New Companies Debut at Web 2.0
|
Written By Reprise Media | October 6, 2005 | Share This
|
|
Reprise Media Managing Partners Peter Hershberg and Josh Stylman are blogging-by-proxy from Web 2.0. So far they’ve seen dozens of freshly hatched companies.
With their heads still spinning, they took the time to write in with some quick takeaways as well as their thoughts on who to watch:
Takeaway #1 Overall there were a lot of new entities who don’t have revenue models and are simply looking to launch services and use Google as their plug-in revenue stream.
Takeaway #2 Even still, there is definitely some cool innovation taking place, evidence that people and companies are taking some of the basic tenets of Web 2.0 (open environment, user friendly features and functionality, etc.) to heart.
Here are a few of the companies that got our attention:
Socialtext: Today wikis are everywhere and happening at scale, but these guys were first. They announced that they are going to be giving away their software in an open source environment at Wikiwyg.net.
Rollyo: David Pell, the founder of this company started as a schoolteacher in Brooklyn (shout out > Crooklyn!) who helped his students by creating hacks that enabled them to search specific web sites. He later developed a product and demo’ed his new site by showing examples featuring URLs from celebrities and celebrity bloggers such as Debra Messing and Ariana Huffington. People can choose to make their sources “public” - which could serve as a customer acquisition tool for people looking to demonstrate their expertise in a particular area. It’s a wiki meets search engine in one.
Joyent: The mission of Joyent is to “deliver simple, powerful, web-based software for small teams” and it’s essentially a combo of mail, calendar, contacts files and binders. They offer tagging smart filters throughout. There are some cool features for tagging email, group collaboration and the like.
Bunchball: The company’s founder opened up by saying that people do things online that are different than what they do offline. He went on to say that a lot of social networking services help hook people up with people that they don’t know. This service allows people to connect with people they know and actually do things together. It’s your basic web-as-platform meets social software play. It’s allowing people to collaborate to circumvent the problem of infrastructure distribution.
RealTravel: This one was pretty cool and combines elements of travel blogging and social networking. Ken Leeder, the founder, gave a demo of his new site which offers community tags and lets people discuss information about places they’ve been. This info shows up in their profile pages and within the geo area of their profile. With the internet as such a powerful place for travel, this service is definitely useful and could be a cool next-gen travel site, like Openlist and Kayak.
Zvents: This is a cool local search play. The site offers three boxes (what, when, where) and allows people that come to their site to learn about things that are going on locally. The examples demonstrated included typing “airplanes” into the “what” box and then learning that it’s Fleet Week in San Francisco. The coolest part was that all results easily be dragged and dropped to a blogs, thereby enabling the community easily talk about events that are going on.
Orb: Your media anywhere over IP is the main idea here. It’s basically a personal portal that lets you connect all your information, from logins, passwords to home automation. The demo given showed the speaker turning on the lights in his home directly from his laptop at the show. Very cool.
Wink: Another user generated, tag enabled search site. Founder Michael Tanne claimed that this was a people powered search. He indicated that this is a way to avoid spam, although we’d love to learn more on exactly how, since we’re always suspicious that people will try to game the system.
AllPeers: This company is developing what seemed to be cool Web 2.0 applications, all embedded within Firefox. The idea was cool, but the presentation was a little muddled and definitely not as well articulated of a “business pitch” as some of the products and companies presented.
Zimbra: By far the coolest product we saw demo’ed. It’s a collaboration suite that’s based on open flow of data and mash-ups. It’s compatible with all the standard mail and office applications used today and lets people get really sweet functionality in their email - calendaring, maps, etc.
Some mash-up examples:
- Out your mouse over an address within an email you’re reading and you get a sneak preview of a map from google
- Mouse over an image file and you get a preview of that image
- Mouse over a FedEx tracking number, then you can get status (also in a graphical popup)
- Mouse over a purchase order and right mouse click and you can approve the order right there in your note
- Mouse over someone’s name in an email and get a glimpse of their calendar
- Mouse over a phone number and make a call through Skype
They also have a killer search feature that rivals many of the desktop products on the market. It supports lots of different file types and allows you to do parametric searches based on all sorts of criteria.
Flock: This is an open source social browser focused on helping fill the original vision of Tim Burners Lee of a two way web. It’s the classic 12 kids in a garage in the Valley looking for funding story. We felt bad that his demo didn’t work well, although it seemed like a cool thing that lets people use their history and bookmarks and tie that into other apps (like del.icio.us) and blogs.
Topics: Conferences & Events |
Human Service Agencies Brooklyn
Through our professional training services, we help to ensure the implementation of best pract