Summation

BlogOn VIP Bag - Contents

BlogOn VIP Bag - Contents
Originally uploaded by pfconsults.

for those of you who are speakers and VIPs at the BlogOn conference (on Oct 17-18 in NYC by the GuideWire Group).

here is an annotated photo of the BlogOn gift bag and its contents that we (the Silicon Valley 100) put together.

COW: Meebo

Company of the week: Meebo is cool. I like Meebo.

For those of you who don’t know, Meebo is web-based way for you to access your favorite IM. Traveling in Bhutan and headed to a local Internet café but still want to use IM? No problem … just log into Meebo and IM away. You can use AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, etc. … what you normally use.

Amazingly enough, Meebo is the first AJAX-based way to IM -- I actually can't believe no one has implemented it yet (tough I bet Google will be launching it soon).

Meebo just launched and I spent some time with its CEO, Seth Sternberg (who is a still second yr business school student at Stanford). I am impressed with his vision of where the company needs to move forward … and it sounds like they have two really hot-shot AJAX engineers that have built the application.

They are based in Palo Alto and I expect we'll be hearing a lot more from them soon.

Internal Prediction Market @ Google

Google joins HP and the Pentagon in building an internal prediction market.

this is very interesting ... putting Wisdom of Crowds into action...

The Monster is a Mouse

Scott Kirsner writes a great column in today's Boston Globe:
It's a scary time for Monster.com
(two small quotes from me in the article)

with the advent of meta listings sites (like SimplyHired) and more proactive candidate push sites (like WooMeNow and TheLadders) Monster is becomming less relevant to the passive job seeker.

and new services like H3 and KarmaOne are attracting the passive jobseeker that Monster has never been able to get its hands on.

COW: NetVibes

Summation Company of the Week: NetVibes

Greg Narain turned me on to Netvibes ... and this is a cool site!

you know MyYahoo, MSFT's new Start.com, and Google's personalized page ... all trying to get you to make them your home page.

now they have competition from a little French company which, from what i can tell, is just two really-smart entrepreneurs who have already translated Netvibe into 8 languages ... including Croatian ...

of all the homepages proliferating, Netvibes and Microsoft Start's are the prettiest ... and the most useful. both are easily customizable (the Netvibes page is a great use of AJAX). amazingly, Google is behind here. (i expect that won't last long as Google can play catch-up rather quickly)

and there is no doubt they are on to something ... they have turned me into a big fan...