I just gave a social software talk, showing off cool tools like Ward's Wiki, Kwiki, Wikipedia, Wikipes, Wikitravel, Socialtext, Typepad, Flickr, del.icio.us, EVDB, Technorati, Newsgator, Feedster, PubSub, Feedburner and NetNewsWire. Rather fun to show how these simple tools have complex behavior in a rapidly evolving ecosystem. Sure beats a blatant pitch. Here are some notes on the other panelists:
Zoominfo is a summarization search engine, used to be called Eliyon. Focuses on people, product and company metadata. Try a search on your name, the transparency is quite disturbing. Used by recruiters, sales intelligence and financial services. Key points: Tagging technologies are due to upset the proprietary metadata defense against Google. Customers are against this defense in the first place, as integration of metadata is a key requirement. Zoominfo tries to out-Google when it comes to Googling People. Looks at tagging as a rich opportunity, now looking to refine 4.5 M Companies to search and a Yellow Pages market.
YellowBrix, a technology company in content clothing. They are an Aggregator in the more traditional sense. Explains the progression of their technology: developed methods of eliminating duplicate content, identifies identities and marks content up, summarize on general content, classify and find relevant articles. Delivery agnostic. People say they want real-time, but really something a little slower will do. Business model emphasizes providing options.
Jargon watch: Isle surfing, wear socks and stand up in the isle when the plane takes off to see how far you can surf.
I got called out by someone in the audience for blogging while paneling, so I'll stop during the discussion ;-).
