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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.

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 coming.

Like other focused search engines, Retrevo has plausible survival odds if it manages to lodge itself in your brain as the place to go for a particular need. In Retrevo’s case, it wants to be the place you think of before your buy consumer electronics (TV, printer, DVD, iPod, etc), but also after you buy — to get help with troubleshooting, for example.

Retrevo is in a closed testing mode, but you can get to a trial page here until it goes live Wednesday at DEMO.

If you have say, a problem connecting your Sony camcorder to your TV, you can do this search, and Retrevo will give you search results that include a page directly from Sony’s guide book, in a preview section (see below for screen shot of another example)

It culls relevant information from manufacturer guide books, product reviews and forums/blogs. It filters out everything else.

It is a comparison shopping site, a lot like Shopping.com, Nextag, Become.com and Pricegrabber — but it aims to serve the full life-cycle of your needs, including eventually even recycling information.

The consumer shopping search engine industry is competitive, so this will be a tough road for Retrevo. But its backer Alloy Ventures says Retrevo has a good chance, given the huge consumer electronics market of some “$130 billion” in the U.S. alone, according to the firm.

Chief executive Vipin Jain has been working at this start-up with ten employees at his offices at the Plug & Play complex in Sunnyvale, with a “little less than a million” in backing from Alloy.

He’s now about to start looking for $5 million in venture backing, he says.

He wants to make money from advertising and from lead generation revenue from the device retailers.