New companies launched today

With so many companies launching at Web 2.0 here are few tidbits I took from the 6 minute demos they did. Also gave each an interestingness rating in stars.

SocialText, Ross Mayfield (***)

• look at case study of intranet wiki
• Wikiwyg.net (GUI Rich Text Editor)
• Synchroedit.com (sharable editing interface)
• Mention "web2con" at socialtext and get free wiki for 5 users for a year

Rollyo, Dave Pell (***)

• Search engine focused only on certain search sites
• Creators of searchrolls get credit for these with traffic back to their blog site

Joyent, David Young (***)

• Network suite of apps: Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Files, Binders
• Leverages tags (smart filters), RSS, vCard, vCal, WebDAV, XML-RPC
• Group collaboration and productivity tool (all online). Some interesting UI elements.

Bunchball, Rajat Paharia (***)

• Doing things with people you know
  1. Social application gap
  2. Replication of reality
• Problems: Recreating groups? Infrastructure? Distribution?
• This is the plumbing/infrastructure for your social applications

RealTravel, Ken Leeder (**)

• A better way to find info about places from people like you.
• Integrated travel blogging with social networking.
• Another guide player
  

Zimbra, Satish Dharmara (*****)

• Collaboration server meant to replace Exchange (open source)
• Lots of mashups (addresses=>gmaps, "next Friday"=> what you're doing, phone number => skype). Wow this is an amazing example of Web 2.0
• Email searching by domain, interesting date ranges, all updating on the fly
• Amazing UI (DHMTL layers right where you want them, and fast)

Zvents, Ethan Stock (***)

• The best local event search and web service
• 3X the closest compedition, 60,000 events in SF
• "What-when-where" in both "list-map-calendar" situations

KnowNow, Ron Rasmussen (**)

• eLerts for RSS, lets you know when RSS feeds get updated
• Just notify you of change, annonomous. Integrates thru toolbar add-on
• Alerts too frequent and a bit annoying.
  

Orb, Ian McCarthy (***)

• Threw frisbees out with login info at start of preso (cool)
• Make your home desktop accessible on any WiFi device's browser
• Stream anything from your home PC
  

Wink, Michael Tanne (*****)

• Introducing "TagRank" which is based on aggregate tags and analysis
• Builds off Y!'s "My Web 2.0" by leveraging social networking and tagging
• Helps fight against SEO spamming

Allpeers, Matthew Gertner (**)

• Transforming Firefox into Web2.0 dev platform
• Adds: Extensible Profiles, Data Storage, Resource Replication, Peer-to-peer communication

Flock, Bart Decrem (***)

• Crazy enough to make a new web browser: "The social browser"
• Open source, built on Mozilla technologies, dozen folks in Palo Alto
• Launch: Alpha in late October
• Focus: Favorites/history & blogging
• We should keep an eye on adoption of this web browser