DEMO: Internet spreads sexist tweets faster than ever
It’s no secret that the tech world is one big sausagefest.
There were zero women — none — in Paul Graham’s YCombinator startup class last month. There were maybe two female founders at Facebook’s fbFund Rev and about five women presenters at TechCrunch50 last week. DEMO, the conference VentureBeat co-produces and at which I’m now sitting, seems to have about the same ratio.
There’s been plenty of handwringing over why so few women start companies. Is it… Continue Reading
DEMO: Gelato makes online dating more authentic with real-time streams
Gelato is a startup that wants to marry the real-time stream with online dating (not to mention maybe real people).
Instead of creating a profile, Gelato pulls in updates from your Facebook profile, Twitter account, Netflix queue, Pandora stations and Flickr photos to create what founder Steve Odom says is a more authentic profile of who you are. Odom says online dating is ripe for change because it involves static profiles that are time-consuming to create… Continue Reading
MyQuire, a new project mangement service
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… Continue Reading
Tubes, offering Web site editing offline, now works on mobile
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… Continue Reading
Glam, the Web’s fastest growing network, unveils Digg-like feature
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… Continue Reading
Fluid Innovation: The market for valuing intellectual property
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… Continue Reading
Cashview lets companies manage cash online, raises $6.5 million
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… Continue Reading
Vyro unveils device to reduce stress while playing games
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…. Continue Reading
LiveMocha uses social networks to teach you languages online
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… Continue Reading
RADAR, next-generation media browser, launches at DEMO
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… Continue Reading
Three ways to tap “wisdom of crowds”: Attendi, CoComment, RelevantMind
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… Continue Reading
Diigo, highlighting the best parts of the internet
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… Continue Reading
Retrevo offers gadget search engine; raises less than $1M
There is a rolling thunder of new Silicon Valley Internet start-ups launching on funding of around $1 million or less.
The latest is Retrevo, a Sunnyvale search engine focused on research and other advice on consumer electronics. It has raised less than $1 million from Alloy Ventures.
You may try to call this a Web 2.0 bubble, but frankly, we don’t see any end to this. There is so much money around, these start-ups will keep… Continue Reading