The Web 2.0 Expo organizers took a page from American Idol today and encouraged the audience to vote for its favorite of three pitches:
Spock.com is an editable people directory. Each person on Spock is tagged, has a biography, etc. Machines do most of the work by harvesting the web for whatever it can find on a person, then humans inform the system by adding or voting on tags, adding new people, etc. The service is built using Ruby on Rails, and Jay Bhatti threw out a pitch for Ruby talent. The company is also sponsoring a $50,000 prize for whoever comes up with the best solution for entity resolution, one of the more obvious, yet difficult, challenges that must be overcome.
WebEx Connect is a collaboration platform that wants to 'revolutionize how application suites are built and sold.' The company sees its long-term opportunity around modular, people-centric, and flexible forms of collaboration. WebEx has 3.5 million WebEx users, and this launch is clearly a way to start monetizing them for more than just Web conferencing.
Humanix released inpowr, a web site designed for consumers that want to 'create balance' for self-exploration and well-being. Users answer questions about their day or their views, then rank their well-being at that moment. After 21 days of adding data, the system purports to show the links between your daily actions and your well-being. (If you have a marketing hat, this is a clear application of conjoint analysis.) Folks in the techie audience appeared skeptical of this one, but who knows -- the LOHAS (aka cultural creative) market is growing rapidly.
At the end of the pitches, the audience could text to vote for their favorite pitch. My pick for the best demo was Spock, which had a clear application, broad appeal, and a practical guarantee that every US consumer with broadband will visit the site to check on their profile and tags. I expect that they've kept track of the popularity of personal Google alerts and will combine this propensity for navel-gazing with new social media norms.
Note: the text-to-vote didn't work in real time as the organizers hoped, so I'll update this post later if they circulate the audience's vote.
