Demo07: Day 2, Afternoon: "Wisdom of the Crowds"

The first afternoon block of day two included  set of information-sharing and collaboration services under the heading of "Wisdom of the Crowds," playing off the title of the James Suriowecki book of a similar name. The companies included:

• Boorah, Inc.
• PairUp, Inc.
• Zoho/AdventNet, Inc.
• Me.dium, Inc.
• CircleUp, Inc.
• Nexo Systems, Inc.
• Attendio, Inc.
• DesignIn, Inc.
• My Currency Co.
• Nextumi

Boorah: Text Says: Two Thumbs Up. Or Down.
CEO Eric Moyer and CTO Nagaru Bandaru demonstrated a series of search queries that Moyer claimed could provide analytical data from raw text. The company’s semantics analysis engine analyzes, say, restaurant reviews, and automatically generates review points based on users’ text comments (get it? Boo, Rah?). The idea is that natural language queries are a better way to get information, and that extracting data from plain English text saves users from having to provide explicit ratings. There seems to be a high margin of error with this approach, and it’s not clear why users are more likely to write comments than to simply rate services and products based on straightforward scoring. But we’ll reserve judgment until we see it in action.

PairUp: Meet Me In St. Louis
Who’s going where I’m going, or who’s here where I am? According to Founder & CEO Esteban Sardera, PairUp offers “connected travel,” a new approach to networking while you’re on the road. You upload your Outlook contacts, post your travel plans, and choose whom you want to be able to find out where you’re going. Assuming that others have done the same thing, you’ll all see whom you can network with. You can also tag your contacts to show whom you saw at what previous events. It seems to have the same fundamental flaw as, say, Plaxo: Do I really want to share my contacts, do I really want my own contact information shared, and will enough users do it to make the service valuable?

Zoho/AdventNet: The Next Generation of Web Apps?
Zoho is an “online notebook” that lets users drag and drop different media components onto Web pages. CEO Sriidhar Vembu showed how the service supports a range of different page types, allows you to link components between pages, and lets multiple users collaborate on page changes. You can also dynamically link content from Web pages in the wild, and embed external Web applications into Zoho pages. Though the interface was a little rough, there seemed enough functionality to make it a potentially useful service.

Me.dium: Every Move You Make
A page from GigaOm.com’s coverage of Demo was displayed on the screen, then a small window appeared purporting to show icons representing other users watching the same site in real time. “Me.dium reveals the hidden world of people behind your browser,” said Kimbal Musk, CEO, Musk says the browser add-in turns off whenever you’re on a secure site, and lets you choose if you want to be visible to all, friends, or none. “Being around people changes everything,” said Musk repeatedly – assumedly meaning that people will change their behavior when they see what other users are surfing where you are.

CircleUp: What Gazinta, Gazouta
CircleUp is a “social communications service” designed to allow you to communicate more efficiently with groups of people. Suppose you’re sending an email message asking for help from a group of soccer parents: CircleUp’s semantic analysis engine suggests modifications to the question you’re asking, so you’ll get more straightforward answers. Using a wheel interface, you can see the members of your network, and choose who should see the message – email, instant messaging, and “eventually” SMS. The software aggregates multiple responses into a survey-like page, and includes widgets that better structure responses into a set of answers with numerical data: “Gazintas” are widgets that CircleUp provides to put information into the network, while “gazoutas” help you take it out.

Nexo Systems: GroupSpace
CEO Craig Jorasch and VP Marketing Gina Jorasch (related, you think?) demoed a new approach to group content management. “Our goal is to do for groups what MySpace has done for individuals,” said the male Jorasch. The female Jorasch offered a gratuitous drive-by statistic – 100 million groups in the U.S. – to point out the need for people to collaborate. Co-founder and COO Tom McGannon bravely donned a wig to emulate “Lindsay Lohan’s rehab group,” and proceeded to add a variety of components, including pictures, surveys, and email communications into a shared Web site. The user tools looked clunky, but then so do those in MySpace, and that limitation doesn’t seem to have diminished its popularity.

Attendio: Recommendation Meets Event Listings
The events listing arena is becoming a rather crowded space, which Attendio knows: The company cites competitors such as Eventful, Upcoming.org, and Zvents, and could add Confabb as well. Yet Attendio pushes on, offering a service designed to bring information about events "important to you" (as determined by yours and others' preferences) by Web, email, or cellphone. Standard “iCalendar” formatted data comes to you as “feeds” of events from the Attendio database. It’s not clear, though, if the company pulls event information from its competitors’ databases as well. CEO and founder Gerardo Capiel says Attendio is a featured Windows Vista add-in for Outlook 2007.

DesignIn: Home Improvement
Founder Ramsay Hoguet says that $305 billion was spent on home upgrade products in 2006. As Hoguet offered the voiceover, “colleague” Hillary Hauser showed how the online MyDesignIn application lets users design home layout models using a “drag and draw” interface (my term, not theirs), pull data from catalog Web sites, and assign “social bookmarks” so others on the team can see suggested remodeling components. What’s interesting is that DesignIn intends to treat Web-based information as part of the design process, an interesting approach that could be applicable for a range of other collaborative processes.

My Currency: The Wisdom of Brokers?
“Have you ever gotten screwed buying or selling a house?” began Karim Tahawi, Many hands appeared. The home sales process is broken, Tahawi maintained, and the Net offers little help: Two thirds of Internet leads have a sales conversion ratio of zero, he claimed. To increase the likelihood that you’ll get or pay the “right” price for a house (after all, what people pay is what the market is, non?), My Currency (which needs a new name) has a new spin on predictive markets. Their first target is real estate. The site is designed to do three things: Help you find a vetted professional (broker) by showing the top performers in an area; get indexes of housing values determined by local “communities” (assumedly brokers); and get information shared by people in the community (assumedly brokers, buyers and sellers). For example, Tahawi said, “Ask the community: What’s the future value per square foot of a house in this neighborhood?” The assumption is that housing pros will make accurate predictions to increase their reputation ratings.

Nextumi: Passing Around Pictures
CEO Mike Blackwell talked about, and VP Products Gina Winkler demonstrated, Share2Me, an offering that “bridges the gap” between email and instant messaging. Blackwell claimed that to the new generation – 15 to 24 – email is the new snail mail, because the younger set won’t check their inboxes any faster than they’d receive a letter. Gen-X “colleague” L.J. showed how a user can automatically send a single image to email, cellphone, instant message, SMS, and a MySpace page using Share2Me –  where, according to Blackwell, “It’s faster to share anything, to anyone, anywhere” – seemingly a mildly overstated claim, given that the pair didn’t demonstrate sending anything but still images.

gB

Comments

[Uri Baruchin]

Isn't me.dium a reincarnation of bubble causality Gooey?
A short while after it came out some messengers added that functionality as a plugin (ICQ included) and it never really took off...