VentureBeat

It’s a classic pulp science fiction idea: Put a special band around your head, and suddenly gain the ability to project your thoughts into the world around you. The idea will seem less like fiction after two startups unveiled at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference start shipping their products.

Emotiv and Neurosky are both busy demoing prototype headsets capable of picking up electrical signals from user’s brains and translating them into actions in a game world. Unlike schemes that have existed for years in laboratories, neither company requires shaved heads and pasted-on electrodes for their equipment to work — you just pull it on like a pair of headphones.

And, surprisingly, both headsets seem to work pretty well, at least for users that have spent some time with them. For newbie telepaths, it’s not so easy. That’s because the sensors have to learn to recognize repeating signals from your brain before they can know when you’re trying to make a specific action.

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say each user has to program their own device. Think of it like hooking up an input device to your body that translates motions to computer commands. It doesn’t matter whether you lift your arm or kick your left leg out to “click” as you would with a mouse, but the computer does have to learn first what either motion means.

However, repeating a bodily motion is also easier than making your mind repeat a thought or feeling on command, at least for most people. It’s not insurmountable, but there is a learning curve.

Both Emotiv and Neurosky are showing off their devices with video games. In both, the video character runs about and controls objects in a virtual world with his mind. The headsets are also at least passingly similar. And both companies are planning to have products on the market by this Christmas.

There’s a significant difference when it comes to business plans and targeted price point, though. Emotiv has a completed design and plans on manufacturing and selling its own product, for $299. Neurosky, on the other hand, doesn’t plan on making any products of its own.

Instead, the company will sell only its sensor to manufacturing partners, letting them determine the design specifics. Its headsets at GDC are all just demonstration units. But it does hope to maintain some control over the end price. It aims to make headsets using Neurosky sensors significantly cheaper than Emotiv’s, a spokesman said, providing no specifics.

Of course, beyond just games, there are probably dozens of uses for these headsets. Why not take the last bit of effort out of using a computer, and do away with the mouse? Psychiatrists should also love the emotional control required by the headsets; after all, the basic technology came out of their own labs. Both companies even have open developer kits. But, at least at first, it looks like these will be confined to gaming.

Emotiv is based in San Francisco, and has raised $6.3 million from Technology Venture Partners, Epicure Capital Partners and the Australian Government. Neurosky is based in San Jose, and has also raised funding, but has not yet disclosed how much.

Unheard of mobile service company Mig33 is showing explosive growth — by offering a simple way to text, IM and make cheap voice calls.

The company has gained four million subscribers in less than eighteen months, mostly in South East Asia, many of whom are using it as their only way to access the Web. Significantly, this is not a technology company. It is using standard technology, and following through with a clean execution.

Tomorrow (Monday) it announces it has raised $10 million from Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures, two well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Technology Venture Partners also invested.

Its traction is impressive considering the company has paid less than $20,000 in marketing costs — according to chief executive Steve Goh.

Customers can use it on standard phones, to text and IM for free, and to share information in chat rooms. Mig33 gets paid when customers buy a pre-paid phone card, to use for voice services. While the voice calls themselves are made over the Internet (VoIP), and so very cheap, Mig33 takes a small cut for the service. The company did not specify how big its cut is. The company has just moved to Burlingame, Calif., from Australia.

While other companies offer various aspects of its service — eBuddy offers mobile chat, for example — Mig33’s advantage is that you don’t have to close your voice or text application to access its IM service. You can do all three in one session. See screenshots below. The service is downloaded via an SMS message, making it simple — and viral.

In most of the more than 200 countries where it operates, users don’t rely on the same sort of entrenched mobile carriers we are used to here in the U.S. In many countries, many people rely on pre-paid cards for making calls.

Mig33’s parent is Project Goth.

One notable trend is that most of its Mig33’s users are using the company’s own IM service, instead of opting to use more popular IM services, such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, or MSN, which Mig33 does let its users choose. More than 75 percent of subscribers are choosing Mig33’s IM services. They’re sending more than 15 million messages a day. Mig33 also offers users a way to create a profile and to share photos.

Eurekster, a San Francisco company that tailors search engines for bloggers and other publishers to put on their sites, has raised $5.5 million in a second round of financing.

Eurekster’s search engines are more social than Google’s, because Eurekster lets the site publishers limit the sources Eurekster’s engine scans while searching. Many publishers want their readers to be able to do a topical based search, removing the non-relevant clutter that may find its way into Google results. A gardening Web site, for example, may want a search engine that scans only gardening-related sites — to better serve its readers.

Google has offered publishers a similar product recently, letting publishers limit the index that Google searches. However, Eurekster is still more flexible, says chief executive Steven Marder, because it lets you select RSS feeds to search from as well (Google doesn’t). Eurekster has other ways it customizes. Eurekster’s site-specific engines, called Swickis (a word that plays on the cross between search and wikis), give readers of a site the ability to give a thumbs up to a particular result, for example. This pushes the result up in the rankings of future searches. A thumbs down pushes the result down. Eurekster tracks clicks and other patterns of users as they use the search engine — all in an effort to improve it.

Eurekster relies on Yahoo and Ask technology, among others, to power its search. Eurekster negotiates a revenue split on advertising with those search engines. Eurekster then gives a portion of its cut to the publisher it serves.

Eurekster raised a $1.35 million angel round in late 2004. The latest round was led by Technology Venture Partners (TVP) of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan, and included individual investors who provided the seed capital.

Eurekster says it serves more than 18,000 publishers, totaling 50,000 Swickis worldwide. It is already making millions of dollars a year, Marder says.