At this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, we set out to find some of the most interesting companies who had set up their booths on the Expo floor. This was no easy feat – the Expo is not a place where new and innovative companies tend to launch – it’s more of a place for established companies to showcase who they are and what they do. A lot of the companies used the event to bring attention to their latest announcements, be that a new partnership, a new version of their software, or a new feature set. That said, there were a handful of companies that really got us excited. Here are our favorites.
We filmed the company representatives describing what their company does and those videos are featured below. You can either watch the footage, read the descriptions, or do both.
TweetCall: Speak Directly to Twitter
TweetCall is a service which lets you Twitter from anywhere just by dialing a number and speaking your tweet into the phone. The reason this service is great is because it doesn’t use voice recognition technology in order to translate your voice message to a tweet – it uses real people to do the transcription. This leads to much more accurate updates as there are humans proofreading all the messages for proper syntax, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. To try it yourself, just call 1-877-TWEETCALL (893-3822).
Zeus Technology: A Load Balancer for the Cloud
Zeus Technology provides application delivery software to ensure applications are faster, highly available and easy to manage. Zeus’ ZXTM solution lowers costs for data center space and power, cuts the cost of bandwidth and offers the highest scalability of any application delivery controller or load balancer in the industry. As the only software application delivery solution available, the Zeus products are flexible whatever your deployment environment; the cloud, a virtualized environment, a purpose-built Zeus appliance, or standard servers.
Static: The World’s First Micro-Broadcasting Network
Static lets you micro-broadcast articles, photos, videos, blogs and more to Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. The site is more than just another Ping.fm as the broadcasts themselves are grouped and tagged by topic and they can be voted up or down by community members. In other words, it not only lets you update various social networks but it also aggregates everyone’s updates and turns those into a searchable resource.
MotherApp: Letting Web Developers Build Mobile Apps
MotherApp enables web developers without mobile expertise to create native client apps on iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and other mobile platforms. The web developer just has to set up a web site based on the MotherApp HTML specification. MotherApp then creates the app in the mobile format you specify and sends you the code. All you need to know is HTML – MotherApp does the rest.
80Legs: On-Demand Web Crawler
80legs provides web crawling and online content analysis service to developers. With 80legs, any developer can crawl up to 2 billion pages per day at $2 per million pages. In addition to crawling, developers can use the service’s 50,000 computers to perform custom computation on the web content they find, such as semantic analysis, image comparison, video content extraction, and much more. (Sorry, no video of this one.)
