Saturday session "On the Edge: Reducing Stigma Through Social Networking" rounded out the SexTech conference afternoon. In it, three women head projects that give formerly alienated individuals a place to share their life-shaping, controversial commonalities.

Kristen Schultz Oliver created Exhale, a site for women to support each other after abortions. The site runs on the Ning social network platform after extensive customization. Since removing all the public sharing features and external linking to Facebook and Twitter, it has become an anonymous sanctuary. Strict criteria is employed to create a completely supportive environment where only women who have had an abortion can join. No politics, rudeness or personal attacks are allowed, and personal stories, mutual support and gratitude proliferate.

St. James Infirmary is a clinic for sex workers in San Francisco, and in 2007 created an industry podcast called Renegadecast. Executive director Naomi Akers heads the staff who were recruited from the clinic and were trained using a Social Media Advocacy toolkit.

At first, RenegadeCast was produced by the founders of the clinic, "addressing the benefits and challenges of sex worker organizing on health outcomes." Later they switched to current or former sex workers who were able to speak more credibly to their audience of peers. Instead of the rescue ethic that many government or organization initiatives adopt, St. James promotes and provides risk reduction practices.

Filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman uses her short documentary "The Line" to create a space to discuss sexual assault. The 24 minute film is designed to stimulate discussion of not only Schwartman’s personal assault experience, but to encourage college-aged women and men to ask themselves and others where their "Line" is, where consent ends and rape begins.

For the participants of WhereIsYourLine.org, it is critical to expand the dialogue from teaching girls to protect themselves to include the responsibilities of boys and men.

On the opening day of SexTech 2010 yesterday, the afternoon Plenary Panel showcased national prevention programs from organizations that are developing tools for their local communities. Individuals from Planned Parenthood Online, MTV’s GYTnow, inSPOT, and SexReally.com discussed the challenges of balancing a country-wide presence with a local resource destination.

Tom Subak of Planned Parenthood talked about how their online strategy brought them from a fragmented online experience made it extremely difficult for Internet searchers to find what they were looking for. Some were looking for information on contraception, STI/HIV testing facilities, or other information and services. Instead of a centralized hub, the different clinics in cities across the US were basically competing in search results.

Now, the organization has a site that connects to all of the smaller communities, but also gives resources that are relevant for teens, health centers, educators or parents. Not only is there information, but they also developed widgets that can be posted on articles, blog posts and Web sites. In the example above, users can search directly on this page in English or in Spanish for a local health center based on zip code or state.

There are also widgets that help people decide whether they should get a STI test, or determine what type of birth control suits them best.

SexReally.com’s Lawrence Swiader is very focused on Twitter, with account and search term feeds on the main page. But they also are basing much of their awareness-promoting strategies based on information from the Fog Zone. This report was released by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and shows the huge gap between the intent and behavior of is full of videos that package humor with accessible messages on relationship and sex issues. Titles like "What’s a threesome?" and "One Night Stand" hope to pique interest in young adults that subscribe or visit the site.

The smartphone is not a PC, but we still use it as if it were, says Sanjeev Agrawal, CEO of the location-based recommendation service, Aloqa.

“This whole idea of a phone being a smartphone will not be realized until you stop using the browser all the time to type things in,” Agrawal said at Tuesday’s TechRadar. “That pull-based usage of the phone is not the way Mr. Bell intended it.”

Aloqa tracks static and moving objects in real time and notifies users of nearby events and people.

“What we capture are very deep user and location analytics. The idea of ‘who are you and what are you doing and what does your usage fingerprint look like?’, but also ‘what does San Francisco between 6 and 7 on a Tuesday look like, over time?’” Agrawal, former Head of Product Marketing for Google, said.

Aloqa is both a multi-OS stand-alone app and a platform that can be integrated into other applications. The app is composed of interest-based channels, and the app’s centerpiece is its Hotchannel, “An always-on, local mobile inbox.”

Aloqa’s Hotchannel gives “recommendations across a loca, based on your usage over time and who you look like most, plus the location fingerprint piece,” Agrawal said.

“It’s like an email in-box of stuff coming in,” he said. “As you move, it constantly refreshes, saying new stuff that you can be doing right now.”

“Think about it as a collaborative filtering for locations, not for people,” he added.

In addition to its stand-alone feature, Aloqa can also be integrated into other apps. “So if Keith [Lee, MyTown] comes to me and says, ‘I never want people to leave my game and go to Google Maps or fire up a browser,’ we could just be a tab inserted into his app, so that in addition to playing his game people can get recommendations for restaurants and bars and stuff like that in addition to the core purpose of the app,” Agrawal said

Agrawal describes calendars that can plan your weekend, address books that organize contacts by their proximity, services that show if electric car-charging stations are available in real time, or context-sensitive sales, like a salon offering 50 percent off haircuts on a rainy day.

Aloqa’s vision, in Agrawal’s words:

We think the world will be going a little more in the direction of going away from just search and pull-based ‘I’m typing something in and looking for a Starbucks,’ to [the phone saying] ‘let me proactively tell you.’”

And going from this whole world we live in now, where 95 percent of the opportunities that are surrounding us are never brought to our attention, to one where textually-relevant information is being pushed to us at the right place and the right time.

Wherever I am, there is a bunch of stuff happening around me. There’s tons of stuff that’s both static and dynamic. The most static stuff is places; the most dynamic stuff is people moving around. Everything else is a spectrum in the middle.

Aloqa is just the things relevant to you, chosen, and then pushed to you. It’s taking all this stuff that’s happening around me and organizing it for me.

The company’s business model is based on its recommendations, for example a hotel channel that locates nearby hotel deals. Aloqa’s most popular channel is the real-estate channel, which shows the closest homes and large properties for rent or for sale; Aloqa gets a cut of every lead they send to realtors.

“The way we make money is very straightforward,” Agrawal said.

Aloqa began at the University of Munich, and is based on the doctoral work of two of its co-founders. It was a nominee at the Mobile Premier Awards 2010 and was winner of the 2009 MobileBeat Tesla award and Motorola Best Android App.

Aloqa went live in Q4 2009. It currently has about 400,000 users in 6 countries, and is growing by about 4-5,000 users a day.

This year’s Macworld is different than most tech conferences because, outside of vendors on the exhibition floor, much of the focus is on entertainment.

Both David Pogue and Leo Laporte did variations on the talk show – Pogue’s a celebration of all things Pogue, Laporte’s more traditional, featuring an interview with The Bird’s Roger McGuinn on the new music space, a chat with one of the Mythbusters guys, and a performance by Warp 11, a classic-punk band whose songs are all about Star Trek.

And of course Kevin Smith rocked the crowd with his decidedly non-PC (the ideology, not the platform), non-tech, Q&A.

So while in a sense the tech fades to the background, Macworld is still a conference about the Apple ecosystem. The three main themes repeated among conference attendees and the media are:

1. Apple’s absence has really marred the event.
2. It should no longer be called Macworld, as it’s more focused on the iPhone than anything else.
3. What do you think of the iPad?

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Building a video game from scratch takes a lot of resources. But just like anything creative, technology is making this category more accessible to those of us who have ideas, but not necessarily the technical knowledge.

Now there is GameSalad - "Game creation for the rest of us." Currently being exhibited at MacWorld by a developer with long blond dreads and a few other guys, this stand-alone application makes game design something most anyone can do.

With an interface that gives resolution for Apple iPhone, GameSalad.com, and some larger options, the program has a building block component feel. As attendants define rules for objects and preview animations, the GameSalad team shows the basic principles for design. The program includes quick start genres, but customizability seems extensive enough that there is not a "GameSalad look" to the games that have used the software.

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The overall consensus is that this year’s Macworld is a shadow of what it used to be. With Apple’s pulling out, the conference and mystique has shrunk to the point that some are predicting that this Macwold will be the last.

“Macworld used to take two days to see,” said one attendee. “This year you can see it in an hour.”

While the event has – largely with director Kevin Smith, who absolutely killed in yesterday’s 1 ½ hour Q&A – been able to fill in the absence with an entertaining sheen, the general sense here in the media room is that pickings are pretty slim.

That was even apparent in the Best of Show, exhibition floor companies that were chosen by DEMO as the best. The awards, presented by VentureBeat’s Editor-In-Chief Matt Marshall, the new head of DEMO, were indicative of this. Of the six ‘best,’ three were great, and three were pretty blah.

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Kevin Smith’s talk at MacWorld on Thursday afternoon began as one would expect, full of filmmaker talk and adult humor.  His structure basically was answering questions from the audience, and had little to do with technology, and less still to do with Apple.

However, in a response that was concerned with the types of stories that interest him when he is making films, he revealed the extent that tech has influenced him. With Podcasts and Twitter, his opportunity to publicly discuss certain subjects has meant that he does not feel that he needs to include them in his films.

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The big story about this year’s conference is that Apple is no longer involved.

“I’ve got four words for you: Steve Jobs isn’t here,” keynote speaker David Pogue said after arriving onstage doing a Steve Ballmer imitation (which itself was an imitation of a drunk gorilla).

While attendees see Apple’s exit from Macworld as a loss for the conference, Pogue says that it will be freeing, saying, “For the first time we don’t have to kiss apple’s – we can say anything.”

“This is a Macworld where anything will happen,” said GM of Macworld, Paul Kent.

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Teens in tech face some particular problems that others in their age group surely do not. Like if college will be a detriment to their success.

Tech is famous for its most successful entrepreneurs not finishing their studies – Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, for example – and whether or not to go to school is a legitimate concern for teen entrepreneurs for whom classes are an obstacle to their business activities.

“The important thing is all these people [Zuckerberg, etc.] enrolled in college,” said John Ramey, who started his company, isocket, while a student at Indiana University.

“They just didn’t finish,” said Ramy, who didn’t finish either but whose company signed a deal to handle Techcrunch’s advertising last May.

If you do enroll in college, do you spend all your time worrying about your grades and slack off on running your business?

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After giving an influential speech at last year’s Teens in Tech conference, Daniel Trinh — once a 17-year-old design at Digg, now a 19-year-old freshman at the University of North Carolina — was invited back to this year’s event in San Francisco to build upon his ideas.

In Saturday’s speech, Trinh explained what it was like to be what he called a TAinT – a teenager in tech.

He detailed how he was able to work for one of the most influential Web 2.0 companies, Digg, and what he learned during his time as a 17-year-old intern whose peers were all in their mid-20s and up.

Trinh’s story starts with relationships.

Trinh was able to leverage a meeting with Daniel Burka, former creative director at Digg, into an internship at the social news site. Trinh said such relationships with mentors are crucial to teens trying to break into the tech industry.

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