"What's going to happen now is a little bit of contolled chaos." That's how John Battelle kicked off the five-minute launch presentations at the recent Web 2.0 Launch Pad. Here are my snapshot reviews:
Services I'd use
- Instructables provides "step-by-step collaboration." Users can post their instructions for any sort of crazy project. (I just went over and posted the Thanksgiving Calculator.) Founder Eric Wilhelm announced a new feature, Collaboration, that enables groups to collaborate in building instruction sets. People come to the site to share how they do what they do, or to learn from others. Like Wikipedia, this site now enables users to work together to create information that is easily digestible by others.
- Turn applies search-like technology to online advertising. Turn is an automatically targeting ad network that uses bidded, CPA (cost per action) pricing. You can upload your own ad, then use Turn to analyze the various publishers and rank both the publisher and the ad insertion based upon both the bid price and the probability of action. Over 1000 advertisers are signed up already, with over 5M ads in inventory. 21M monthly uniques currently. This launch had all of us VCs buzzing, since it signifcantly eases the complexity of working with these systems and understanding information as necessary to make informed business decisions. More on the company's launch at VentureBeat.
Services I'd experiment with
- Pidgin Technologies' Klostu is essentially a Web services switch that's used to bridge "300 million users of disparate social networking sites." The idea is that a MySpace user could network with a Gather user.
- Omnidrive helps individuals to deal with more dispersed data storage. Essentially, this is a device driver that takes remote files and presents them to the user as if they were local files. No more upload/download paradigm - you treat all files the same regardless of actual physical location. I would have loved this when I was managing multiple Web sites and had content strewn across many servers.
- Sharpcast's Project Hummingbird connects PC, Mac, mobile, and Web data. Hummingbird synchronizes files from your laptop to an online storage area. Hummingbird files can be created on any of the platforms that are linked via the service. The most compelling aspect is being able to set up sharing while you are offline, then having the system sync automatically when you get online again.
- Stikkit (co-founded by favorite iconoclast Rael Dornfest) enables users to write up a sticky note any time. The metaphor that the company uses is 'filling the gaps between applications.' e.g., write down a phone number without setting up an address book card. Rael says that he wants to "get as close to paper as possible without actually involving the trees." I love the gap metaphor, and whether that translates into adoption remains to be seen.
- Sphere is search that looks for
blog posts that are contextually relevant to another article that
you're currently interested in. The idea is that if you're reading this
post about product launches at Web 2.0, you'd have interest in the Web
2.0 Launch Pad site or maybe that VentureBeat article; so Sphere will
offer them up to you. I've added Sphere to my blog feed and you can try
this for yourself.
There were other new products launched at Web 2.0, but these are the ones that caught my eye by solving a specific problem - most of which had to do with enhancing interoperability and making information appear seamless to a user that was skimming across networks, servers, applications, etc. Please do check out the Launch Pad site if you'd like to see the full show roster.
