The Launchpad session last year was one of the more exciting sessions at the Web 2.0 show. This year they had a panel filter through hundreds of candidates to arrive at the “baker’s dozen” below:
inthechair.com – music practice as a video game. Play along to background music and get realtime feedback on how you’re doing. Like Guitar Hero but you play with real instruments.
instructables.com – like Make Magazine for the web (O’Reilly, publisher of Make, is an investor). A collection of rainy day projects with community features built in. 30k members.
Klostu – Their other product, boardtracker.com, tracks 300 million bbs members posting 50 billion posts/day. Klostu ties all of this together and works like a Trillian that manages your identity across all the systems. Simplifies signing up for an account, let’s you cross post messages and search across bulletin boards easily.
Sharpcast – their product, Hummingbird, syncs files across mac, pc, web, and cell phone.
Stikkit – Rael Dornfest’s first product, universal input for short notes that parses unstructured data and tries to make sense of it and organize it for you. Type something in manually into their post-it like interface or email your notes off to a stikkit-specific email address tied to your account. “Simple, not simplistic. Clever, not smart. As close to paper as you can get without involving trees.”
Turn – applies searchlike technology to advertising. No keywords, bidded cost-per-action (CPA). Turn is network neutral and can optimize across graphical and text ads. 1000 advertisers, 5M ads, 21M unique page views.
Sphere – launching contextually related features. Added as a footer to articles on Marketwatch, TechCrunch, GigaOm and others. The results page is a pop-up (that somehow gets by my popup blocker) which brings together results from Sphere, the publisher’s site, and contextually matched advertising. Downplays links for matching looking at content on page. Installs with just one line of javascript on your template.
Omnidrive – a “storage aggregator” that pulls together all your online storage capacity. Drag & drop simplicity.
Adify – a platform for publishers to self-organize. Matchbin is aggregating small town newspapers who group together to land national advertising accounts. Ready to Rare, a comic book collection network. Washington Post is using adify for it’s sponsored blogs initiative. Has a community element because ad networks are, to an extent, communities.
3B.net – 3d browsing and chat, browsing becomes like walking through a mall or trade show. Works great for flickr and shopping sites.
oDesk – free to post jobs, free tests for certification, profile histories of potential contractors look like World of Warcraft profiles (number of missions, levels, talents, etc). Includes teamroom software to help you manage your relationship with your remote team. Work Diary is a way to track your provider with real time snapshots (at the interval of your choosing) of your remote contractor’s desktop. The snapshot feature was met with groans from the crowd but it’s important to overcome very real problem of trust.
Venyo – solves problem of “lack of trust” of blogs. Developed universal reputation management tool . Once registerd, adds little rating chicklet to your blog – users can than tag and rate a blogger. In some ways it’s like a mybloglog for reputation.
Timebridge – syncs calendars across systems – allows you to peer into people’s schedules to find out when they are free – get’s rid of the back and forth of trying to schedule meetings.
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