Journal: News & Comment

Live notes: product launches and demos at Gnomedex

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Blazing 10-minute demos and product launches from Gnomedex attendees...

• Second Life (and it was under 10 minutes!):
  1. It's not a game
  2. Your avatar is customizable
  3. Content is all from residents
  4. There's a development language
  5. Scripting tools is event-driven
  6. You own your intellectual property
  7. Virtual economy
  8. There's an API, and you can export in XML. Not yet as open as they want it to be.
  9. Pioneers are setting up shop: American Apparel, Amazon, BBC, etc.
  10. It takes awhile to get it
• Blue Dot:
  • Social discovery
  • Share interesting stuff from the web around the world
  • Social relevance meets information
  • A lot of sites ask, "Who are my friends?"
  • As you get older, you ask more, "What can I learn from my friends?"
  • "Dots" are essentially the "entries" in this concept
  • Easy to create in Firefox and IE
• Farecast:
  • When should you buy airfares, and where?
  • Predictive model of what's happening to airfares in the past and future
  • Based on a CompSci model from UW
  • Designed to be quick and responsive
  • Lots of filtering and sorting
  • Updated every night
  • Private beta in May and June, now public starting Tuesday
  • Lots of traffic driven in by prominent bloggers
  • Blog interest drove interest by mainstream media
  • "Bloggers I'm telling you, we kick ass." - Chris
• Pixsy:
  • Media search engine
  • Every photo and video thumbnail: visual Google
  • Organized in an Ajax interface
  • Power photo and video search for anyone who wants to set that up
  • Can generate different types of search engines for different audiences
  • Why build another video sharing company when we can aggregate all the video sharing sites instead?
  • Fast-moving thumbnails as searches load: could that include ads?
  • We have no idea how that ad model might work yet
  • Scan through the news visually
  • Relevance is one element, but you can also sort by provider, time, etc.
  • What's unique here is a distribution model that syndicates, and powers media search across the web
• Melodeo:
  • Small Seattle company for mobile phone media
  • Can now download podcasts to your phone
  • Now adding some social networking and achieve a better podcast experience in regular browsers too
  • Navigate the site while you're listening to the player
  • "Paged" icons so you can move quickly between podcasts
  • Easily discover what podcasts your friends listen to
  • Playlist from the desktop will be sychronized to your phone (delete, add, etc. on either side, including podcast play position)
  • A really big deal in Europe and Asia
• People Aggregator:
  • All these things work great once you get the people
  • Move between social networks
  • Post content, share, etc.
  • PeopleAggregator.net
  • Lets you set up and run your own network
  • If you want to add social networking, just download the source code
  • Includes user-centric ideas from sxip, LiveJournal, Flickr
  • Give it a try!
• Blubrry:
  • Negotiates advertising deals on behalf of podcasts
  • But you can say no to any deal, just say "part of blubrry.com"
  • Lots of sorting, searching, browsing
  • Keep control of your own brand within blubrry
  • Imports shownotes
  • A second point of presence for your podcast, and that's what it's supposed to be

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