One of the projects I've been most intrigued with here at DEMO is Acesis, a clinical data capture service that does two things of interest to me: it makes structured data collection simple and it brings Adobe's Rich Internet Application platforms Flex and AIR into the enterprise.
Medicine is a space with a whole lot of data and a whole lot of money and while I won't claim enough domain expertise to judge the merits of this company relative to other ventures in medical information - I do think they are doing some things that anyone in tech could find interesting.
During my current trip to the US, I've been following the US presidential primaries - it's hard not to, with the blanket coverage on CNN and in newspapers. Coincidentally while trying to hail a taxi after the Crunchies ceremony, I bumped into a man who is building an Internet version of the primaries. Called OnlinePrimary, it's an experimental project by Jim Edlin to create "a new, Internet-age way to do elections".
Jim Edlin has a long and distinguished history in the IT industry, including being the co-founder and first editor of PC Magazine. While giving my family and I a lift back to our hotel after the Crunchies (the taxis were non-existent that night!), Jim explained to me more about OnlinePrimary.
Six Apart this morning launched a plugin for their MovableType blogging platform that aggregates and displays a user's activity from social web sites. Similar to FriendFeed, the Action Streams plugin displays things like, your latest posts to Twitter, images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, or events from Upcoming. The plugin is available this morning as a free download for MovableType 4.1 and currently supports 75 difference services.
Vertical Search is one of those confusing terms that means many different things, depending on where you are coming from. To most RWW readers, Vertical Search tends to mean “the search space that Google has not yet grabbed and that does not require a major technology breakthrough such as natural language search”. That’s a good enough definition from a start-up perspective. For traditional media, Vertical Search is also about creating a space that Google cannot simply steamroll over. Traditional media may call it Rich Data or Information Services or Data Products, but the end goal is the same.
There appears to be evidence that Facebook users are beginning to suffer from app fatigue, and there is growing discontent about how applications are being distributed and about the amount of noise that the application platform has introduced into the Facebook ecosystem. As Mark Glaser writes on the PBS MediaShift blog, Facebook has a growing trust problem. Further, new numbers suggest that fed up users might have had enough of some of the most popular Facebook apps. This, however, could be a good thing for users and for the health of the platform in the long run.
SproutBuilder is going to explode the world of widgets on the web. This is far and away my favorite product I've seen at DEMO, not just this year but ever in the three years I've attended. Limited beta accounts are available to RWW readers via http://www.sproutbuilder.com/readwriteweb
The product is a drag-and-drop Flash authoring tool built on Adobe's Flex. SproutBuilder lets you build very sophisticated, multi-page widgets with media, analytics and more. In minutes. With ease.
Digg made a post to the company's blog this morning announcing that they are officially joining the DataPortability.org Working Group. Digg follows Facebook, Google, Microsoft and many other companies in getting on board to discuss protocols that will make it easier for users to move their data from one site to another while still protecting their privacy.
The company posted more specifics about its embrace of data standards than almost any of the other participating companies has. Read more below, plus check out some related resources that we hope you'll find useful.
The startup launchpad conference DEMO has just begun here in Palm Desert. Word on the street over the past few years has been that the conference is losing its luster -but here on site it's feeling pretty relevant still today. You can judge for yourself via live streaming video embedded here below the fold. The conference runs through Wednesday night.
You're likely to see a lot of press about DEMO over the next few days, we've posted a toolkit for tracking the event, but below are some of the arguments for and against the continued relevance of this high-profile event. The live video player below from BitGravity may make you want to turn down your volume but that's what it's like here at the event, too.
Dan Frommer over at Silicon Alley Insider reports that Google's latest effort to break into newspaper ad sales includes printed barcodes that can be scanned by readers to send them to web sites. That sounds very similar to failed plans of late-90s Internet/technology startup Digital Convergence, who saw their :CueCat barcodes appear in newspapers and magazines all over the US in 2000 to a fairly indifferent response by users.
We interrupt this broadcast to thank our sponsors for supporting ReadWriteWeb. We have a great line-up of sponsors, all supporting RWW's mission to provide in-depth coverage of Web Technology trends and products.
Of course we're also thankful for a passionate and smart reader base. We've made improvements to our commenting system over the past month, so we hope you're noticing a faster system. And yes, OpenID is coming ;-)
If you would like to enquire about sponsoring ReadWriteWeb and/or our network blogs last100, AltSearchEngines and ReadWriteTalk, please email the editor for a Media Kit.
