DEMOfall: The wisdom of many, many individuals

The center of influence and knowledge gathering, organization, and sharing is shifting from a centralized authority to the many individuals at the edge of the network. In this session, the following companies showed their solutions for these critical knowledge work tasks:

• Diigo, Inc.: We spoke with Diigo last week while they were preparing for DEMOfall. Diigo combines web highlighting, note-taking, organization and sharing in a very nice package. Enabled by adding a bookmarklet to your browser (all major flavors are supported), Diigo is adding the ability to collect your web clippings into an easily shared WebSlide presentation. There is a Groups feature that allows you to predefine a distribution list for sharing information and the interface is nicely AJAXed to provide drag-and-drop organization of content. Diigo also provides a social network dimension that allows you to search across the public collections shared by other Diigo users to find people with similar interests. You can search by tags or profiles and extend your network to include others who have displayed a similar are of interest to your own. Inviting friends you already have is all well and good but Diigo provides a way to discover new connections in the web clipping sphere.
• coComment: is the company that allows you to track, manage and share your online conversations all from a single location. If web2.0 is about communication and your commenting on dozens or hundreds of articles, how do you keep track of all these conversations?

You can’t. It is virtually impossible to track all your comments let alone respond to the replies. The thing is, if you can’t follow a conversation, how can you comment on them?

This is why they built CoComment.

CoComment runs along side the website upon which you are commenting, allowing you to see the whole conversation and what others are saying. You can also bring other people into the conversation a number of ways; via email, if they’re already a CoComment user, if their in a group or some other area on the social web. Soon they’ll also be able to bring Facebook users into CoComment.

CoComment is the single location to track, manage and share conversations. In the eight months since the company has launched, they’ve powered comments on 220, 000 sites and 11 million conversations. They’ve also accumulated 500K users in eight the months since they’ve launched.

• Attendi, Inc.: “The battle for search engine domination is over.” That’s a bold way to open a DEMO about search. Attendi focuses on capturing and indexing what people are searching for and consuming on the web. “attendis” are people who are sharing information on the attendi network about what they’re interested in.A Talk Now button allows you to connect with others to discuss what you’re interested in. When both parties agree to communicate, a chat window opens allowing a conversation to take place,. What’s interesting is that these chats are saved and added to the attendi index so subsequent searches on that topic will also be discoverable.”It’s the difference between reading about Paris and talking with someone who is living in Paris.”In a coming release, attendi will allow bloggers and social network participants to embed a widget to facilitate access to the conversation space they’re building. We’ll definitely be visiting this company in the Pavilion after this morning’s sessions are finished to find out more about this.
• RelevantMind. Inc. is about tracking not every conversation only the ones that matter. People are talking about things that they’re passionate about and products that they’re passionate about.

Online we’ve done a poor job at supporting buying decisions. People are talking in communities and giving out this kind of useful information but if you aren’t in the right place at the right time, how do you find that information after the fact?

RelevantMind brings topic experts in various communities to help identify the best of class in a huge array of products. By capturing the conversations of these experts and indexing them across available products in essence taking someone from the “What” to the “Where” of the buying process.

Currently the company is launching with cycling and golf, rolling out new product categories over time.

• Fluid Innovation, Inc.: Virtual Ventures is a web-based community that allows participants to play venture capitalist. Fluid Innovations collects infomration about market leaders and innovators and provides a game space that allows people to evaluate products and ideas and help decide whether there’s potential for scale and success. Beginning with an investment round, where companies are evaluated using standard investment conventions, companies and products can be “funded” with a seed round of $1 milllion (virtual of course). After this funding has been applied, you can track the utilization of these funds and rate the effectiveness of how they’re used. Successful implementations create virtual liquidity events that add to the value of your portfolio and gives you additional funds to play with.Fun and games aside, this modeling technology has real world applications for a virtual exploration of commercialization potential and is being evaluated by Microsoft and others as a way to test drive potential innovations before putting real assets into play.
• Advanta: Ideablob

Ideablob.com by Advanta: Share, Compare and Celebrate Ideas.

Where do people with ideas go for advice? Mentors are rare and hard to find.Sometimes an idea withers simply because there’s nowhere to go or no one to turn to for advice. Ideablob is a place where people can go to get suggestions and advice and take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd.

Opportunities to develop ideas may be limited due to who we know, where we live, our resources, and many other factors. Some of us have advantages based upon where we live, who we know, and even our financial situation.

Ideablob can help increase the chances that you’ll get the advice or the connections that you need to take your idea forward. Ideablob also offers a $10,000 prize each month for the company the site visitors vote as best over that period.

This is an interesting if touchy-feely company. I’m not sure if you’ll see earth shatter ideas here - I for one would be concerned about revealing my ideas here because I don’t know what protections are in place to prevent someone else from simply taking what might be a really valuable idea and simply running with it.

For people that aren’t trying to change the world with their ideas, however, Ideablob may be a valuable even life changing.

• spigit: Best prop so far this morning – a jar of jelly beans. “Imagine this jar is your company and these jellybeans are the ideas in your company.” spigit aims to provide a a simulation engine and innovation framework for communities or companies to capture, evaluate, and explore the ideas being generated within that organization. spigit is modeled as an innovation economy. Participants can earn “spigits” and enhance their reputation (standing in the spigit community) through their activities. Review and approval by “experts” – those with high reputation values – can push an idea to the top of the stack. spigit provides a dashboard to monitor the real-time innovation processes within an organization in their enterprise edition. There’s an entrepreneur edition and one aimed at the education world as well. A number of public “spigits” have been made available including one tracking the 2008 political campaigns.
• Glam Media: Glam 2.0

Glam Media Launching Glam Media 2.0

Okay, I have to be honest. This one I just don’t get. The presenter said he was going to do five things in his presentation and although I tried very hard to identify those five things I simply couldn’t.
Glam Media claims very substantial traffic of a highly desirable demographic and they’re launching two widgets, Glam Storybox allows you to get socially ranked articles while you are searching the web, helping you find information that has been qualitatively ranked so that it is relevant and useful to you as you browse the Glam Media site.

The second widget allows you to curate - that is index and qualitatively rank items or articles it also allows you to compare how you curate compared to other people that are also curating similar types of content.

The company claims that this combination of activities helps to close the gap between the middle market and the long tale but frankly I just don’t see how the vast amount of content the company claims to have helps bridge these gaps or what, exactly, differentiates this model so much that it is, as the company claims, the beginning of “Web 3.0” (I was wondering if I was going to hear this starting this year and we didn’t even get through the first morning session before someone attempted to plant their flag on the next generation of the web.)

(Author’s note: from what I’ve seen and heard from the true movers and shakers of new technology, Web 3.0 will be the truly semantic web and unless I am missing something really significant here, this isn’t it).