Lots of excitement about "Launch Pad: A Dozen New Companies in One Sitting" this afternoon. 13 new companies all launching their products in back to back lightning presentations. It's going to be overload for sure, but overload worth soaking up. Who was chosen for this workshop says as much as what they are showing off. The list is:

• SocialText, Ross Mayfield
• Rollyo, Dave Pell
• Joyent, Inc., David Young
• Bunchball, Rajat Paharia
• RealTravel, Ken Leeder
• Zimbra, Satish Dharmara
• Zvents, Ethan Stock
• KnowNow, Ron Rasmussen
• Orb, Ian McCarthy
• Wink, Michael Tanne
• Allpeers, Matthew Gertner
• Flock, Bart Decrem
• PubSub, Bob Wyman

I know of or about half of these already and have used several of them in one way or another but am looking forward to seeing what the others have to offer. Notes in the extended entry...

13 companies - 6 minutes each

not a jurried thing, more of a "look at that shiney thing that Battelle saw"

* SocialText, Ross Mayfield
first wiki company started in Dec 2002 - wikis are being used for group communication such as wikipedia. wiki's replacing intranets. 80% of socialtext code will be opensource by 1st quarter. wikiwyg.net is wysiwyg editor for wikis. synchroedit.net / leveraging atom API / offline editing using Ecto. Zero cost distribution, zero cost sales. Web 2.0 is about people.

* Rollyo, Dave Pell
this will be the shortest non-sexual performace of his life. Organizing search by source. brings in search results for only domains you are interested in. Can also share your source searches so you can see what shops Debra Messing usually goes to look for clothes at. Search Rolls are like Blog Rolls. Built on Yahoo! engine.

* Joyent, Inc., David Young
e-mail, calendars, contacts, all mashed up. all data in and out is open (RSS etc), and provides XML-RPC. built for small groups - 2-20 people. You can tag e-mails and can use tags to control access. Calendar is tagable as well and you can get RSS feeds for the cal. Maps as well.

* Bunchball, Rajat Paharia
doing things with people you know. Not about connecting or about friends of friends. "social architecure" like blogging to self-publishing. allows people to make their own apps for what they want to do. Ad-share with developers. Can't log in on a mac currently - bunchball.com

* RealTravel, Ken Leeder
real people, real advice, real experiences. travel info site that leverages blogging and soc. networking. Internet is not the most important channel for travel but focus is on price rather than experience which isn't relevant to the actual trip. Site lets people keep journals and post reviews including tags.

* Zimbra, Satish Dharmara
HOLY CRAP THIS GUY IS LOUD!!!!!!!! Ajax client that mash ups e-mail and browsing and calendars. Can mouseover a URL in an e-mail and see a popup of what the page looks like, also mouseover address for gogole maps mash up, can do the same for calendar or skype or whatever. Mousing over "next friday" in an e-mail shows you what you schedule is like next friday. This is very, very, very cool. indexes all calendar data and e-mail so searching is a snap. the crowd loves this one, it's bad ass.

* Zvents, Ethan Stock
"the best local event search and web service" - claim they have the most events, best way to find events, and are already web 2.0 (APIs, RSS, REST, SOAP, iCal, hCal, blogging widgets, etc). can break out search results by day so you can see scheduling - view as calendar. Can also view as map so you can see where things are happening near you, and filter thous based on genre. Can also generate iframe to embed the info on your own blog and you never have to go back to zvents. This is a very damn cool feature.

* KnowNow, Ron Rasmussen
"turning http into two way web." this is a notification service. I'm not sure how this is different than an RSS reader since the big push about this seems to be that it tells you when something changes - which is exactly what my RSS reader does. It's toolbar based but.... ? (side note - this guy didn't turn this off and these notifications have been interupting all the presentations after that - that alone was enough to show me this is not something I want. Software that inerupts you is bad. BAD.)

* Orb, Ian McCarthy
Orb is a small piece of software that you put on an always on device and it lets you access your stuff from anywhere. So if you run it from your home computer you can access your MP3s or video from your files on your PDA or anything. Using X10 and a webcam you can watch a living room and turn on lights or other things remotely. Access to all of your stuff from anywhere.

* Wink, Michael Tanne
people powered search. tag sites you think are interesting, block spam, rate results and provide answers via a wiki. TagRank technology. Can see what other people have searched for and found. combining search with user input.

* Allpeers, Matthew Gertner
developing web 2.0 apps. chanlenging programming model. (got an emergency call and missed a lot of this, sorry)

* Flock, Bart Decrem
The Social Browser. lets you do the things you already do better and faster. Built on Mozilla. few weeks away from alpha launch. Favorites & History and using Blogging from the browser. Favs and Bookmarks are integrated in that favorites are sent off to del.icio.us, stores locally, and pulls all the feeds from the site. In the browser you can read the feed. You can then take content from the page, drop it into your shelf, and then blog it. Has a blogging top bar (blog editor) and a flickr topbar that you can drag images into it. Make posts from other pages in second.

* PubSub, Bob Wyman
Structured Blogging. This looks very complicated and I'm seriously doubting that users on a whole will jump through this many hoops. I want less hoops.

[web2con web20]