Under the Radar and STIRR
I spent most of yesterday at the Under the Radar Conference: Why Digital Media Matters. I enjoyed the chance to serve as a judge, and found that I thought better of all the companies I reviewed based on their presentations. The wifi was incredibly unusable, so I am recommending to Debbie Landa, of IDBNetworks, the group running the conference, that they need a different venue. Microsoft seems unwilling or incapable to open up enough bandwidth for the event.
I sat on two panels moderated by Sean Wise, who is irrepressible and a solid MC. With me were Yahoo's Steven Horowitz, and Lalit Balchandari of Adobe, both great. We sniffed over 7 companies together, since Revver cancelled at the last minute due to some technical disaster.
The companies were these (not /blipped due to the pisspoor wifi yesterday):
- Broadbandsports -- A video-rich social network trying to appeal to young males with a sports focus, but can it differentiate?
- Flukiest -- A white label social media technology with very strong social network component. I think there is a market for a new generation of tools like this, and that they will displace social media 1.0 technologies like those from Wordpress and SixApart. But Flukiest needs to reposition to do that.
- Grouper -- A p2p social network solution banking on the difficulties inherent in streaming mega-media files, especially video. Will centralized server technologies ever be able to scale? Grouper is betting that they can't, since the pipes won't be wide enough for five years or more.
- Tagworld -- A far-too-animated animated presentation from the CEO (less caffiene, bro) showing off new video chat/comment/post functionality. Tagworld is growing quickly with young adults, and their differentiator seems to be technical innovation.
- Blip.tv -- A good example of a social video network in the making, Blip.tv is also banking on its rapid innovation curve to outpace competitors.
- Reality Digital -- A video technology company, focused on supporting large companies of whatever sort who want production, turnkey video technology for their websites. Tough market, with all the giants moving in.
- TurnHere -- Very interesting social media company developing hyperlocal video content, using a cadre of professional videographers to "tell stories" about places in our world. Reviews and travel-related information seem to be the thrust of the service, and I really liked the mashup with maps.
I wandered around and sat in the audience after my judging duties were done, but because of the connectivity problems I got extremely frustrated. I hate to write when disconnected from the web. In the Remix session, I saw an array of impressive video editing tools, like Eyespot, Jumpcut, and VideoEgg. Mike Arrington and the other judges in that session were pretty dismissive of the level of support, but I thought they looked good. This is an area where Adobe and the other monsters in this area are likely to screw up these startups, though.
A fun and informative show. I didn't hang for the final moments, since I was running to get to the STIRR event in Palo Alto, where I got to see even more demos!
- Loomia, David Marks, CEO -- "Personal recommendations for your website" -- as I said in an earlier post today, this will be a mainstay of social networks in the future, and Loomia is battling it out with a host of others, like MyPickList [Full disclosure: a client in which I have a financial interest].
- Mozes, Dorrian Porter, CEO -- Mediated social communications based on SMS handles. Cool technology, and building momentum. Was used at UTR to record votes for various presenting companies.
- RadioHandi, Brian McConnell, Founder -- Another mediated social communications system, with a forum/community site model.
- Sphere, Tony Conrad, CEO -- Tony has me convinced to switch over to Sphere as a blog search platform. I got a kick out of being one of the top ten Web 2.0 pundits within Sphere's Featured Blogs beta. Looks like a real competitor to Technorati, especially with the PubSub collapse.
- SwapThing, Jessica Hardwick, CEO -- A social swap system, falling into the Craig's List space, but all about swapping, not buying and selling.
It was a packed day, to say the least. Things are busy at the epicenter!
Loomia - one of my investments - is not focusing on the social aspect of recommendations for now, it is using a much broader and systematic approach based on collaborative filtering. MyPickList is competing with Kaboodle from one I can tell (another of my investments).
Posted by: Jeff Clavier | June 15, 2006 at 02:39 PM
Hi Stowe,
You note: "Broadbandsports -- A video-rich social network trying to appeal to young males with a sports focus, but can it differentiate?"
The " sports focus" (extreme/action sports to be percise) is the differentiation.
Posted by: Greg | June 19, 2006 at 02:45 PM