blackrimglasses

tagged: web2con

So LaunchPad is the kind of show and tell for new companies.

It seems, looking at them, that Z is the new I (zevents and zimbra). That’s awesome I think. If they had been iZimbra, it would have been better. Totally Dada/Talking Heads mashup.

Six minutes per company…

Social Text
First Wiki company. Wikis for enterprizes. Capital, etc. They want to blow it. Going totally open source. Doing Wikiwyg. Slap onto any text area, etc. How is this different from existing tools? SynchroEdit (synchronous editor for the web). Leveraging the AtomAPI. Microformats.

Rollyo
Search engine provider. I went there once, haven’t been there since. The value proposition is just not there I don’t think. I liked it for five minutes, but I think I might be too advanced. Either that or I’m too dependent on a set sites, RSS feeds, etc. Cool idea, just, well… something is missing.

Joyent
Network suite for small groups. Creating a network suite of applications for small groups. Mail, calendar, contacts, files, binders. Providing additional applications as well. Tagging, smart filters. XML-RPC. AJAX stuff, live edits, etc. I need to use it.

bunchball
Do things with people you know. Two parts to that equation. Social application gap, replication of reality. It’s flash, automatically I’m unhappy with it. Oh well. Seems a lot like Ning. Targetting Flash first, then others second. Quite boring, and for nine months shows no polish.

RealTravel
Ken Leeder. - all about real people, travel. The design is very 1997 based, which is quite weird. Social travel advice site. Combines a travel-log with a travel interface. The problem with this: why would a user devote so much time to construcing an identity on a site that was so focused on only one facet of a persons life.

Zimbra - Collaboration system. Open source, on server and open source AJAX collaboration client. Have an Ajax toolkit. Support all standards, IMAP4, RSS, etc. All smartphones, etc. Definetly pretty slick and nice featureset, and they are getting the best response. Lots of mashups. “Next friday” links to next friday. Hot words with mashups. Very cool software.

Zevents - Z is the new blog!!!!!!! ROCK. Zevents is a competitor to Upcoming.org. 50,000 events in there. Most events, best way to find (what-when-where), lists, maps and aclendars. RSS, REST, SOAP, etc. Nice embedded type thing. Bookmarking events.

KnowNow - alerts for RSS. Provide notification and relevant information. Continuous live notifications. Subscribe to any syndicated content you get notified of change continously. This seems like a shaky prospect for a business model. Underwhelming.

Orb - Orb is streaming video and such. All devices have the web. The other thing that they have is that because they have the web, they are all a gateway for people to get stuff. Access and control of your stuff. Everything that you have at home can be accessed anywhere. The most applause we saw today is that he used an X-10 controller in Orb to turn a light on, which we saw on a webcam. Yes, we cheered like Britney Spears fans.

Wink - Not winksite, which is Dave Harper’s thing. Verity, 1993. Michael Tanne. Combining search with user participation to give a more accurate, spam-free search. Like MobSearch or My Web 2.0? Possibly so. Seems like a delicious and search combined.

AllPeers - Challenging programming model. This is a Firefox built application for developing web 2.0 applications. Metadata, tags, adhoc protocols. Peer to peer, resource replication, profiles, data profiles. Really difficult to do an rocket science, so they say.

Flock - building tools to do the things that we do every day faster and cooler. Open source, built on Mozilla technologies. A dozen folks with some funding and some smart angel funding. First public release coming in a few weeks, will be alpha quality. Going back to Tim Berner’s Lee’s “two way browser.”

PubSub Semantic web based search engine. They want to let other people create structured content using Web 2.0 semantic web formatted content. The chicken egg problem is what is limiting semantic web adoptation, so this will go well toward advancing this movement in both interfaces and data created with the metadata included. Blog is more than text now.

OK, thats it for now.