Chris Shipley is clearly feeling the power of the crowds nowadays - a startling number of startups are launching products and services that leverage collective knowledge, via either direct content contributions or the use of algorithms. Applications of collective wisdom here at DEMO 07 ranged from product recommendations, to architectural design, to identifying travel serendipity. The snapshot reviews are here, but I'll also reveal my personal favorites: Aggregate Knowledge, CircleUp, Digger, MyDesignIn, and PairUp.
Recommendations sharing
- Aggregate Knowledge lets consumers tap into the wisdom of crowds. Overstock.com uses Aggregate Knowledge techology to recommend you those shirts in the discovery pane adjacent to the item description that you selected. The company also has a cool, Digg-like data visualization program for marketers. Best of all, their business model is based on success fees - when buyers order a recommended product, that's when the company makes money.
- Trailfire is a new engine for social discovery that uses the sticky note paradigm. Users can annotate a Web page and link notes together as they wish. These 'trails' can be either discovered by serendipity or shared with friends, and as others follow your path they can add to it and make it more robust.
Crawling for answers
- Attendio is an online event discovery service that recommends events based on what like-minded people are interested in. The company plans to differentiate by targeting groups, whether the PTA, a moms group, or a soccer league.
- Boorah provides a crowd-based recommendations engine. The company uses natural language technology to sift through existing online content - e.g., searching for a great restaurant recommendation, and getting one based on all crawled content rather than a single site. Best-of lists, summaries, etc. are automatically generated.
- Digger infers the probable meaning of queries in an effort to return more relevant search results. The search engine uses linguistics, context, and learnings from previous searches. The company is doing a private beta currently, and I'm interested to see how it will compare to Powerset.
- ZoomInfo launched PowerSearch, a business information search engine that compiles individual profiles based upon the information that it crawls. The product is targeted at sales and marketing professionals building their pipeline, or perhaps executive recruiters. The company anticipates competing with both LinkedIn and Hoovers, and with over $10 million in revenue last year, it's already profitable. As a marketer, I like this, but as a target, it's a bit scary.
Content collaboration
- Me.dium is a free browser sidebar that enables 'social exploration' - in the company's words, to "bring the human touch to the Web experience." Users can share and compare their own Web surf activity with their friends' activity. Think StumbleUpon.
- MyDesignIn is a social network for home design. Interactive blueprints match information scraped from Web sites and online catalogs to the CAD information built into the DesignIn system. Users can bookmark products for consideration. Vendors like it since their product get spec'd directly into customer home designs. You could even lift an entire room design from the Pottery Barn catalog and snap it in. Layouts created by other system users can be streamed and shared to inform your own remodeling project. Their tagline: "collect, create, and collaborate." Since I have spent many months interviewing architects to help us gut out what we affectionately call our own 'Winchester Mystery House,' I will definitely look at using this service.
- Reveal is designed for searching and sharing unstructured data across workgroups. Both an index of project documents and the actual content are maintained. Information is both shared peer-to-peer and cached on the network for persistent access, in the event the original source is no longer on the network. The public beta will launch next month.
- Zoho announced the addition of Zoho Notebook. Users can work with other users, and leverage existing content in the creation or something new. Their mantra is "create, aggregate, collaborate." These folks will face forbiddingly stiff competition - both from wiki systems, which are more inherently collaborative, and from existing vendors in the office productivity space.
Cat herding
- The CircleUp alpha allows users to query a group of users, and get back a single, optimized result. In the demo, they walked through coordinating a ski trip; the system resolved who would leave when and from where, who was driving with whom, and how gear would be distributed amongst the various vehicles. Microformats are embedded in all of the results pages, so answer information can be uploaded into a number of applications. That's a lot of saved e-mail threads. CircleUp would be an amazing add-on to Evite or an online group calendar, and I suspect there are many applications (such as political polling or conjoint analysis) which are outside of the company's current execution plan.
- Helium combines user-generated content with peer review. Content worth reading rises to the top, so the site owner knows which content is worth paying for. Helium Debate rates online arguments on online discussions or blog posts, such that highly-rated comments rise to the top, while lower-rated comments drop to the bottom. This means that threads on Robin Williams' acting ability won't be prominent in a discussion of what happens in the afterlife. This would be a great complement to services like Digg or Newvine in addition to lively shared interest communities. (Disclosure note: I manage Omidyar Network's investment in Digg.)
- Nexo had one of my favorite demos of the week. They are pushing an anti-MySpace social networking platform, and created a Lindsay Lohan support group. The "Mean Girls" support group was able to add users, share resource links, do polls, IM, blog, share video, have threaded discussions, etc. etc. It's easy to use and add widgets, and you can lift the hood if you're more savvy. While an army of social networking sites came before Nexo, their offering provides a refreshingly easy and friendly interface.
- PairUp allows you to actually connect in meatspace with your social network. When you're planning a trip, you enter your travel plans into the system - e.g., going to DEMO in Palm Springs from 1/28 to 2/1 - and PairUp will tell you which of your contacts will also be there. Users can limit who has access to trip plans on a per-trip basis. You can set up trip alerts that let you know if folks in your network will be in your part of town or at the same conference, so you can decide if you want to reach out and schedule a meeting. As someone who travels for business, I'd love to know who I could meet up with for dinner after a day of meetings.
Predictions
- MyCurrency uses the wisdom of crowds to apply a smell test to housing valuations. There's an emphasis here on harnessing professionals - individual participants develop reputations based on their popularity, their contributions, and their accuracy/performance. What I like about this is that it answers the 'reputation for what?' question with high specificity, and weaker reputation offerings do not.
