I'm going through the list of companies presenting at TechCrunch40. I'll comment on the ones that look cool to me:
Online identity is hard explain. These dotName (or is it nicName) might have solved the marketing problem. ".name domains do for people what .com domains did for companies!"... and it works with OpenId.
Another Enterprise 2.0 platform. Looks clean. Built by Swedes. Similar offerings include Huddle, Blogtronix, IBM Lotus Connections.
Natural language search. Great promise. $12.5M in the bank. Closed site which, despite them presenting at TechCrunch40, still tells you come back later. There is huge market potential here. Half the Google searches I do seem to take me directly to Wikipedia, which eventually helps to answer the question I have. I want to be able to ask "What is Ruby on Rails?" and get an answer in about 100 words or less. I have no idea if PowerSet can solve this problem, but it would be great if they could.
Mind you, I just tried that search in Google and got a good answer... from wikipedia.
Uses facial recognition to find video of specific people. Useful for people looking for canned video of very famous people already in the Viewdle database.
Social network for people who want to share super private details of what they invest in and when. "Cake Financial lets you check out the actual portfolios, watchlists and real-time trades of everyone from proven top investors to your trusted family and"
It seems totally counter intuitive to me. Why would traders share this information? Or, perhaps more importantly, why wouldn't the "best" traders not use the site to front run the market. The moral hazards are ... large.
Maybe they have figured it out. Maybe there are a class of smaller investors that want to follow the herd. Mind you, those kind of folks would probably do better to invest in an indexed fund or a mutual fund.
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