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Under the Radar: Making the phone more Web 2.0

The Under the Radar conference kicked off this morning with one of my favorite panels: three video and voice companies that are trying to take services we're already using and make them better.

First up was Eyejot, which we've covered several times. The core service revolves around video e-mail, although it has recently moved into other areas like Eyejot This, which lets you annotate Web pages with video clips from your Webcam (and even share them via Twitter). There's also a platform that lets site owners add video notes and mail to their service.

There are two … Read more

Kiss Microsoft Project goodbye

If you use Microsoft Project, you might want to seriously consider three alternatives that run completely on the Web. In addition to supporting more contemporary features right now, and getting updated with even newer gadgets more frequently than Microsoft can muster, these products, being completely Web-based, offer much more robust collaboration tools.

First up: Liquid Planner. We saw this product at Demo 2008 but it will be on stage again at the Under the Radar conference that I'm moderating on Thursday. This tool's special sauce is its embrace of uncertainty. Users can put in best-case and worst-case estimates … Read more

Under the Radar: 32 cool business Web apps

Next Thursday in Mountain View, 32 new (or newish) companies will present their business-focused Web apps at the Under the Radar conference. I'll be moderating at the event, so please look me up if you are there. Click here for $100 discount on admission to the show.

Josh and I will pick our favorite apps from the event once it's over, but going in there are few I plan to pay special attention to:

DocSyncer. A little utility to synchronize your Microsoft Office documents into your Google Docs account. I can't for the life of me see … Read more

Zoove improves on SMS short codes

Of the companies I saw yesterday at the Under the Radar: Mobility conference (more stories), the most audacious, and therefore my favorite, was Zoove. This company makes a service and a technology that allows mobile phone users to dial a short code (preceded by **) and then receive information via SMS or e-mail.

Sounds like SMS short codes, right? But there's a big difference: to get data from the Zoove service, you dial your phone. That is you press a code, like "**coke," then the Talk key. It's just like making a call. Except that instead of … Read more

Mobile platform pitches at UTR: Getting media to your pocket

Wrapping up today's pitch sessions at the Under the Radar Mobility conference are four companies focusing on the platform, also known as "how to get things on your phone." It's one of the deepest levels of the mobile space, and also one of the most nebulous and hard to explain.

mPortico (whose name is not to be confused with a pizza place near CNET's San Francisco headquarters) creates the technology for branded memory cards people can stick in their mobile phones that has embedded games, applications, and video content. These cards end up on retail store shelves that anyone can buy and plug in without having to deal with navigating to Web sites or download huge files while on the go. To help save the content from being shared openly, the company has employed a proprietary DRM system.

To get cards to the shelves, mPortico has partnered with Kingston, Universal, and I-Play mobile gaming. Kingston actually makes the memory cards, while mPortico takes care of the rest.

The judges questioned mPortico's move toward solid state storage as a medium instead of going for Web downloads, which mPortico's CEO Shimon Constante noted as offering higher capacities for slower mobile networks while offering consumers a useful piece of storage they can use when they're done with it.

Remotv is a streaming platform that serves up your home content to remote devices. It has a desktop application that you can install on your computer to access your content from anywhere similar to Orb, Simplify Media, and others. They've also got a Facebook app that lets people access their stuff and share it with others. To actually make money off this, Remotv has an integrated directory of content made by both users and content providers that gets mixed with contextual advertisements.

What sets Remotv apart from its competitors is its centralized server system that will take media from your home machine and serve it up to others without sucking up your bandwidth. One of the weaknesses about most other services that offer media sharing is if the machine with your content goes down or has too many people leeching, the system falls apart. … Read more

Meet emerging mobile social networks

New social networks are born each day, and at the Under the Radar conference (see all posts) a new batch is on display. Most are in early funding stages, and one is so new it's still in closed beta. The other three are ready for a try-out.

I'll give Frengo this--it's certainly different than most mobile chatting services. Case in point: Neither of Frengo's main competitors, Twitter and Jaiku, asks users to vote, compete in contests, or earn points. In that sense, a bit of the social-discovery element of social networks creeps in. Except, of course, the goal isn't necessarily to become friends with other users. Frengo is more interested in social collision--sort of a tamer, more innocent Hot or Not. Example? The Flirtable Facebook application launched last Thursday.… Read more

Voice services: Other people making money on your mouth

Voice services are the next generation of technology evolving from person-to-person phone calls. Voice services can solve some of the big problems like having to press buttons or pay attention to what you're doing. That's good for people with vision problems and for road warriors. In the past, people associated automated voice services with the fictional computer of the Starship Enterprise, but these days we're able to use it for mobile Web services like GOOG-411 and 1-800-DIRECTIONS, which showed off their stuff in the last session.

First up was Lypp, which offers a mobile conference-calling platform. Lypp … Read more

Under the Radar: Mobile messaging and media sharing

In the Messaging and Sharing track at Under the Radar 2007, four evolving players hawk their wares. I recently covered two of them, Trutap and Utterz in the mobile social networking space.

Heysan (CNET review) is a free mobile instant-messaging service that connects to major IM networks, including Windows Live Messenger (previously MSN), Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and Google Talk. The wholly Web-based service is roughly modeled on Meebo, with its single buddy list and tabbed conversations. Heysan is ad-supported.

Trutap is a downloadable app that aggregates instant messaging, picture messaging, photo uploading, social network access, e-mail, and SMS in … Read more

UTR Mobility: Search and discovery on the go

Under the Radar's Mobility is all about accessing Web services while away from the comforts of your home computer. While a great deal of that has to do with phones, many of the sites and services can be useful even when you're back at the homestead. The first four companies showing their stuff are Boopsie, Buzzwire, Dial Directions, and ImThere. While all four have mobile components, Boopsie and Dial Directions are phone-centric.

Boopsie showed off its mobile search application, which has both a standalone application for phones with open platforms like Windows Mobile and Palm, along with a BREW and J2ME application, and an ajaxy Web interface the company touts as iPhone-friendly. The search tool is focused around categories, which the user has to choose before seeing a search box. Boopsie's CEO Greg Carpenter did a live demo of the service on a Palm Treo for finding a Wikipedia entry. The results come up live and very quickly. It's also got prefix search, meaning you need to type in only the first few letters of a word in multi-word searches.

The company makes its money from theme-skinned clients and an enterprise version that can be tweaked for businesses wanting to use it as an internal tool. Eventually Boopsie hopes to integrate keyword placement with wallpapers, ringtones, and all the other things that are making buckets of cash for mobile-phone companies.

The panel of judges chided Boopsie for putting too much pressure on the consumer who needs to pre-think searches by picking a category--something that goes against the current trend of letting users be "lazy" and simply type into a blank search box. Carpenter says consumers who use the application tend to use it extensively enough after doing a single search that they identify channels they go back to.

Buzzwire focuses on streaming media, which is made from audio, video, and written content like blog posts and news articles. The service is launching "early" next year, as soon as it can line up carrier support, although the company has had a 3000-user beta trial going since July. The application lets people find stuff to read, listen to, or watch online, and make customized lists of favorites that can be accessed on both the phone and from a desktop browser. There's also a social-networking component with a sharing service that lets users swap bookmarks with one another.

The big question from the moderators is how the company would maintain whatever deal it have with the carriers without being pushed out over time. Buzzwire's answer was that the content it serves up is king, and that it always tries to maintain compatibility on as many platforms as possible.… Read more