of content for $3 a month.

ToyBots Woozees

ToyBots Woozees isn't a product as much as a platform. Think of it like Teddy Ruxpin, but Internet-enabled, and available in a whole slew of smart toys. ToyBots wants to get toy manufacturers using their standardized firmware, which lets toy owners swap personalities, and run downloaded software like games and stories.

This whole idea of shared content is hosted on a large network, kind of like Apple's iPhone and iPod App Store, so that games you buy for one device can work for another. It also lets third-party developers program new ways for consumers to interact with that old toy.

As a business this can bring something toy makers don't currently have with most stuffed animals: a revenue flow post-purchase. Instead of relying on accessories like additional outfits, and other characters, they can make money off software sales. Of course before this happens, ToyBots has to get toy manufacturers on board.

Spawn Labs

Spawn Labs was pitched as a "Slingbox for video games" and that's exactly what it does. The $199 box is a one-time purchase that users hook up to their home game console and their Internet connection. It then lets them play video games from any Internet-enabled computer as if they were playing it on their home TV.

The service has three big things going for it: One is that it pipes the content in 720p HD, which is the proper size for most laptops and what its creators tell us is as good as you can get for real-time streaming without bulging the price tag to around $5,000. It's also a one-time purchase, which means there's no monthly service fee beyond whatever you're paying for electricity and Internet. And, the company tells me it plans to offer compatibility with future game consoles through updated hardware drivers, meaning that you can buy the box now and not worry about having to upgrade it when the next generation of consoles arrives.

Considering it costs close to what most current-generation game consoles do, it may be a hard sell, but after having tried it out at the company's demo booth we definitely want one--and think many other gamers, and people in one-TV households will as well.

... Read more

Gdgt, a new site co-founded by Peter Rojas (founding editor of both Gizmodo and Engadget) and Ryan Block (former editor in chief of Engadget) is opening up today.

It is--surprise--yet another gadget site, but it's quite good, and more useful to real people than the gadget porn sites these two editors came from. It's a community-driven site, wiki-like in features and general atmosphere, so it's the site's users that will make it succeed or fail.

Meanwhile, the new version of Retrevo (previous coverage), another tech product site, launched on Monday of this week. It's a more sober site, useful but not as exciting as Gdgt. It's more of a buyer's and owner's resource.

Gdgt: By geeks and of geeks

"It's the gadget site we always wanted," Rojas and Block say about their new site. Conceptually, it's quite simple, and potentially powerful. Users on the site pick the products they have, want, or once had, and write up quick reviews of them if they like. It's social, it's fast, and if the product you want to write about isn't in the database, it's pretty easy to add it.

If you're looking for solid advice on a product--how to fix it, if you should buy it--the community could provide value. You'll be able to see what users are saying about products and dive into discussions about particular features. If you like researching what the people who are really passionate about their gear say, this will be helpful.

But the people who get the most out of Gdgt will be product geeks and fanboys who like chatting about toys. The service has a very high social component. You can follow people, friend them, get alerts when your friends write reviews or respond to yours, and so on. There are also free-floating discussions about product companies, and "feature" stories (blog posts) by the editors that will serve as jumping-off points for community chatter.

It sounds like an straightforward concept, but Gdgt wins points for execution. It's fun to use. It's fast (at least the unloaded beta I tried was) and most of the pieces are where you expect them to be. Those that aren't (like the site's preference for using product model numbers instead of more popular brand names) will likely be fixed based on user feedback.

I admit I do have issues with sites that encourage people to define themselves by what they own, and Gdgt definitely does that. There's a tacit game of one-upsmanship in the "I have" list. But if you do have the gadget bug and see no issue with feeding it, I think Gdgt will end up being a great place to hang out.

Retrevo: Get in, get info, get out

In contrast, the new, recently launched version of Retrevo is designed to "make the shopping journey simple and enjoyable," an anodyne pitch if ever there was, but attractive, no doubt, to people freaked out by the idea of buying a digicam or a flatscreen.

Retrevo has an AI core that gathers up product review and pricing data from numerous sources (including CNET), to present overall recommendations on products. What's new is its Farecast-like feature of telling you if the product you're looking at is at its peak of popularity, or heading toward or away from it, plus indicators telling whether users like it, and if it's a good value or not at the moment. If you trust the Retrevo machine, it provides good info to reduce buying anxiety.

A new automated "product catalog" also gathers up information on entire categories of products and puts into a catalog-like format that's supposed to be comfortable to users. I found the information on the catalog pages poorly organized, however.

The site will now also telegraph the essentials it knows about products to you via Twitter if you send it a query, which is potentially useful if you're in a store and curious about a product you're looking at on a shelf, and if you don't care if all your Twitter followers see when you query the Retrevobot. Another handy feature (which I don't think is new) is an electronic "shelf" for keeping product manuals. Retrevo has a nice library to stock it from.

If you're a gearhead, try Gdgt for fun and community, but don't skip Retrevo when you're looking to make a purchase.

And to keep me employed, be sure to check out CNET reviews as well. Thank you.

Disclosure: In past jobs at Red Herring and Ziff-Davis, I have worked with people now at both Gdgt and Retrevo.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, although on the Web it can be followed by the threat of litigation.

Wired reports that travel search site Kayak.com sent Microsoft a "legal letter" this week based on Microsoft's Bing travel search tool looking too similar to its own. While the Farecast-powered travel search provides differing results from Kayak's, the company is citing its similarity in look and functionality.

A Microsoft spokesperson rebutted the allegation, telling Wired that the latest design was a joint venture with Farecast and the Bing team.

Microsoft redesigned its Farecast travel search engine in conjunction with the launch of Bing.com in late May. Both it and Kayak have the same basic query layout, along with results that can be quickly filtered with sliders and check boxes that sit on the left side of the screen. The two also share certain color patterns and design elements.

That may not be enough to hold up in court though. U.S. copyright law protects creative work that is put in "tangible form." For copied imagery and text that distinction can be easy. However, when it comes to Web design, things begin to get murky. Its defense often relies on the comparison of the code of two sites, as well as the infringement of any company brands or trademarks.

"It is a hard case for Kayak to make because all airline reservation sites look a lot alike--they are trying to convey the same information, so this is not surprising," says Jim DeLong, who is the chairman of the intellectual property practice at Kamlet Reichert's Washington, D.C., office.

"It looks like a legal area called 'trade dress.' And Kayak would be limited to arguing about the use of grey in the left column, and about some of the typography in the same place."

Travel search remains one of the most profitable parts of Microsoft's search business alongside its local and shopping search engines. Microsoft purchased Farecast in 2008 to boost its profile in the travel search market. It was then integrated deeply into Microsoft's MSN properties, and now Bing.

Other high-profile design similarities in recent history have involved AOL's beta site, which looked suspiciously close to Yahoo's front page; Google's Chrome browser logo; and Croatian Radiotelevision's BBC-like redesign.

Note: This story was updated at 12:07 p.m. PST with comment from Jim DeLong.

Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off Bing, the rebranded and rebuilt search engine formerly code-named Kumo, designed to replace Live Search. It's a solid improvement over the previous search product, and it beats Google in important areas. It will help Microsoft gain share in the search business. It's surprisingly competitive with Google.

Bing isn't available to the public yet, but you won't have to wait long. Starting on June 1, some users will get Bing search results from Live Search. On June 3, we're told, Bing will be Microsoft's new default search. We got early access to the service. Here's how it looks.

Hands on

In search presentation, Bing wins. It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) to display refined versions of your query down the left side of the page. For example, I searched for the game "Fallout 3" on Google and Bing. While Google gave me good results, Bing gave me a menu of "related searches," that included Walkthrough, News, and so on.

Bing also pop ups an excerpt of the text on a search result if you hover over it. This saves a lot of time if you're not quite sure if you want to follow a result.

In the content of search results, Bing is not consistently superior to Google. In many searches I did (not the sample searches Microsoft sent me), the Google results were more relevant and useful. Not by miles, mind you, but in many cases Google delivered the goods just enough better than Bing to make me question the wisdom of adopting Bing as a replacement search engine. Just one example: Searching for "Best house paint for humid climates" gave me better advice links at the top of the search results with Google than with Bing.

When searching for product reviews, Google's search result pages were mostly better than Bing's -- although, again, not by a lot. However, Bing also collates user and expert reviews on many products, and this gives you a great overview. This feature doesn't always show up, though; and I wouldn't even have known about it had it not been for the Wired review of Bing.

When you want to shop for an item, both services have very strong "shopping" tabs that organize results well. Google gives you seller ratings, which Bing doesn't. But Bing offers a cashback program, which is hard to beat.

And in some searches, Bing won on results outright. When searching for "Facebook sandberg" on Google, the top link was a story from 2008. On Bing, the top item was "News about facebook sandberg" with three sublinks to very recent articles. When searching for "Obama Supreme Court," Google did show news results, but the top link was a day-old story. Bing's was from 32 minutes ago.

To be fair to Google, you can also click through to Google News on any result and sort results by date. But that's extra clicks. Bing is more aggressive about including news.

All search engines have their strengths, and many of Bing's lie in areas where Microsoft has its own content companies. For example, Microsoft owns the airfare prediction service Farecast, and it includes Farecast buying advice whenever you search for airplane travel. Bing also displays some medical data inside the search engine itself.

Bing also does very well in at least one area where Google should do better. The video search result page for "Thomas Jefferson" in Google gives you a vertical list of videos. On Bing, you get a big grid that's easier to scan, and a list of related videos on the left for "George Washington," "James Madison," and so on. The search results are about equivalent, but Bing's presentation is far superior.

You should use Bing

I planned to write this story with the headline, "Bing isn't Better," but the new engine won me over.

The new game in search is parsing information and displaying it in the engine itself (see Wolfram Alpha for the extreme example of this). Both Google and Bing, and other search products, have areas where they will collate and format information for you, instead of just linking you to external pages where the data reside. Bing does an extremely good job at this in several popular areas -- like product reviews, movie listings, weather, travel, and stock prices.

While the service doesn't reveal all its riches at once, it rewards exploration and yields pleasant surprises to users who poke around.

Google keeps improving in the area of in-search collation and display as well, but Bing makes Google look complacent, and that's not good for Google. For the moment, Bing's on top in this game. Try this search engine. I do not think you will regret it.

In the midst of the financial meltdown and a contentious upcoming election, you might think the U.S. government and taxpayers are just funding wars, bank bailouts, and bridges to nowhere or somewhere. But this is the same government that funded the Internet way back when and is also funding the next generation of technologies that will make the current Internet seem like a Model-T.

Over the last several years, the U.S. government--via DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) grants--has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in PAL, an acronym for "Personalized Assistant that Learns." Smarter software and networks and augmenting human intelligence are useful in times of war and peace.

As part of the PAL project, more than $200 million of DARPA money has been poured into CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) over the last five years. CALO has been run out of SRI International with the assistance of 25 research organizations and 400 researchers.

Several companies, including Radar Networks, Farecast (acquired by Microsoft) and Adapx, have been spun out of SRI based on some facet of CALO technology. The latest, Siri, was founded in December last year and has raised $8.5 million in series A funding from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.

At this point, Siri's management is being secretive about what the company is developing. The elevator pitch goes something like, "Users' online lives are becoming more complicated and getting out of control for mainstream users. What if there was an easy way for normal users (non-power users) to ask the Internet to help them."

According to the Siri PR pitch, the product is "a new interaction paradigm for the consumer Internet experience that applies intelligence at the interface." The company expects to release a beta version of its initial product in the first half of 2009, according to Dag Kittlaus, a former Telenor Mobile and Motorola executive who is a co-founder and CEO of the company.

"We have to be careful at this stage," Kittlaus told me. "We don't like to play these games, but we need to keep a tight lid on what we are specifically doing. We have some original ideas of what the product is going to do, but we don't want to spark ideas among potential competitors." Those competitors would likely be masters of the Internet with large Internet footprints and research prowess like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Kittlaus did allow that Siri has more than a dozen partners, presumably large, well-established distribution players that can help build a consumer market for Siri's product. Unlike most Web start-ups, Siri has a business model, Kittlaus claimed. "We have good business models, both existing and emerging. We think CPA (cost per action) is the future, and this specific application is good for CPA and we are partnering on that."

He also touted the pedigree of the company's current cadre of 19 employees. "They are mostly engineers from Yahoo, Google, SRI, NASA, and Xerox PARC," he said. The chief architect of the CALO project, Adam Cheyer is a co-founder and vice president of engineering at Siri, and Tom Gruber, a well-known artificial intelligence and semantic Web expert, is a co-founder and CTO.

Cheyer described CALO as superset of what Siri is developing. "The CALO project is building an automated assistant to help manage and improve your life. The technology spans all aspects of interaction--natural language processing, speech recognition, and planning and reasoning capabilities--and interfaces with all kinds of systems, such as email and contacts," he said.

"Learning in the wild is core focus," he continued. "We want it to improve over time and learn from users with no coaching and without changing any code. We are taking the key elements from the project to commercialize it in a form that will delight users. We are not building systems that do things but that learn how to do things."

CALO sounds like a representation of the famous Apple Knowledge Navigator video from 1987.

"Siri is a subset of that concept," Cheyer said. "We have to keep in mind existing user behavior. It will feel like something close to what people use a lot. We will add speech recognition and other features as we go. We don't want to take such a leap that people cannot identify with it. We'll do things similar to but more advanced than what we do now. The longer term vision is the Knowledge Navigator, although it is an early chapter now and it might look different than that."

According to Gruber, intelligence at the interface allows the computers to make recommendations, like a personal assistant:

The interfaces we use to interact with the world's information are getting smarter. Web portals gave us someone else's idea of the content we should see. Then came search engines, which let us tell the system what we want, one query at a time. We are about to see the next wave -- intelligence at the interface -- in which the system knows about us, our information, and our physical environment. With knowledge about our context, an intelligent system can make recommendations and act on our behalf.

Siri may be working on more intelligent Web interfaces that can make inferences based a wide variety of user activities (the "lifestream"), learning over time on its own, and then taking actions on behalf of users. For example, if you are booking travel or looking for a restaurant, Siri would know your preferences and about travel sites or restaurants, integrating data and context from multiple sources to deliver personal assistance. This could be especially useful in mobile scenarios where you don't want to wade through pages of search results or deal with complex interactions.

We'll have to wait for next year, if the company stays on schedule, to see whether Siri can really define a new paradigm for experiencing the Web.

On Tuesday, the Web 2.0 Expo invades San Francisco. The largest Web 2.0 conference there is--the organizers are expecting 7,000+ attendees--will inhabit the Moscone exhibit hall through Friday. Unlike smaller, more intimate conferences, there will be too much at the Expo for any one person to absorb it all. So herewith are a few things worth paying special attention to:

Keynotes to attend

Amit Mital from Microsoft will be talking up Live Mesh (see "What's in Ray Ozzie's Mesh?") at 5:00 PM Wednesday. It looks like this product will be the talk of the show, but there are other keynotes we're going to be sure to check out.

Mozilla Foundation chairman Mitchell Baker will give a talk called "Opening the Mobile Web" on Thursday at 9:50 AM. This will be especially interesting if she addresses the fact that Mozilla is not building a version of Firefox for iPhone or for Android, due to licensing incompatibilities between these companies and Mozilla's open-source project.

I'll be very curious to hear what Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh has to say in his talk about open platforms at 10:00 AM Thursday. Yahoo has many products based on open platforms, and is also trying to develop new platforms of its own, such as Fire Eagle, that it's opening up to developers.

Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, takes the floor at 9:35 AM Friday. Worth going to for entertainment value.

Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, will be giving a short talk at 10:15 AM on Friday. He is always worth listening to; unlike some young entrepreneurs, his vision goes far beyond the product he's in charge of, which bodes very well for the company's future and for blogging in general.

Web 3.0? Really?

Is Web 2.0 obsolete? Expect hallway conversations about "Web 2.5" and "Web 3.0," the next "versions" of the online innovation roller coaster we're now on. Web 2.5, according to News.com Editor-in-Chief Dan Farber, will see the continued emergence of platform-as-a-service, in other words the growth of Web application engines like Salesforce.com's AppForce, Google's new App Engine, Amazon's suite of platforms known as Amazon Web Services, and so on. Web entrepreneurs start building their Web apps on top of these new platforms, things will change for users: We'll see tighter integration between data among different apps, more reliability and better performance from apps, and possibly even more rapid innovation.

Web 3.0 is generally agreed to be the "Semantic Web;" in other words services that "know" what the information they're holding is about. PowerSet, for example, is building semantic search--it searches for what pages mean, not just what they say. The Semantic Web is not just an exercise in artificial intelligence, though; the emergence of rich and agreed-upon data structures, like microformats, across sites and service make it possible to build apps that "understand" the data they are working on more than current Web apps do.

Richer applications

At Demo 2008 earlier this year we saw the release of several Web applications based on Flash (and the Flash runtime, AIR). At Web 2.0 Expo, we expect to see even more rich apps on this platform. The outlook for Microsoft's Flash competitor, Silverlight, is not good.

Cloud storage

We're also tracking the ongoing migration of user data from personal and local devices to the Web, or the "cloud." Web-based backup is becoming cost-effective now, not just for small amounts of data but also for personal media files. Live access to personal data--not just backup--is the next thing, and with the growth of online productivity suites, like Google Docs, and online media applications, like photo editor Picnik, users are already getting accustomed to putting their most important personal files online, often with no copies at their homes.

Rush to the exits

It may not be overt at Web 2.0 Expo, but one thing I will be looking for is signs of increasing merger activities among Web 2.0 companies. With a troubling economy upon us, and with the maturing of Web 2.0 ideas (if not business models), entrepreneurs and their funding sources will be looking more aggressively for the exits (financial, that is), while the bigger companies seek to consolidate their Web offerings by roping in the products from startups or from complimentary Web-focused companies. Cases in point: the recent acquisitions of Farecast and Sphere (by Microsoft and AOL, respectively), and the partnership between Google and Salesforce.com.

Web 2.0 Expo is a partner with CNET Webware.com, which will be honoring the Webware 100 winners at the Expo.

Microsoft confirmed Thursday that it has acquired Seattle-based Farecast, a travel site that offers an engine predicting whether airfares for a given route are headed up or down.

"Farecast has been a partner of ours on MSN Travel and we look forward to working closely with the Farecast team to incorporate and apply its technology in new and interesting ways," Microsoft PR director Whitney Burk said in a statement.

The travel site's CEO, Hugh Crean, also posted a brief blog on Farecast's site announcing the sale to Microsoft, but adding few details.

"This acquisition creates tremendous opportunities for the Farecast team and our customers," Crean said. "We look forward to sharing more details in the weeks to come."

Techcrunch reported that Microsoft paid $115 million for the site, a figure Microsoft declined to confirm. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer had said last week that Farecast had been sold for more than $75 million, but didn't name the buyer.

In January 2007, Farecast said it raised $12.1 million in Series C funding, and had raised $20.6 million to that point.

I have received requests for an inclusive index of all 300 of the Webware 100 finalists. So if you're looking for a particular product in the Webware 100, check out this alphabetical list of all of them. Click through to the product's category page to read more about it and cast a vote.

As of this writing, we've recorded more than 840,000 unique Webware 100 product votes. That's already more than we got last year! We think this highlights how important Web-based apps are becoming to mainstream technology users--the audience that CNET aims to serve with this site, as we currently do with Download.com and CNET.com itself.

Click through to the permalink page for the list...

... Read more

I don't know about you, but I often find myself saying "I'd totally buy that if it cost $__ less." It happens to me all the time with items such as RAM, video cards, Windows Vista (joking), and the Amazon Kindle. Luckily there are two handy services to help keep tabs on prices for online goods.

The first, and newer of the two is called Waitable. It simply monitors the price of whatever items you put in either by URL, Amazon.com sales number, or UPC code. All you need to do is plug in what price you'd like to pay (a la Priceline) and it sends you an e-mail if the item is selling at or below your requested amount.

In addition to e-mail notifications, Waitable provides an RSS feed you can subscribe to, or plug into your favorite feed reader to avoid having to check your in-box. The service only works on Amazon.com at the moment, but after seeing what PriceProtectr (review) can do on price drops after you buy something, I can imagine seeing other online retailers making their way on there in the future.

The other service is called WishRadar, and has a larger emphasis on what you can do with the list of items you put together. You can create and share various wishlists ad nauseum. It also imports whatever pre-existing list of products you've got on your Amazon.com wishlist, along with a bookmarklet you can click to add any product you're looking at (on Amazon or Half.com) without having to copy and paste.

The one thing both of these services are missing is a way to view a product's life cycle to see if there have been any price drops or fluctuations in the past. For example, a pair of headphones I bought and use on a daily basis quite regularly jump from about $90 to $70 on Amazon, and neither of these services would tell you that. Likewise, predictive services such as Farecast, have created algorithms to tell what's going to happen to the future price of airfare--something that could potentially be automated with reoccurring life cycles of major electronic goods.

See also: Price Protectr: Watch for Price Drops without Watching