Which companies did we think made the grade? Read on to find out.

80Legs, a web crawler service, publicly launched at DEMO. For a small fee, anyone can rent out this "mini-Google" to do their bidding. A number of markets will be impacted by making web crawling an affordable option, including media analysis, IP protection services, market researchers, and more. In addition, the company announced a new "app store" concept that lets developers build and share applications that run on top of the service. Now, not only is web crawling itself made simple, but also what you want to do with it.

Read more: 80Legs: A Web Crawler as a Service

Cortera

The best way to understand Cortera's potential is to read the tweets about it. People were calling it "dull" and "unsexy," but also "smart" and "addressing a real need." Essentially, what this B2B service wants to do is reinvent credit reporting. By combining traditional credit data like what Dun & Bradstreet offers with crowdsourced payment experience reviews from Cortera members, the company offers a modern and much less expensive option for small business owners. The end result is that mom-and-pop shops will have access to the same business intelligence that previously only large companies could afford.

Read more: Cortera helps you see whether small businesses are credit worthy (VentureBeat)

Twirl TV

Twirl TV initially looked like a Hulu competitor, considering that its focus is delivering online streaming TV to your PC. However, where Hulu is a joint effort from media companies NBC Universal, FOX, and ABC to put their TV shows on the net, Twirl TV is simply a search engine for what's already out there. That means that you can use the service to find all the TV content on Hulu along with the streaming media from companies like CBS who have yet to participate in Hulu, choosing to keep their content on their own site. While that alone makes Twirl TV an interesting alternative for online TV watching, it's the focus on "social TV" which really makes Twirl TV stand out. Like a social network for TV viewing, you can share episodes with friends, see what others have viewed, and discover new shows. If that doesn't interest you, then maybe you're just not in the right demographic. Twirl TV claims they don't care about anyone over 25 - they're marketing only to today's digitally connected youth.

Emo Labs

Emo Labs had the honor of walking away with not one, but two awards from DEMO: a DEMOgod award and the people's choice award from IDG which gave the winners up to $500,000 of free advertising. They certainly deserved it. When chatting among fellow attendees about their favs, Emo's name kept coming up. While not the sort of tech we typically cover here at ReadWriteWeb, Emo Labs has created something incredible. Their "invisible" speaker systems made out of clear, thin sheets of plastic can be overlaid on TV screens where they vibrate to produce sound. Unbelievably, the sound is actually sharp, crisp, and clear. Currently, the technology is more expensive than traditional speaker systems, but that's always the case with new hardware it seems. One day, though, we may see external speakers as relics from the past and we'll have Emo Labs to thank for that.

Liaise

It wasn't just hype when we proclaimed Liaise to be "possibly the coolest email add-on ever." This smart tool automatically extracts information from the content of your emails and creates "to do" lists when it finds items requiring action. You can then manage these items right within your inbox where Liaise provides summaries, reports, and even calendar integration. For now, Liaise only supports Outlook users, but that makes sense given its enterprise focus. While inbox management services aren't always the sexiest of technologies, either, it's an area that undoubtedly needs the most help. The people must agree, too, since Liaise won the other IDG media prize for best enterprise product.

Read more: Liaise: Possibly the Coolest Email Add-on Ever

Using OrganIP

When you launch the application on the web, you're presented with a search box where you can type in the contact's name who you want to reach. Assuming you're connected to them on one of the supported networks, you'll then be presented with their profile name next to an icon representing which social network they were found on. To place a call, you just click on one of the three options provided: you can either call directly, send them a voicemail, or send a voice-to-text message.

If you're placing a call directly, it doesn't immediately ring the recipient's phone. Instead, they're alerted via a message in Gtalk or Facebook chat, if available, or via the OrganIP website. They can then choose to answer the call, send the call to voicemail, or have the voicemail transcribed into text and sent to them.

If you're worried about all of a sudden getting a deluge of call requests from online buddies, don't be. The options available for each contact are a direct reflection of how you've configured your profile and privacy settings on the social networks in question. For example, if you don't list your phone number in your Gmail profile, no one can call you directly, it will always go to voicemail. For Facebook and Gtalk, only those friends who are allowed to chat with you can send a URL via the chat interface to invite you to a phone call.

Unfortunately for the company, the actual demo of their technology didn't go so well on stage. The first attempt at placing a call didn't go through so it appears they may have some kinks to work out before they officially launch. However, they did give it a shot a second time and the call went through as promised. It's hard to say whether it was network issues causing the problems or the OrganIP software itself.

Partnership with OpenDNS

Through a partnership with the free DNS resource OpenDNS, any users typing in a telephone number in the address bar will be connected to OrganIP service and provided with shortcuts allowing them to make a call or send a voicemail. For a small startup, that's really hitting the ground running, as OpenDNS currently boasts about 15 million+ users.

Mobile Application and Future Plans

In addition to the web interface which works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, OrganIP is also launching an Android application which delivers the same functionality to smartphones running Google's mobile OS. The company is working on versions for iPhone, Palm Pre, Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, too, which will be made available in the coming months.

For now, OrganIP is a free application, but starting next year, the company plans to charge via a subscription service plan for a reasonable monthly fee which will hover somewhere around $5 per month. The service will be a "freemium" offering, keeping some aspects free while other features will only be available to paying customers. However, all calls made over Wi-Fi networks will remain free always.

OrganIP will be launched into an open beta on October 19, 2009. You can sign up to join at www.organip.com.

What 80Legs does is no easy feat. It provides its users a service which offers up 50,000 computers which can crawl up to 2 billion web pages per day. Yes, it's like having your own little search engine that you can rent for a small fee. How small? 80Legs is about 50% less expensive than any other competitive service out there.

While consumers may not have a use for a service such as this, there is an extensive market that does. 80Legs aims to attract customers from a wide variety of disciplines including alternate search engine developers, market researchers, IP protection services (those who go after copyright infringements, article theft, etc.), competitive intelligent services, and ad networks looking to audit their own ads and see where other ad networks are placing theirs.

80Legs App Store

In addition to the big news about the service's public launch, 80Legs is also revealing their development program. With this new feature, developers can write their own applications that run on top of the 80Legs service and then make them available to others through a soon-to-launch "app store." Here, other customers can browse and purchase apps that suit their needs whether it's something for media analysis, market research, sentiment analysis, or whatever else the developer comes up with. The developers get to set their own CPR price for the apps and get to keep 100% of the revenue earned, too.

The API for app building was actually made available to beta users a couple of months prior to DEMO, but the company plans to soon support multiple languages which will include Java, .NET, Perl, and Python, so developers can work in whichever they feel most comfortable with.

While there are other ways to crawl the web, 80Legs wants to make sure that there's nowhere else you can do it for such a small fee. If you're interested in trying 80Legs for yourself, you can do so as of today by signing up at 80Legs.com. Use the code "RWW" to receive an additional 50% credit on top of the amount you put in. (First 50 users only).

In addition to the basic Q&A structure of the brainstorming sessions, the site also allows for commenting so discussions can take place as well as a thumbs up/thumbs down feature which allows users to vote on the answers provided.

Before being accepted into the site as a "guru," the potential experts are vetted through a process where their credentials are checked. Specifically, each member of this curated crowd should have a body of work which shows their expertise in an area. Also helpful is whether or not they've received some sort of acclaim like an award, a press mention, etc. It's worth noting that site founder Edward Cruz isn't waiting for the gurus to come to him. He's actively recruiting them now and has already seeded the site with several to choose from. Site users can also recommend a guru by clicking a button at the top of the page.

Business Model

GuruStorms itself makes money by retaining the listing fees. While on the publicly available BountyStorms, the fee to post a question is only $4.95, on GuruStorms it's $295.00. In other words, this site is for serious business only.

There are, of course, analog equivalents to what GuruStorms offers. For example, the Gerson Lehrman Group is a leading brokerage for connecting businesses with experts, and made $284 million last year doing so. GuruStorms takes that concept online, but doesn't just connect you with one qualified expert, but a whole site filled with them. Essentially, the goal here is to make expert-based consulting a service which you can buy into without having to ever pick up a phone.

GuruStorms opens today. Question askers and gurus can join now at www.gurustorms.com.

Although the data repository Infochimps has been open for a year or so now, the company is making a big announcement at the DEMOfall 09 conference today. Now, in addition to simply being one of the best sources for finding raw data online, you're able to share your data - or even list it for sale - through new site features which the company hopes will encourage businesses to open up their commercial datasets to the world.

At Infochimps, data can either be hosted on site in a standard format like CSV, XML, or YAML, or it can simply point to an external source. While the data itself cannot be manipulated on the site, the metadata like the description and tags can be edited by anyone who creates an account at Infochimps.org. The site founders have seeded the site with some data already - like the data from the comprehensive knowledge archive network - but the majority of the data is user-submitted. They've also partnered with Amazon to share Infochimps data with Amazon's Public Data Sets service. To date, one-third of Amazon's Public Data Sets were contributed by Infochimps.

New Announcements: Sell and Share Your Data

Today, the company is opening up and allowing anyone to upload their own datasets. The data can be any raw data that has an open license. To get started, users just upload it to the site and Infochimps will then handle the storage and distribution. Also, for any truly valuable data, be that commercial data a company wants to share or some sort of data manipulation - like editing awful census data into a format for use with MySQL databases - users can now charge for downloads, too. The price for the dataset can be set to any amount, however Infochimps makes its money by taking a 20% cut of all data sold.

There really isn't a company that's doing anything like Infochimps. Amazon's Public Data Sets comes close, but isn't nearly as extensive. And although other repositories of data exist, (Archive.org and the newly launched Data.gov come to mind), these resources focus on one particular type of data as opposed to providing a search engine for all data.

Those who have data to share or sell can now do so as of today: just visit Infochimps.org to get started. ReadWriteWeb readers who use this service can use the code RWWrocks to get in.

The process works not only with traditional coupons but with customer loyalty cards, too, which are typically used for in-store discounts, points, and other special offers provided by the retailer to regular customers. Since most stores already run their own in-house programs for this, MoLo Rewards is introducing a way to link the existing programs to their mobile platform. The incentive on the retailers' part, says the company, is that a mobile system such as this would dramatically cut down on fraud while also cutting costs associated with mailings and printings. They can also use RFID tags on store shelves to distribute coupons to customers walking the aisles.

In addition to the coupon processing, the MoLo Rewards system tracks your purchases on the backend in order to provide you with targeted coupons and other offers based on both your spending habits and your physical location. As you use the mobile coupons, you earn MoLo points, which can then be redeemed for "rewards" which include things like laptops, game consoles, bikes, gift cards, and so on.

NFC vs RFID

One drawback to this program - at least here in the U.S. - is its use of NFC technology. NFC is much more popular in European and Asian markets where it's already used for everything from micropayments to file sharing. With this in mind, MoLo Rewards also offers RFID as an alternative. This allows the application to work with any phone as all the consumer needs to do is attach the company's RFID tag to their phone in order to participate. Also available are "show and go" coupons, which are basically a low-tech feature of their application that lets you show the coupon on your phone's screen to the cashier so they can then enter it manually into their system.

MoLo Rewards is currently in beta as they work to add more retailers to their system. In the meantime, those interested in registering can do so here.

Gelato is the kind of web site that's going to make married and attached folks almost wish they were single again - it's that much fun to use. Getting started is one of the simplest processes we've ever seen. Not only does it offer Facebook Connect as an alternative to creating an account, it actually imports your Facebook profile information to create an instant dating profile on Gelato. (You can select and deselect which items you want to import, too).

However, Gelato doesn't stop with just Facebook - the site actually supports eight social services in total and has more on the way. Obviously, there's Twitter support, a key component to any good lifestream, but there's also Last.fm, Netflix, Flickr, Hulu, Amazon, and Seesmic. By adding a mix of these sites to your profile, it's much easier for someone to get an idea of what sort of interests you have than by reading some sort of self-created profile list. Think about it: you may have a rather typical list of favorite movies which include everything from "Forrest Gump" to "The Godfather," but your recent viewing of Dollhouse Season 1 on Hulu will out you as the sci-fi geek you are at heart.

Your updates on these social networks are combined to form a lifestream of your activities, just like they would on FriendFeed. Also like FriendFeed, you can "like" and comment on the items posted. And if you don't know what to say, various "icebreakers" are available to help you be witty on the fly. However, because Gelato is focused on making one-to-one connections, those likes, comments, and icebreakers remain private. The only person who can see them is the recipient. They can then respond to your comment if they want to start a conversation with you.

Real-Time Search

A real-time search feature, another borrowed idea from FriendFeed, helps you find topics you're interested in. For example, if you're looking for someone who's talking about the latest Harry Potter movie, you can search for that using keywords. Of course you're also able to filter your searches by age, sex, and location, too, so you can find someone local to chat with.

Legit Accounts and "Friendships"

One unique feature to Gelato that didn't come from elsewhere is what they're calling your "SCOOP" rating, aka the "social confidence of online profile." The higher the "SCOOP" rating, the better chance you're legit. This feature is designed to combat those who post fake profiles on dating sites. To bump your rating up, you can post to Twitter or Facebook and ask your friends to confirm who you are. Obviously, this isn't foolproof, but it should help highlight legit accounts as being so.

The only area that may need a little finessing is the way friendships work on the site. As with Facebook, you can send friend requests to other users and they must accept your request before you can be friends. This in and of itself isn't so bad...or all that different from how many other sites work for that matter. However, since a lot of online dating interaction is typically of the "try-before-you-buy" sort (live chats, email messages, etc.), it could lead to some sticky situations when you decide that the person you "friended" isn't someone you want to get to know better after all. To get them out of your friends list, you have to unfriend them and they will know you've done so. Considering all the other smart features in Gelato, it would have been nice if they could have come up with a less hurtful way of saying "I'm just not that into you."

Still that's a minor complaint in what is, overall, a unique entry to the billion dollar marketplace that is online dating. Despite the fact that much of the site's inspiration comes from FriendFeed, we won't hold that against them. In fact, we applaud them for it. Taking FriendFeed's innovations and applying them to a marketplace decidedly lacking in such technical innovation is a brilliant idea.

If you're ready to give the "stream dating" of Gelato a try, you can join now at ge.la.to.

The site also offers special "In Company" features which let you network among your work colleagues differently than how you network with persons outside the company. With your "In Company" connections, you may choose to reveal a relationship with a high profile contact that you would not share to others outside the company...or the other way around. Also, "In Company" users with Silver or Gold memberships can make unlimited introductions and information requests.

Another unique feature is WhoDoYouKnowAt's Contact Data Integrity Management option (CDIM). This allows you to control who has access to your current contact information. To set this up, you fill out both your current and formerly valid, but now outdated, contact information. When your data is matched with others' contact lists, you're automatically notified. If they still retain your old contact information, you can then choose to grant them access to your new information or ignore the notice without them ever knowing.

Too Complex?

These features are only scratching the surface of what WhoDoYouKnowAt has to offer. The site has been thoroughly thought through, with seemingly every scenario or use case accounted for. There are options like Prospect Lists for connecting with contacts at targeted companies, Alerts, Relationship Rankings, and a Productivity Center for managing your connections.

In fact, if anything, WhoDoYouKnowAt might be overly complex for a niche product that aims to address only the needs of heavy-duty business networkers who find LinkedIn uncomfortably open. (Just look at that chart! Click to maximize). We suppose that, for those folks, WhoDoYouKnowAt could be the perfect solution given all its levels of privacy and trust. However, for the everyday business professional, LinkedIn or even Outlook will probably still suffice...or these days, even Facebook may work.

This impressive tool is launching today at the DEMO conference, where it may very well steal the show. Liaise is currently available only for Outlook, but if you're an Outlook user then it's worth your time to download. Outlook user or not, you'll want to check out the video demonstration below.

I really hope that this product will support GMail sometime soon (perhaps with some Google Gears integration?) but for now this is the first software in a long time that's made me give Windows a second look. This level of automated task-tracking and organization, with minimal interruption to your existing work-flow, has got to offer a competitive advantage. The elegance of the real-time analysis and the usefulness of the language processing, at least in theory on the day the product launches, is the kind of experience that reminds us how much innovation is still possible.

The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers who click this link will get access to download the application.

If you're not familiar with DEMO, it's a very slick conference where startup companies are selected to present to an audience of potential investors, reporters and others. It's been around for decades and has roots in the mobile world. All the major tech blogs now race to cover the scads of companies that launch there each year. It's also become very controversial as the media and tech landscapes have changed.

I like DEMO, though my wife reminds me that every one of the 3 times I've been there as a reporter and once with a presenting company, I've called home and said "why do I come here, I don't want to ever come to this again." It's too Silicon Valley for me, though I do love getting to see and meet many of the people I always do at DEMO. I feel similarly about reporting on this story. I just want to see what Kara Swisher has to say about it, because I'm guessing that she's going to explode with snark.

More details on this in a few minutes as I fill in my thoughts on the topic. I just wanted to post first on it because the behind the scenes wrestling match over embargoes, etc. is absurd. It's actually pretty funny that you read about this here first.

I hate the fact that most of this story is not about Chris Shipley, who has done a great job for 13 years running DEMO, even dancing on stage while she does it! Unfortunately, some big personalities have overshadowed Shipley's hard work at least in these parts and in recent times.

Photo of Chris Shipley CC by Robert Scoble

Michael Arrington's contention is that DEMO is a "pay for play" event that excludes some of the most important innovators by way of its nearly $20k price of participation. Arrington, who incidentally is a former employer of mine and whom I owe a lot of gratitude for help with my career's advancement, believes that his competing conferences (the TechCrunch 50 etc.) are superior because they are free for startups to present at. That's a debate that has raged back and forth but my personal opinion is that many startups have for decades been able to drop that $20k without too much hesitation. Those who can't can debut at different events, or on blogs. Scheduling the TechCrunch events at the same time as DEMO seemed an overly competitive move to me, but Arrington doesn't often put the words "overly" and "competitive" in the same sentence. He is winning, too, so that's hard to argue with.

Now DEMO will be taken over by Matt Marshall, who is ostensibly a blogger and seems like a nice enough man. He's also been a partner in Arrington's other major conference The Crunchies for the past two years. We at ReadWriteWeb were as well for the first year, but we declined to participate this year.

Michael Arrington is a very competitive man whom many people either love, hate or have both feelings towards. Many people live in fear of falling out of his good graces, but now someone very much within his good graces (Matt Marshall) will be taking over the conference that Arrington seemed intent on killing. Meanwhile, Arrington himself is out of the country in an undisclosed tropical location taking a much needed break from a lot of hard work and some really inappropriate backlash from psychotic people targeting him for his accumulation and perhaps use of power in the tech industry.

It's all a big nasty Silicon Valley mess, and Silicon Valley is always fairly big and nasty. We'd like to see a bunch of successful conferences thrive and bring great technology into the public eye. We'd also like to congratulate Chris Shipley on her great work over the last 13 years and wish her the best in the consulting she'll continue to do.

Disclosure: DEMO is a current RWW sponsor.

Usually team collaboration tools are separated into distinct categories. You have tools for presentations like GoToMeeting, WebEx, or BudgetConferencing; you have whiteboarding applications like Twiddla's team brainstorming solution and sometimes you have combo solutions like Adobe's Connect Now which lets you whiteboard and web conference at the same time. Or there's Vyew which lets you whiteboard and screen share. Then you have your project or task management tool set which can be anything from Basecamp to Clever Tools to Google Docs or it can even be an enterprise 2.0 app like the newly launched Qtask. Finally, if you just want to share screens live, you have to turn to solutions like Yugma (review), Yuuguu (review), or DimDim.(This isn't an extensive list by any means, FYI).

There aren't many apps that combine all these functions into one. OpenACircle, however, makes a good effort at doing so. The only feature they're lacking is a dedicated whiteboarding tool, but considering the support for everything else from file sharing to screen sharing, it's not worth dismissing the app solely due to that one missing feature. Besides, they're looking into adding that in a later release, if there is enough demand.

OpenACircle Dashboard

OpenACircle's Feature Set

What OpenACircle does provide is an extensive feature set that works well for distributed teams that still need to meet up regularly and share what they're working on with each other. To accomplish this, the app provides the following features, as detailed below.

Collaborate

The core feature to OpenACircle is the concept of the circles themselves. Essentially, a circle is a virtual team collaboration space where everyone can share information and work with each other in an environment focused on one particular area of a task or project.

If you have documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, PowerPoints, or any other type of file, you can upload it to the circle. You can import contacts from your email program and you can invite other members to join the circle. From within the circle, you can quickly launch the other conferencing aspects of the program like web conferencing which is done using web cams or screen-sharing. Every action taken within a circle is meant to be fast and easy, often only one or two clicks away. In a circle, no one person is tasked with being the admin or organizer - everyone can upload files, start chats, or host a meeting.

A Live Room

Presentations and Web Conferencing

Whether you need to share your desktop for a presentation or just have an online meeting with other team members, you can accomplish this from OpenACircle. Anyone can schedule the meeting and invite members to attend. Although a dozen members can participate in a live audio or video conference at one time, OpenACircle limits you to viewing three web cams and one desktop at a time. They claim this to be an intentional design choice because "people talk in same clusters," but the reality is that the system might not be able to support a dozen live cam streams at once. That's not really a big deal for smaller teams, but those teams with more members might wish to see all the faces of the meeting attendees.

Meeting Participants

For anyone who missed the meeting, the recordings are made available for later viewing. What's interesting is that multiple recordings from each member's viewpoint are archived. This means that you could have Bob, who was watching Sue's desktop, saved in one stream and John, who was watching Bob's desktop, saved in another. That's a feature you don't see elsewhere.

Chats

While attending a meeting, you have the opportunity to chat with other members through an integrated text chatting feature. You can even privately chat ("whisper") to each other. Those public chats are later archived within the circle. They could be used for side discussions or even as real-time meeting minutes.

Conclusion

OpenACircle represents an innovative all-in-one solution for small teams. They could be teams in a traditional enterprise or SMB environment who are just looking for a better way to work together or they could also be distributed teams for whom geography is a challenge. Mobile professionals will like it too, as it allows them to attend meetings and have the benefit of team collaboration even when they're on the road alone.

Users today receive 25 circles with as many as 50 people in each circle with unlimited storage. OpenACircle.com will begin charging in January. Anyone who signs up now will receive 90 days free even if they exceed what is currently being provided for free. Pricing is $9.95 for a premium account that incorporates additional circles and additional storage. OpenACircle.com will always have a free version. A fully operable version will be free up to a certain memory limitation (1GB) and over that will be $9.95 per month per user.

You can now join the OpenACircle beta program from the company homepage.

UPDATE: In light of the comments below, it's worth noting that OpenACircle has initially launched Windows-only, but support for other platforms (like Mac) and browsers (including a mobile version) are coming in the future. More specifically, Firefox support is only 30-45 days out.

These sites aren't just simplified versions of our former desktop apps, either. Instead, they offer a number of features that take advantage of their "always on" status. Forget downloading updates and typing in your transactions line-by-line, these new banking 2.0 sites can offer you better insight into your financial situation with no additional effort on your part beyond just logging in.

Mint

Mint.com may be the most popular of the online banking apps today...or perhaps it's just the most hyped. The site currently claims to serve nearly 400,000 users, manages over $12 billion in transactions, and has saved $100 million+ for its users. On Mint.com, you can manage your bank account, credit card accounts, loans, brokerage and investment accounts, and more. The site also provides guides that can help you make big financial decisions like buying a new car or home. The feature which makes Mint unique is their ability to scan through your bank account and credit card transactions in order to help you find savings. They do this by matching you up with offers for new credit cards with lower rates or by negotiating a lower rate with your current company.

Wesabe

Wesabe takes what's normally a private activity - financial management - and makes it social. Like other online banking apps, Wesabe lets you see all your bank accounts and credit cards in one place. You can categorize your transactions and see spending and earning summaries. Where Wesabe is different is that it takes your data, anonymizes it, and shares it with the Wesabe community. That aggregate data is then analyzed for patterns and those results are shared with everyone. For example, Wesabe can show the cost of an average transaction at a particular merchant.

Geezeo

Geezeo is very much like Mint.com in that it offers a centralized site to access all your financial accounts including banking, credit cards, loans, etc. Where they are a bit different is in their community aspect. Instead of anonymized data, they offer community-focused areas like Groups and Goals where you can socialize and learn from others who have the same financial concerns that you do. Geezeo also stands out for letting you upload your own bank account data, if you so desire, instead of having to set up accounts to upload into Geezeo automatically. Transactions can also be manually entered. Geezeo offers a mobile app too, that lets you check your balances and available credit from your mobile phone.

Expensr

Expensr is an online personal finance application which was recently acquired by recommendation engine Strands. The site is now being integrated with Strands' recommendation technology to produce a new product, moneyStrands, which analyzes your financial history in order to recommend products and services you may find appealing. The site lets you import your bank account files into their system using a secure uploader. The app will then auto-categorize your transactions. You're presented with a variety of pie graphs and bar graphs that break down your spending to show you where your money is going. You can compare yourself to your peers by tagging yourself with keywords like "young professional" or "college student" and then look at your spending habits versus the average from that particular group. Expensr also offers budgeting tools which can help you plan for the future.

moneyStrands

After acquiring Expensr, Strands has been working to combine its technology with their own recommendation engine. The end result is moneyStrands, still in private beta. Ultimately, the site will offer you a way to aggregate your financial information in one place and see instant snapshots of your finances. Recommendation technologies will present you with services you may be interested in and you can anonymously compare your habits with others. At the moment, Expensr and moneyStrands appear as separate web sites, but perhaps they will become more integrated in the future.

Xero

Where Mint.com may appeal to former Quicken users, Xero.com appeals to former Quickbooks users. This kiwi startup offers daily bank reconciliation as well as invoicing, reporting, A/R, A/P, expense claims, and other bookkeeping tasks. For those considering the switch, a handy page on the Xero web site lets you show your accountant exactly what Xero can and cannot do so that you can analyze whether or not their service is right for you.

Rudder

Rudder made their official debut at the recent DEMO conference in San Diego. Unlike the other apps reviewed here, Rudder focuses on bills more than banking. With Rudder, you can determine how much money you have available to spend while still paying all your bills. The app aggregates your banking and credit card accounts, but the focus here is not on what's taken place in the past (historical trends, spending habits, etc.). Instead, Rudder focuses on the future by letting you know what's left in your account for spending and saving. The best feature about Rudder, though, is that it doesn't force you to log into their site to get this information. The app delivers balances, transactions, and upcoming bills directly to your email inbox.

Green Sherpa

Another app which debuted at DEMO was Green Sherpa. At first glance, the app appears to be very much like its competitors with bank account aggregation, reconciliation, and budgeting tools. However, Green Sherpa offers a combination of features which appeal to those who are making the transition from desktop apps. The app lets you input transactions manually and offers a more advanced cash flow projection than Mint.com does. However, the app's most unique feature is its sharing aspect. You can choose to give other people (like a family member or accountant) access to your data. While that makes Green Sherpa stand out, they've entered a crowded space where competitors already have solid leads, so it may not be enough to win people over.

Buxfer

Buxfer is another app offering a home to all your accounts. It will auto-download your data, categorize your transactions, and help you budget. Buxfer addresses the privacy concerns that many have with banking 2.0 sites by integrating with Google Gears. The app uses Google Gears to store your account login information on your own computer, only syncing back the data collected, not your private credentials. They also offer a groups feature which will appeal those sharing expenses with others, like roommates, for example. You can use Buxfer to track and settle IOUs with others through the site. This makes the app more appealing to a younger crowd, as does its mobile integration. You can access Buxfer via SMS, Twitter, email, on on the mobile web.

Shryk

Shryk is a company which just launched at the TechCrunch50 conference. Their two-pronged approach is designed to help kids achieve financial literacy. The first part of that approach is a service called iThryv which teaches kids about earning, saving, and managing money. This product is sold through banks and credit unions and is also available free to educational institutions. The second part of the Shyrnk platform is WeProsper.org. This is an online community where teachers, schools, and financial institutions can come together and develop new tools and methods to promote financial literacy.

Security Concerns?

For obvious reasons, some people will find the thought of banking in the cloud frightening. This is, after all, data that requires a high level of security. However, with banks themselves offering online services and bill pay, people are beginning to see that "online" doesn't necessarily mean "insecure." In fact, having your banking data stored on servers run by a business may actually be more secure than having a Quicken file saved on your laptop, a device which could be easily lost or stolen. Also, because home users don't tend to back up their data as often as they should, a hard drive crash could mean a complete loss.

Challenges

Although there are a number of sites to choose from in this competitive space, there are still some challenges to overcome. For one, because almost all these companies are U.S.-based, the banks they support are U.S.-based as well. This leaves potential international customers without a way to participate. Some of the companies state in their F.A.Q.'s that they plan to add support for more banks worldwide in the future, but that's only likely to occur if the company can first gain a foothold here in the U.S.

Another issue with these sites is that there is almost no support for small community banks and credit unions. Unless the site allows you to import your transactions manually (which somewhat defeats the purpose), you're out of luck. Why is that almost all major banks are available yet so few of the smaller banks are? This is the type of service that could help keep smaller banks more competitive with their big bank counterparts, so you would think some of them would be interested. Is the burden on the banking 2.0 sites to help smaller banks get online or is it up to those institutions themselves? Perhaps the banking 2.0 sites need to be working a way to automate the import of transactions from any bank, regardless of whether or not the institution itself supports the site. The first company to come up with a solution like that could really set themselves apart from the rest of the pack and gain a whole new set of customers in the process.

Conclusion

Banking 2.0 is still very much an emerging technology trend. Yet with the young generation of digital natives now entering the workforce and starting their careers, you can be sure that they will have an impact on this space. They will expect their banks to support not only online banking but also other online money management tools such as these. This is not a generation that's known for their brand loyalty, so you can bet that they will be all too happy to change banks if they decide they want to use one of these services and their bank isn't supported.

Banking 2.0 represents only one aspect of the growing trend that is cloud computing. Just as other desktop software is being threatened by new online apps, desktop financial management software is threatened as well. These banking sites go up against expensive and unwieldy desktop software while offering their services for free and finding you savings. In our current economy, that activity gives banking 2.0 the potential to go mainstream fast.

To get started with SemantiFind, you must first create an account. You can then download the browser plugin which installs the SemantiFind toolbar. This plugin is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

To begin using SemantiFind, you must go to www.google.com - the service won't work from iGoogle or your Google search box in your browser. After you enter your search term in the box as usual, you then are prompted to indicate the precise meaning of your term before starting your query. This is done through the use of a drop-down box where specific terms and their definitions display. For example, if you were searching for "Georgia," you would be presented with the option to select either the U.S. state or the former soviet republic.

Once you've selected the word which matches your search term, you'll then be taken to the search results page. The results are simply Google results as you would normally see them, but the extraneous noise from items that don't match your desired query will not display (in theory).

When you find a page you like, you can then mark it as being relevant and useful with one click of the "Semantify" button on the toolbar. This page will be then be included in your future searches and will also become a part of the SemantiFind community so others may benefit, too. Those "semantified" pages will display at the top of future search results in a separate box.

Does It Work?

Unfortunately, SemantiFind is one of those tools that's good in theory, but not so good in practice. When performing some test searches, results were not as precise as they should have been. For example, in the above-mentioned search for "Georgia," a search for the U.S. state returned Google results for the country as well. Also, the SemantiFind search box included a link to a Valleyway story about the Russian invasion of Georgia the country. Obviously, whoever marked that story as relevant to a search for the U.S. state made a mistake, but that just goes to show why search engines that rely on people to filter the results might not work. Human error shouldn't be a factor in web searches.

Without the "community" element to SemantiFind, the technology could have potential if they would work on providing more accurate results. However, "wisdom of the crowds" is the precise angle they're going for with this tool as they believe it will lead to the best results. We're not so sure, but it's still nice to see some innovation happening in the semantic search space.

Affordable Film Distribution On Any Site, Any Social Network

MeDeploy is a new digital media distribution platform that just launched last week at DEMO. With this solution in place, any filmmaker, whether a big Hollywood studio or small indie artist, can get access to all the tools needed to manage and distribute their content to any web site, social network, or mobile device. The platform offers features like media transcoding, content management, media storage, delivery, anti-piracy tools, and secure credit card processing. Films can be sold as digital rentals, download-to-own videos, or video-on-demand sales.

Instead of offering pre-made templates or store-widgets, MeDeploy offers a white label solution for sales, marketing, and distribution on any web site anywhere on the web. It provides the necessary tools for doing so in the form of widgetized bits of code. These aren't just simple "blog widgets" functioning as ads, either. The site provides cut-and-paste code for several different types of functions from "add to cart" to "watch trailer" to something called a "balloon widget," which pops up additional info about a title when you hover your mouse over an item, like an image for example.

A Balloon Widget In Action:

The code samples can be pasted into any web site, blog, or social network, including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Imeem, and other networks on the OpenSocial platform.

Why This Matters

Although some filmmakers may be technical, they shouldn't have to be advanced web developers in order to market their movies on their own sites or social network pages. (Of course, if they are technical, the developer API and documentation are available). By offering a white label solution, customers don't have to leave their current location in order to buy or view the films - the media can come to them instead, no matter which site or social network they're on at the time.

A Social Network Widget for Brain Damage Films

Who knows how many indie films are sitting out there unseen and unknown simply because the filmmakers can't afford to market them. Similar to how blogging CMS platforms leveled the playing field for online publishing, tools like this one from MeDeploy can do the same for filmmakers.

Pricing

Prior to MeDeploy, the only options for distributing paid video content like movie downloads were very expensive enterprise digital solutions that only large studios and TV networks could afford.

MeDeploy's Dashboard

Although MeDeploy was designed to help the indie filmmaker, that's not to say that it can't cater to the large studios, too. The company offers two pricing tiers: MeDeploy Indie ($19.95/mo) and MeDeploy Professional ($199.95/mo). With the Indie account, a filmmaker has everything needed to get started with online distribution. When their catalog and distribution needs change, they can then upgrade to Professional, which is a more customizable and scalable solution ideal for larger distributors, studios, and broadcast networks.

Any filmmakers out there who want to test the waters prior to signing up can get started with a free 30-day trial: just visit www.medeploy.com.

For more information, check out their presentation from DEMO, embedded below:

Apple Introduces iTunes 8 and New iPods

At Apple's "Let's Rock" special event this week, Steve Jobs introduced a new version of iTunes, the availability of HD TV shows for the American market, a new design for the iPod Nano and iPod touch, as well as a major update for the iPhone/iPod touch firmware. According to Jobs, Apple has sold 160 million iPods worldwide and now holds 73.4% of the market in the US. Check our post for more data points.

ITunes 8: The Genius in the Box

Music discovery services are definitely a hot topic right now, with Pandora, Last.fm, imeem, and others vying for users. This week, Apple joined the fray when it released iTunes 8 and its 'Genius' recommendation engine. After examining your iTunes library, iTunes uploads data about your library to Apple's servers and returns back a set of information about how the songs in your library correlate to each other. Based on this, iTunes can now build playlists of similar songs and display shopping recommendations.

AOL May Try to Bring RSS and Lifestreaming Mainstream

RSS and centralized integration of activity data from multiple social networks are the kinds of technologies that only early adopters are interested in, right? AOL has the exact opposite kind of audience, does it not? Those assumptions appear to be facing serious challenge, because AOL is planning to put an RSS reader and a window for participating in multiple 3rd party social networks right onto its front page. This could change the lives of millions of people, so check out our analysis.

Also this week Yahoo! told the press that its home page will soon be home to far more content from outside the Yahoo! network than ever before. Could the era of the walled garden is over? See our post for more details.

DEMOfall 08 Coverage

Not too long ago, there were some grumblings about the state of the tech blogosphere and the industry in general. By spending so much time reading Techmeme, Twitter, FriendFeed, and the like it's easy to get the impression that some of the most influential people in our industry today were less interested in the technology they were reviewing than they were in making a name for themselves as some sort of navel-gazing superstar. Not only that, the apps that people were fawning over were often not the kind of apps that had mainstream appeal or were solving real problems. It was as if the whole crowd was shouting at each other, trying to be heard over the noise and patting each other on the back for being so hip with all our shiny, social media-flavored toys.

Was this what the tech industry had come to, we wondered? No, that was just what the tech blogosphere had come to. This year's DEMO conference proved to our reporter Sarah Perez that technology innovation is still alive and well.

Here is our full coverage from DEMO:

• Giftag: Social Wishlists Using Open Standards
• SpinSpotter, A New Browser Plugin To Help Spot Media Bias
• Have The News Come To You With Alerts.com
• FFWD: A Remote Control For Internet Video
• iKnow! Launches Adaptive Learning System
• SkyData Integrates Everything, Puts It On Your Smartphone
• HeyCosmo: Automate Your Life Via Your Mobile
• Invision.tv: Like A TV Guide For Internet Video
• Web 1.0 Job Sites Have New Competition: PaidInterviews
• Better Photo Management for Mac? iLovePhotos Hopes So
• Talk To Your iPhone With New Voice-Recognition App, Say Where
• Qtask: Web-Based Team Collaboration

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

User Experience: Learning from the Pros

There are more startup tech companies launching this week than almost anyone can keep track of, but any time a new service launches - one thing is key to its survival. The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line.

What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. In this post are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

RWW Live: Chrome & Its Impact on The Browser Market

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, was on the topic of Google's new open source browser Chrome and its potential impact in the browser market. We had 3 very special guests on the show to discuss this: Aaron Boodman from Google, a Software Engineer on the Chrome team; Chris Messina from Vidoop (formally of Firefox and Flock); and Alex Russell from The Dojo Toolkit.

Download MP3

RWW Predictions: Browser Wars 2.0

This week we ran a prediction challenge, on the topic of browsers. Google's new browser, Chrome (our coverage), is sure to take market share from the existing players. So we asked: which of the following browsers will lose the most share (in percentage terms) between August 2008 and December 2008? Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or a tie or other? The results are on RWW Predictions and IE was most peoples pick to suffer, although many voted for Firefox too:

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

What do CIOs Think About Social Media?

The internal IT department, headed by the CIO, no longer acts as the gatekeeper for all new technology coming into the enterprise. IT may stand at the gate to the castle, but SaaS and social media startups are swimming across the moat. Internal IT can still set fire to the moat and otherwise make life difficult. But how do you make this a win/win relationship, so that they welcome your entry? Start by understanding how IT is thinking about social media.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.