Web 2.0 launchpad

I am attending the Web 2.0 conference today and decided to crash the Launchpad session to see what’s new with a variety of companies. The Launchpad provides 6 minutes for a company to introduce and demonstrate a new product to the audience in a manner very similar to the DEMO conference.

Socialtext just announced at Web 2.0 a move into completely open source by Q1 2006. Socialtext is currently only 20% open source.

Rollyo is an interface to Yahoo! Search allowing users to restrict the scope of their search to specific sites. Dave Pell described it as “Yahoo! provides the engine, we provide the steering wheel.” Rollyo users can select up to 25 sites to restrict their search, and share their saved scoped search publicly and placed into categories and identified by tags.

Joyent is a web-based groupware suite covering mail, calendar, contacts, and file sharing. The site uses tags to classify content, Ajax to browse, and RSS to subscribe to changing content. The company’s web server was unavailable for me during their demonstration, making me wonder about the company’s scalability.

Bunchball is a social application focused on helping people connect for activities. Bunchball provides social architecture to developers. Users join the site, create a profile, and join groups. Developers provide the content and hosted applications and Bunchball collects a portion of the revenue from each developer.

Zimbra is an open groupware company that integrates across calendars, contacts, mail, and arbitrary web services to provide contextual information in your mail reader. The software is available as a hosted service as well as a download. Is a date mentioned in an e-mail? Mouse-over the date and Zimbra will show you what else you have scheduled that day. Would you like to see more information about a person mentioned in an e-mail? Hover over his name, and see contact information, including direct contact information such as Skype.

Tags: , , , , ,