While we clink glasses over House victories and bite fingernails over squeaker Senate races, here are some notes from today’s sessions at Web 2.0.
Thirteen new companies offered five-minute pitches for new products and services at the “Launchpad” event here.
The one that jumped out at me, unsurprisingly, given my history of interest in personal-information managers and the focus of my book on one such project, was Stikkit. It’s a personal-information manager (and sharing tool) built around a sticky-note metaphor. It looks like it has a heritage stretching all the way back to the old-fashioned “terminate and stay resident” note-taking programs like Sidekick and free-form PIMs like Lotus Agenda. Stikkit is led by Rael Dornfest, who I know from his work organizing many editions of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I made a note to myself to explore it further tonight, but it appears to be down at the moment. More later!
I was also intrigued by Klostu, an attempt to create a “super-social network” linking together the separate islands of the “Boardscape” — the thousands of disconnected message boards across the Net. This strikes me as smart: there were tons of communities sharing stuff online long before anyone had coined the term Web 2.0, and it makes a lot of sense to serve them.
The presenter for Instructables, a site featuring user-contributed “how-to” projects, repeatedly emphasized that his service’s most important feature is the passion of his users. He’s right: more than spiffy software or innovative business models, that’s what makes any Web venture — “2.0” or not — matter.
Here are the rest of the projects:
Omnidrive and Sharpcast: Two different approaches to syncing stores of content across multiple machines and devices.
Turn: Automated ad targeting.
Sphere: “Less geeky” blog search.
Adify: Instant advertising networks.
3B: Three-dimensional, walk-through Web browser.
ODesk: Hiring market and distributed management system for software developers.
Venyo: Reputation management service for bloggers.
Timebridge: Outlook add-on for meeting scheduling.
[tags]web 2.0, web2con, launch pad, stikkit, klostu, instructables[/tags]
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