December MashUp Demo
Hello everyone.This is Makoto. I usually write a blog about Ruby,Ruby On Rails , and European startup in Japanese, but since many people asked me (and also CTO of Zemanta, one of the demo company , gave me this account to try out his product), I decided to write in English from time to time. Here is my first English post about MashupDemo, which I visited on 5th December.
Mashup Demo is a startup demo event where each startup company is given 5 minutes presentation time. This event was second time and held at Sun Microsystem's office. I also went to the first event held in last October, and blogged about it, but it was written in Japanese. However, you can see the photos of the first event here. The detail of the second event is here, so I do not go through each one of them , but here are some companies of my notice.
Zemanta
Zemanta is building a web platform for intelligent content annotation and augmentation. We will offer a web service which will convert your plain text into a full featured web ready article with images, links, related stories and tags. A perfect tool for a blogger! Zemanta is one of the Seedcamp winners, chosen among 278 companies from across Europe.
Yes, this company is the reason I am writing blog here now to try out their product. They provide a tool to suggest bloggers various online resources (eg, images, related articles) by analyzing what I write. They also suggest links and tags,too. If you see the bottom of this blog, you will see "Related articles by Zemanta:". This is actually suggested and dynamically inserted into my blog by Zemanta.
Zemanta is one of the winner company of Seedcamp, which I also applied , but was rejected , so I especially feel connected to the company. I had long chat with guys from Zemanta after the demo, and asked lots of question not just about their product and business model, but also discussed about their back end technology, which was very interesting. They are very young (one of the developers was still 21 years old) and motivated (Moved from Slovenia to London for last 3 months for intensive development and marketing purpose), and I really wish their success.
Jiglu
Jiglu plugs into your site to automatically create intelligent tags and links for your web content. This means that people can dive straight in and read what they want - your most popular blog entries or even stuff buried deep within your site.
Jiglu also aids bloggers like Zemanta, but from a different approach. Instead of suggesting tags while blogging, Jiglu provides a small javascript which analyze all your (complete)blog contents and generate tags about topics, people and links embedded on your blog as widget. You can see the example here.
The similarity of Zemanta and Jiglu are the fact that they analyze blog contents and extract keywords automatically. Interestingly, the similar functionality is also implemented in a blog system I use to write my Japanese blog. The system is provided by Japanese Web2.0 company , called Hatena, but again in a slightly different way. If you look at my blog, you can see 2 kinds of links. One in thick underline is the link I added manually, but one in thin grey color link is added by Hatena automatically. When you click this dynamically generated link, it links to Hatena's "Wikipedia" like site(called "Hatena keyword") where there are descriptions of the linked item and related blog article links written by other Haneta bloggers. This is very good tactic for SEO way. When you search certain keywords on Google, they usually show links and Wikipedia site, and also links from this "Hatena keyword" sites on top.
As an example, I seached "MashUp" in Japanease.
At the above result page, I see Wikipedia's link on 2nd result, but also see Hatena's keyword on 6th (d.hatena.ne.jp/keyword...)
It would be interesting if Hatena sells their functionality to other blog systems ,but probably they wouldn't do that.
Anyway, back to MashUp Demo companies.
Equity Blogs
Another site to help bloggers is Equity link, but it is in a slightly controversial way.
Equity Blogs will be presenting their first product http://projectstars.com, a talent community for professionals. Projectstars has 300+ enterprise-focused communities where experts blog in a collaborative, search engine friendly environment in order to get noticed by potential clients and partners. Every three months, the top 100 contributors to the community are rewarded with shares in projectstars inc.
This is very interesting way to motivate bloggers to write lots of blogs, because if many people vote for your articles, you have a chance to win and get Projectstar equity. However, they also provide points if project star members invite their friends to join Projectstar community. This "Invite your friend and I will give you a referral" may exist in other community site, but it's different at Equity Blog in the 2 ways below.
- You get company share, rather than gift voucher or cash. This will works as if you give stock option to the community member, so their community members are really motivated to write good articles or invite friends.
- Equity blog is not just doing this for their own "Project Star" stie, but also trying to sell the system to whoever wishing to do the same thing as project star.
The reason I said controversial is that I can see some people trying to join as many "project star" like community sites, and keep sending invitation spam to all his friends. Having said that, this is definitely a very unique business model and interesting to see how this works out.
Blyk, Mippin,D2See,TruTap,WeGluI have attended several startup demo event, but this is the first time when I see so many mobile companies. 5 out of 12 companies are actually mobile related companies. I personally use mobile phone only for "phone" purpose, and I am so behind mobile technology, but this is definitely the area to watch out.
