While Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, was speaking at the CTIA this Wednesday, Microsoft Corp.and Facebook jointly announced that Microsoft took an equity stake in Facebook. It is only 1.6 percent stake that worth’s $240.00 million.

By Mathieu Ramage,
Media and Editorial Manager of Atelier

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After the last of the 69 demos, Chris Shipley used a string of qualifiers to describe the trends represented by this year’s companies: rich-media, social, collaborative, secure, business-aware, creative, global and mobile. It about sums it up.

Because of the intense pressure weighing on the presenters for two days, the closing dinner felt like a collective sigh of relief with the sense of having survived a sort of baptism by fire. It is the custom for the conference to bestow DEMOgod awards to those presenters who performed most gracefully under pressure and best engaged the audience. One of the 2007 DEMOgod is Chaim Indig. For the 29-year old serial entrepreneur, the recognition was the crowning moment of an event that has already resulted in coverage of his company Phreesia, maker of an electronic patient check-in clipboard, in USA Today and several other media. For Indig, Demo has already paid off handsomely.

And now a closer look at six last companies.

Only three companies were presenting in this category despite its importance in the online user experience.

Exlead

This New York-based company is headed by AltaVista veteran François Bourconcle who claims that Exlead’s latest product, Baagz, is the first engine to capture the Web 2.0 by combining search with social networking capabilities. As you use Exlead’s search engine, the results show the “baagz” of other site users. You can grab some of their favorite sites and drag them into your “baagz”. Taking the social aspect one step further, you can ask other users questions and add them to your network of friends. Baagz is currently in private beta.

This track mainly addressed questions of security, rather than the issue of trusting content.

CodaSystem

Based in Paris, CodaSystem has been providing a photo and video authentication solution to large companies for a while (one example is a chain of stores needing to prove to its suppliers that they are displaying their products as agreed). Now the solution is becoming available to everybody with a smart phone running Windows Mobile or Flash. A watermark is inserted into the pixels and disappears if the photo is altered in any way. Photos are stored on CodaSystem’s secured servers. Applications in real estate, construction, display advertising and police work come to mind.

Pudding Media

San Jose-based Pudding Media will offer free calls over the Internet. The twist is that, thanks to a voice recognition technology, the site picks up on your conversation and brings up relevant content as you chat. Some of that “content” is targeted ads. “We don’t keep records and we are not backed by the NSA,” assured founder Ariel Maislos to respond to widespread criticism that his service is an Orwellian, eavesdropping scheme that takes targeting a little too far.

Myndnet.

On Wikipedia, experts share their knowledge for free. On Myndnet, they sell it. To customers looking for leads, new recruits and any type of information vital to their business, the East Palo Alto company offers a venue to post their question online. For example, a recruiter would be charged $35 per name (a refund policy comes with the product). The “expert” who provides a valued answer gets $14.

Truphone

James Tagg, the CEO of London-based Truphone, wants to bring the benefits of VoIP to millions of cell phone users. On stage here, he even demonstrated what he claimed was the first web call made on an iPhone. Whenever a cell user is within range of a Wi-Fi network, the calls transit over the Internet and become free.

mig33

Steven Goh and Mei Lin Ng, the two co-founders of mig33, say that their service is already used in 200 countries by 7 million users sending 30 millions messages a day. That sounds impressive and now they are bringing the service to the US. What is mig33 about? A sort of MySpace on the cell, it allows cell users to connect to their buddies on any web-based email system, to send them photos or to call them cheaply across borders.

Isabelle Boucq in San Diego

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For comments on this article,
email us at editorial@atelier-us.com

Returning to business after an evening of partying and mingling at Demo after Dark, 37 companies are presenting today and the room is feeling decidedly more energized on the second day of the conference.

The morning session covered meeting management tools, small business Office 2.0 applications and the customization of media content.

Two companies which were to demo this morning, Wixi and mEgo, were conspicuously absent without a word of explanation from MC Chris Shipley. Word is that they jumped ship and presented at last week’s TechCrunch40 conference in violation of their exclusivity contract. As a result, they got kicked out of Demo. It is a tough world out there.

Our closer look at six companies

For those who spend a lot of time organizing and attending meetings, a slate of companies had help to offer. As is often the case after a presentation here, one wonders if users will actually take the time to master that particular application or site. But those two companies got attendees excited.

This Montreal-based company is trying to take the headache out of scheduling meetings, particularly with people outside of the organization. Its plug-in sits in Outlook and can be sent to contacts you want to invite to join your group. Once somebody is on board, you can view their availability before sending them a meeting request and you receive updates to their calendar that might impact the request. Tungle Spaces is a more private version of the product to be used with those contacts with whom you don’t want to share your entire calendar. And it is free.

Mountain-View Vello’s CEO Mark Dzwonczyk made his demo very effective by collecting cell phone numbers on the first day of the conference and setting off a concert of ring tones when he called dozens of people in the room to show off how easy it is to put together a conference call using his service. Select participants in the application and click “Call”. For those who miss the beginning of the call or get dropped off the call, 1-888-myvello is the easy way to join in.

Announcing the first of the presenters in this track, Chris Shipley felt that “companies have been disrespectful to small businesses by offering them dumbed down software.” Most of the presenters claimed they understand the needs of small businesses. After all, they are small businesses themselves.

Yet another Silicon Valley company, CashView is based in Palo Alto. Its goal is to free business owners and managers from endless paperwork, invoices and bills. The web-based application is a cash-management service where a business owner can keep track of bills and invoices, schedule payments on a calendar and even get an alert if cash flow becomes a problem. By storing contracts, copies of cashed checks and establishing who needs to approve a particular bill, CashView keeps it all together. Word is that the company might have made a deal with Bank of America for their small business clients. Interestingly, CashView looks like the professional version of the winner of last week’s TechCrunch 40, online personal money management tool Mint.

Alexandre Rambaud, the French CEO of Texas-based AgendiZe, stormed the stage with his cowboy hat and French accent. His premise: businesses may get consumers’ attention online, but too often lose the sale to offline stores. His response: a call-to-action button that e-commerce sites can install to bring consumers to call them immediately, share the information they found by email or instant messaging or download it to their desktop to browse when offline. E-commerce sites who subscribe to AgendiZeMe get reports on their visitors’ use of the button.

The “your” here might represent either the consumer or the marketer as those two companies demonstrate.

Using technology developed by British Telecom, this UK company offers brands a tool to dissect their existing advertising videos (audio or graphics too) and repackage them for specific viewers according to their gender, geographical location or other relevant factors. The necessary information is collected from cookies or behavioral targeting networks. Najam Kidwai, the company’s CEO, calls this “adaptive content.”

This one will speak to everybody who can’t keep up with all the information landing daily in their RSS reader. “We make your feed reader smarter,” promises Dave Mawhinney, the CEO of Pittsburgh-based mSpoke. His application learns from a user’s reading habits and their explicit and implicit behavior. Did I forward this post to a friend? It must mean I found it useful. By customizing mSpoke to adjust to your changing interests, the idea is to cut down the clutter.

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This week reviews what is trendy on the web magazine of our great expert contributor Ubergizmo.com, dedicated to consumer electronics news and reviews.

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Here are four portraits of New York entrepreneurs and their companies. Sure, you could start a company about anywhere in this online world. But they think that New York is just the place for them.

Charlie O’Donnell, Path 101.

After working as a venture capitalist and the director of consumer products at Oddcast, O’Donnell decided to strike out on his own. He identified a need to help students chose their career. “You won’t connect with your future boss on Facebook and it is too early for LinkedIn,” he says. Scheduled to debut in early 2008, Path 101 will aim to attract students with tools to help them explore different careers and assess their own interests. “People in New York are very creative. Because they did not necessarily grow up in high-tech, they are not married to some specific software. In the Silicon Valley, everybody is so tech-savvy that they are working on problems that only affect them and six friends,” believes O’Donnell.

Larry Allen, Tacoda.

The company’s behavioral targeting ad network reaches over 120 million people. It has helped clients such as Snapple, FAO Schwarz, Panasonic and Macy’s drive traffic to their sites. “We built our business with the biggest media companies supporting us to sell inventory. If we were not in a hotbed of advertising, we would not have succeeded,” states Larry Allen, senior VP of marketing and business development at Tacoda. “Our industry is growing fast and quickly bleeding into traditional advertising,” says Allen. Advertising Week, which took New York by storm at the end of September, is the “meeting of the minds” for both traditional and online advertising. The presence of the Internet Advertising Bureau and local interactive ad club 212 is the year-long manifestation of New York’s importance in that field.

Alex Torrenegra, Voice123.

Voice123 is an online marketplace for voice talents and the businesses looking for a voice. At Voice123, they call the producers, film makers, game developers, phone system providers who use their services “voice seekers”. Started in Alex Torrenegra and Tania Isabel Zapata’s tiny apartment in Queens, the company is now headquartered in the NYSIA’s incubator. “Like Expedia which has taken out travel agents, we want to do the same thing in the voice over business,” explains Torrenegra in his small office as he takes a break from a video conference call with the rest of his team in Columbia. In the voice business, New York is the place to be.

Jeffrey Warren, Vestal Design.

Warren and his design consulting firm Vestal Design just moved to New York from Lima, Peru. Most of his clients are in the Silicon Valley. “It doesn’t matter where you are. We use online collaboration software like Basecamp and I visit them about every six months,” says Warren. After a few weeks in New York, he has become a regular at Cooper Bricolage, a coworking group that gathers in a coffee shop in the East Village, the former hangout of the Beats, the Yippies and other artists. For $15 a day or $200 a month, freelance workers and young entrepreneurs come to work there to break the isolation and make contacts.

Isabelle Boucq, in New York - for Atelier

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On a warm September evening, a group of young high-tech entrepreneurs are having a drink at an outdoor café on Union Square in Lower Manhattan. “I wanted to organize something with more inward-facing time than the NY Tech Meetup which has 300 or 400 people. I thought maybe 20 people would show up,” remembers Charlie O’Donnell (right photo), the force behind the informal group NextNY and founder of Path 101, a site designed to help students with their career choices. “But 75 people came the first time and now we have over 1,000 members.”

55 Broad (right photo), within spitting distance of the New York Stock Exchange, is considered by some as the site that established the “Silicon Alley”. The address is home to the New York Technology Center which houses many technology companies. Another tenant is the New York Software Industry Association which counts Google (with its 500+ employees, Google’s office in New York is its second largest engineering center after Mountain View), Microsoft and many other smaller companies among its 500 members.

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After the last of the 69 demos, Chris Shipley used a string of qualifiers to describe the trends represented by this year’s companies: rich-media, social, collaborative, secure, business-aware, creative, global and mobile. It about sums it up.

Because of the intense pressure weighing on the presenters for two days, the closing dinner felt like a collective sigh of relief with the sense of having survived a sort of baptism by fire. It is the custom for the conference to bestow DEMOgod awards to those presenters who performed most gracefully under pressure and best engaged the audience. One of the 2007 DEMOgod is Chaim Indig. For the 29-year old serial entrepreneur, the recognition was the crowning moment of an event that has already resulted in coverage of his company Phreesia, maker of an electronic patient check-in clipboard, in USA Today and several other media. For Indig, Demo has already paid off handsomely.

And now a closer look at six last companies.

Only three companies were presenting in this category despite its importance in the online user experience.

Exlead

This New York-based company is headed by AltaVista veteran François Bourconcle who claims that Exlead’s latest product, Baagz, is the first engine to capture the Web 2.0 by combining search with social networking capabilities. As you use Exlead’s search engine, the results show the “baagz” of other site users. You can grab some of their favorite sites and drag them into your “baagz”. Taking the social aspect one step further, you can ask other users questions and add them to your network of friends. Baagz is currently in private beta.

This track mainly addressed questions of security, rather than the issue of trusting content.

CodaSystem

Based in Paris, CodaSystem has been providing a photo and video authentication solution to large companies for a while (one example is a chain of stores needing to prove to its suppliers that they are displaying their products as agreed). Now the solution is becoming available to everybody with a smart phone running Windows Mobile or Flash. A watermark is inserted into the pixels and disappears if the photo is altered in any way. Photos are stored on CodaSystem’s secured servers. Applications in real estate, construction, display advertising and police work come to mind.

Pudding Media

San Jose-based Pudding Media will offer free calls over the Internet. The twist is that, thanks to a voice recognition technology, the site picks up on your conversation and brings up relevant content as you chat. Some of that “content” is targeted ads. “We don’t keep records and we are not backed by the NSA,” assured founder Ariel Maislos to respond to widespread criticism that his service is an Orwellian, eavesdropping scheme that takes targeting a little too far.

Myndnet.

On Wikipedia, experts share their knowledge for free. On Myndnet, they sell it. To customers looking for leads, new recruits and any type of information vital to their business, the East Palo Alto company offers a venue to post their question online. For example, a recruiter would be charged $35 per name (a refund policy comes with the product). The “expert” who provides a valued answer gets $14.

Truphone

James Tagg, the CEO of London-based Truphone, wants to bring the benefits of VoIP to millions of cell phone users. On stage here, he even demonstrated what he claimed was the first web call made on an iPhone. Whenever a cell user is within range of a Wi-Fi network, the calls transit over the Internet and become free.

mig33

Steven Goh and Mei Lin Ng, the two co-founders of mig33, say that their service is already used in 200 countries by 7 million users sending 30 millions messages a day. That sounds impressive and now they are bringing the service to the US. What is mig33 about? A sort of MySpace on the cell, it allows cell users to connect to their buddies on any web-based email system, to send them photos or to call them cheaply across borders.

Isabelle Boucq in San Diego

FEEDBACK
For comments on this article,
email us at editorial@atelier-us.com

Returning to business after an evening of partying and mingling at Demo after Dark, 37 companies are presenting today and the room is feeling decidedly more energized on the second day of the conference.

The morning session covered meeting management tools, small business Office 2.0 applications and the customization of media content.

Two companies which were to demo this morning, Wixi and mEgo, were conspicuously absent without a word of explanation from MC Chris Shipley. Word is that they jumped ship and presented at last week’s TechCrunch40 conference in violation of their exclusivity contract. As a result, they got kicked out of Demo. It is a tough world out there.

Our closer look at six companies

For those who spend a lot of time organizing and attending meetings, a slate of companies had help to offer. As is often the case after a presentation here, one wonders if users will actually take the time to master that particular application or site. But those two companies got attendees excited.

This Montreal-based company is trying to take the headache out of scheduling meetings, particularly with people outside of the organization. Its plug-in sits in Outlook and can be sent to contacts you want to invite to join your group. Once somebody is on board, you can view their availability before sending them a meeting request and you receive updates to their calendar that might impact the request. Tungle Spaces is a more private version of the product to be used with those contacts with whom you don’t want to share your entire calendar. And it is free.

Mountain-View Vello’s CEO Mark Dzwonczyk made his demo very effective by collecting cell phone numbers on the first day of the conference and setting off a concert of ring tones when he called dozens of people in the room to show off how easy it is to put together a conference call using his service. Select participants in the application and click “Call”. For those who miss the beginning of the call or get dropped off the call, 1-888-myvello is the easy way to join in.

Announcing the first of the presenters in this track, Chris Shipley felt that “companies have been disrespectful to small businesses by offering them dumbed down software.” Most of the presenters claimed they understand the needs of small businesses. After all, they are small businesses themselves.

Yet another Silicon Valley company, CashView is based in Palo Alto. Its goal is to free business owners and managers from endless paperwork, invoices and bills. The web-based application is a cash-management service where a business owner can keep track of bills and invoices, schedule payments on a calendar and even get an alert if cash flow becomes a problem. By storing contracts, copies of cashed checks and establishing who needs to approve a particular bill, CashView keeps it all together. Word is that the company might have made a deal with Bank of America for their small business clients. Interestingly, CashView looks like the professional version of the winner of last week’s TechCrunch 40, online personal money management tool Mint.

Alexandre Rambaud, the French CEO of Texas-based AgendiZe, stormed the stage with his cowboy hat and French accent. His premise: businesses may get consumers’ attention online, but too often lose the sale to offline stores. His response: a call-to-action button that e-commerce sites can install to bring consumers to call them immediately, share the information they found by email or instant messaging or download it to their desktop to browse when offline. E-commerce sites who subscribe to AgendiZeMe get reports on their visitors’ use of the button.

The “your” here might represent either the consumer or the marketer as those two companies demonstrate.

Using technology developed by British Telecom, this UK company offers brands a tool to dissect their existing advertising videos (audio or graphics too) and repackage them for specific viewers according to their gender, geographical location or other relevant factors. The necessary information is collected from cookies or behavioral targeting networks. Najam Kidwai, the company’s CEO, calls this “adaptive content.”

This one will speak to everybody who can’t keep up with all the information landing daily in their RSS reader. “We make your feed reader smarter,” promises Dave Mawhinney, the CEO of Pittsburgh-based mSpoke. His application learns from a user’s reading habits and their explicit and implicit behavior. Did I forward this post to a friend? It must mean I found it useful. By customizing mSpoke to adjust to your changing interests, the idea is to cut down the clutter.

FEEDBACK
For comments on this article,
email us at editorial@atelier-us.com

At Atelier, we are thrilled to announce that Ubergizmo.com –including, Uberpulse.com, Uberphones.com, and Uberbargain.com- is now an exciting expert Contributor of Atelier’s web site.

As a new contributor to Atelier, Ubergizmo will share with us its expertise in the high-tech industry with a special insight into the world of gizmos.

On the web

• “…I just found some neat stuff at Ubergizmo”, “…and as a reader, I’ll look at Gizmodo’s list and at Ubergizmo’s and make my own list” (Jeff Jarvis - Creator of Entertainment Weekly)
• “Another day, another great new tech-gadget blog on our desktop. Ubergizmo has been getting great information on all kinds of gadgetry of late…” (USA Today “Hot Sites”)
• “OK technophiles, here’s a site you’ll want to visit and bookmark as soon as possible. From cell phones to digital cameras and from music players to the web, Ubergizmo.com is an uber site if you like to stay plugged into what’s next.” (KYW News Radio 1060 Web Picks)
• “We have another confession. We’ve been cheating on our favorite gadget weblogs. We’ve been lured in by the colorfulness and lucidity of newcomer Ubergizmo. Oh, the others need not worry. We’ll keep them around like scarlet mistresses.” (Portagame.com)

What people say

• "The growing popularity of tech-site Ubergizmo has opened up new doors for us to extend our editorial coverage to a whole new market of Ubergeeks.” (Christian Harris, editor of BIOS  and GadgetryBlog)
• "Being associated with Ubergizmo helps expose Ployer.com to a wider audience. Additionally solid traffic increases comes with each co-published story." ( Ron, editor of Ployer)
• And I ask myself, "Is this a real blog or just a tech gadget teaser site?" I really don’t care. Any site that shows me tech gadgets that I want 8 out of every 10 items displayed is cool in my book. While quite a few might never reach US shelves, it is a good place to see the new directions tech creativeness may take us. (Claus)

Ubergizmo, it’s also :

By Mathieu Ramage

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Widgets are cool little applications that Internet users add to their Facebook page or their blog to jazz them up. Widget maker Slide claims to attract 134 million unique visitors a month. Something is definitely happening and marketers are jumping on the opportunity to take viral marketing to a whole new level.

Here is a sure sign that widgets are hot. The burgeoning widget industry held its first conference, WidgetCon, in New York in July. As the organizers put it, “Widgets are small applications that provide functionality and content online, distributed through a potentially vast number of websites.”

Marketers did not miss a beat in putting widgets to work for their brands and products: “[Widgets] also represent an entirely new way of looking at advertising. Unlike almost all other online ads, widgets are uploaded onto sites (personal sites, profile pages, blogs) by consumers themselves. They are pulled by their audience, instead of pushed by marketers.” In other words, viral marketing has reached a whole new level.

Freewebs, a web hosting company recently converted to widgets, and incidentally the organizer of WidgetCon, considers itself a trailblazer in that area. “The second a person takes a widget to his or her individual web page, what was once an ad, becomes content. Today’s users are speaking for the brand by adding these widgets to their personal websites,” recently declared Chris Cunningham, vice-president of Freewebs Advertising.

Among Freewebs’ clients are Cingular, Paramount Pictures, Reebok and Adidas. In a recent campaign for the movie Number 23 featuring Jim Carrey, Freewebs designed a widget that “manipulated bits of the users’ personal information to show them the ubiquity of the number 23 in their own lives.”

There is debate about who invented the first widget. Widgify, a blog devoted to the phenomenon, argues that hit counters placed on web sites were the original thing. A San Jose Mercury News story asserts that RockYou “launched the first widget, a slide show application, on Nov. 14, 2005, and promoted the free service by posting six messages over two weeks in a MySpace forum,” attracting 6 million users in the process. According to the same story, “ComScore found that about 24 percent of Internet users had seen a RockYou widget in the past year”. This is one more indication that widgets are a big draw for Internet users who want to personalize their page without reinventing the wheel.

Where does an Internet user turn to find widgets? One place is Widgetbox, a directory for widgets that work with “TypePad, WordPress, Blogger, MySpace as well as most other blogs, sidebars or websites. No plug-ins are needed, and they”re free!” Freewebs members can also download items from its Widget Bank. RockYou has a wide variety of slideshows, avatars, countdown timers, games, horoscopes and more. Slide is another destination providing mostly slide show widgets to MySpace users and others. Its numbers are going through the roof. One of the latest arrivals on this market is gbox. Its widget enables users to build musical wish lists, post them on their page and wait for the presents to pour in.

If you want to add a search engine to your site, head over to Eurekster and create your own swicki. Nearly 100,000 users have now done just that. One of them is Eurekster’s vice president of marketing Britta Meyer. “I created a swicki about surfing in Half Moon Bay. I can email it to my friends or publish it on Widgetbox,” she said. “When they accumulate traffic, you can monetize them or sell them on eBay.”

There are widgets for everyone. Expectant mothers can add a “baby countdown” widget on their web site and watch the baby grow as the days go by. This is one of the most popular items on Widgetbox at the moment. People wanting to personalize their pages and marketers looking for new ways to engage consumers are all crazy about widgets.

Isabelle Boucq, for Atelier

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