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Before the advent of the written word, the story goes, humans had to either store all their memories in their own heads, or by oral tradition passed down through designated members of their tribes. With trade came notation of facts and figures, and later alphabets, books and libraries. With them came the modern brain, which treats recorded knowledge as an extension of itself.

Throughout these developments, previous generations have grumbled that each new advance leaves us worse off — take this month’s issue of the Atlantic, which includes a feature story titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. Yet Google’s search-and-retrieve functions are only the tip of the Internet iceberg, when it comes to memory. A whole new generation of efforts to move our memories online is in the works, and may represent one of the biggest upcoming movements in computing.

Pensieve, an IBM technology, is the latest project to unveil itself. The idea, being able to snap pictures of business cards and people with your cell phone for later retrieval, sounds almost identical to Evernote, a company I reported on a month ago when it came out of private beta. That doesn’t mean IBM is copying; rather, that IBM is taking the most obvious tack first. Business cards (as well as receipts and other short, printed matter) are easy for image recognition software to read.

The problem right now is that the low-hanging fruit is fairly limited. Recording is easy — so easy that a Microsoft researcher has been doing it for nine years, saving photos, videos, web pages, and nearly everything else he interacts with.

Each of those capabilities is now duplicated for regular people. “Life casting” became a minor fad with Justin.tv last year, and more recently Qik’s had its public launch. Other companies like Kyte also offering video and picture feeds from your mobile phone, all of which can potential be saved. Emails have always been possible to save, although companies like Zimbra and Xobni have since added much more functionality, while Xoopit helps search through mail. For web pages, there are bookmarkers like Delicious, and upcoming services like Twine, whose private beta I’ve started using to save my web ramblings, although the service itself still needs plenty of work.

However, there’s still a lot missing. First, you need an integrated storage spot for all this material. Hard drives die, photo sharing services go down, email accounts are hacked. It’s likely that in the future web companies will exist that offer ironclad storage for all your data — meaning the complete, unedited record of your life. Storage services abound right now, but users will want something special for storing their lives.

Almost as important are editing services to narrow all the incoming data to points, which can be disseminated across Facebook feeds, weblogs and other public forums. If you really did record your whole day today, you’d have to spend a lot of time searching out the moments that mattered and tagging or annotating them for immediate use or later retrieval. The more automation exists, the more people will record parts of their lives.

Search and editing, in fact, are choke points that may stunt the growth of a memory industry. But then, there are trends that suggest otherwise. Image recognition, driven by advertising uses, is advancing rapidly under the care of companies like Blinkx and Viewdle. Voice recognition has stalled researchers for years, but companies like SoliCall and VoiceBox may yet offer a working solution.

Once software can recognize pictures, video and audio in addition to text, the work passes on to the growing ranks of semantic startups. Twine itself isn’t just a storage point for web pages; it’s attempting to add structure through automatic, intelligent tagging so that when you’re trying to find something you’ve saved, it’s easy. (A similar effort not yet out of stealth is called Qitera.)

Such startups will represent the first set of technologies that can truly help establish external stores of memory. Simulating short-term memory early startups like ReQall and Jott, both now available on the iPhone, already help with day-to-day reminders.

Our long-term memories are the tougher nut to crack, but there’s a wealth of opportunity in automated journals, work streams and research logs, not to mention data mining services that can help us manage our time better (RescueTime is an early example). And a true integrated service may be closer than it seems; take a look at Numenta, which is working on a “hierarchical temporal memory system (HTM) patterned after the human neocortex.”

And when all these things exist, what will happen to our memories? As the Atlantic article suggests, we may find that the net effect is to “scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration,” — or, as it argues in another part, we could spur a “golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.” The result may well depend on the quality of the efforts.

Perhaps you’ve heard of a little film called The Dark Knight. It’s the sequel to Batman Begins and it’s opening this Friday in theaters. As a little treat to our VentureBeat readers we have 20 tickets to give away to a screening of the film the night before it opens, this Thursday, July 17.

The screening is being put on by three startups: Xoopit, Zivity and Powerset. Xoopit makes it easier to find things in your Gmail inbox by way of search. Zivity is an adult-oriented social network focusing on beauty. And Powerset is a semantic search tool. Powerset was recently acquired by Microsoft, a story which VentureBeat broke.

This screening will be at the Metreon theater in San Francisco, Calif, so you’re going to either have to be based here or have some way to get here. The tickets will be dispersed on a first-come first-serve base via the Eventbrite site we’ve set up. Please go here to see if there are any left: http://venturebeat-batman.eventbrite.com

There is a small $1 charge, mostly to ensure that you intend to go to the screening.

The movie will begin at 7pm 6:30pm and will be followed by an after-party at the DNA Lounge from 9:30pm until 2am. To get passes to this party simply email batmanevent@gmail.com.

This event isn’t just fun and games; all three companies are actively hiring qualified developers and hope to find some and partake in general networking. If you’re interested in finding out more and entering yourself for possible prizes at the after party, simply attach your resume or a link to your LinkedIn profile when you send the email to batmatevent@gmail.com. Developers are asked to specify if they have specific interest in learning more about Xoopit, Powerset or Zivity.

Just as in Batman’s world, costumes will be highly encouraged at the movie/after-party.

Watch the trailer for Warner Brothers’ The Dark Knight below:

update: The show apparently starts at 6:30pm, not 7pm as we previously wrote.

Two young web-mail startups, Zenbe and Xoopit, have set out to rewrite the rules of web-mail. They see today’s leading web-mail services as dinosaurs, mired in the bureaucratic inertia of the sluggish internet titans that control them.

And they might be right. Sure, in major overhauls last year, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL added some horsepower and storage and pulled off some elegant face-lifts. Sure, the new Gmail runs faster, supports IMAP, and offers a contact manager that no longer sucks. But what happened to that “ah ha!” feeling that accompanies an encounter with real innovation — the one many of us felt after discovering Gmail for the first time? Well, in case you’ve lost track, the last “ah ha” happened four years ago.

Recently, though, I’ve had two. One was last night, talking to Xoopit’s Bijan Marashi as he demoed a new feature that his company releases today (more on that below). The other was in late May, while speaking with Zenbe CEO, Alan Chung. Both men share the belief that the web-mail experience is loaded with potential energy and that this energy will be tapped by making web-mail more “social.” However, when it comes to specific strategies on getting there, and actually defining what “social” actually means in this context, the two companies are way apart.

The Xoopit approach: Integrate, innovate, make it fun

Xoopit, which launched into private beta at the end of March, (coverage) is a service that makes it easier to find, navigate, and use the photos, videos and files buried in your Gmail inbox. Today, it releases a keyword search function to make the process even easier. Xoopit’s core technology works by digging into your emails, grabbing attachments, following links to video and photo sharing sites, and indexing everything it finds.

Its original version, launched into private beta at the end of March, used a FireFox plugin to layer an interface for browsing and sharing photo, video and attachments seamlessly into Gmail itself. The new search feature is as seamless: You search as you normally would, and Xoopit simply directs the query to its engine, bringing results to a sidebar on the right side of Gmail’s standard results page (see screen shot below). From this sidebar, you can sort the results, filtering, for example, for Word documents or photos from Flickr. It’s generally quite cool, but the interface is not efficient enough. Marashi’s query produced over 700 results spread across hundreds of photos, documents and videos, and the sidebar could only display a handful of each. Maneuvering around involved too many clicks.

But the simplicity of Xoopit’s implementation belies its potential: Xoopit has built a completely integrated search engine for email that adds real value to Google’s own, and the company has every intention of spreading beyond Gmail onto the other major web-mail services and social networks. Marashi stresses that utilities are only one part of the picture and that “fun” will play a large role in Xoopit’s strategy. Asked to define “fun,” he remains cagey, but says we can expect to see the inbox and the media within combine to evolve into rich, engaging social experiences. For Xoopit, then, fun and interactivity are central to the idea of “social” email. Its strategy revolves around creating a compelling application, blending effortlessly into existing platforms, shoving open the door and changing the game from the inside. Ah ha! (Click to join Xoopit’s beta.)

Zenbe’s Strategy: Take ‘em all head on!

Zenbe, on the other hand, wants to change the game from the ground up. It is a standalone web-mail application, and yes, it really intends to compete directly with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. The hope is that, with clever design and rapid innovation, Zenbe will be able to convert users fed up with the non-progress coming from the giants and attract a respectable percentage of the hundreds of millions of people worldwide coming into web-mail for the first time.

Zenbe, which was created by AJAX pioneers with serious interface experience, is certainly cleverly designed. Unlike Google, which has separated email and calendar into two sites, Zenbe has them integrated into one (see screen shot below). Instead of searching for that one email with that file you need, Zenbe has a tab for attachments and makes them easy to navigate. It’s also far easier to tag an email in Zenbe than it is to add a label in Gmail, and tags arguably work better than Yahoo’s system of folders as a way of recovering the emails you want. Zenbe’s coolest early feature is the “ZenPages,” which let you select emails to share with the public or friends, mash up the emails with photos, videos, Google maps, and IM conversations, all in an easily navigable interface. (Click to join Zenbe’s beta.)

Zenbe’s more significant innovation has yet to become visible. According to Chung, Zenbe is a fully extensible platform, soon to be open to any third-party developer with an innovative way to exploit your email, contacts, calendar, to-do list, or all four. Zenbe’s interface includes an elegantly constructed, tabbed sidebar that has room for plenty of tabs, which will house the third-party applications. Zenbe has created tabs for Twitter updates and the Facebook news feed, but Chung’s vision is more grand.

Chung observes that in the current paradigm, “email is a one-way street,” in which you “collect tons of knowledge and then it’s dead.” ZenPages provide a way to repurpose the information collected in your inbox, combine it with theoretically any web-based form of data, and share it in multiple forms. He pictures an application that uses semantic analysis to determine the themes of your ZenPages and then queries an index of all publicly shared ZenPages to offer relevant information. (Imagine putting together a ZenPage surrounding your efforts to buy a house in Florence, Italy, and suddenly, pertinent email or IM exchanges from helpful strangers start to populate the sidebar, followed by real estate listings, photos and maps from the neighborhoods you’re considering, any of it added with a quick drag-and-drop.) In Chung’s take on “social” mail, the inbox is not an environment meant for fun forms of communication. If you want fun, you can go to Facebook to play some Warbook, tell your most recent hook-up that “u 4got ur undrwr @ my hse lol” and then hit her with a sheep. An inbox is the place you go to exchange important documents, deal with important contacts, receive your invoices and travel information and swap missives with Grandma. It becomes more “social” as it transforms from a data silo into an increasingly inclusive, dynamic and ultimately functional medium for the aggregation and rapid exchange of useful information between connected people.

And the winner will be…

First, the facts: Windows Live Mail and Yahoo Mail have somewhere between 250-260 million users each. Gmail has around 90 million. Unlike, say, search engines, web-mail is one of those services that has relatively steep switching costs: The effort involved in changing the application you use is high, and the reward — except when Gmail came along all those years ago — is not usually worth it. You typically have a huge body of messages you don’t want to lose, all of your contacts are familiar with your current address, and you’re accustomed to the interface. Making the change is not simply a matter of navigating to a new URL.

This fact alone puts Zenbe at a marked disadvantage against Xoopit, a product whose major obstacles to adoption are the installation of a browser extension and a willingness to share your log-in credentials with a new startup (not everyone is game). But Zenbe’s problems don’t end there. First, it faces a classic chicken-and-egg problem that might be impossible to overcome. Before it has a stable of terrific applications, the incentives to adopt it are not particularly strong and it’s hard to see users flocking en masse. Yet to convince developers to create those terrific applications, Zenbe needs a mass of users.

It gets worse. While Xoopit gets to exploit all of Gmail’s in-demand qualities (like threaded conversations and a great load time) at zero cost, Zenbe must build them from scratch when what it needs to do is put out some apps that flex its fancy new platform.

All of that being said, though, Zenbe is not doomed. One of its founders has sold companies to Sun and AOL. The other founded Datek Online, an online brokerage company that came out of nowhere to take a dominant position in a market packed with deeply-entrenched competition with multi-billion dollar market caps. If Compete data is worth anything, Zenbe has seen steady growth since it launched an invite-only beta at the end of April.

Finally, as Chung argues, there is still a huge, rapidly expanding piece of unclaimed territory in the web-mail market. It’s called mobile. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will have their first web-mail experience on a mobile phone, and none of them are devoted to Google. How in the world an unknown American startup will capture mind-share in Latin America and Africa is anybody’s guess.

But hey, the cutting edge is sometimes anybody’s game.

Xoopit wants to help you more easily distribute your photos, videos and files — and taps into your social network through your email account to do so.

The San Francisco-based company is in private beta, and it has a few components. It’s a plugin for Firefox that works in Gmail, it’s also a free-standing site and an iGoogle widget. Here’s the gist of how it works in Gmail (VentureBeat readers can get invites at the bottom of the article).

First, you install the plugin, then sign in to your Gmail account: Xoopit’s application appears within Gmail, above your messages. It searches through all of your emails to find attachments and links to photos, videos and other files, putting everything into a simple interface.

It collects lists of friends in your email, based on their relationship to the media file, so you can do things like comment on a photo and it will be emailed to the person who sent you the photo. You can also search Xoopit’s collection based on the person or topic. You can also post an item from Xoopit, from within Gmail, to Facebook or a blog.

In my testing today, the tool only pulled up a fraction of the media files that I have in Gmail — but the company’s site is no doubt getting hammered by its first big wave of users. The core of the company’s work has been in developing search and data-organization technology to enable it to access and sort so much data, and the team is comprised of experienced engineers from a variety of well-known search and data-analysis companies, so I expect these bugs to get fixed in short order.

The company is branding itself as a sort of social network for email because, as Bijan Marashi says, email is the largest, oldest data set on the web, and data in it is a mess.

The longer-term vision is to allow users to seamlessly import and export data across email services, social networks and other sites. Xoopit, like many startups, hopes to one day have complete access to data on sites like Facebook — so maybe Gmail users, could for example easily either dump all of their photos collected by Xoopit into Facebook, or vise versa. Marashi imagines someone being able to tag him in a Facebook photo, which he could comment on from within Xoopit in Gmail, and then have that comment appear on the photo in Facebook.

The company received seed funding from Foundation Capital 18 months ago, and Accel Partners joined the firm in funding the company in a Series A round, with total funding coming in at $6.5 million.

Get your invites here.

In ten years, an internet eternity, web-based email has only made token improvements, moving from Hotmail to Gmail. Meanwhile, instant messaging and social networks have rapidly developed.

Four new startups, all of which came out of secrecy this year, point toward a bright new future for email. These oddly-named saviors — Fuser, Orgoo, Xobni and Xoopit — have a simple goal. They want to centralize communication, and they want to give it structure and meaning.

Power users feel the pain of having to repeatedly switch between email and the address book, having to close one email before writing another, or losing track of instant messages as the write a new email. For lighter email users, only once email begins to stack up and conversations become lost or forgotten do their cries for help begin. The least committed email users may have dropped it entirely in favor of messaging on a platform like Facebook, which seems to offer many of the same basic features.

The individual aims of these companies differ. Fuser and Orgoo (previous coverage) both centralize communication, whether from email, instant messaging, a social network or even mobile SMS and video, in one simple interface. Xobni (previous coverage) is an overlay for Outlook that helps organize high-volume communications with a multi-functional sidebar. Xoopit organizes all those thousands of pages of archived email, pulling out meaningful content long since lost by the user.

While each is different, they recognize the same disease, and offer the same cures. To use the wording of Sean Rad, co-founder of Orgoo, the aim is to first aggregate all communication; next, integrate the separate streams into a single work flow; and finally, organize, to increase the efficiency and usefulness of email.

We’ll give a summary of each startup, followed by some thoughts from their top executives as to what’s in the future.

Fuser
Fuser pulls together its user’s communications, both from all of their email accounts as well as the social networks Facebook and MySpace. It then places the message-centers of each service in a single web based interface, providing a central place to catch up on what’s been happening everywhere.

According to the company’s president, Jeff Herman, “The problem is that most people today have multiple email, social networking accounts and so forth. You have to log in to five or six places to find out what’s going on. What we’re really going for is a virtual command center to pull together everything a person has.”

Orgoo
Orgoo, like Fuser, aggregates communication, but with an interface that more closely resembles traditional email. And while both Fuser and Orgoo can access any type of email account, Orgoo adds in instant messaging accounts rather than social networks, and also has a video chat option.

“As things stand, you have different accounts on all these services. If I email you, we continue our conversation by IM or phone. But I don’t have one single view of that conversation. We’ve taken the first step of integrating and allowing you to organize in one central location,” says Rad.

Both Fuser and Orgoo plan to add, as quickly as possible, features that the other has — Fuser will add instant messaging, while Orgoo will add social networking. Where the two companies differ is in their interface (see screenshots) and their target markets; Herman says that Fuser is aiming for the “middle American” market, while Orgoo seems to appeal to a more tech-savvy crowd.

Xobni
Xobni attempts to help information-overloaded business people keep track of their contacts within Microsoft Outlook. A sidebar view shows the relationship of a message’s sender to the user, as well as a correspondence history, their contact information, and files exchanged — all without ever opening a single email, much less tracking through endless folders and conversational threads.

Despite some initial problems with the software’s implementation, with users complaining of excessive memory usage, co-founder Matt Brezina says demand has been strong from heckled Outlook users. “We decided to stick to Outlook because there’s a lot of pain there, and a lot of value that can be created for those users,”Brezina says.

Xoopit
To Xoopit, the email inbox is a library in lack of the Dewey Decimal System. While co-founder Bijan Marashi is guarded in his statements about the company, which will come out of stealth mode later this year, he told us that the purpose of Xoopit is simply to organize email.

For example, Xoopit can search through every email ever sent to a user and pull out and compile a photo gallery from the attachments. Other content in emails can also be separated out. The idea is to make even old emails and content available without requiring hours of digging, much like separating a single towering stack of documents into organized filing cabinets.

The future

The question is, just how painful is existing consumer email? The majority of us are lazy, and we’ll put up with a lot before learning a new system. Sure, our Yahoo Mail may be clunky at times, but it’s “good enough,” right? If they only appeal to a tiny sub-set of users, all four startups are doomed to failure.

However, there are examples of innovation in email paying off. When Zimbra, an enterprise email client, launched in 2005, we admit to doubting that it could challenge Outlook. It took two years, but the Ajax-based software took off, gaining enough momentum among users excited about its extensible features and add-ons to convince Yahoo to acquire it for $350 million, earlier this year. However, Zimbra isn’t (yet) for general consumer use, nor is it a standard web mail client like Yahoo or Google offers.

The lesson is that to have a chance, new email startups must be easy to use, and address multiple needs effectively. To become the command center for any internet user, email should go further, pulling together communication and making them more intuitive, and more useful.

Rad says that Orgoo’s goal is to make a user’s past communications reveal deeper patterns about them. If all your messages are aggregated in one place, the inbox can be the target of an automatic analysis to “allow people to explose the hidden social networks and the hidden information,” Rad says. “We want to create new ways for you to visualize email, easier ways to navigate through and see things in messages and relationships in a larger context. For example, if you look at Gmail, it groups your emails by subject line. That’s good, but there are a lot of other ways to group, whether by sender, topic or something else. You want to create a user interface that allows you to re-thread conversations and put them in context.”

Likewise, Fuser wants to dig into the wealth of information flowing through user’s accounts. While the site already features a “leaderboard” showing who users communicate with most on their social networks, it could gather more information, for instance keeping track of a friend even when she has different accounts as well. More such features are planned, but Herman also points to another important area for his company. “We’re aimed at middle America, where people are not technologists,” he says. “If you don’t make it very easy for people to set up accounts, you’ll lose them. To really win we have to focus on an interface that can be useful to mass America.”

Xobni’s co-founder Brezina says his company doesn’t plan on resting on its Outlook laurels, and may branch out to a high-powered web mail or a client that can, like Zimbra, act as a platform for developers, for example being able to automatically look up real estate prices and connect them information in an agent’s email. And like the other companies, Brezina thinks that email is a rich information resource about a person’s life. While Xobni already pulls out some information like phone numbers from email, there’s much more information waiting for someone to find an innovative way to highlight. “There’s a structure that just hasn’t been broken apart and exposed,” he says.

And when will a Google or Yahoo decide to change their own platforms? Xoopit founder Bijan Marashi compares the challenge of changing email to upgrading an operation system: “That’s a major overhaul of stuff consumers use every day, and the [OS] companies pull it off. If someone can really make this stuff simple, the majors might be able to take a lot of it away.”

Adoption or acquisition by a big company may be the best way for any of the four to succeed, providing them with the money and backing to spread their word.

We’ll follow these startups as they evolve. More this week, on related projects coming out of the Web 2.0 conference.