VentureBeat

There’s a social networking site for nearly every person, animal, and interest – but what about a social network for the person who matters most? That’s right, a social network for YOU, the proud recipient of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.

Look in the mirror. Do you really know yourself? Could you be happier? Thanks to a new web site called Inpowr, which launched yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, you can finally learn how to build a better YOU 2.0.

Inpowr bills itself as the web’s first platform for self-exploration.

Once you sign up for the site (beta test it with password: web2expo), you’re presented with a quick quiz that examines your well-being across 36 areas of life. After completing the questionnaire, you’re presented with a pastel-colored lotus flower that scores you in the six main categories of well-being.

I scored well in most categories, though I only got an 86 percent score for accomplishments, probably because I’ve been kicking myself lately for failing to coin the Web 2.0 label before everyone else. It was so obvious! But I digress.

Once inpowr politely informs you of your deficiencies, it guides you to create an action plan for improvement. It suggested I improve my altruism to boost my accomplishments score. Was it bad karma for me to pick up that quarter I found on the floor after yesterday’s VC session? Maybe I should have Twittered a lost and found.

The service emails you after 21 days and prompts you to re-evaluate yourself so you can measure progress toward your goals, and identify the specific actions that led to the progress.

The site will soon implement social networking features so that users can harness the collective experiences of other users. Kind of like a 12-step program where God is replaced by your social network and a friendly lotus flower.

The technology behind the site is based on developmental psychology theories about how human beings relate to the perceived environmental realities of their physical, mental and social environments. The general idea is that with a little hand-holding from the site and encouragement from our friends, we can all be guided toward healthier lifestyles and attitudes which in turn lead to a virtuous circle of ever-greater health and happiness.

Looked at another way, for example, if you lack physical energy due to poor nutrition, your work life may suffer, which could cause you to lose your job which would impact your financial ability to support yourself, which would make you sad. Obviously, this is an oversimplification, though any geek worth his salt will tell you Web 2.0 is also about the interconnectedness of everything.

Psychobabble aside, there’s probably a sizeable market for inpowr’s services if it can reach a critical mass of community participation.

As a society obsessed by self-improvement with the assistance of quick fixes, we already spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the pursuit of greater happiness, whether it’s via anti-depressants, stimulants, diets, plastic surgery, mental therapy or self-help books.

A free web site that gently guides us toward healthier actions, lifestyles and attitudes may be just what the doctor ordered.

Although the company hasn’t yet revealed its model for generating revenues, many other health and well-being sites such as WebMD have already proven the desirability of this audience to advertisers.

The site is owned and operated by Quebec-based Humanix. The company closed its first $150,000 angel funding round in September, 2006 and a second $350,000 angel round in March 2007. Michel Chioni, Humanix’s president, tells VentureBeat the company is in talks with Canadian VCs for a possible $1-$2 million round.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker

O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo kicked off yesterday in San Francisco, with 10,000 attendees from 59 countries. VentureBeat’s Mark Coker took notes from the day.

The highlight was the evening’s Ignite event: Imagine packing a large conference room with about 600 geeks, giving ‘em all the free beer they can drink, and then entertaining them with a rapid-fire procession of sixteen fast-talking techies who each deliver a twenty-slide PowerPoint on an eclectic subject with only fifteen seconds per slide for total presentation time of five minutes. Add in a huge LCD panel television monitor on stage, facing the audience, displaying a steady flow of the audience’s raucous real-time commentary about the speaker’s performance, transmitted of course via SMS texting.

Notables:

Colin Bulthaup of Squid Labs talked about how his new venture, Potenco, aims to bring electric power to the two billion people in underdeveloped countries who lack access to the electric power grid. He told the audience that 1.6 billion people light their homes with dirty-burning kerosene lamps, which are the leading cause of tuberculosis. His solution? Generate electricity from human beings. We thought this idea had been debunked (see our post about the futile effort of capturing human energy via treadmills; see last item), but Bulthaup showcased a yo-yo-like device his new Alameda, Calif. company has developed that with a few arm pulls generates enough electricity to power interior LED residential lighting or other necessities such as cell phones. Listening to Bulthaup, we get the impression this may become a big business.

Christy Canida of Instructables, a social networking web site, demonstrated how users are using it to share how they make fun things out of ordinary household items. If you haven’t heard of this site, take a look at examples like the 14-year-olds making intricate gunnery equipment with K’Nex toys - a kind of next-generation legos for today younger generation. Notice that the YouTube video (below) by this kid got 35 comments at YouTube’s site, but that the real dialogue takes place at Instructables, where he gets 670 comments. An example of how theme-oriented sites (verticals) are taking more action from broader sites (horizontals).

Jordan Schwartz of Microsoft Corp shared his personal adventures in beekeeping and taught the audience the waggle dance, which is how bees communicate to other bees. He likened the hive mind of bees to how users of social news sites like Digg.com do their own waggle dance about stories they discover. This isn’t just an analogy. Schwartz suggests there’s some real science behind this similarity between the hive — where bees that find interesting flowers come back and report it to their buddies at the hive, who then verify it and spread the news virally — and Web behavior. See his blog.

Jane McGonigal, a game designer at Avant Game, argued that the day we are lying on our deathbeds, we’ll measure the success of our lives by our happiness in the past. Inevitably, therefore, we’ll move away from thinking of the Web mainly as a way to be more efficient. By 2012, she predicted quality of life will become the primary metric consumers use to evaluate technologies, and referred to a rise of the positive psychology movement. She urged the techies in the crowd to focus their development efforts on technologies that hack reality to create more happiness.

Timothy Ferriss, author of a new book, The 4-Hour Work Week, shared his tips on how to eke more productivity out of a workday: Only answer your email twice a day; outsource everything possible to $5 an hour workers in India and Canada; and get rid of less profitable customers who consume a disproportionate amount of your time. His credentials? On his official web site, linked above, it’s difficult to ascertain what this self-described polymath actually does for a living, other than generating a lot of press coverage for himself by break-dancing in Taiwan, cage-fighting in Japan, and acting on a “hit” TV series in China. Nebulous credentials aside, the crowd loved him and voted him one of the two best presentations of the evening.

Web 2.0 Expo continues Monday and Tuesday.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker

(updated version)

Yoono is the latest start-up to offer a “web clipping” feature to let you manage your reading and collaborate with others.

For those who’ve never heard of Yoono, it is a French company that offers a social search engine. It gives you downloadable toolbar that, with varying degrees of accuracy, displays websites, blogs, and news articles related to the Web site you’re visiting at the time. When we last wrote about them, in early December, they were claiming 200,000 users, but according to them, the winter months went by and that figure tripled–a somewhat stunning burst, considering Yoono’s low profile.

Yoono “officially” launches and shares its newest feature at the Web 2.0 Expo next week. This new feature is “Buzz It,” a souped-up and smooth-looking mix of Clipmarks and Grouptivity. (See coverage here.) Blending the functionality of its two new rivals, Buzz It allows you to “clip” pieces of content–text, images, videos– from websites and then take what you’ve clipped and save it privately, share it openly, e-mail it to imported contacts or post it to your blog.

In the updated version of Yoono, clicking on a new button in the browser’s toolbar will bring up a “Buzz Note” applet, which is a pop-up screen that becomes your editing dashboard (see screenshot below). This applet deploys Grouptivity’s method and pulls all the videos and images from the site you’re browsing, lining them up as thumbnails. One click on any of the thumbnails adds the content into the Buzz Note, where there is room to jot. Grouptivity, however, limits you to e-mailing your clips. Buzz It does not; as with Clipmarks, exporting your note to your blog or MySpace profile involves a few clicks.

We’ve only seen the demo, but the applet itself is elegant and appears to be intuitive. Compared to Grouptivity’s devilish editing interface, Buzz It’s is an archangel. It offers different editing options from Clipmarks. Clipmarks lets you customize colors, and reduce the size of videos, whereas Buzz lets you do things like reposition text, edit text with formatting like italics and bold, and move photos around.

That being said, for all of Buzz It’s sharp look and feel, Clipmarks offers the most important clipping and posting functionality with a simpler interface: with Clipmarks, you don’t have to open a new window to make clips. It’s difficult to say how popular these sorts of features will become. But for people wanting an easy way to pull content from everywhere and jazz it up with editing tools for their blogs, these are companies to watch.

Note: Grouptivity plans to release a white-label version next week during Web 2.0 Expo.