A Wider Net

Business 2.0 magazine recently featured a list of 25 startups to watch. Among those are some interesting companies for marketers to watch and event planners to use. There are also a few companies that probably shouldn’t be considered “startups”, especially at the current web2.0 business development pace, but forgiving that, here are some examples. Oh, before I go onto the list, can I just say that’s it’s time for a new naming trend? Dropping the last vowel (or all of the vowels) from your name is going to look mighty dated pretty soon. There are a bunch of branding teams who might want to try hardr.

The list:

1. stumbleupon - Find web sites based on your interests and habits
2. slide - creates embeddable photo slide shows
3. bebo - Watch - 30 million users - might be where the fickle myspace and facebook users are flocking
4. meebo - Instant messaging ajax application that gets around firewalls
5. wikia - Watch - user-written magazines might be the next big thing in publishing
6. joost - Watch - founders of Skype and Kazaa have cred and this video network already has viacom
7. dabble - organize videos into playlists you can share
8. metacafe - Use if you’re pushing videos on You Tube
9. revision3 - Use (watch diggnation if you’re trying to stay on top of geek tech)
10. blip.tv - video platform for syndicating serial shows
11. fon - trying to leverage everyone’s wifi routers for common use
12. loopt - Watch - app lets friends keep track of where their friends are - has awesome location-sensitive targetting potential
13. mobio - Watch - speaking of location-sensitive targetting… mobile services like local movie listings.
14. tiny - Try - might be a moblogging event candid miracle.
15. soonr - Try - allows you to find and view stuff on your desktop through your phone.
16. turn - Consider - a new online advertising model.
17. adify - Consider - online ad marketplace with 4,000 publishers.
18. admob - Consider - ad distribution service for mobile phones. I hate the thought of ads on my phone.
19. spotrunner - need a cookie-cutter 30 second TV ad?
20. vitrue - allow your customers to upload videos about your products
21. successfactors - a six year-old company with $100 million in revenue is a startup?
22. janrain - helping you log in once, and access multiple sites with passwords
23. logoworks - The online logo buffet line
24. reardencommerce - also not a startup but worth a look for personal travel and agenda planning.
25. simulscribe - Try - converts voice mail to text emails.

Every blogger has his leftovers. And for leftovers comes Tumblr. At least that’s what I see it for - all the little stuff that you want to post but can’t/shouldn’t/won’t post on your main blog. It creates a Tumblog - a running log of thoughts, snippets, posts, scraps, and ends.
I played with it for a few minutes - and in those few minutes I had my own Tumblog created. You can make simple posts, quote text, insert conversation snippet, upload videos and images, integrate multiple RSS feeds, and even moblog to it. For a better example try Leo Laporte’s tumblog or the project.ioni.st . (I’m not sure if the last one is a Tumblr tumblog but it’s a tumblog either way.)

They also have an alpha version of “radar” - a display of recent tumblr posts - which is designed to help people discover other tumblogs.

I’m not sure at the moment how I would prescribe this to a typical marketing person. You may find them easy and fun enough to want one for each new campaign as a sort of progress journal. If you find a great marketing application let me know. At the very least, you can use this as a creative outlet - something many people in our business need from time to time.

Vivox got Second Life. Wow - that sounds like a jumbled pharmaceutical tagline!

Vivox, maker of internet voice products specially designed for massively multiplater online video games, has now added massively multiplayer online communities to its client base. Second Life will use the VOIP technology to allow people to talk to each other without a separate conference call. Vivox technology also makes sure you can only hear the people near you in virtual space, which is pretty dang cool.

This will certainly help add a much-needed degree of communication convenience to online meetings held within Second Life. What’s not clear is if the technology will support audio reinforcement, such as a podium microphone in an auditorium, so you can address a crowd.

Second Life also made the cover of the recent issue of Corporate Meetings & Incentives magazine. Considering the Second Life community of nearly 3 million registrants has under 1 million regular users, it sure is getting a lot of media attention (including their own Reuters desk).

Ning, a service that allows you to build your own social network, made waves today on Scoble and TechCrunch. Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, and Gina Bianchini, the current CEO. Ning’s social networks allow you to build a community of users who share a common passion in something, and enable them to share media and communicate. They can be public or private, and they cost next to nothing out of the box (more if you hire a company to design and reskin your network completely.)

This may be a terrific solution for smaller meetings and conferences. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but the design flexibility and low cost make it worth a try.

As Marc Andreessen said in his Scoble interview, every political campaign will have a social network. Here’s an example of a Ning network built for people who want to draft Al Gore into office:

Seth Godin wrote a nice bit on name tags done right. I agree - great name tags are essential for a successful meeting. I also agree that the art of the name tag as a service courtesy is getting lost, especially at trade shows. Exhibitors tend to use the show badges as name tags for their booth staff. Unfortunately, show badges tend to print the company name really small, making it difficult to figure out who is working the booth. I’d like to see exhibitors making professional name tags for their booth staff. You can, if you have the means, use the flashing badges or LED scrolling name tags but they do get distracting.

I think Seth has nicely arrived at the low-cost version of nTAG, the current leader in electronic matchmaking, ice-breaking name tag technology. See earlier post on nTAG. I’ve had lots of customers ask what they can do if they can’t afford a full nTAG solution and it looks like Seth may have it.

Sue Pelletier at Meetingsnet picked up the story about Wikia, Inc launching three new magazine-style communities - entertainment.wikia, local.wikia, and politics.wikia. Similar to Wikipedia, the massive open-source encyclopedia launched by Wikia’s principals not too long ago, all the articles will come from users. This type of magazine solution is what’s missing from Digg.com where users merely highlight stories - here the users create content.

At the office, we use a central Wiki to collaborate on meeting agendas. I imagine that larger meetings have started doing the same, although I have not seen a case where a wiki was used to collaborate on a large meeting where the attendees were invited to contribute. I’m sure we will see that become quite common before long. As a speaker at the upcoming Exhibitor show, I would welcome a wiki through which people could review the content, ask questions in advance, and propose alterations. As an attendee, I would also find that valuable - to have access to that content, even in outline form, and be able to ask the speaker to address specific details. Having this edited in public wiki form rather than having to handle individual personal requests would not only make it easier on the speaker, but hopefully provide some valuable public discussion.

NewTeeVee has a nice list of 10 great video mashup sites. Don’t forget to check out the ones in the top paragraph, too.

Each one has different functionality - some are designed to track popularity of videos across multiple sites like youtube and google, while others provide make-your-own-thing-and-share-it tools.

It will make your head spin a little, but if you’re attempting to follow the social/web/viral/video/mashup thing, then consider NeeTeeVee’s list a “to-do” list for ya.

Enjoy iFilm’s Viral Video Best of 2006

Note: The guy from the video below was recently featured at the IAEM(now IAEE) show.

Nabaztag - a wildly buzz-worthy robot that speaks, listens, blinks, and wiggles - can wake you up, tell you the weather and the traffic reports, read you the news you care about and email that you don’t, and even help you send secret messages to your rabbit-toting significant others. It’s worth a few minutes to play around on their site - you won’t believe me otherwise. It’s a communication bot and a toy, but unlike most other robotic devices that read you your mail and tell your kids stories - this one has moods, speaks it’s own mind, and listens to you.
I haven’t figured out if this creepy-yet-awesome rabbit is a sinister plot or a wildly inventive communication gadget. There’s something orwellian-creepy about a fleet of talking rabbits placed at our bedsides that receive their programming via the internet. I can imagine TV Tech-u-dramas called “Max Headroom Raving Rabbids” or “Star Trek Series 15: The Trouble With Nabaztags”

No matter how you slice it, these cute rab-bots are full of smart technology, and they do bring to mind one interesting marketing hook: Can you gift these to your customers in such a way that the critters will have to broadcast your news updates every morning while their owner is having coffee?

This is Engadget’s fault. But if you send it to a key customer and they love it, then it’s my fault.

There’s a ton of video on the web. Among this ton of video, is nearly a ton of video we can all live without. Gotuit Media has an answer - personal video tagging from any video source. This means that you can watch a video on the web, anywhere, and using the Gotuit system, identify the part that’s cool or relevant and share just that part with people. Then, you can add other scenes from the same video, or scenes from other videos, and stitch them together into something entirely new. It could be a highlight reel of football moments, or presidential mispronunciations, or it could be a collection of commercials from all your competitors.
Sharing videos has great viral potential already, and sharing sequenced bits of videos can be all sorts of fun, but it’s going to give the ad-insertion people fits. Gotuit seems to allow you to serve up a piece of a video without any leading or trailing ads, and without any of the source owner’s player page brands or banner ads.
In this example, a user compiled a chain of their favorite Family Guy scenes.

I’m not sure how this is legal, except it’s possibly protected in much the same way deep-linking is protected on web sites.

This tool may have practical applications for marketing and communication people as well, allowing you to easily tag and organize pieces of videos to illustrate examples, provide training on specific subtopics, etc.

I think it also should remind us that putting a video on your website doesn’t mean it’s going to stay on your website. Assume it won’t - and make sure that video carries your brand and message even if it’s lifted out of your page or player. A simple “bug”, like a logo in the lower-right, may be all it takes.

Then, hope and pray that someone cuts up your video and sends it to a ton of friends, and they do the same, and so on, and so on, and so on…

Via Techcrunch.

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