FlowPlay

FlowPlay is a gaming social networking site that targets the teen demographic. It consists of Flash-based animatable avatars, enabling you to interact with your virtual friends without revealing who you are. The main part of the site though is Flash-based online games. They currently have 100 games, not all of them in-house developed - some licensed from others. While you play, you can earn virtual money - with which you can buy virtual things for yourself (e.g. clothing). After dressing up your character, you can go to places, bars and hang out with your friends, dance, chat and have fun. The fact that there is a virtual economy inside the platform makes it quite attractive.

metaplace is attempting to create an open virtual world. The founders think the potential of virtual worlds is high, but most current ones are walled gardens. Further most existing virtual worlds are huge desktop apps that you need to download and keep up to date. metaplace is lightweight and has its own markup, which makes it fully portable from the web to mobile worlds.

Loic Le Meur thought this was a good product and defined it as "the Facebook of SecondLife". On the other hand, Yahoo's Brad Garlinghouse said: whether we like it or not, there is already a popularized platform in the form of SecondLife - so this one is too late.

WooMe

WooMe started its presentation with some stats around real world speed dating market - which will approach $1 B in 2008.

WooMe brings speed dating to the virtual world. It consists of audio-visual sessions, using webcams. You can use it for dating or to find a partner to travel with. When you find someone (it needs both parties to agree) you have to pay $1 to get in touch.

The surprise of the presentation was that Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom is connected to this app.

The general concern of experts was whether this is just a 'feature company'. Loic Le Meur and Caterina Fake liked it. In my opinion, WooMe has the potential of being used as a Craigslist alternative too.

Zivity

Zivity's promise is to change the rules of user generated (adult) content. Apparently it's about democratization of adult content. You or your photographer put your erotic photos online, people vote, and you may make money. Membership is $10. 1 vote costs $1. 80 cents go to content creator, 20 cents to Zivity.

Sarah Lacey found this model logical and said this can be an online version of Playboy. MC Hammer warned about the potential abuse of 16 year old kids wanting to earn a little money from this.

Kaltura

Kaltura is another social video site - aka video wiki. This Israeli company is now based in New York. They raised $2M from Avalon Partners.

The idea sounds similar to StoryBlender (covered in an earlier TC40 report). You can take videos from YouTube, photos from Flickr, or other multimedia from your hard drive, and mash them up. You can even stream live video via your webcam.

Their new Facebook App allows you to greet your friends (birthday, graduation) with mashed up funny videos created in collaboration with your network.

Edited by Richard MacManus

xtr3D

xtr3D is trying to change the way we interact with computers. Their software replaces the traditional mouse and keyboard with real-time 3D motion analysis. Their "3D Human Machine Interface" can translate your physical movements into mouse moves and keyboard clicks.

BroadClip makes the MediaCatcher application for Facebook, which helps users to find DRM-free music via your trusted community (Facebook friends). The presentation was cut short by Jason Calacanis in the middle, and the team wasn't even on stage -- it was streamed. General consensus seems negative on this one.

mEgo

Los Angeles-based mEgo makes a widget/avatar that holds all your social networking profiles so that you can share it anywhere. Their single widget allows you to share your YouTube videos, Flickr photos, etc. everywhere. mEgo has an alternative offering which allow you to present your profile as a CV too, and is available for mobile clients. It has RSS and Twitter syndication from the widget.

Editor's Note: So could you take your Twitter feed and put it through mEgo and export it to your Twitter feed? Very M.C. Escher.

Wixi

Wixi is a media sharing platform that uses web desktop interface to make things easier and more straight forward (think: web OS). Using this interface, you can share your stuff with your friends and post them to your blog or social networking account. Wixi offers a Flash player which allows you to embed multiple pieces of media inside a single widget -- it is very similar to SplashCast.

Wixi has a number of social networking features as well, such as Feeds, which shows you what your friends are adding (think: Facebook Newsfeed).

BeFunky!

BeFunky is a cartoon avatar tool that "cartoonizes" your real pictures. It also allows you to warp pictures (i.e., they made Mike Arrington lose 20 pounds instantly) and share them on social networking sites. BeFunky also demonstrated rotoscoping software that turns live-action video into cartoon. They used a clip from the Matrix for their presentation.

Edited by Josh Catone.

AdBrite

AdBrite has announced a new product: SPOTTT.com. It's a link exchange program that is very similar to LinkExchange (from the web 1.0 era). Just to remind you; LinkExchange was sold to Microsoft for $265M in 1998.

Started by FuckedCompany's founder Philip Kaplan, AdBrite says they are bringing back LinkExchange with new innovations. Instead of LinkExchange's 2:1 ad publishing program, they have a 1:1 display program - this means for every one ad you publish, your ad is published on other sites as well. Tony Hsieh, co-founder of LinkExchange, is also assisting with the product.

Clickable

Clickable is an advertising business backed by Union Square - Pequot. The product interfaces existing advertising networks and makes the control very simple. They say they're in the simplicity and recommendation business. They try to solve the complex problem of advertisment management and smooth up the process.

At this event, they announced a new partnership with AdBrite.

Clickable's innovative user interfaces, like ActMap, aim to make things much easier for advertisers. This may make Clickable a valuable company in the very profitable online advertising market.

GotStatus

GotStatus is a server-side Google Analytics. What Google Analytics does is give you deep analysis of your website visitors, via a short Javascript snippet that you embed into your site. GotStatus does the same, but it's all done on the server side. That is, you place a Ruby snippet (but note: not all servers support Ruby by default!) and they do a deep analysis of your server statistics.

They also give you the possibility to share this data on your blog via widgets. However, I wonder who really wants to do that. It is private data after all, so the widget doesn't sound that useful.

GotStatus is an API driven, open system; the founders believe it can be further improved by the community. They eye a piece in the huge $8 B systems management market (source: Gartner).

PubMatic

PubMatic got their first media coverage from Read/WriteWeb in August 2007. Their service helps web site publishers run the highest paying ads from top ad networks. According to the company, the complexity of advertising management is growing every day - we are continously having more and more choices. Image ads, link ads, video ads, Google ads, ValueClick etc...

What they do is maximize your profits via an auction system for ads. However this sounds exactly the same as Yahoo's RightMedia. As far as I understand, the difference is that PubMatic looks at past data, while RightMedia does it in real time.

They claimed that a Windows Themes site improved their profits 106% with PubMatic; and a Sportsvite.com did the same in the rate of 90%.

ZocDoc

Briefly, ZocDoc is the Yelp of medicals. The site is for dentist appointments. You can see dentists mapped on Google Maps, along with user feedback. The site also offers advanced search functionality. They claim to have 2% of dentists in their system already.

Edited by Richard MacManus

Xobni

Xobni ("inbox" spelled backwards), makes the Insight plugin for Microsoft Outlook that adds social networking features to your email. The plugin extracts a social graph from your email conversations. Xobni says that email is already used as a file manager, contact manager, todo list and social network and their software just ties those functions together. For example, the plugin can reveal connections between people who have emailed you and create a historical view of your contact with an individual.

Orgoo

Orgoo merges your email accounts into what they call a "cockpit," along with chat, SMS, and instant messaging, allowing you to organize all your social interactions in one simple location. With Orgoo you can search all of your Internet communication in one place, and even reply to emails via instant messenger.

Orgoo's user interface is very similar to new Yahoo! Mail and it is available for mobile devices, as well. They are planning to launch in Q4 of this year.

App2You

App2You is a custom application creator for non-programmers (or, as they say, anyone who can use Excel). Their pitch is aimed at people overwhelmed with by emails, phone calls, and other communications, but their database app builder can be used for more than organizing email. One of their pre-built app templates, for example, is an event manager.

App2You is not just about data collection, but about creating full workflows to manage the flow of your information.

Mint

Mint has been my favorite startup at TechCrunch40 so far. Mint is a financial application that hooks into your bank account and helps you keep track of your finances. You can see where your money goes (gas, food) via visually rich charts and graphs. The site also offers mobile access and can alert you whenever you start spending too much or when you need to pay a bill.

Mint, which goes live today, tries to save you money by recommending credit cards that suit your spending habits. For example, if you spend too much on gas, it recommends cards that give you cash back on gas.

Kerpoof

Kerpoof's mission is to change the way kids interact with the computer and become a top destination for children. They want kids to not just read stories but also to write them. They don't want kids to just watch movies but also make them. Kerpoof provides a great example of participatory culture. They seem to be after the big market of kid-centric social networks like NeoPets and Club Penguin. Their marketing message, however, is about teaching basic object oriented programming to kids (to attract parents maybe?).

Working inside the browser, users can pick pre-created scenes, place objects in the scenes, change perspectives, and add music & text to create their own stories.

I'm definitely far from their target market, but I can't help but wonder if this isn't just a bit too complex for children. Or if they are targeting older kids, isn't it too childish?

Edited by Josh Catone.

Note: for a full round-up of the day's action at TC40, check out Allen Stern's sterling effort at Center Networks.

Cake Financial

Cake Financial is a financial sharing platform backed by Ron Conway. It allows people to share portfolios and real time transactions with others. The site can be integrated with services such as E*Trade and Charles Schwab. This sharing feature allows you to chart yourself against other people and the market normals. You see what your friends are doing, you get notified in real time, and so on. So it's financials, enriched with social networking features.

My question: isn't this private information that you'd rather keep to yourself. Plus this may result in gaming and legal problems. However, since this business deals directly with money, it can create real addiction among its users and virally spread. So it may be a great success.

DocStoc

DocStoc is the "YouTube of documents." It allows you to share professional documents via a widely accepted and embeddable Flash interface. It offers basic features like categories and search. As a result, you can search for "venture capital companies in california" and you get the documents you want - full of contact info. Special ranking algorithms are based on user trustability. You can set documents to be private or public, and set whatever license you want. The site also includes other social networking elements, such as messaging and comments.

TeachThePeople

TeachThePeople's goal is to be the "ebay for education" [Ed: what was Bernard saying about Concept Extrapolation yesterday? ;-) ]. You can create classes on topics you are an expert at, then teach them and earn revenues. The example that the founders gave was:

Say you are Mark Andreessen, you are a great entrepreneur who has built many big companies and successfully exited - in that case, many people would like to learn from you, know your secret. By creating a "university" on this network, you share your knowledge and earn revenues. You can also set up a management team, assign assistants (in this instance, Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington).

The site gives every teacher 5GB of storage space. It has advanced features such as discussion boards, Q&A, live chat, etc. It really seems to be a great platform for this purpose. The company says Y! Groups and others are great for communicating, but they can't specialize on topics such as guitar courses, Salesforce teachings etc. They say: you must be good at something, so why not monetize it.

CrowdSpirit

CrowdSpirit is an electronic products crowdsourcing site from France. You post an idea, people vote; if your product gets many votes, it goes to a marketplace where "fans" and "partners" may join you in purchasing and/or selling.

For me, this was the weakest idea of the event so far. Why would anyone want to share their ideas with an untrusted community, when the idea is not defendable?

Ponoko

So far in computing history we've had the personal pc, personal printing - now we get personal manufacturing. Personal manufacturing actually started with the likes of CafePress, but Ponoko takes it one step further. It allows you to make toys from .eps formatted Adobe Illustrator files. I don't think the public can easily get started with this advanced program, but the company claims it is easy.

How it works: you set up material type, color, and so on; then your product gets manufactured and shipped to you. You can even sell it in a marketplace and earn money.

The idea is good, but the market may be small and it will probably be way too hard for the average user to get started with it.

Edited by Richard MacManus

StoryBlender

StoryBlender is a promising video mashup startup from Korea. Video editing is not new, but this one's approach is like a 'video wiki'  - it lets you mash up videos collaboratively, with your friends and peers. The interface they demonstrated was very easy and straightforward. You can easily add music, video, text and animate things. No need to be a pro, no special skills needed.

At the end of the session, Don Dodge expressed concern about copyright (as an ex Napster employee, that was quite understandable!).

Tripit

Tripit solves a big problem. It is hard to plan travel; you have to deal with many sites, papers and other details. Tripit's mission is to make this process very simple. It's not a booking company, but they serve to manage your travels.

You simply forward incoming bookings to plans@tripit.com and it manages the rest. Their patent pending "itinerator" technology is a baby step in the semantic web - it extracts useful infomation from these mails and makes a well structured and organized presentation of your travel plan.

It pulls out information from Wikipedia for the places that you visit. It uses microformats - the iCal format, which is well integrated into GCalendar and other calendar software.

They claim that "instead of dealing with 20 pages of planning, you just print out 3 pages and everything is done for you".

Their future plans include a recommendation engine which will tell you where to go and who to meet.

Many experts at the conference found this startup very useful and easily monetizable.

Flock

The open source browser Flock was at Techcrunch 40 with the promise of v 1.0 very soon. Flock is a social web browser, satisfying the social needs of the new web. It lets you interact with your friends while you surf. This market is hot - me.dium tries to tackle the same goal from another path.

Flock can save your credentials from sites like Flickr, YouTube and Facebook, then e.g. you can share news from NY Times with your friends on Flickr with a simple drag n' drop.

Everyones concerns are the same thoug - why not do it via extensions and utilize Firefox? The Flock CEO replied that they are ambitious, they are not just aiming at single digits of users - they want hundreds of millions of users.

MusicShake

MusicShake is another mashup startup from from Korea. The motto is: user generated music. Just like docstoc, they are the YouTube of MUSIC. The service aims to make music creating very simple. Their example was a music created by a 9 year old in 5 mins, which was selected the number 1 user generated music in Korea's biggest social network: cyworld.

MusicShake takes 100% ownership of IP, has 170K music patterns (1M to come). They claim they have a real business model as well - end users can make money just by selling their music for a few bucks.

The attendants in the Palace Hotel really liked MusicShake, so it was a successful presentation.

8020publishing

The idea behind 8020publishing is: "web is killing printed magazines? No, the web can make it better". For them, magazines are good for inspiration and the web is good for planning. So they've made a hybrid and created a hypermedia - using the best of media and web. Their success story is JPG Magazine, in which over 100,000 people helped create each issue. Today they announced a new product: everywhere - which focuses on travel.

In 8020, content is created by the people. But the editorial proces is traditional.

It's a real business model, and on the web side of it, there are significant social network elements like profiles and comments.

Jason Calacanis' concern was that in traditional press, publishing and distribution are the biggest costs. So what's the advantage of this? The 8020 people replied: "it's not about cost but quality - being a part of a community" - which sounds very logical to me.

Edited by Richard MacManus

Cubic Telecom's mission is to make phone calls seamless and cheaper than ever. They do it by locating special wifi spots all around the world and making your calls via these spots. For GSM calls, they have a special cheap price as low as 15 cents per minute. You can call anywhere in the world anytime you want.

According to Om Malik, if they can scale, Cubic can be a viable business. However, they're going need to compete in a very commoditized market and it's likely that their profit margins will be way too low.

Yap

Yap is trying to enable speech for the mobile web. Small keyboards are really archaic interfaces and they impose a lot of frictions on the popularity of mobile browsing. Yap is trying to solve this with an innovative J2ME based interface, and distributed, lightweight speech recognition technology. They will soon announce their first round of VC funding.

The company will allow people to change their Twitter or Facebook status and send SMS via voice. In order to get established they'll need to cut deals with telecom carriers; but they have reason to be hopeful. The company includes people who created and popularized the iPod, IBM ViaVoice as well as ex-Cingular and Amazon executives.

Jason Calacanis said he likes this company. Their business model is mainly advertising; when you say "let's go have a cup of coffee," the service may reply with the location of the nearest Starbucks. See also Jott, a recently launched competitor.

Ceedo

Ceedo claims to enable mobile phone virtualization for PCs. When you connect your phone to your PC, it shows up a user interface which will make it much easier for you to use the capabilities. For example, you'll be able to use Picasa directly. They will also allow you to buy music for your mobile device immediately.

Personally, I didn't see anything revolutionary here. Just an interface; virtualization is way too serious for this kind of technology, in my opinion.

LoudTalks

LoudTalks is a neat idea from Russia. The founders say that today there are 2 ways of real time communication: telephone or instant messaging. They are building a desktop application very similar to ICQ or Skype that serves as an internet walkie-talkie. They try to eliminate the limitations of instant messaging - no emotions, time loss due to typing. It's basically a push to talk system. But it allows you to talk to many people at once. You don't need to be in a continuous dialogue with someone, you can talk and browse the web, do your job at the same time. When you go busy, incoming messages are stored so that you can listen to them whenever you are available. Neat idea, and similar to Twitter in my opinion - not a technological breakthrough but catches something that we missed in rush of finding the next big thing.

According to Marc Andreessen the main problem that they may face is distribution and he recommended them to use blog widgets (perhaps like meebome) to spread virally. See also long-time provider of a similar service, YackPack.

TruTap

TruTap brings social networking to mobile space. It's a free, universal mobile service which lets you see the status of your IM friends (MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AOL supported). It allows you to blog and set your profile. You can make group messaging as well. The service is planned to go live in 16 weeks. They claim that they have already cut deals with key social networks and the service will be available in more than 200 countries. TruTap will be usable from your browser too. Developer APIs will be immediately available.

For me, there were such promises before too, but we didn't see anything viable. The deals these companies make will define their destiny. It's a fact that Nokia is already after this market and doing anything to capture market share. Time will show how it's gonna roll up.

Edited by Marshall Kirkpatrick.

This morning saw the first five startups at the TechCrunch40 event hit the floor and presented to journalists, investors, and early adopters. The first session focused on search startups. It's interesting to note that one third of the presenters at the TC40 are from outside USA. Below are quick reviews of the first five companies to present.

Powerset

Powerset is a natural language processing-based search engine that raised $12.5 million a year ago to create what many have touted as a "Google killer." Company founder Barney Pell said this morning that interacting with today's search engines is like talking to a 2 year old. What Powerset does to change that is index the web semantically and extract meaningful relations.

At present, Powerlabs has 3 specialized verticals based on restricted subsets of Wikipedia: Quotes, PowerMouse, Business. Business and Quotes are self explanatory, while PowerMouse searches Wikipedia entries for connections between topics. For example, you could search for "Yankees" and "home run" and find home runs related to the Yankees.

Cognitive Code

Cognitive Code makes an artificial intelligence platform called SILVIA (or, Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, Intelligence Algorithms). Their platform provides a technology for starting human-like conversations with machines and an intriguing interface to start dialogue. For example, you could tell SILVIA to open the most recent file on your computer and it will process your command via voice recognition, understand the meaning, and execute your request. Their linguistic variability technology allows them to understand what you mean -- you can give your command in many ways, but their software will still understand your intentions.

Cognitive Code says that they have already signed licensing deals with toy companies, but there are many more opportunities awaiting them.

CastTV

Founded by a husband and wife team, CastTV is a video search play that is attempting to index every video on the web. CastTV indexed videos from many sources, including user generated video sharing sites like YouTube, mainstream media like CNN, and paid download services like iTunes. They deliver their results using an impressive clustering technology that lets you drill down results by date, relevance, source, price, and more. When you search for Britney Spears, it asks you whether you are looking for her music or sex tapes, for example.

FAROO

FAROO is a P2P search engine that has no central crawler or index (so something like Wikia's Grub?). Their demo was blazingly fast and brought to mind my recent open source distributed Google clone article.

FAROO says their P2P search technology can save traditional search companies $1 billion. On the other end of the spectrum, the advantage for users is "revenue sharing and attention ranking," they say. They are committed to sharing 50% of all search revenues with users and the quality of their ranking is based on the time you spend on these sites; in other words, they follow you. This brings privacy questions into play.

For them, distribution is going to be a problem -- without people, there is no value in their technology. Wikia is known to be very open to small acquisitions, however, and already dabbles in this field, so could be a potential suitor.

Viewdle

Viewdle is another video search engine. Viewdle uses a facial recognition algorithm to search for people within videos. The main problem is that people need to be in their database to be covered, and so far they only index celebrities. Viewdle already have a deal in place with Reuters, who Om Malik thinks will end up buying them. Marrissa Mayer asked Viewdle how they plan to scale when their database enlarges to many people, and their answer was "contextual analysis," which will allow them to recognize faces after the environment.

Full disclosure: Emre Sokullu joined search startup Hakia as a Search Evangelist in March 2007.