AdaptiveBlue is a company founded by my friend Alex Iskold, who also does some great analysis type posts on Read/Write Web regularly. (I’m looking forward to seeing Alex at the Defrag conference, which starts tomorrow in Denver.) AdaptiveBlue, based in NJ, was launched at DEMOfall ’06 (my coverage). It has since received funding from Union Square Ventures in NYC. I like the company’s mission: they want everyone to "browse smarter." Who can’t support that? Alex and his firm are very much out in front of the whole Semantic Web movement. But they aren’t just talking about it; they coming up with practical tools now to help us see the power and the potential of the Semantic Web. The latest of these? SmartLinks, which bring what Alex decribes as "fun, utility, and a social dimension to your pages…whether you’re a blogger or a big media company." Here’s a screenshot showing some of the sites whose links are displayed when you click on a SmartLink.
It’s all based on a little blue icon that appears next to certain links on your site. I’ve intalled SmartLinks on this blog, and here’s what one of those little blue icons looks like, at the end of a book link on my blog: 
And here’s what you see when you click on this icon in this case — choices on where you can go to get the book, information on the author, reviews, and other links. (Installing was a breeze, by the way — it’s one click for Blogger or Typepad, my platform; a plug-in for WordPress; and just a single line of code for other types of sites. Note: to see where SmartLinks appear on my site, scroll down to the books section in my sidebar.) 
Key point about these SmartLinks: they let your readers explore related information, such as book reviews,
similar movies, stock research, music videos, etc, without navigating away from your content. That is huge.
One use of SmartLinks that’s really getting a lot of attention since the company introduced the tool a week or so ago is SmartLinks for stocks. Here’s an example of what you’d see when you click on that little blue icon next to a Google link (stock symbol: GOOG): 
For more discussion of what this is all about, see the company’s blog, including a post on how to use Smart Links for stocks. Also, on the same blog, here’s a Q&A on Smart Links.
It was a brilliant PR trick. Who couldn’t believe that Bono, known to be a real tech guy (and even a VC in his own right), might not show up at an event like this? And the guy looked exactly like him. He actually fooled a couple of CNet reporters. I had to tell them when we sat back down in the ballroom for the next session that I knew better: a firm I knew, Mindtouch, had hired an amazing Bono lookalike to hang out in its booth. What a stroke! VP Aaron Fulkerson, whom I know because he’s based in St. Paul, had previously told me the guy would show up. I asked him how he’d found him — hired him through a talent agency? “Nah,” he said, “I found him on the web.” And he said the guy actually knew Bono and had the same (real) first name: Paul.
I just wish theyda told me the hotel had two towers, and that if you were unlucky enough to make your reservations a bit too late, you’d get stuck in the West Tower and have to hoof it three-quarters of a mile to where the event was held, in and around the East Tower. For the prices, there has to be a better venue in the San Diego area.
It was reminiscent of the pre-crash conference scene for sure — and I wondered how many of these people were experiencing this “high” for the first time. My guess would be a large percentage, because there were many, many young faces in the crowd. 
The press policy is a very democratic one, I learned: it allows only one reporter from any one media outlet, even including the WSJ, NY Times, USA Today. But let me apologize now for not covering all 67 presenting companies. Nothing against any of you that I didn’t — just not enough time. It’s flatly impossible to do, with any depth, anyway. [I did manage to blog some 37 of them, though!]
Another of my shots shows the two presenters from 
That’s two Demo conferences in a row where companies I’ve run into early and blogged about became Demo God winners. [Just lucky, I guess…]
I was so hoping to win that nice stick (donated by sponsor Qualcomm). But, alas, the guy in front of me did — and he didn’t even seem excited about it. Dude?
But could the guy conjur up something better to wear than the most god-awful pair of jeans I’ve even seen? I look better than that when I’ve done lumberjack work for three hours in the woods behind my house, for kee-rist sakes. In his defense, he was just one of several presenters who were dressed shabbily. And, sorry, anything including jeans fits that category for me. Please, Chris, can we have a dress code for presenters? It’s the least they can do for us. Hey, if Steve Jobs is coming on stage — fine, he wears what he wants. But these guys, they ain’t no Steve Jobs — okay? 🙂 Certainly not yet… And having them pretend like they are is just too hard to stomach.
They’ve raised $8 million for far from Sequoia and Globespan. Today, they announced JajahMobile, which lets you make free international calls from your cell phone — no new phone needed, no new number, and no contracts. I love the way the Demo folks describe their competition: “the global telephony industry.” Yes, indeed, and it should be plenty worried.
The system, which has a very clean, attractive interface, always tells you who’s calling, and it gives you four options on how to deal with any call: accept it, send it to voicemail, listen to the voicemail, or accept and record the call. The latter is especially useful if someone’s giving you information but you can’t write it down because you’re driving, for example. Grand Central has been funded to date with $4 million from Halsey Minor’s venture firm, Minor Ventures, also in San Francisco, and it inherited the name and domain from a previous company of Minor’s that was in an unrelated business. 
And the prices for using the site builder tool and hosting services are very reasonable, starting at just $15 per month. If you ever get called on to help friends or relatives set up a web site (don’t we all?), this is where you should send ’em! As described today, SiteKreator offers the elegance and sophistication of a design studio at the price of a common site builder.
My first real look at it was in their demo today, and I must say it’s an elegant interface. Changes the game. But it should be for what they paid Frog Design to do it! (Nothing like all that Microsoft money, and Bay Partners, too.) It was completely developed in Flash. Check it out. The business model of this MySpace and Facebook competitor is interesting — no advertising! Its revenues will come strictly from taking a 30% cut of all e-commerce on the site — but that should be a very, very nice number.
Each of the “scrapblogs” you create with this free service –and it’s aimed at parents, newlyweds, vacationers, etc — is a rich-media blog that’s formatted very nicely for either sharing online or printing into a high-quality photo book. The design, attractiveness, and ease-of-use of Scrapblog was very impressive.
The service lets you use your photos, videos, games, music, and sound effects to create an “immersive” mix, and then share it via email or IM, and/or publish it anywhere, to any web page or blog. The company calls its “mods” creation a totally new way for people to express themselves. And they seem to be convincing, already having raised $3 million in VC from Maveron. iBloks sees a ready market, too, citing a Forrester study that says 31% of consumers now spend an hour or more a day on social networking sites. [Now I’m wondering if anyone’s measuring how much work (or homework) isn’t getting done as a result?] 
What it specifically does is connect them with local events where they can meet their friends — old and new — by the hundreds, it seems. They’re only active in their home base of Boston right now, but they had a rush of 80,000 twenty-somethings sign up on their site in a short period of time recently, still in their pre-launch phase. [And, yes, they already have Series A funding from Highland Capital and General Catalyst.] Naturally, they have plans to go national. You heard it first at Demo, folks…
It’s about sharing, publishing, and even selling your creative work — and it’s all free. eSnips puts content at the center of things, and lets it lead the way to creating new relationships. Think artists, photographers, karioki enthusiasts, anyone who wants to share his or her passion or creative pursuits. Users each get 1 gigabyte of storage for free. You just upload to folders, each of which becomes a web site — designated private, group, or public. There’s no limit, and files can be of any type. “It’s a social network focused on finding people,” the CEO said. It must be catching on, because she said eSnips already has one million registered users, and the site is now logging 3 million unique visitors per month. Geographic distribution includes about 30% U.S., and a fairly equal spread between Canada, Europe, and Asia. The Israeli based company received a seed round of funding from Gemini Israel Funds. 
The firm claims that browser personalization is the next step in personal productivity online, but notes that the market is not clearly defined — overlapping with targeted advertising, for one thing. The Demo producers call Adapativeblue’s Blueorganizer “a sight for sore eyes, going beyond social bookmarking by turning your browser into a productivity tool….It’s a browser with a brain, and it’s about time.” 
He was debuting 
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