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Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad

Read/WriteWeb’s Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo!

The Launchpad at the Web 2.0 Summit is a popular event, the venue is
packed.  13 companies have 5 minutes each. Here are some quick
impressionistic views of how it went….

In
the chair
is a music-based video game, where people can interact with music –
e.g. generate your own content and play along. It’s being billed as a music
publishing platform, with mashup and remix tools. Today is the launch of their
version 2 beta. Seems like a cute tool, not sure how useful it is for most
people.

instructables
is “step-by-step collaboration” for home projects. It’s targeted at
“passionate” hobbyists. Again, it’s a nice tool… not groundbreaking.

Klostu
is positioning itself as “the blogosphere of bulletin boards”. Its aim
is to connect boards together, by giving you a unique id that you can use across
multiple boards. As the presenter said, it “has all the bells and whistles
of social networks”.

A good concept perhaps, although not sure if it’s compelling to bulletin
board users – aren’t they loyal to their particular boards? Not sure, but I’m
curious to know the percentage of people who use multiple bulletin boards.

Sharpcast
is next and this is a product I like (we’ve profiled it before on R/WW). It
synchs data across PCs, the Web and mobile. Sharpcast Photos was the first such
product, but today Gibu Thomas the CEO is launching a product code-named
Hummingbird – which synchs all files. Gibu had some issues with his demo
computers, but nevertheless the product is a compelling one I believe.

Rael
Dornfest’s new company has a product called stikki.
He too was initially affected by demo issues. Stikkit is a yellow post-it notes
tool. One of the things it does is “make messy data smarter” and
allows you to share that data. So it’s a very granular data-sharing app. It aims
to get as close to paper as possible. Sounds interesting, but it’ll have a tough
job replacing paper in my life (I still use paper notebooks!).

Turn
is a search-like tool for online advertising. It has bidded CPA pricing, for
graphical and text ads. The CPA actions could be a sale, a lead or anything.
They claim to analyze webpages to determine which ads are suitable for it. They
rank all their ads based on the probability of action. They call this
“automated targeting”. It sounds impressive, particularly as CPA is
mostly an unsolved problem right now on the Web.

Sphere
is a blog search engine. It’s had a lot of blogosphere buzz already, but
Technorati still seems to dominate this space. Now they’re partnering with
mainstream media, starting with MarketWatch. They have also introduced a little
clickable pop-up link, which displays related blogs and articles.

Omnidrive
is an online storage app, that aims to merge the desktop with the web. It’s now
positioning itself as a “storage aggregator”. It has both a desktop
and web interface, which both have an OS style interface. It also has sharing
features and a developer API.

Adify
enables you to build your own advertising networks – creating “one thousand
John Battelles” in the presenter’s words. [nb: by this point I’m getting
drowsy… not Adify’s fault, I should add! But it’s a long session and there’s
only so many product pitches I can bear….]

3B
is a 3D social network, that operates from inside the browser. You can use
MySpace, Hi5 or Bebo pages or photos you’ve loaded onto Flickr, Photobucket or
any other web service. For example it can spider MySpace, allowing you to add your friends there onto
3B. You can see and interact with your friends with 3B. It’s also a visual
search tool, allowing you to order search windows in the 3D space. You can
change the wallpaper and create “personal 3D spaces”. It looks like it
uses scraping to put other web content inside this 3D environment. Intriguing
product, which I am keen to explore some more. Received a good round of applause
from the crowd here.

oDesk
is a jobs website and community. It basically matches freelancers (called
“providers”) with employers. It has some project management tools to
complement all this. One of its aims to is to “build trust” between
participants – e.g. it can take screenshots of the worker every 6 hours and
track their mouseclicks (!!!). How this builds trust I don’t know…

Venyo
also aims to build trust, by giving blogs and other sites reputations. Includes
the Vindex, a “global trust index.” Sounds like a little too much work
for the participants. It’s a nice idea and possibly has a market, but getting
take-up will be challenging.

Timebridge is a scheduling and
calendaring tool. It works with Outlook and works by proposing meetings to
participants by email. Participants reply via a team environment. At this point
Timebridge does the scheduling (finds suitable time for everyone, confirms and
notifies, etc). Sounds like an interesting value-add for Outlook users, but is
it enough to lure Outlook users to try it?

Summary

Phew, that was a long session and everyone is tired now. Of all the ones
listed here, 3B was the one that intrigued me the most. But check out the ones
that interest you and let us know what you think.

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