The TechCrunch party Friday night was a blast, thanks a lot to Mike for hosting it. Good food, good wine, and companies presenting in Mike’s office on a large LCD display. Check out techcrunch tag on flickr.
Meebo was presented first, a pretty cool AJAX Web-based instant messaging aggregator that supports AOL IM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! and Google Talk messengers. The founder has just quit the Stanford School of Business the other day to continue on with Meebo. A large portion of their users are school kids, who asked for such features as being logged in under multiple identities.
Tony Conrad presented Sphere, a new blog search engine with better results and better suggestions of what to read. Conrad said we are at the tipping point, where so much information is contained in blogs, that the recommendation services are needed. Plus none of the existing players do a good job.
HealthLine presented, just a better vertical search engine for medical information. We discussed the possibility of Google getting into personal health records outside. Healthline emphasizes information from professional sources and paid some content provider for doctor-generated medical infirmation.
Wink is trying to build a new social search engine, where the results are tagged and grouped by the users, hence resulting in better search results. You can rate the search results you got with stars (they also asked about yes-no option), you can save the searches to a collection, you can assign tags to certain search results.
Flock social browser demoed as well. I grilled them about the business model, but they didn’t seem to be terribly concerned about it, and pointed to me that Mozilla Foundation was doing pretty well being a non-profit. Right now the goal is to provide better browsing experience through Firefox-based browser that plugs into del.icio.us and major blogging platforms.
MeasureMap is a brand new service from AdaptivePath that, according to the demo by Jeffrey Veen, seems to get things right. What Webmasters really need is up-to-date referrer information, with search engines broken down, referrer spam dealt with, and important things like sudden surge in traffic to old posts, described. I will be testing the service with my personal blog, since Jeff was nice to invite anyone who asked for it.
Pandora is all about discovering music and making recommendations. These guys have been around for a while, and got some pretty impressive coverage.
The name ZVents makes you understand how hard it is to get a 6-character domain nowadays. It’s a pretty cool service that tries to be a flickr for your calendar. The events can be private and public, and the public ones are then aggregated into the common calendar. One can subscribe to events, and blog about them, and then get the latest blogs discussing the same event. When the event expires, ZVents event stays on the site. There’s a blog, too.
Also notice that they’re not in beta anymore, they’re in delta. Touche!
Loomia is all about podcast recommendations and ratings. Pretty nifty site, quite easy to use, and provides some interesting information like overall tagging cloud for the podcasts out there.
Goowy is working on the concept of virtual desktop – a set of AJAX-based Web apps available from any computer that has a browser and Internet connection. Right now the apps include an e-mail client, calendar, search boxes, address book and some Flash games. Pretty impressive demo, very detailed and nice user interfaces, I asked them if Microsoft Office documents were supported, the answer was – not yet, but if the users ask for them, who knows what will happen.
RealTravel is all about social travel – blogging, pictures, sharing experiences. It aims to cover destinations in general, specific hotels, restaurants and venues. Something we’ve seen with Epinions before and something we’re seeing with Yahoo! Travel, maybe a nicer and more streamlined interface. They invite people to start blogs, but I like their idea of being specific about topics – just travel blogs, places you visit and restaurants you eat at.
Kevin Burton presented TailRank, a web log recommendation and personalization search engine. Some of the stuff you’ve seen in Findory, and some of new features. See screenshot here.
Joyentall inside a browser. Also, as often needed by small businesses, users can read one another’s e-mail, if the e-mail owner chooses to open it up, so Bob from accounting can always see what Mary from sales promised to the client as far as discounts.There’s blog, too.
OQO was presenting its ultra-portable and uber-priced (at $1,899) PC (that I got some pictures of), allowing everyone to play around with the thing. Pretty useful, and Dave Winer told Robert Scoble to check it out right away, saying “it’s your dream come true, it runs Windows”. Pretty sleek Windows XP machine, pluggable into external mouse+keyboard+monitor at work and at home, but the price??
Other posts on TechCrunch meetup
Mark Canter on Dave Winer’s keynote speech
Robert Scoble was there as well.
Report from Ethan Stock.
Mike Arrington thanked everyone for coming.
Post from LaughingSquid.
Dave Winer gave a keynote, which NoSoapRadio mentions and Sylvia discusses in more detail.
Tara took lots of photos.
Andrew Wooldridge wrote about his experience.
Jared also wrote up some thoughts of his.
Zoli Erdos wrote up a pretty long report of the stuff he saw and liked, and his post pointed me to a post by Philippe Lewicki with some details from TechCrunch BBQ.
