lifeIO is meant to serve as a control panel for all of your communication, featuring tabs for Email, calendar, note taking, social sites, and RSS — in other words, a one-stop-shop where you can conduct the vast majority of your online activities. That’s a lot of personal information to store in one place, but fortunately everything is encrypted and transferred via a secure HTTPS connection. Features are broken into broad sections, like ‘Social’ and ‘Email’, which you can jump between using a slim menu bar at the top of the screen. The site does a good job keeping things consistent — navigation within a section is always done on the left side of the screen, with the content itself appearing in the middle (it works similarly to most desktop mail clients, like Outlook). Finally, the right portion of the screen is always dedicated to the lifeIO MyStream, which provides a real-time stream of new blog posts and notices as they come in. It can be a lot of content to absorb, but fortunately lifeIO lets you customize which items appear at a given time.

The ‘Social’ tab is reserved for services like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace (the number of supported services is actually quite limited right now, but more are on the way). One possible workaround if you’re looking to import as many services as possible: simply import your FriendFeed RSS feed. This social information, along with your Email, makes the site’s search feature potentially very powerful. Other features include the ability to chat with your buddies on most common protocols, including AIM and MSN, and a ‘Shopping’ section that lets you persistently monitor search results for a certain product.

The site has some good ideas — I especially like the real-time stream of new content that shows as new blog posts are appearing from my RSS feeds. But there are definitely some usabililty issues to work out before the site launches to the public. For one, the site needs another layer of polish: feeds and search results appear as unnecessarily large boxes (these would be great if they included extra content, like images from the article they linked to, but they’re fairly empty). And navigation can become a bit confusing at times. And perhaps most important: the mail client still has a very long ways to go before it will be able to match Gmail’s interface, which is going to be key if the site is going to draw any hardcore users. All of that said, lifeIO is still in very early stages, and we can likely expect some major improvements in the future.

Disclosure: lifeIO was a sponsor at our August Capital party earlier this month.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

I drafted some real-time notes of the products demo’d and launched at event at CrunchNotes, and my more complete notes are below.

Attensa	Ether	lifeio
Netvibes	PostApp	PROTOMOBL
Sharpcast	SoonR	StumbleUpon
Vpod.tv	Webaroo	ZiXXo

Sharpcast

Palo Alto-based Sharpcast (TechCrunch posts here) has developed a platform to sync application data across your computers and mobile devices. Their first showcase application is Sharpcast Photos, which not only pushes photos from one device/computer to others, it also keeps them synced. Make a change on one and it pushes the changes to the other copies as well. There are lots of new applicaitions coming as well (documents, calendar, contacts). The company, which has raised $16.5 million in capital, will be application-agnostic so you don’t have to switch to using new software. Windows only today, Mac coming soon.

Webaroo

Webaroo, headquartered in Santa Clara is a new service that launched in April that allows PC users (no Mac support yet) users to access cached web content when they are offline. Webaroo offers pre-selected content, called “web packs”, and users can also cache whatever websites they would like to have access to. For more, see the TechCrunch Webaroo review here.

PostApp

PostApp is a new company that allows users to pull web services directly into their blog or other website without having the technical skills to use the API supplied by the service provider. With the explosion of widgets, PostApp may be the right application at the right time. They also secured $1.5 million in funding from Hummer Winblad. See the full profile here.

Vpod.tv

Vpod.tv was one of my favorite companies presenting at a conference in Spain last month. It is a video sharing site, similar to YouTube, but that focuses on transcoding to most video devices (ipod, PSP, etc.) and allowing users to download video to those devices. They also have an innovative approach to monetization. See the full TechCrunch post here, which also discusses their $5.1 million funding.

Ether

Ether officially launched at Supernova. They’ve created an “ebay for services” that allows people who wish to sell their time on the phone to do so. Place an Ether logo on your site – when someone clicks on it they can set up a time to speak with you according to the terms you’ve set (price, time of call, etc.). When your phone rings, there is a person on the other end who has already given their credit card information and is looking for your advice. Ether went into beta in March, and we covered the official launch here.

Lifeio

Bruce Spector from attap gave the Supernova audience a very early look at Lifeio, “the new life organizer”. Lifeio will combine instant messaging, email, calendaring, contacts, to-do lists, etc in a multipage Ajax site (from what I saw it looks like Lifeio is competing with Goowy, Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc.). Lifeio is also opensourcing the platform framework, called jitsu. Look for more details as the September launch date approaches, and sign up for the beta on the Lifeio homepage.

Other attap companies include Riffs, Buzzvote and personal DNA.

GearON

GearON, a mobile service launching this month from ProtoMobl, centers on your phone’s contact list and creates a social network around it to share photos, music, events and venue information. See the flash demo of GearON here to get a better idea of what it’s all about. Their launch will be covered on MobileCrunch as well as here at TechCrunch.

Soonr

Soonr is a new mobile platform that we’ve previously covered at TechCrunch. One of the most useful applications they’ve launched so far is the ability to use Skype on a normal cell phone (all you pay for are the Skype-out charges from Skype to your own cell, and you can then use Skype to call anyone on your Skype list). The Mac version of Soonr was announced at Supernova.

Zixxo

There are a few ways to look at Zixxo. For users they will deliver highly targeted local and national coupons to you based on whatever personal and demographic information you choose to share with them. For businesses, they are a very cost-effective way of reaching consumers who actually want to receive these coupons. For third parties there is a revenue share opportunity for bringing users and/or businesses to the network. Zixxo is still very young, but the core idea is strong. Look for a potential quick acquisition of this company if they start to get traction.

Attensa

Craig Barnes, the CEO of Attensa, talked about how his suite of RSS reader applications (mobile, outlook, online) analyze user behaviors to recommend specific content and help people deal with information overload. They’ve also just released a new version of Attensa for outlook. TechCrunch posts on Attensa are here.

Netvibes

Founder and Co-CEO Tariq Krim gave the audience an overview of London and Paris-based Netvibes, the Ajax home page that has seen tremendous growth and now has millions of passionate users. Netvibes now has an active community of independent developers creating modules for the site. Netvibes is on a roll. TechCrunch posts are here.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a social browsing application. Users download a browser toolbar and can find popular sites in different categories, vote on sites, etc. Stumbleupon has nearly 1 million registered users in 139 countries, who “stumble” 2.2 million sites er day. Advertisers can get their ads in front of a targeted audience for 5 cents an impression. I use this service.