InSTEDD has built a product called InSTEDD Geochat, which is a service combining SMS, Twitter and email. However it is SMS-only interaction for users, as most don't have browsers. Driving the system is a "semi-structured" API with an extensible pipeline. However the idea of this system is that the participants don't need to be concerned with all the technology behind it, they can just interact with the system using SMS.

Interoperability is an issue, but this is being addressed with an InSTEDD service called Mesh4x. It syncs data from diverse applications, sources and devices. It works via HTTP, files and SMS. It supports open standards, such as FeedSync - an open protocol that describes data formats and algorithms used to version information in a mesh. Interestingly this is a Semantic Web application, with RDF as the default data representation.

The next challenge is using this data for collective action. "Today it takes a lot of coordination to get two organizations working together", said Jezierski. So they have been working on a system called Evolve - described as an RSS Reader for groups by Jezierski. It aims to provide collaborative decision support around streams of information. The service tries to sift through data and identify emerging health-related events. It also has an automatic feature extraction, for data classification and tagging. There is a human input and review module that "allows users to comment, tag, and semantically rank the elements (positive, neutral, or negative)." The overall theme is that it is a mix of machine and human intelligence - the machine can recommend a course of action, but people trigger the actions.

Jezierski has worked in the commercial sector before and he noted that "doing stuff to help people in Cambodia is way harder than running the London Stock Exchange". He said for example that for Twitter to reach wide adoption in these places, much work needs to be done to enable it. In particular he thinks a "better shared language" for technologies is needed for third world work - much in the same way that web 2.0 evolved a specific language in the tech world (tagging, user-generated content, etc).

The InSTEDD Innovation Lab is another project. It's a "socio-technical" lab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and mixes InSTEDD's own team with various other organizations, to work on technologies that help society.

Overall it's clear that InSTEDD is doing some great work to bring collaborative software and systems into countries that need it the most - for disaster prevention and recovery, healthcare, and other essential needs.

We found the DropPlay interface painless and fun to use. The YouTube integration was pretty seamless and there is a quick setting to compensate for a slow network connection. Plus, there is a lot of potential for the social side to really explode with the decision to go with Facebook Connect. It's still a little rough, but for an initial beta release, overall, we don't have a lot of nits to pick with the way it works.

However, we do have some thoughts we'd like to address overall.

First, just like with Muziic, this service leverages YouTube specifically for music videos (via the YouTube API) and appears to not honor YouTube's advertising model. This means that it is, in essence, getting the 'milk for free,' something that we believe can last only so long until Google clamps down on this sort of behavior, either by making the API more restrictive or being more aggressive about removing music videos.

Second, although Facebook Connect is used so that you can easily log in, find Facebook friends, and save playlists, there is no export option once your playlists are created. This means that all the work you do lives in this app, and you must resign yourself to a possible future where the site may disappear one day and any playlists or shares will vanish with it.

Finally, there seems to be no support for sharing any discoveries you make in DropPlay with outside services, except perhaps your Facebook friend's wall. There's no link back to the original YouTube video and no sharing options via email or other social network. While this approach seems to mimic Facebook's own original 'walled garden' approach, even Facebook realizes they themselves must become more open and share more social graph data with other networks.

Tekarma was built by a team that includes a number of former eBay executives and engineers. The idea for the site, as Tekarma's Alex Kazim pointed out to us today, was to provide a comprehensive homepage for every product that would allow users to get tech support, read FAQs, and discuss the product with other users. The content on the site is completely user-generated, though Tekarma also uses Shopping.com's APIs to pull in product specs, which, however, can later be edited by the users.

Features

Every product page features four main sections: FAQs, Reviews, Web Resources, and Surprises. Surprises is actually one of the most interesting sections here, as this is where users can share information that is often left out of standard reviews such as the ground clearance of a car that a buyer would only notice after using it for a longer period of time.

While Tekarma features a price-comparison widget, Kazim told us that shopping is not the focus of the site. Instead, Tekarma, at least in its current iteration, focuses on providing support after a user has already bought the product. In the long run, once the site has more content, Kazim envisions that this may shift a bit, depending on how the users end up utilizing the site.

We liked Tekarma's user-interface, which makes browsing the site extremely easy. As Kazim pointed out to us, the team incorporated a lot of the lessons it learned at eBay into Tekarma's interface. One nice feature, for example, is that the service displays a list of your last search results in the left sidebar. Thanks to this, you don't have to constantly click the back button when searching for a specific product.

Good Start - Now All it Needs is More Users

Overall, while Tekarma is not necessarily revolutionary in its approach, we think that it has enough compelling features to set it apart from similar services like FixYa or product-specific forums. At the same time, though, Tekarma, like most services that rely on user-generated content, will have to attract a sizable number of active users to add content and fill the gaps in its current catalog.

Invites

If you would like to try out Tekarma and maybe add some of your own expertise to the system, you can follow this link. It will be valid for the first 100 readers who sign up for the service.

Like other SaaS offerings, Zendesk offers significant cost savings when compared to its more traditional installed competitors.

How it works

Zendesk is aimed to be used by call takers at the same time as they're talking to their clients - because of this it seems that they've taken lots of time to think about simplifying the user-interface. They make good use of a very simple Ajax user interface and have also included tagging on cases to allow for quick and easy problem classification and searching.

Zendesk has also made good use of API's and can be integrated with other web offerings (campfire, MS Active directory, CRM etc) as well as providing for e-mail integration.

Primarily Zendesk uses tickets as the work stream. A call generates a ticket which can be updated, tagged, searched and resolved all via the web interface. Some features of there offering include;

• Fully customisable tickets
• RSS feeds for both tickets and views
• Tagging of all helpdesk attributes
• Self-service portal for help desk users
• Tickets are email integrated
• Built in SLA tracking
• Resolved tickets can be automatically converted into solutions and added to the solution database

This last feature creates a great self-learning solution centre that, with time, results in a much quicker and more efficient support experience for users.

Pricing

The basic offering, for up to 50 end-users and one agent, is free. From there on Zendesk offers tiered solutions with their premium plan offering unlimited end-users and up to 25 agents costing $349 per month. Like other SaaS products Zendesk is a pay-as-you-go service with no contracts, sign-up or termination fees. Below is a feature highlight video from Zendesk

ReadWriteWeb giveaway

Zendesk's name is a play on the fact that help desk situations can sometimes get a little intense. Zendesk are trying to bring the spirit of serenity to this normally stressful environment. As a bonus for ReadWriteWeb readers, they're giving away 10 of their Zendesk Buddha machines to the first 10 people who email this address.

A guest post by Ben Kepes of diversity.net.nz, a blog that focuses on SaaS, cloud-computing and Web 2.0 for the real world.

No, I don't mean my idea personally (although I do have some ideas for the company), but rather the collective ideas of every Starbucks loyalist, hopped up on caffeine. Simply put, My Starbucks Idea is a socially driven marketplace for Starbucks-related ideas that will help the company reinvent itself.

You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple -- we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen. Let’s get started.

All you need to do to participate is sign up on the site using a username, password, and an email address. Once you're logged in, you can post your idea in one of 13 categories:

Every posted idea immediately shows up in the recent ideas queue, where it is voted on in a Digg-style manner. If it gets enough votes, it gets 'promoted' to the popular ideas list and top all-time list, from which Starbucks employees and management pick the best ideas to actually implement in stores. If your idea catches someone's eye, it will be labeled as **under review**, and if they actually decide to implement it, you will see a **coming soon** tag next to the idea.

A complete list of ideas that are going to be implemented can be found in the ideas in action section of the site.

Overall, the site is an absolutely great idea. In many ways it is very similar to Dell's IdeaStorm which I similarly praised. Every company could benefit from its own implementation of a socially driven marketplace for ideas, especially major consumer brands such as Starbucks and Apple, which have developed an incredibly loyal core following. Such marketplaces can help companies capitalize on the passions of their their most important fans and deliver on the promises of the next big thing without huge research budgets.

My Starbucks Idea has been a huge success so far, just like Dell's IdeaStorm before it. Approximately a month after launching, the site has gotten a plethora of great idea submissions from Starbucks-lovers, and the most popular submissions have gotten tens of thousands of points (votes) and hundreds of comments. As long as Starbucks keeps letting the community freely voice its opinion and keeps implementing the crème de la crème of the community's ideas, the company has nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Disclaimer: I own Starbucks stock.

AideRSS's "post rank" algorithm scores items in any feed for the number of comments, Diggs, tags in Del.icio.us and inbound links it's got. You can then view, or subscribe by RSS, to just the 50%, 20% or most popular items inside that particular feed. The new Firefox plug-in lets you apply these filters on the fly inside Google Reader with just two clicks.

The first 200 RWW readers that click through this link can get access to the plug-in immediately. The plugin uses GreaseMonkey (no separate download required), which the company says isn't playing nicely with the wonderful new Firefox 3 Beta, so FF3 users won't be able to use it yet. Update: We're hearing reports that you can turn disable addon version checking in Firefox and then use this plug-in with FF 3 Beta. Likewise, in the spirit of "it's in private Beta" users with Greasemonkey already installed and turned on may need to turn it off first. See this customer service thread for details.

Here at RWW we use AideRSS regularly, some of us daily. It produces simple, powerful and clearly useful results. In addition to using it in any feed reader, there's all kinds of other things you can do with a feed filtered by popularity. See, for example, our recent post on bricolage blogs ("10 Sites for Finding Wonderful Things"), where the most popular items from 10 prolific blogs are filtered using AideRSS and displayed dynamically using FeedDigest.

AideRSS can filter almost any RSS feed, including tag and search feeds. Popularity, as expressed by explicit attention gestures like AideRSS indexes, may not be the perfect determination of quality - but it's not a bad start at all. AideRSS is a great little tool and we expect that many Google Reader users will find this new extension very useful.

How It Works

DreamAds appear only during your REM sleep, as a footer overlay to your dream. According to scientists, things that we see during our sleep are up to 10 times more influential than the things that we see in our real life. And this is exactly what makes DreamAds a potential cash-cow for Google.

DreamAds works with a very light apparel that you put on your head. It is said to be so light that you won't even feel it and so it won't disturb your sleep in any way. The apparel will be distributed for free, starting with a beta rollout in San Francisco - dates as yet unknown. Here is a concept drawing of the device, which we got from our Google source:

Full image

On the business model, we were told us that the ultimate goal is a CPA model (Cost Per Action), whereby ads are embedded into dreams so that users can 'action' them. However the current technology isn't that sophisticated. So in the first version of DreamAds, Google will start with a 'Cost Per Impression' based ad model.

Conclusion

This is an intriguing product that has the potential to take Adsense to the next level. Google will probably be able to make around $500 per DreamAds apparel user. And with the upcoming CPA version, the high relevancy could increase Google's revenues to $5,000 per person. Think about that: $5,000 * 1 billion users means an unparalleled distribution model for advertisers and a gigantic revenue source for Google.

Our source didn't confirm this, but we've heard a rumor that Google has already started a private beta program with a limited number of trusted testers in the Mountain View area. ReadWriteWeb will stay on top of this story and bring you updates as they happen. In the meantime, please share your thoughts in the comments.