The annual Web 2.0 Summit kicked off today at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The conference Summit, which has been sold out for months, is noticeably larger than last year and hundreds of people are milling about, seeing and being seen.
The highlight of last year’s conference for me was LaunchPad, where thirteen young startups showed their stuff to the audience. See our coverage from last year here and here. Many of those companies are doing very well. Only one, Pubsub, has entered the TechCrunch DeadPool.
LaunchPad this year was perhaps even more competitive than last year. Over 200 companies applied to present at the conference. Only thirteen were accepted, and each had five minutes to demo their product to the crowd. We have a summary of what each announced below.
3B
3B creates a three dimensional browsing environment based on input from a user, who can then create an avatar to explore the space, invite friends, chat with them, etc. A demo is here. In my notes I wrote “pretty, fun, completely useless.” On further reflection I can see people creating a 3B for various promotional purposes, but it won’t be able to compete with Second Life for virtual reality attention.
Adify
Adify allows anyone to create a vertical ad network – their software handles all of the details and allows publishers to determine prices, ad types, and monitor advertising metrics. They aim to help an estimated 500,000 advertisers fullfill their desire for targeted advertising on the sites they want. The Washington Post uses Adify with their Blogroll platform.
Instructables
Instructables is a site catering to “do-it-yourself’ers” and includes lots of step by step instructions for creating things. 30,000 people use the site regularly, the company says. Today they announced the launch of new collaboration features. More on them in the near future.
InTheChair
IntheChair is best described as turning musical instrument practice into a video game. It’s a web application that lets musicians practice their instrument alongside recordings of professional musicians. By hooking up a microphone to your computer, the application gives you real-time feedback about how well you’re hitting the notes and tempo of any song in their library. Users can also record sessions and share them with their teacher, grandmother, etc.
oDesk
See our previous coverage of oDesk here. oDesk provides an online marketplace for finding talented programming contractors. They launched in May 2006.
OmniDrive
We’ve covered Omnidrive for nearly a year…they announced their launch today at the conference. They have an online, windows, and mac client that allow you to seamlessly store and sync files from your computer to your online drive. Their open API also allows for more specialized implementations. See our previous coverage.
Sphere
We’ve covered Sphere, an blog search engine, for almost a year. Today they launched Sphere It for blogs. TechCrunch has integrated Sphere It into our template and a link is included at the end of every post. Click it to see contextually related blog posts and other information relevant to the story.
Stikkit
Stikkit, the “digital equivalent of a sticky note,” launched today – see TechCrunch UK for deeper coverage. Use it to take quick notes, and Stikkit makes an intelligent decision as to exactly what you are writing about and takes action from there. Mention a name and contact information and it will store it in an address book. Event information is stored in a calendar. Stikkit also supports tagging and other taxonomy structures. We’ll be following up on Stikkit.
Venyo
Venyo is launching a reputation management application with a couple of interesting twists. Not many details yet.
TimeBridge
Timebridge integrates with Outlook 2003 and helps businesses bundle together easy meeting coordination and project collaboration. Meetings are coordinated by sending out email invitations with suggested meeting times that match up with everyone’s schedule. Attendees choose their best times, and Timebridge finds the best time for the group. They’ve taken $6 million in funding from Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners.
Turn
Turn is a new advertising network that work on a CPA, or cost-per-action, basis, meaning advertisers only pay if some defined action occurs, like a sale or user registration. Turn computes how often an action actually occurs, takes into account the bidded payment per action, and distributes ads across its network accordingly. Looks like there’s a lot of technology behind this, and the executive team is strong.
Klostu
Klostu launched today. It leverages the 300 million people who have participated in Boardscape message boards and allows them to create a single sign on and identity among all of the boards. Turns each message board into a social network. We’re going to dig deeper on this one. Great design.
Thanks for the summary. Sphere it sounds interesting: are you in a position to discuss the the business model behind integrating Sphere to TechCrunch?
booh. I was at VM world in LA instead but wanted to be at this show. Thank you for the recap!
The summary was very good
Looks like an interesting conference. Too bad I live on the other side of the country. Thanks for the summary, some of these look pretty good.
Cheers,
Cody Mays
http://www.threadbound.com
It’d be interesting if you could run a poll with this year’s launchpad startups and have users pick the next winner or deadpool candidate.
Sounds like fun times out there! Stellar recap — really helpful stuff. Many thanks.
Too bad we can’t see a little more details behind some of these young startups. A few of them sound particularly interesting, yet their sites are only visible to ‘beta participants’ or not at all.
Is the conference of the year, wish I was there, or getting stream feeds
I’m curious about the same question by Edwin: do you see any emerging business model in linking web 2.0 services from well known web places? Or we’re still far away from that?
My vote for surviving 2007 goes to Omnidrive and Instructables (low-cost).
Out of 200 companies only 13 are privileged to present to the conference. These thirteen companies should definitely be the cream of the new web companies I think to myself and start reading the list.
First company: 3B
My head starts to hurt. Even the comment is cool: “pretty, fun completely useless”. Taking a good look at this product I want to shout:
“pretty, fun COMPLETELY UTTERLY ABSOLUTELY USELESS crap”.
Hey mike. Were you in the decision board that chose these 13 companies out of 200? Isn’t innovation or super smart companies something one should look for in these conferences? It makes me wonder who the other 187 companies are…
odesk launched only in may 06?
how come it states on their website that developers have worked 4000(!!) odesk hours and are members since 2003? how can that be?
check out this link:
https://my.odes...=1530&pos=0
Michael?
I think many readers would love more coverage over the next few days about the events, companies, and speakers from the Web 2 Summit.
I would be especially interested in hearing your thoughts on the “bubble
effect”, meaning does this years event feel like loads of hype, or is there a solid platform below all the excitement.
Bob:
You could use ZapTXT ( Technorati feed + the alert features from ZapTXT. ) to get a stream of commentary from bloggers, many of them sitting at the conference writing in real time. That’s how I followed WidgetsLive and yesterdsays wEB 2.0 coverage.
Check out the following post and you’ll be up and running in a few min:
http://zaptxt-i...o-me-see-how-2/
Nice recap article.
Any knows if there audio/video available with coverage of the summit for download or online viewing? Thanks.
Lot of great products coming out. Agree with you that the first one seems a bit like a dud, especially with the presence of Second Life.
I wish I went to the con… sight.