Coolest name of the day goes to Gravee, whose AdShare product “changes the economic model for search”(!) How? By giving more clout to the content *owners* [huuuuge cheer!!!], instead of the content distributors, like certain companies whose names start with “G” and “Y”, for example. When an ad is clicked on their site, Gravee shares up to 70% of all ad revenue with Web sites and content owners that appear in their search results. Demo says “Gravee turns the search model on its head, delivering economic benefit to natural search results.” The company also empowers consumers to create a real-time, community-driven search index, letting them vote on relevance and tag results.
Here’s another outfit that Demo thinks has the potential to be “the Skype of video messaging”: Vsee. They do it with half the bandwidth of Skype, using P2P technology, letting companies “reach millions of people with little infrastructure,” they say. You can even zoom and pan on the images of those remote folks you’re conferencing with. The secret sauce is some proprietary stuff they do in “human factors,” improving on traditional videoconferencing that “distorts conversational clues.” Translation: you can pick up a lot more nuances from people’s faces and actions. And the interface is extremely simple.
Kaboodle is changing the online shopping experience from being a lonely effort, where a person visits site after site, one at a time, into an experience that can be combined into a single page, then shared with others, who can also provide their own comments. Say you’ve just gone through a long, one-time experience like doing a complete kitchen remodel, and you’ve done a ton of research to learn about where to buy everything. If you’ve done all that online research and shopping via Kaboodle, you can share your page and save other people a lot of time.
This company just came out of stealth.
The CEO of a social networking company called TagWorld, Fred Krueger, told me this morning at breakfast that his company is a “MySpace killer.” This afternoon, they debuted their latest trick: what they call “TagWorld Social Commerce.” Fred says it enables a typical 14-year old to build his or her own online store in two minutes, with a fully functional payment system. They can sell their stuff — movies, CDs, whatever — to their friends or whoever else finds them by searching the item on the TagWorld site. Ever looked at the amount of spending power these online kids have? TagWorld says they’ve already had 700,000 people sign up for their service over three months.
Tag: Demo 2006
As a followup to my post, here’s an Information Week piece that ran last evening.