In the end, Triggit was named as the people’s choice for best startup of Launch Pad.

You can read about each contender below.

Acquia – Acquia intends to provide products that improve on the open source Drupal social publishing system. Projects in development include Spokes, a notification system, and Caliper, a spam and content monitoring service.

Chirp – Chirp’s flagship product, chirpscreen, streams media and information from top social networking and media sites to your desktop. Information can be presented as part of either a desktop application or a screensaver, and content is aggregated from top sites including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and eBay.

Oortle – We covered Oortle’s upcoming new product videophlow earlier today, but here’s a recap: Oortle provides products that bring the community aspect back to sharing media. Their current release is photophlow (currently in invite-only beta), which provides an interactive flickr experience.

JobScore – The job hunt can be just as tough on employers as it is on prospective applicants. JobScore aims to provide a comprehensive solution to help facilitate the process. Employers can easily publish ads to all of the top career sites, and JobScore rates candidates by relevant criteria. Employers can also refer candidates to other members of the site (for a price, if they wish), further expediting the process.

TradeVibes – This site provides a community for people interested in startups, allowing users to share opinions, ratings, and discussions about them. Its profiles include brief overviews and other relevant information about companies. (Disclaimer: This site is a direct rip-off of CrunchBase).

Triggit – With a single line of JavaScript, Triggit lets website publishers easily add advertising to their sites with a simple WYSIWYG editor. Ads can be pulled from sites including Shopping.com and the Amazon affiliate program. Users can also easily add content from YouTube and Flickr. The software is especially appealing to publishers in the long tail who might not otherwise have the savvy to monetize their sites. Today Trigit announced support for integration with Google AdSense to widespread applause.

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Chirp will let you subscribe to a friend’s photo feed so that it can decorate your screen. Click on a photo and Chirp will take you to the corresponding Flickr page to find out more. This reminds me of the Slide Desktop application, except that it brings in photos and data from other Websites. It basically brings social widgets outside the browser, something we’ve also seen with desktop applications from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. The Sidebar in Windows Vista, for instance, lets you bring all sorts of widgets to the desktop, including online photos albums.

Maybe I’m missing something, though, because there is some smart money in the seed round. Greylock Partners, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC and angel investors Reid Hoffman (Chairman and founder of LinkedIn), Jay Adelson (CEO of Digg), and Dave Samuel (founder of Spinner.com and Grouper). CTO David Bill is formerly of Spinner. I guess Chirp’s focus on turning social feeds into a screen saver might give it more mass appeal than just a bunch of desktop widgets.

Phillips explains the difference between Chirpscreen and widgets in the following way:

We’re designed to take over your screen and turn your
computer into a display of the social content of your choosing,
automatically updated with content from your friends – your friend channel.

Taking a step back, if you separate out what we do into three areas:
content aggregation; filtering; and display, most of those desktop
widgets aggregate and then do a limited display. We’re focused on
having highly relevant filtering and a really engaging, interactive
display of that content, as opposed to a desktop widget which is
designed to be a companion to your desktop activities (browsing,
email, etc.).

What do readers think? Try the beta and tell me in comments.

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One of my earliest memories of the internet comes from elementary school where I remember seeing PointCast shown on our classroom computers. PointCast was a screensaver popular in the mid-90s that displayed news stories pulled in from over the internet. This hot Web 1.0 service died off in large part due to bandwidth limitations and the company’s inability to transition away from proprietary software and to the standardized Web.

Anyhow, I was reminded of PointCast when I checked out a new application called Chirpscreen that pulls content from Facebook and displays it in a Flash-based screensaver. Chirpscreen is basically PointCast but with personalized content (currently, only your friends’ photos and status updates, and your Facebook notifications).

The enthusiasm for PointCast may have waned because people realized how much better the web browser was for discovering news content online. Chirpscreen may succeed where PointCast failed in this respect, because the amount of online personalized content (i.e. content that relates directly to you or your friends/family members/etc.) is fairly limited, at least for now.

Chirpscreen plans on incorporating more content into the screensaver, such as your favorite RSS feeds and social graph info from other social networks (I’m sure they’re eagerly looking forward to the impending launch of MySpace’s developer platform). Chirpscreen will also be adding more interactivity and user controls that allow you to put more weight on the display of different types of content, as with the Facebook News Feed.

Chirpscreen is currently in private beta, but you can check out the program showcased as an application within Facebook here (warning: they’re still working out the bugs so it might crash your browser; it did for me a few times). If you want early access to the actual screensaver, submit your email to the invitation box on their website.

I’ve got to admit – I’m generally not very keen on Facebook applications, but I may just have to install Chirpscreen if the public beta works without hitches.

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