SmoothSpan Blog

Session 5: Productivity & Web Apps

Xobni: A personal e-mail assistant, also “Inbox” spelled backwards.  BTW, ever thought what “Evian” the expensive mineral water spells backwards?  Getting back to Xobni, it is way cool.  Dan Farber has a great review of all the stuff it’ll do for Outlook uses.  His laconic remark that he wonders what Microsoft Research has been doing all these years echoes my own sentiments posted earlier (and Google isn’t a whole lot better, BTW).  Microsoft doesn’t innovate.  In fact, people are joking that they want to go backward from Vista to XP.  If they were doing things like Xobni across their empire, people would be psyched.

Orgoo (1/2 Pick):  Gives you a unified dashboard for all of your email, instant messenger, and chat applications.  I love the concept, but it doesn’t go far enough.  I heard about integrated voice mail and email ages ago, and I still don’t have it.  With a raft of social networks and other things to subscribe to, someone needs to create a dashboard that aggregates it all and tells you where to start when you walk in. 

Session 6: Revenue Models & Analytics

Clickable:  Manage ad campaigns across multiple networks.  We’re going to need a lot more tools like this one.  Imagine one that spans the gamut of Web 2.0 Personality Spaces and does a lot more than just managing ad campaigns.  It’s a big job, but a big company focused on really hitting their Web 2.0 strategy on all cylinders needs help managing the scope of such a campaign.

Session 7: Rich Media & Mashups

XRT3D:  Stands for “Extreme Reality 3D”.  Basically a Webcam watches you and your motions can be used for games and such.  This is cool, but it has been done before.  My friend Barry Spencer built a company around this concept.  Everyone loved the demoes as they do XRT3D, but Barry never could get it to monetize successfully.  Perhaps XRT3D will be better.  I know people I talk to love the Wii because getting some body english into it is just plain fun.