twopointouch

And so to Mashup* DEMO: fifteen-or-so five-minute presentations from new or new-ish web companies, presented one after another, without questions. I quite enjoy this style of event, though I reckon an additional three minutes for questions to each of the outfits represented would have added a lot of value. At the very least, though, it provided a bit of a crash course into the current state of Web 2.0 UK.

Video

Web TV continues to bubble away. This came in the form of a marketing tool - 15SecondTV personalises video clips - the example was the presenter’s face superimposed onto a character in a clip from 300. Brands can create a Simpsonize-Me style experience in video and potentially feed it back onto users’ mobile phones. BabelTV - no relation to Babelgum, apparently, and who don’t appear to have a web site (update: it’s http://www.babel.tv/) - is at the other extreme, offering an actual physical appliance similar to Media Centre PCs, but with what looked like a rather more foolproof interface than Redmond can currently provide, and which integrates back-up to a central server to create more of an internet appliance than a computer. Lastly, came Testcard.tv. This is an internet video aggregator, akin to TIOTI: it can find and play episodes of your favourite shows from various online sources. I have to wonder about the legality of these kinds of services. Were I a savagely litigious media company, like err… every media company, I’d have them shut down as soon as I heard of them. Like piratebay, they could claim that they’re simply directories of content, not publishers, though I reckon including a site-specific player - like Testcard has done - tips them into the status of publisher, and thus exposure to IP suits. Let’s see.

Local

WeLoveLocal and Tipped and Rummble were the latest incarnations of local search incorporating recommendations and reviews from friends (cf. FridayCities, TrustedPlaces in the UK alone). All these services seem to suffer a common flaw: there isn’t enough content on them for them to be useful for new users. There are no reviews of ‘florists’ in ‘Mortlake’ on any of those services; Tipped returned zero results (there are about six of them). Why shouldn’t I save time and just use Google Local instead? And what incentive do users have to add a review of anything? The proliferation of these almost identical services leads me to think that there’s also going to be a fair amount of rationalisation soon cf. the gazillion social bookmarking services that were around this time next last year. The one that manages to import networks from Facebook or MySpace - or creates a two-way widget for those services - probably stands the strongest chance of survival. [added] Let’s hope it isn’t just about funding and a war of attrition.

Other

Mobestar makes social networks for mobile communities, a white-label ‘off portal’ solution that brands could use to deploy mobile networks in short order. One interesting feature is the ability to conduct anonymised voice or video calls. Sounds potentially useful for dating or adult sites.

rollSense is a blog widget which finds interesting posts from your blogroll using contextual information to find related posts. Quite a neat idea, let down by execution - you can’t just add your whole blogroll, or let it automatically grab it from Wordpress or Google Reader. No, you add them one at a time.

meecard is an online business card that you can put into your blog or email signature and thus connect readers to your various online presences. Bit like profilactic, but with some automation of the profile creation, I gather.

Kwiqq provides social networks for brands. They have a library of social widgets that they can put together with varying business logic and presentation layers to create very different social sites quickly. Jack gave the example of the 2wentys site they put together for First Choice holidays: +100% internet bookings for the firm in just two months provided a pretty compelling case for proprietary networks, though I reckon finding the right product or service to base that around probably makes a big difference to the results.

Serena mashup composer allows "ordinary" users to create their own corporate mash-ups, without the involvement of corporate IT. I’ve tried a couple of these tools and would rather involve IT, on reflection.

edocr is about document interactivity - YouTube for documents - a lot like scribd. Having signed up for the ‘Friends of edocr’ group on Facebook, I’m going to have a closer look at this and hopefully find something more constructive to say about it.

Brandwatch is a social media monitoring tool for brands. You can see what the blogosphere (and social networks) is saying about you. It renders this as a score and a graph, with drilldown into the results. It strikes me that it’s easy enough to do this with free tools and also that if you’re satisfied that you’re doing enough to monitor your brand by looking at a graph, then you’re not really cut out for a job in reputation management.

Fav.or.it is a new RSS reader, plus commenting, plus blog-writing, plus ungame-able recommendation solution. It looks absolutely fantastic, but unfortunately there’s no reason for me to write about it here, since Mike wrote everything you could possibly want to know about the service yesterday. I’ll definitely be giving it a whirl, though. About time Google Reader and Digg and Bloglines faced some serious competition, eh?

Bondaii aka. Mobiglu is a ‘pervasive identity bonding’ solution. Your mobile phone (perhaps) as your personal key to every aspect of managing your identity. All our ‘things’ are becoming connected to the cloud, but they exist in digital bubbles. Connecting all those bubbles together could potentially make all those bubbles a lot more useful as they become aware of your preferences and relationships, etc. The short story published by Cory Doctorow the other day makes for an entertaining lunchtime read, and ably demonstrates why this sort of thing ought to be absolutely terrifying to any right-minded person.

Phew. You probably feel, dear reader, like I did at the end of the session. I reckon we deserve a pint.