DomainTools Blog

Last week I was at TechCrunch40 to see what was exciting in the world of Web 2.0. For a first time conference, it was pulled off very nicely. The quality and caliber of presenters was exactly what I was expecting, and nothing short of phenomenal.

The conference was setup as a launch party for 40 Internet companies. I was expecting to see 40 never-heard-of companies but I found that I already knew about a few of them. The first to present was Powerset. I have been hearing about this company for a while, this is a new search engine company that hopes to solve a semantic search problem. They claim that there is no good way to understand a complex human query. For example I should be able to ask a computer, “What is the best rated Pizza place within 2 miles of my current location?”. I think we are a long way from that. But what powerset does do well is something most users would not appreciate I think. I know that less the 1% of Google users used advanced search queries; so Powerset may be solving the wrong problem if they can’t tell me where to go for pizza. If you are one of the 1% type of people I suggest you go play with Powerset at labs.powerset.com.

Instead of talking about every company that launched I am going to tell you which companies I am addicted to and had no idea I was missing them until I saw them at the launch.

Cubic Telecom is a company that I have been searching for and didn’t know it. If you travel internationally like I do, then you need this company. They sell a sim card and phone that will allow you to talk to anyone else in the world for $0.15 a minute when you are traveling. So imagine being in Spain and calling home to the states for just 15 cents a minute. If you used your regular phone you would be charge $2 or $3 a minute. Now the neat thing with the phone, if you are in a Wifi spot you get charged nothing! People can call your cell phone number back home and reach you in Spain as well. Only costs 15 cents a minute. The best part is that the sim card and phone allows you to have unlimited local present numbers. So I have have UK phone number, Spanish Phone number, where ever I am I can get a local phone number. Everything is a local call. So with my Spanish phone number I can call Spanish places and it is local call. Yeah, Sign me up. I am buying one of these phones before my next international trip. UPDATE: It appears the prices mentioned during the launch party were not 100% accurate, read the comments for more detail.

TripIt.com is the next company I didn’t know I needed until I saw them. Every time I travel I book things like plane tickets, car rentals, and hotels. After booking something I get an email confirmation. However, now if I forward all those email confirmations to TripIt they will parse my emails and organize my schedule for me and share that data in an RSS ICAL feed and keep my family in the loop by sharing the schedule. The feed can be directly and automatically loaded into my Google calendar, which I then have automatically synced to my IPhone. My one word review, seemless. The service is completely free, so I hope they stay in business a long time. They are the same guys that started Hotwire so I am sure they know what they are doing. I think this is almost better then a personal assistant for booking travel.

BeFunky.com is a cool company. I don’t know if I need them, but I am going to use them. They offer free cartoons of pictures that you upload. They have an artist that turns your picture into a cartoon. They also have a service that allows you to upload a video to the service and they make the entire video into a cartoon. After a while they will charge $5 per cartoon-ization they do of people’s faces. I think the cartoon face would be one cool avatar. I recommend getting your own avatar before they start charging the $5.

Mint.com won best in show and was one that I thought I would use right away. They are like TripIt except instead of knowing everything about your Trip they know everything about your money. You give Mint.com your login to all your bills, credit cards, and thing that you pay. It then sucks in all the information on a daily basis and gives you a heads up display. It alerts you if you are low on something or if you should be aware of something. It is hard to describe exactly why I want to use it but I have the feeling it will help me organize my bills. They promise it will also help you save money too. If you use a service they compare rates and competitors to that service and tell you how you can save money by switching. It is fitting that the best of show award went to a company that had the best domain name too.

Vudu was a neat company that offered a hardware device no bigger than a large hard cover book with movies on demand. It was like an Xbox, but just for movies. You can order a movie and it would be available on your vudu after a quick download. The movie was in high definition and you had the option to buy or rent the title. I want to buy one of these but my home theater is already on the low end, a high end device like this would put it to shame. There is also a backup option so that you could plug in extra storage to the Vudu. I recall the guy saying that if I paid for something I could re-download it if my device crashed.

If you are a single, WooMe.com and SpeedEDate.com looked neat, but required a video camera and a microphone. They are both online speed dating companies that look like they will crush Match.com and eHarmony but they will need to get some serious funding behind them to do that.