Last night I attended the spring presentations of the Web Innovators Group Boston. The format is as follows: three "main dish" presentations (about 6 minutes each) followed by 7 "side dish" presentations (limited to 30 seconds). Before and after the presentations, booths are set up around the room, giving the presenting companies an opportunity to demonstrate their technologies. Kind of like a mini-DEMO (or TechCrunch50 if that’s your preference).
Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of the companies that presented last night. I’ll check some of these out in more detail very soon.
Main Dish Presentations
I first saw good2gether this year at DEMO. They are trying to "enable nonprofits to enter volunteering opportunities, events, in-kind donation needs, etc. once – then good2gether distributes that information across their network to leverage free traffic." Through their media partners, good2gether will distribute contextual ads for nonprofits. For instance, if you were reading an article related to diabetes on Boston.com, good2gether would put up ads for, say, volunteering opportunities at your local ADA.
Here’s their DEMO2008 Video:
PicMe bills itself as an easy way to share, view and discover photos. It helps you organize your photos in stacks and share them via facebook, flickr, etc. Here’s what it looks like:
I tried to check it out but had no luck. After installation, PicMe completely crashed and took everything down with it. Hopefully I can get it to work later.
They offer a free plan, a premium plan ($9.95 a year) allowing you to share up to 5000 photos, and a Professional plan with up to 15000 photos ($29.99/year).
They’re making sending greeting cards ridiculously easy. Here’s the idea: you go to JackCards, sign up, add your contacts and their info (birthday, address, etc…). Find them a card, and JackCards sends you the card – stamped and addressed. All you have to do is write your message and pop it in the mailbox.
To me, something like this would be really useful. I still have about 15 Winter Holiday cards in my laptop bag.
Jack Cards has been covered on the Rachel Ray show, the Wall Street Journal, and Oprah’s magazine. I’ve heard she has some influence.
Side Dish Presentations
Their three step process:
- StylePath learns your style
- Selects items from 3000 sites
- Shows just what you like
I checked it out quickly and found this watch (so, if anyone is looking to buy me a belated birthday present, well, there you go). They learn your tastes through collaborative filtering, and present results as a comparison shopping tool.
Search the Arabic web, use English letters.
A social network, an advertising network, and a marketplace for bloggers. I’ll be posting more on entrecard tomorrow.
Take pictures with your mobile phone and share them with your friends.
Helping content producers (of video, photography, writing, etc.) promote and track their content.
A multilingual dictionary focused on helping people learn new languages.
Custom-branded flash video sites with analytics.
Conclusion
Well, that’s it for now. Time to check these out and kick the tires. The next Web Innovators Group Boston meeting is on July 15th.
