What's the solution? Stay up all night? A new startup launching this week called Live Matrix has a better idea. Live Matrix is your program guide to the real-time Web, allowing you to search, save and create reminders for all the live Web events you want to be a part of.

When people think of the real-time Web, they often think only of the "breaking news" aspect. The blog post that just went live with the details of the next-gen iPhone found in a bar. The tweets from ground zero of some big natural disaster. The new Web service that just opened its doors to the public.

However, a lot of the real-time Web is planned in advance. It's the product launch you've been waiting for, the daily video podcast you like to watch recorded live, the Second Life meetup that you've known about for a week.

Live Matrix wants to help you better manage these types of scheduled events. It's the "TV Guide" for the Web. And unlike a lot of startups launching these days, it doesn't have us saying, "Hmm, that's interesting," - it has us saying, "Wow! I needed that!"

The service was co-founded by Sanjay Reddy, whose experience has spanned across industries from banking to animation - in addition to an SVP position at Gemstar-TV Guide, makers program guide technology and publishers of the well-known printed mag, "TV Guide" - and Nova Spivack, a longtime Web entrepreneur who gave us Dice and the brilliant, but ultimately overly complex Twine.com, a semantic Web application that was eventually acquired by another semantic-focused startup, Evri.

But where Twine was confusing and poorly organized, Live Matrix is simple and straightforward. Perhaps that's due the company's decision to use an outside design firm. Whatever the reason, it works.

Live Matrix Features

In fact, there's isn't even a need to explain how to use it. You've used search engines and program guides before; you'll figure it out.

But we will mention the service's many standout features:

In the works is an alerting feature that would let you track events based on keyword or interest (e.g. "shoes," "Apple," etc.) and more advanced analytics.

Live Matrix is in closed private beta right now, but you can sign up to join via the website.

With real-time live updating folders such as these, it's easy to imagine how any web site could take advantage of this feature. Live updating RSS feeds or top stories from your favorite news source? Yes! Real-time stock quotes or fantasy football updates? Sure! And that may only be the beginning...the potential is there to expand the technology into other applications, too. For example, a live-updating RSS reader.

Also, since Android apps can run in the background, a Live Folders-enabled application could display update-related info right on the phone's homescreen similar to how an email application displays the number of unread messages. In an Android RSS reader application, that information could be the number of unread news items, for example. For other applications, though, the technology could be used to change the icon itself for a more subtle type of notification. Anything's possible of course, but for now Android users will have to be content with the way Live Folders currently works. However, that's still pretty impressive.

According to Android Developer Joey Sochacki, the latest version of Cupcake is solid and he suspects that it could be ready for public consumption in only a matter of weeks if Google's Android team wanted to deploy it. Considering that there will be major announcements today surrounding an update to the iPhone software, Google may want to prepare to release something exciting of their own, too.

The concept behind Zcapes is somewhat reminiscent of the mobile social network Brightkite's feature called "placestreams." With Brightkite, users can post text and images surrounding a particular place or event directly from their mobile phone. Zcapes is very similar in concept - except instead of being a social network whose primary goal is connecting you to other users, a Zcape page is just the placestream, nothing more. However, Zcape pages aren't limited to a physical place in the real world or an event like a conference or concert. They can also be created for an activity, like "watching the Oscars" or a group - like your coworkers, for example. The pages you create can be set to public or private, as you choose.

If you want to tap into conversations surrounding a particular keyword, the service could easily do that. However, it's not limited to web chatter alone. In addition to tracking the real-time web of Twitter updates and Flickr uploads, the service can also track RSS feeds while letting you integrate messaging options, text boxes, images, polls, RSVPs, maps of a particular location, and other features that a traditional blog might have right into your Zcape page. (You can see Zcape in action by checking out this one for ReadWriteWeb: http://rww.zcapes.com or this one for SmartMobs, which recently introduced the service to us.)

How To Share Your Creation

Once you have created a Zcape of your own, you can share it via email, Twitter, or even QR code. Upon creation, the service provides an image of a QR barcode which you could easily stick somewhere in the real world - especially if you had one of these portable, ink-free photo/sticker printers. Make sure to save the image right way, though, because once we left that final page of the creation process, we had trouble finding the sharing options again.

To interact with the Zcapes created by others, you'll need to sign up for a free account. You can then "Favorite" Zcapes by clicking on "Love this!" which is found at the bottom of all Zcape pages. The pages themselves are designed to be viewed from a mobile phone, not a desktop/laptop PC, as you can see from the image below, captured on a laptop.

Where Does Zcapes Fit In?

To understand where exactly a product like Zcapes fits in, you can refer to the following diagram, which will either simplify the concept for you or confuse you, depending on how well you interpret diagrams!:

Zcapes was founded by Raimo van der Klein, Claire Boonstra and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, who are mobile service architects from a strategic creative consultancy called SPRXmobile based in Amsterdam. Together with their technical partner Triple IT, they built this service which launched last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

For more information about Internet-connected "things", see the following articles: "5 Companies Building an Internet of Things" and "The Next Node on the Net: Your Car!"