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MyQuire is a another company that wants to help you better manage projects, and it’s offering bells and whistles some others don’t have.

The Mountain View company launches today at the Demofall conference in San Diego, Calif. It was co-founded by chief executive David Steinberg, who left Yale in 2005 to study philosophy at Cambridge. While managing a non-profit project from the UK, he realized how complicated online tools are for this sort of thing. With no technical expertise, he wrote an essay complaining about the market void. Somehow, it landed on the desk of some Microsoft engineers, who agreed to join Steinberg build a company.

The online site service is oriented around projects. You can organize projects, and trade them like cards. You can update them on the fly, share them with friends, manage to-do lists, chat live and more. There’s milestone management, and also storage features. Four thousand people have tested it.

Steinberg turned down a job offer at Goldman Sachs to start the company last year. Quickly building a prototype with the three guys from Seattle, he raised $2 million in backing from angel investors in May. He now has 12 people. He’s based in Mountain View, the rest are still in Seattle.

There are large incumbents in this area, including Microsoft’s Project, but they charge too much for them to achieve significant distribution, or more than a million users, says Steinberg (Project is $600 for example).

There’s Basecamp, of 37Signals, which launched about three years ago, and became an industry leader despite not having innovated much since then with the latest Internet features. Basecamp, however, was the first to distill the key components of MS Project, making a nimble online edition affordable to the masses. It has become very popular, boasting more than a million users. There are a dozen or so other copycat companies with nuances of this. Two others are Goplan and Huddle.net.

Microsoft recently released Microsoft Live, which had a number of project management features, but it did not include Word or Excel, which Steinberg believes will keep Live stunted. Microsoft fears undermining the revenues it gets from independent sales of those products, he said. There’s also Jive Software, but that serves large companies, and is not offered online.

MyQuire repackages the concept so that it’s like you’re in a room with people you’re working with – at the same time. Right now, MyQuire is online only (it does not work offline). It lets you view profiles of people, assign tasks and helps facilitate real meetings.

Steinberg says he believes people working online are moving toward having identities, somewhat like avatars in Second Life, where their physical presence is represented by a profile, and where others can talk with them and see them as they area really there.

The company has also worked hard to allow companies to integrate it with rest of their software applications.

Tubes, a service that lets you recreate entire Web sites for viewing and editing offline, has launched with new mobile features.

Tubes, based in Boston, is useful because many people like to work offline — for example on planes, trains or on the beach –  where it’s difficult to get an online connection. Moreover, having a desktop version of a Web site can be much faster to use, since its not reliant on an Internet connection.

Better yet, if you are online, Tubes lets you make changes to your online version, and then syncs with your desktop version. And vice versa: If you change something offline, Tubes will resync with the online version once you go online again.

Tubes lets you even click on links within the offline version of the site. As long as the links are internal to the site, you they’ll work. For example, Tubes could offer you the entire copy of VentureBeat, and all the back links to our old stories would work. (This is, in fact, scary, because we at VentureBeat rely on advertising, and Tubes has no way of serving ads in this offline edition – at least for now).

The offline edition also pulls music, video and other multi-media content so that it can be replayed.

You can publish information to Websites by dragging and dropping content into a special icon on the desktop.

We’re not aware of any real competitors. There are file sharing sites, such as Pando and Pownce, but their file-sharing capabilities are limited to online usage (Pando’s, for example, is closer to the Tubes URL feature listed below).

Tubes issued an early release of its feature in January. This one offers widget that lets publishers offer their sites to users. Users can subscribe to many different “tubes.” A newer release, timed for release during the Demofall conference today and tomorrow in San Diego, Calif.,  will include mobile features. Tubes will also offer a single place where all available “tubes” can be found and subscribed to.

The company used to be known as Addesso Systems, which first presented at DEMO three years ago.

Tubes is available for free, including 1GB of “synchronized” storage, and can be found at www.TubesNow.com. Professional accounts provide more storage, advanced support, online backup and business use license, starting at $5.95 per month.

The features also include:

–URL access to any file on the desktop:  Right-clicking on any file in any tube provides a unique URL to that file. Email that URL to a friend  and that file – on your desktop – is accessible over the web. Make changes to that file – on your computer – and the URL still points to the updated version.

–public/private content sharing: Privacy controls allow users to assign different access rights to users, including the ability to authorize them to contribute to a group tubeSite. TubeSites can be made private or public.

–advanced features: Advanced users can use their own HTML code to customize their tube. For instance, content owners can put Flash files in a tube and the tubeSite will automatically build a media player webpage.

–Personal:

• share any size and type of file with friends bidirectionally while retaining control
• create a single sharing place for family photos & videos on both web and desktop
• collaborate with students on multimedia projects or homework assignments
• promote your music, video or art for free on the Hub

–Professional:

• distribute very large files securely while retaining ownership and control
• exchange documents and media with project teams, clients and colleagues

Glam Media, the controversial Silicon Valley company that says its network of woman-oriented sites is the fastest growing on the Web, has released a new set of features designed to boost traffic even more.

One is a Digg-like feature for recommending stories, only designed for non-geek woman. Call it the anti-Digg.

See our earlier coverage of the company, and the notable follow-up piece in Forbes about the company. What makes this company so interesting is that promises to be a raging success if it gains a certain critical mass in time — by signing up enough bloggers and ad deals that it can sustain itself after a its rapid buildup. Or, if the steam runs out of the economy, and spending on advertising dives, Glam could just as easily go down in flames. It is about to finish raising another $200 million.

Today, at the DEMO conference in San Diego, the company has released three more features. First is a new navigation bar, to make its expanding empire — now numbering 400 publishers — more navigable. The navigation bar organizes all content items according to whether they are articles, blogs, photos, quizzes, products or part of a specific theme area with its own channel, for example “health and wellness.” A blog item about health would fall under this channel, but would also fall under “blog,” for example. Glam will soon introduce video as a content type.

The move is significant because the content is all indexed and processed with tags, so that it can be better searched, including by search engines — all part of Glam’s effort to make its content rise higher in result rankings to give it more traffic as it tries to distance itself from competing networks like iVillage.

Second, Glam has introduced a “Story Box” feature, or a widget that shows what other “hot” content exists around the Glam network is relevant to the page the user is looking at. Glam’s Samir Arora says the box has been tested, and has already produced two billion ad impressions a month.

Finally, it has unveiled something called “Curate It,” which lets users recommend an article or other piece of content for others, similar to how Digg or Yelp let users recommend news or restaurants. However, Glam is holding to the reins, by picking professional curators to guide the content-ranking process.

Here’s how it works: Regular users can being curating, and then work their way up to get more status. As they do, their votes count more. They work themselves up from curator, to senior curator, to power curator. At that point, like eBay does with its “rising star” system, Glam steps in and anoints someone with “executive curator” status. Finally, the top step is “curator-in-chief.” See images below. In another twist, Glam lets users choose which curators they like, and which ones they don’t. That way, Glam can see which curators are maintaining a following and can reward them with promotions, accordingly.

Users can take their curates and distribute a “curate badge” as a widget on their site, on Myspace, Facebook, Glamspace, and so on.

Groups of people can more accurately decide the worth of something than individuals can, at least if you believe in free markets.

Fluid Innovation wants to use this concept to create an online marketplace where companies can license large, unused stashes of original technology to other companies who see ways to bring it to market. Called Virtual Ventures, it will launch at DEMO this week.

The Austin, Texas company lets sellers — Fortune 1000 companies, for now — provide brief, business-focused descriptions about whatever intellectual property they may have, patented or not. Buyers, for now smaller software vendors and IT types, can buy “shares” in the seller’s technology they find most promising, based on an allotted number of shares each buyer is given each week. In other words, Fluid is creating an auction to try to determine the potential value of unexploited technology.

It is similar other marketplaces for patents, such as the LegalForce, Yet2.com (see coverage).

At Fluid Innovation, a seller can use this market to get a better idea of what their technology is worth, something that is often not clear if it was originally created to fill an internal need.

In one of example of how Fluid can work, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics’ legal team decided to commercialize software the company built to transmit technical data about F-16 fighter jets between maintenance crews. The team worked with Fluid to license the technology to a company called Jouve Aviation Solutions, which wants to provide the same service for other aircraft, as well.

In the corporate world, the idea of predictions markets is that employees can buy imaginary shares of proposed strategies, projects and other important decisions they favor — the smartest employees will favor the best ideas, influencing subsequent management decisions.

Internal stock markets of various sorts have been introduced at companies such as Microsoft, Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

Fluid Innovation is currently self-financed.

Cashview is launching a product to solve a mundane but vital question: How much cash does your business actually have on hand and how are you managing it?

It is also announcing it has raised $6.5 million.

The Palo Alto company lets you store all your company transactions and related documentation on an online account, automatically processing recorded transactions so you can see a nearly real-time view of how much money is flowing in and out of your business. It lets you email PDFs of invoices into the system, creating a single place for you to view transactions.

Most small businesses rely on desktop-based accounting software like Intuit’s Quickbooks to help them track how much cash they are making and spending.

While these systems provide comprehensive ways of measuring the financial health of your business, they typically require employees to spend time manually entering information from printed invoices, whether checks the company is getting from customers or bills the company is paying to others — although even Quickbooks itself is developing an online version.

Cashview offers an appropriately bland, professional-looking interface that includes a calendar showing cash activity for each day, tabs for viewing incoming and outgoing payments, related documents, reports and other unsurprising accounting features. When the site requires you to manually fill out information — for example, to assign a manager responsibility for approving an expense — it shows you the digitized invoice next to the task you are assigning another person in the company.

The average amount a company pays to process a single invoice is somewhere between $3 and $34 dollars, mostly incurred from human processing, according to a report from research company Aberdeen Group last year (pdf).

Cashview’s service is free for now but the company plans to charge a monthly fee of $10 per user next year, along with a $1 transaction charge.

Larger businesses typically invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in complex accounting systems. They want to maintain complete control of their data, and may even be required to because of accounting regulations.

Cashview focuses instead on businesses with less than 500 employees, the “small to medium sized market” targeted by many other business-focused web applications. These smaller businesses have a lot to gain from a better product, with less to lose from trying it. Cashview focuses on cash, it says, because it’s one of the most important day-to-day statistics for any business to track.

Other recently-launched startups also ask you to share intimate financial details with them, including personal-finance tracker Mint and stock portfolio analyzer Cake Financial. Those companies have gone further than older competitors in asking you to provide logins for multiple banks or other financial institutions. While some critics have questioned the wisdom of giving vital financial information to startups, people and businesses hungry to save money find the risk worthwhile.

Cashview says that its team of finance-oriented veterans will help to allay security concerns. Its founder, René Lacerte, was previously a co-founder of Paycycle, a popular online service that automates organizations’ payroll processes. He still sits on that company’s board.

The company also integrates with the aforementioned Quickbooks and Quickbooks Online, and other standard accounting software that includes ways of accounting for inventory, taxes and other more general expenses.

It has previously received $2.1 million from DMC; this round was led by Emergence Capital, the backers of one-demand hit software company Salesforce.

Vyro Games, a Dublin Ireland company, unveils a device today that forces you to relax while playing games.

It is called a PiP, or “Personal Input Pod,” and it measures things like the moisture in your hand to assess whether you’re stressed. If you’re showing signs of stress, your performance in a game deteriorates. If you relax, you do much better.

The PiP communicates wirelessly with software on devices such as mobile phones, PCs or games consoles. The devices must have Bluetooth technology.

Stefan Schaefer, the vice president of business development, will demonstrate the device Tuesday morning at the DEMO conference in San Diego by playing a game called “Relax and Race,” where two people control a dragon, and the goal is to race a course as fast as possible.

If you relax, the dragon spreads its wings and flies. If not, it stumbles all over the place. Schaefer said that some people, including his wife, have the ability to “shut off” the stress they feel at work when they come home. When they’ve played the dragon game together, his wife’s dragon always flies speedily to the end, while Schaefer’s dragon futzes around at the starting line - in part because he’s still stressed from work.

The company, which has three employees in Ireland, and two in a Santa Clara, Calif. office, has two other games, including “Storm Chaser,” where storms and wind howl until you relax, at which point, the sun comes out and birds start chirping, and “Lie Detective,” which gets more interesting because it detects whether you’re lying or not.

Schaefer said 12.8 million work days in the U.S. were lost in the 2004, according to one study, and that 70 to 80 percent of doctor visits are stressed related.

He said other applications can be developed for the product. Professional sports players, for example, can use it to find ways to relax before competition. Or if you’re playing golf, it will help you relax to attain that perfect swing. He said teachers may want to use it in the classroom, giving kids with short attention spans an incentive to focus; companies may want employees to use it to focus on getting tasks done.

The product works by first establishing a baseline set of characteristics for the user. It finds things like the normal level of moisture in your hand, and then works by detecting the slightest bit of variance from that baseline level. It doesn’t rely on your pulse.

The company has been in development for two years, and has received an undisclosed amount of venture capital.

It is now searching for partners to help it in development. It is also forging strategic alliances with mobile handset companies and gaming companies for distribution.

Hearing about new social networks usually makes us cringe. Surely by now, all relevant communities of people have a place to share ideas, photos and blogs.

But at this years DEMOFall, Seattle’s LiveMocha launches with a interesting twist. The company mainly focuses on teaching you a new language using the do-it-yourself immersion methods of the popular Rosetta Stone software, but it has blended in a social network to enrich the experience.

LiveMocha is not the only start-up hovering around this concept. It has a competitor, Mango, that also offers free courses, 100 lessons each, in over 13 different languages.

But even though Mango offers more languages (LiveMocha’s got six right now) it’s the social network, paired with its VoIP capabilities and chat rooms, that sets it apart. The key is that, unlike so many of the wannabes in the social network game, LiveMocha’s social network is not the central focus of the site but simply a feature.

The bulk of LiveMocha’s site shares much with Mango, offering around 160 hours of content per language, spread across a number of increasingly advanced courses designed to totally immerse you in a new tongue. Each course will take a dedicated student about a trimester to finish, but, thanks to LiveMocha’s social networking features, the learning can extend far beyond the structured content, into online conversations with native speakers.

The social networking is designed to foster a tit-for-tat exchange: if I want to learn French and you speak French and want to learn English, LiveMocha uses a very basic search that makes it easy for us to connect. You can, of course, create a profile, upload your picture, add some contact information and interests, add friends, and so on, but really, the only important part is what language you speak and what language you want to learn.

However, the company has added some small but nice touches. For example, when you add friends, you can see how far along they are in their lessons and compare your performance to theirs, creating social pressure to push yourself forward.

Refreshingly, LiveMocha is not hinging its business model on advertising. Instead, the site intends to add content accessible only by subscription, and may open up a virtual marketplace for language tutors and take a percentage fee of the transactions. Of course, this all assumes that LiveMocha will be able to attract enough users worldwide to fill out the ranks of people willing to help each other learn languages — no mean feat.

In its press materials, LiveMocha notes that no real innovations have occurred in the self-taught language-learning market since the advent of CD-ROMs. Indeed, Rosetta Stone, the market’s dominant player, is still pushing its product on CDs, and charging a bundle for them. Considering that the language-learning market (on and off computers) is an estimated $20 billion, there’s no shortage of demand.

It was only a matter of time before someone would leverage the web ’s new technologies to take a shot at the old guard.

MetaRADAR, a San Bruno, California company, is likely to turn some heads at DEMO when it unveils RADAR, a sleek new interface for browsing media on the web.

While we haven’t been able to get our hands on the product, a quick demo reveals that the company has successfully created a means to browse and share media — news, videos, photos, data from your social networks, etc — in a rapid fire yet seamless experience that gives you quick access to all of the above without requiring you to fuddle with tabs or the like. The company calls it a “MediaMasher.” Take a look at this screenshot below to see what we mean.

A quick glance at RADAR, which works online with AJAX or through a downloadable application, brings the iPhone to mind.

On this example, extracted while browsing Reuters, you see a video playing on the left. This is the media viewing side. On the right, you see icons that represent different categories that you can browse from Reuters’ vast stores of content. The navigation of this content is smooth and intuitive, allowing you to quickly add something to your favorites, share it, or line it up in a playlist. All of this can be done without interrupting the video. In later iterations, uploading content to your social network of choice will be just as simple, the company says.

The powerful element embedded in this interface — and what makes RADAR both fascinating and terrifying — is that, according to its logic, consuming the media on the left is no reason to stop digging for the more media on the right: It is the ultimate tool for the ADHD world.

RADAR is still in its early phases, and in its current form, it’s basically an RSS aggregator and media sharing tool on speed. While it successfully, elegantly, brings all of the chaos under one roof, it is still chaos. Until some geniuses figure out how to change this with highly personalized data feeds, this kind of tool will be a beautiful way to dig through the muck.

But it still is pretty cool.

Companies presenting at this week’s DEMOfall conference point to a trend: A growing number of Websites designed to collect and index the everyday interactions of surfers, from casual conversations to blog comments,

The idea is to draw from the information trapped away in the minds of the internet’s ordinary users, who don’t have their own webpages or blogs but do have specialized knowledge — untapped outside of forums and chat rooms.

The three we’ll discuss here are Attendi, CoComment and RelevantMind.

These companies hope to make money by running advertising alongside discussions — thus continuing a dependence upon advertising as the business model for most internet companies, although Attendi may eventually develop a pay model centered around subject experts who charge for their time.

Attendi, which is presenting on Monday, provides users with a place to show off and build upon their own expertise. Users will be presented with a place to chat with each other about subjects they are interested in — for example, motorcycling. The site’s search engine will then parse the conversation for relevant information and archive it for later user searches on the subject. It seeks to eventually become a portal for much of the web’s knowledge. (Quite the modest ambition!)

CoComment, by contrast, focuses on following existing conversations on other websites, primarily the comment sections of blogs. Users can pick out the discussions that matter for ongoing perusal. Worthwhile conversations are saved and made available to user groups interested in the same subject. CoComment had already launched prior to DEMOfall; it is now releasing more ways to share the community’s findings, adding in buttons to quickly submit content to aggregators like Digg. For our previous commentary on the site, look here.

A third company, Berkeley, Calif.,’s RelevantMind takes yet another approach to picking out worthwhile discussions, mining forums in niche categories like road cycling to extract information about products. The idea is that someone researching a product should have access to more than the “one-way” discussions embodied by the the current form of user reviews, and that the best way to fix this is by digging up online dialogue between passionate users and making it easy to parse. It has an index of nine million posts and 500,000 topics, spread across a small handful of sites.

With such a profusion of startups attempting to mine their users for knowledge, the question is which among them will find enough content, or enough users, to create a lasting site.

Attendi strikes us as a long shot: By attempting to create another social networking site, they risk throwing a party but not having anyone show up. The site’s creators say they want to start off by focusing on small, engaged communities. For instance, they have done work with the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation. Relying on sufferers of a disease to start a community, however, is nothing new; niche sites such as PatientsLikeMe are banking on the same idea.

CoComment, on the other hand, doesn’t cast a wide enough net. The set of readers who are engaged enough to want to save and follow conversations from blogs is relatively small. Although the site was started back in 2005, it has yet to attract a significant user base, and may never do so.

For its part, RelevantMind has found an attractive niche; however, it faces a steep uphill battle against two competitors who are already entrenched — Bazaarvoice, which just raised $9 million, and Power Reviews, which also recently raised $15 million. The two companies have already secured deals with hundreds of retailers, giving them a reach and visibility that will be hard to match.

Whether any of the sites above are successful, we’ll no doubt be seeing more startups centered around accessing the untapped knowledge of individuals.

Social bookmarking has been hot for more than a year, with webpage annotation — cutting and saving relevant parts of a website — a flourishing niche. Startups like Plum, Yoono and Grouptivity have all entered the space, and we reported in August that Clipmarks had been bought by Forbes.

One reason we’ve seen such a swarm of attention around social annotation is that the internet is a messy place. While search engines tackle the problem by pointing out the pages with the best content, social annotation harnesses the efforts of users to clip out and aggregate the best parts of webpages.

Diigo, which is opening its private alpha site during DEMOfall, is yet another iteration of annotation. More so than some of its competitors, the site attempts to build communities of users interested in specific subjects. The idea is to create social networks of engaged users, whether they are university researchers or fans of a TV show. By contrast, Clipmarks has few social aspects, only allowing users to pick out specific people whose content they enjoy.

The central feature, though, is still “clipping” webpages. For Diigo, this revolves around the notion of highlighting, just as a student might do to important passages in a textbook. After hightlighting a block of text, the user can comment on the importance of what they chose to point out.

Subsequent Diigo users visiting the same page will see the highlighting and comments. The content is also aggregated on the user’s profile, found through the main website.

On the Diigo website, the further dimension of community is offered. Users can gather themselves into subject-oriented groups, like stock investing or horseback riding, or instead join a group centered around a specific website, a concept Diigo calls SiteCommunities. For example, fans of obscure Wikipedia entries could start their community around that site, clipping out interesting tidbits.

Finally, the site also features a service called WebSlides, which allows users to mash the content they’ve discovered together into slide shows for others.

Diigo’s founders, Wade Ren and Maggie Tsai, are former investment managers who, like the lawyer who started Clipmarks, set out to make a tool helpful to themselves. Tsai notes that she doesn’t expect casual internet users to visit Diigo; rather, she thinks that anyone who reads extensively will find it useful.

Tsai also noted that the trend of annotation will move beyond any existing service, saying, “We’re the tip of the iceberg as to what can be done with this idea.”

Based in Reno, Nev., Diigo employees 10 people full-time, but has not yet taken any venture funding. When fully opened, the site will supported by targeted ads and some premium services.

TextDigger is the latest company seeking that Holy Grail: Improving on Google’s results by understanding the sense of the words you’re looking for.

TextDigger’s search engine is called Digger, and it just launched at the DEMO conference.

First, some context: Digger, of San Jose, joins Powerset, the San Francisco start-up, and Hakia, of New York, and others which are trying to do something similar. Our piece on Powerset sparked debate within the search industry, namely because some experts believe automated search engines can never understand words the same way we humans do. Google, many think, is doing about as good a job as is possible. Google doesn’t try to assign meaning to your search term. It merely ranks the pages it thinks are the most popular that contain those words. Powerset still hasn’t launched. Hakia has, sort of, which we’ll get to in a minute.

TextDigger addresses the semantics problem by asking users to help it. If you search for “hotel with a view of the golden gate bridge,” it will tell you what it assumes about your intended meaning, and then asks you to modify. “View,” it tells you, means panoramic view, as opposed to personal belief. That might be fine, but what if you want personal belief?

By clicking on “refine keywords,” you can tell it you want “view” to mean personal belief (see screenshot below), or both panoramic view and personal belief. In other words, it is a classic Web 2.0 company, getting the masses to work on its behalf, and in turn improve results for everyone. This is significant, because Digger launches ahead of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ effort to do something similar. Digger relies on what people tell it about semantics. Powerset, by contrast, relies on smart grammar interpretation, which is very different.

Whether Textdigger can pull this off is another question.

It is in a closed testing period. You need an invite. Chief executive Tim Musgrove says it gets better the more people use it. It’s not ready for the masses.

We played with Digger. Our conclusion: We think this is useful tool, and we’d be surprised if Google didn’t implement something like this soon — especially if Digger gets any traction. It should be easy to do.

We should note, with Digger, you can choose to refine the word meaning for only yourself, or for the community at large. And there are shortcomings. Digger dissects meanings of individual words only, so it can’t assess the meaning of two or three words together, like Powerset is trying to do. The other shortcoming is that depends on you logging on at the site, to personalize results for you. It will have a hard time opening up to non-registered access.

TextDigger has received $1.5 million, led by CNET, where Musgrove was a researcher.

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Meanwhile, Hakia has quietly launched.

Check out what it is doing with searches for people, like for Madonna. It categorizes results into news, music profile, biography and more, rejecting the repetitive results that you get at Google. Similarly, look results for chocolate, India, The Beatles or Red Sox. It’s too early to tell what exactly Hakia is doing, as we’ve yet to talk with them. But it’s essentially a hybrid of Google and Wikipedia — a more aggressive push toward the categorization strategy that Ask has been heading toward (see the right hand side of this search for chocolate, for example).

My Currency is a new real estate company that tries to turn Zillow on its head.

Zillow, you’ll recall, is controversial, because it estimates values of homes. Some people love to gawk at the estimates for their neighbors’ homes, others are irked when they feel Zillow gives a low-ball value to their home. Zillow works because it is top-down. Unlike other Web 2.0 companies, it didn’t require lots of user-participation to get where it is now. On the other hand, that might be Zillow’s weakness. After a user visits the site, what do they do then?

My Currency is the opposite. It lets people participate, and encourages them to estimate the value of homes for sale. If a home is selling for $500,000, and you think it is worth less, you get points if it is sold for less. The idea is that estate agents will want to participate. If they develop a track record of accuracy, their credibility grows, they get more customers. By aggregating votes from all users, the “wisdom of the crowds” can also be assessed — which may or may not help in home-buying decisions.

My Currency has a futures index, too, which lets agents and others predict the future average square-foot price of homes in a region.

The San Francisco company launches at DEMO. The company is focusing initially on housing but plans to roll out services in other areas. Its model is advertising.

Karim Tahawi, Founder and CEO of My-Currency.com, is a former derivatives trader and former Vice-Chairman of the Pacific Exchange.

The challenge for My Currency will be to command enough authority to make people want to participate. This is a long shot; there’s so much noise out there — Zillow, Trulia and many others.

Mobio, a Cupertino start-up, is distinguishing itself by creating simple, useful services for the mobile phone.

We wrote about the company when it released its movie service — which lists movie reviews, times and maps.

Today, Mobio kicks off a 100 more services, many of them handy for kicking round town. There’s everything from OpenTable, flower-buying, dating services to flight-time checks.

Mobio is just the latest mobile company to ditch your stupid, slow cellphone Web browser. Forget it. As long as you’ve got a Java-enabled phone, you can download Mobio’s software and surf Web info from within the phone application (Mobio launches compatible with 20 phones, which accounts for about 60 percent of the market). It effectively lets you crawl the web, only in a more efficient mobile style, free of keyboard.

Take for example the OpenTable application (see screenshots at left). You select OpenTable from main the menu. Then you can use a search bar to find a restaurant in your locale. The Mobio app tells you if a table is free • the same information you’d find on the OpenTable Web site.

Mobio does all this by using a so-called “mediating” server. In the background, while you are using your phone, the server connects with the various Mobio services (OpenTable, etc), drawing information from them, to deliver to you if you select it. Mobio’s proprietary protocol communicates between the device and the server.

The first application is written in Java. Mobio is rolling out Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry and BREW versions over the course of this year, Ramneek Bhasin, CEO of Mobio, tells Venturebeat.

Mobio focuses on local content. The services are designed to be accessible with three clicks or less.

There are lots of other features we haven’t mentioned. Let’s say you like wine. You can go online before shopping, and configure your Mobio account so that it draws wine tasting notes from a wine connoisseur’s public Kaboodle account. Then, as you shop, Mobio draws info from that account, and serves it to your phone, and you can peruse the notes as you shop — or impress your girlfriend while picking out wine during dinner.

It’s all free. You enter some basic personal information to register before downloading the service.

Mobio has raised $9 million from Interwest and Storm Ventures, among others.

Bling Software, a start-up that launches today at DEMO, helps translate your Web site into a visually rich mobile version.

Your regular site can not be duplicated on a cellphone’s tiny screen, so you have to customize it. This can cost serious bucks.

Now, Pleasanton’s Bling has unveiled an AJAX-based software that publishers can use to transform their sites into visually rich mobile versions. Bling’s chief executive, Roy Satterthwaite, tells VentureBeat the company is the first to guarantee the AJAX application will work across cell-phone platforms, and small enough to be distributed via cellular networks.

Until now, if you’ve wanted to create a good mobile application, it is developed with Java and C+, and you have to pretty much hire a specialty firm to tailor it for use on hundreds of handsets • just like ten years ago you had to hire a specialty firm to develop a regular Web site.

Bling handles the basic translation for you. However, it does require the publisher to set specifications — and this means having a Javascript-capable in-house IT staff — although Bling will help if you don’t have that.

See images (left) for examples of some apps Bling has already made. The apps can be pre-loaded onto phones by the carrier or, as in the Bonds example, the application is not preloaded: A user must go to the Bonds site, and download it. It comes via an SMS message, and you just follow the directions.

Bling licenses its software (client) to Web publishers. It doesn’t have a set pricing schedule. Sometimes, it negotiates a licensing arrangement, sometimes a revenue share • in the case of Jay-Z, for example, it is a split of revenue from his music sales.

Eighteen months ago, Bling won $2.5 million in backing from Edge Ventures (run by Will Chang, a part-owner in the SF Giants), and B3 Ventures (namely, partner Peggy Taylor, an ex-Peoplesoft executive; Satterthwaite is also a former Peoplesoft exec). Bling has ten customers.

Devicescape releases a software today that connects any of your WiFi devices automatically to a WiFi hotspot or muni network.

This is significant, because more cellphones are being equipped with WiFi, as the cost of WiFI chips hit bottom rates of $2. And by accessing WiFi with a Skype or other Internet (VoIP) phone, you can make cheap calls.

The service, a software download, automatically detects when there’s a Wifi network nearby; you can set the phone to vibrate, for example, to alert you when you’re near one. Phones, music players, or any other WiFi device can use the service. The device can also download subscribed information from Wifi hotspots, without you having to do anything.

The company has just raised an undisclosed amount of “millions” in a third round of capital, it told VentureBeat. This follows $12.2 millon it raised in January 2005 from firms including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, JAFCO Ventures, August Capital and Applied Materials.

Glenn Flinchbaugh, the company’s VP of products, said 300 cities across the U.S. are at some stage of deploying WiFi systems, and there are thousands of other hotspot providers, both free and paid. Devicescape lets your device communicate with even paid hotspots, but you have to pay to access it. Both the downloadable and pre-installed versions of the software interact with the Devicescape server to enable things like automatic hotspot login.

Devicescape’s chief competitor is Boingo, which aggregates WiFi networks for subscribers. Like Devicescape, Boingo has realized the promise of increasingly popular dual-mode phones, which work on GSM or WiFi (and thus make free Internet calls). However, Devicescape’s software is smaller, at 35KB, because it updates via communication with the Devicescape server. This gives it an advantage over Boingo’s MB-sized software, which has to store all of Boingo’s network information on the phone, which makes it not merely bulky, but costlier.

Devicescape hopes to make money by licensing its software to device manufaucturers. It will also strike partnerships with hotspot providers, getting a cut if it brings them more customers, said Flinchbaugh.

There will be more than 1 billion WiFi devices by 2010, according to Merrill Lynch.

Nexo bills itself as the social network for families, or small groups.

What? Not another social network! Well, the thinking of co-founder Craig Jorasch is that there’s still need for one more. There’s no site on the Web, he argues, where you can slap together a private network for a few trusted contacts - family members or others — and do it EASILY.

Nexo, of Palo Alto, launches at the Demo conference today. It has all the Web 2.0 technology you want (fully AJAXed), and lets you design your family page(s), upload videos, photos wherever you want, and integrate whatever other third-party widgets you want. If you make an update, such as an event time change, you can notify the group by email (each member can specify how often, if at all, they get notified by email. For example, they can be notified of every change separately, or just get once-a-day summary). You then click on the email go back to the site to see changes. This keeps the site part of your everyday work-flow.

When we searched for an easy group site last year for a private project, we were stumped. We chose a wiki product, but it wasn’t very easy to use for non-techies. We recently signed up at Nexo, and it was straight-forward. It is good for any small group — from families, to church groups, sports teams and hobby groups.

Soon, Nexo will incorporate a function where you can email your group an update, such as a message, or photo, and it will be reflected on the site (in other words, you never have to visit the site).

Lots of existing companies overlap with what Nexo is doing. The closest is Myfamily, of Provo, Utah, but it doesn’t provide as much flexibility in designing the look and feel of site, or let you add third party widgets. Another company is Seattle’s Cozi, which has focused narrowly on families, and has quite a few features (see demo here; Flash version recommended). Problem with Cozi is that it requires a software download, which takes it out of the “real simple” camp. It’s less about building a site than managing a family’s life. But if you’re a family and taking things seriously (and don’t mind downloading), Cozi is worth a look. It has raised $4.3 million, mostly from angels. Finally, there’s GetVendors, of Foster City, Calif., which focuses on sharing information about local services, helping a family manage a home construction project, for example. And while highly popular social networking Bebo allows you to connect with friends privately, it isn’t focused on coherent groups. Ning lets you create a site, but doesn’t offer the same workflow features for small groups. Finally, Yahoo Groups lets groups come together, but again offers little control over a site’s design (question: Does this matter? Don’t know). Nexo lets you upload photos or videos from around the Web, including from YouTube, for example. Yahoo is more rigid.

As for security, Nexo lets you give different degrees of access to members, allowing some full editing access, others limited non-editing access.

Nexo is the umpteenth social network to launch. But there are still 100 million groups in the U.S., says Jorasch and most of them are not automated at all. They’re still using email.

Nexo is free and without ads for now. Eventually, it will be advertising supported. But if people don’t want ads, they can choose to pay, Jorasch said.

It has angel backing, and has been at work for a year. Jorasch and co-founder Tom McGannon founded Octopus, a company that was backed by Redpoint among others, and took in $20 million before being sold during the Internet bust for about break-even. The two also founded Metropolis Software, which focused on software automation. That company was bought by Clarify.

(Question to readers: Should VentureBeat ban future stories on social networking companies? Is this overkill? Have you reached saturation point?)

Zink, a company presenting at the DEMO conference today, announces a novel printing technology: A printer that needs no ink.

Zink printers heat up a printing element and roll plastic paper past the print head once, and presto, a 2-by-3-inch picture comes out dry in 30 seconds.

Dean Takahashi, of the Merc, has the scoop (here’s the link) on this Waltham, Mass. spin-out from Polaroid. This will usher in a range of new devices. Later this year, a digital camera will be launched with a Zink printer inside. Another company will launch an iPod accessory that prints from a camera phone. Say good-bye to that irksome HP printer!

Honestly, we never got FON, the company that sells a WiFi router so that you can share your WiFi with others.

FON claims 50,000 nodes, and that it is the “largest WiFi network in the world,” so it appears to be having some traction.

Whisher is a new Spanish start-up flogging a similar model — but its offering may be more palatable than FON’s. Whisher has just raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Benchmark Europe and SwissCom. This news was supposed to be “embargoed” until Tuesday morning’s Demo conference opened, which is the rule for companies like Whisher presenting there. However, the news has already been broken by the habitual embargo-breaker, Erick Schonfeld (got to love his chutzpah) and elsewhere (a good summary of all the latest WiFi offerings, btw), so we’re weighing in too.

Stepping back, the FON idea is that you share your WiFi with others, and they’ll share with you • a great help when you’re on the road and need a connection for free.

But practically speaking, this is a tough sell. You’ve got to buy the router first, and in today’s rushed world, buying another router in hopes that you might find someone else to share with down the line — well, it doesn’t seem to be high on our priority list. Increasingly, there are muni WiFi sites, and if you’re desperate, there are free WiFi cafes; we know at least one in each major town we visit here in Silicon alley. And there are EVDO cards, too.

So along comes Whisher, which basically does the same thing as FON, but without requiring you to buy the $29.95 hardware box. There’s some emnity here, too, because Whisher is run by Ferran Moreno, who left FON, apparently over a split with FON CEO Martin Varsavsky. You do download a free software. This lets you tap into any free WiFi hotspot, or into the private WiFi network of participating members. Once there, Whisher provides other social networking features • for example IM, file-sharing and information about the locale you’re visiting and the users there.

So how does it plan to make money? Whisher, unlike Fon, wants to rely on advertising. By getting users to chat and interact at a local WiFi connection, Whisher hopes to let advertisers target the users. If you’re near a MacDonalds, for example, the fast-food chain can offer you a discount to lure you over.

The investment from Benchmark Capital is led by Klaus Hommels, who was an early investor in Skype, and who says he sees the same viral possibilities in Whisher.

(Competitor FON, notably, is funded by Skype, along with Google and Sequoia Capital)

Ferran Moreno, founder and CEO, tells VentureBeat he’s most proud of the company’s embedded browser • which lets Whisher control the experience, updating it as needed.

The IM service is integrated with Jabber, which allows you IM with anyone else on the network, regardless of their particular IM service.

The file-sharing is noteworthy too. You leave the files on the WiFi network, so that anyone passing by can have access to them.

Right now, the Whisher’s Windows version is working better than its Mac and Linux versions, Moreno said. VentureBeat was unable to login to test the product.