This week we’re going to see dozens of companies launch new products. Here are a few of the companies presenting this week at DEMO that are showing some strong potential:
ffwd:
In most cases, choice is a good thing. But when it comes to online video, the abundance of content available on the web can be overwhelming. ffwd (pronounced fast-foward) deals with this by picking your videos for you. The site uses video meta data as well as user behaviors to create virtual “channels” of video, which are essentially dynamically updated playlists.
Whenever the site presents a video you aren’t interested in, you simply hit the “ffwd” button to play a new selection. The system learns from your choices to help provide more relevant channels, and if you don’t want to spend time “training” it you can simply follow a like-minded friend.
The site is launching to the public with content from Hulu, Comedy Central, YouTube and a large number of other sources. For more details, check out our introductory post on ffwd.
Rudder shares a lot in common with Mint, a personal finance site that debuted last year at TechCrunch40 (and won the conference’s top prize). Both sites present financial data in attractive, intuitive graphs. But Rudder is taking a slightly different approach: while Mint analyzes your past spending habits to help you adjust in the future, Rudder is concerned with telling you how much you have available to spend on a given day.
The site keeps track of recurring payments, like bills and groceries, and subtracts the money you will soon owe from your income to tell you “what’s left”. The site emails its updates on a daily basis, and allows users to customize their emails with a selection of widgets.
With image piracy rampant on the web these days, a number of startups have sprung up to help users easily obtain legal pictures. Photrade has a similar goal, but it also manages to help casual photographers make some cash in the process.
Most photo directories are filled with images from established photographers - not a bad thing, but there isn’t typically room for amateurs. Photrade allows users to upload their images, which they can then offer for free to others while appending a contextual advertisement. Photograhers keep a cut of the ad revenue, giving them an incentive to keep uploading quality images, and other users get to use the images legally free of charge.
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How about making a list of new companies whose stock we can buy based on your calculations, something like recommending everyone to buy Google stocks
In this case we can just buy these companies products but not make any big 
~Photrade is at par with other stock image websites.
I think they are working on it. Give it time and I am sure some of these companies will shine through.
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We’d also launched our startup today, check us out at http://www.adexcel.com
AdExcel is “The Ning for Advertising Networks with more juice in Socialized Ads”..
Let us know what u think
Best,
Darren
Cofounder of AdExcel
Jeez. Talk about dull start ups. Do we really need another video site, finance site or photo site.
Come on be original. All of these will be deadpool in 6 months.
What do you have in mind? What would you consider to be an original idea?
pr0n
yep. deadpool. can’t blame them for being unoriginal since let’s face it - it’s ALL been done.
BUT seriously, was this the best that TC could find @DEMO? lame. very lame.
and deadpool in 5 mos.
Why do companies continue to launch on the INTERNET (you know, that globally, connected thing that you can use all over the planet) with non-internationalized sites? I’m not asking for localization, here, man, just internationalization. What am I complaining about? Rudder.
It woulda been SO easy to be non-currency specific. They could add in currency conversions in the future, and that would be useful for people who live in one country and earn or spend money in more than one, but in the meantime they could have just made it non-dollar-centric.
“What currency would you like to use? Great! All your transactions will be managed in that currency. If you need a converter for transactions in another currency, try … (link here)… ” See how easy it could have been?
Hey Lisha - We’ve definitely considered supporting multiple currencies. In fact, we have had quite a few beta testers sign up from countries like the UK, Australia, & Brazil. We have also had several US/Canadian expats who live/earn money in multiple countries express an interest in multiple currencies. In order to truly meet their needs, we plan to connect to the banks in their respective countries. While we’re exploring options to connect and support banks overseas in a cost effective way, we currently support approximately 3000 banks in US and Canada.
Rudder seems a bit dated to me… if cash on hand is the question of the day then the text alert from my bank would suffice. Not sure I am clear how Mint.com couldn’t turn on this feature tomorrow if they wanted too.
Rudder is a lot more than simple cash on hand. Our objective is to reduce your burden of analysis by providing you with the information you need to make better financial decisions going forward.
We currently offer widgets that analyze all your accounts and perform projections that show you things like, how much you can spend/invest without running out of money when bills are due. We have another widget that analyzes your “burn” rate, and lets you figure out whether you need to slow down on your spending.
While banks may send you alerts of low balances on the accounts you hold with them, we look at your overall financial situation.
Our approach to personal finance is different from the other PFM players in the following ways:
1. Delivery Channel - We deliver relevant financial information and related projections to you. You no longer have to remember to check on your finances.
2. Analysis - We focus on the future, not on the past. We provide you with the kind of “forward-looking” information you need to make better decisions.
3. Tailor made PFM - We offer a widget based building block solution that lets you pick the features you want and ignore the others. (We’re going to be unlocking more widgets in the near future.)
Photrade reminds me of GumGum http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....-platform/ and another one I could swear I read about here (I think it was targeted at bloggers in need of photos to go with their stories). Maybe works good in theory, but the models need tweaking (or more).
Also look out for TravelMuse (www.travelmuse.com) who are launching Social Trip Planning at DEMOfall 08. Now you can:
- Create Trips: Build a queue of all the places you want to go.
- Save Research: Manage your travel bookmarks and notes in one place.
- Organize Schedules: Build day-by-day plans for each trip.
- Collaborate on Trips: Plan trips with your travel companions.
- Invite Friends and Share: View friends’ plans and repurpose their research.
Press release: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-.....amp;EDATE=
Good morning! I’ll have a McYawnwich with that order…
Seriously, these are the best 3?
Photrade, old but simple concept, terrible photos.
Keep an eye on Photocase. Simple concept, great photos.
Lame-o Maryanne!
Good Luck to all the presenters today at demofall08.
Another presenter today that everyone might like is called DocLanding, http://www.doclanding.com, they are a document management, storage and collaboration tool. It is meant to help entrepreneurs have the same file storage and sharing capabilities as large companies. It is pretty cool.
Good Luck everyone.
ffwd has some potential . i dont know much about rudder so i leave it there. but i save the worst for last why is this site Photrade here it offers nothing really unique
that isnt being done already and seeing its alexa is 80k i doubt it is new
doing some research on nikhil roy & it turns out he’s the guy behind spendview (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/spendviewspendview) which was a Mint.com competitor.
looks like they saw the competition & bailed on sv. i guess rudder is a new incarnation of their sv code.
it was smart for them to dump sv with Mint & everybody getting into personal finances (especially if you look at their non-existent traffic YIKES!)
but email you finances? couldn’t they find something better to do with the left over venture money & ip?
seriously. yawn.
Just to clarify the reason behind the change in direction. While SpendView was in private beta, we came to the realization that the model used by spendview, quicken, mint, etc, faced the following fundamental challenges.
1. They were all focused on analyzing historical data and didn’t provide the information you needed to make better decisions going forward. (For instance, if I go out and buy an expensive TV, I know that’s going to burn a hole in my finances, how does seeing that info on a pie chart help me make better decisions going forward?)
2. Categorizing expenses is an exercise only the motivated few perform. Even though SpendView offered features like automatic categorization & tagging, it still required some effort on the users part (for those transactions with odd descriptions), which very few were willing to perform.
3. As important as managing money is, people don’t relish logging on to PFM sites often. Or at least often enough to help them make better financial decisions. So, with Rudder, we decided that we would offer to deliver our product to the user. No effort required. (You can choose the frequency of the email, or decide not receive the email at all and only log in to the site.)
So with Rudder, we’ve taken a brand new approach, an approach that we think adapts to user behavior. We focus on the future, not on the past. We analyze your finances at a high level and let you know what you can do going forward. (Creating buckets for expenses and going back and reconciling against them is irrelevant. We’ll let you know whether you have some money to burn or whether you need to slow down. You can choose the areas you want to cut down on.)
BTW - the name change had nothing to do with change in product. It was due to a trademark issue we ran into with a UK based company.
Nikhil Roy,
Founder and CEO, Rudder.com
Photrade is the most interesting to me, as someone who consumes a lot of stock photography.
However, I’m wary of buying stock from a site selling lolcat photos like this:
http://www.photrade.com/single.....to_id=2507
I’ve got no problem with lolcats, but that smacks of people selling photos they don’t own the rights to.
Also, I’m still waiting to see what is different about the site than iStockPhoto. What I really want is flickr to integrate commercial licensing without attribution requirements into their platform.
Good call George, I’m not sure why people use Photrade in that manner(there are a million other photo sites that could be used instead)…seems highly inappropriate to me!
That’s the whole idea behind the site…protecting YOUR work. I’m going to mention this to Andrew/Krista with your comment specifically in mind.
I’d hate to see photographers (of which I am) getting the shaft on account of these types of things.
Rudder returns an SSL cert error at http://rudder.com. Fail.
I don’t understand Rudder’s target market - the set of people who are worried about having enough money to pay their bills, but are searching for internet web sites to help them predict future cash flow? How big could that group of people be? Who exactly wants to advertise or monetize that tiny demographic?
Mint was more promising, but I think it has also lost its way as well. Both these sites seem to lack a clear and compelling idea of who their target market is, and how that target market could be desirable to advertisers.
I continue to think that there is a place for a service that analyzes your transaction stream and offers savings opportunities and advice. I also think that the kind of people who would use a money management website are likely to be the kind who worry about finding savings opportunity. And finally, I think that demographic could be attractive to advertisers and could be monetized.
But it pains me to watch a startup like rudder, going after a demographic that seems either non-existent, or unattractive to advertisers, or both.
@Fiona,
Shameless self-promotion! I’ve used TripIt, Dopplr, Home and Abroad (and more) and fail to see what TravelMuse has to offer, except for a very busy home page design. Been there, done that.
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I am using photrade since long time, but I am not a professional phtographer.
Although the business model has been used in the past, photrade would be pretty for someone like us who is a casual photographer but would like to share photos.
nice one