I saw a lot of companies over the last two days, many of them were excellent, some of them were interesting, and a select few of them I decided to write about. These are my notes from day two. Since I wasn’t watching presentations on Wednesday, over the next few days I’ll throw in a few good ideas that I saw while wandering the Demopit.

Tingz

“Cross Platform Shareable Widgets”

It’s a widget platform you can use on your mobile device, set-top box, and PC.

The business model involves involves firing targeted advertising to all of your devices. You can also send messages to other Tingz, download new widgets from inside Tingz or from third parties.

It’s one of those products that works if there are a lot of widgets available. It’s not particularly unique, but it does do the same basic thing that other sites do a little better. Sometimes that’s enough. They seem to be pushing the idea of generating a consistent application experience across multiple platforms. It’s a great idea but I am not convinced it’s a product.

iMindi

“Connecting thoughts and collecting minds on the web.”

iMindi is a thought engine using mind maps. Still confused? Yea, so was everyone.

Collaborative mind maps, you can link resources (links, bookmarks) to your map. What’s interesting is that there is a huge, background mindmap. What’s wrong is that the UI is, at best, painful and there is no real reason why anyone would contribute. It works as an academic research tool, but as a general interest destination site it fails.

What stunned me about this product, besides Mark Cuban calling it bullshit, is that they believe there is an advertising model in it. There might be some applications of the data if that dataset ever grew to massive scale, but because it is such an edge-case it seems ludicrous to believe that would happen.

Popego

“Get a more meaningful web”

Popego is what I like to call an Anti-Social network. It lets you use your social networks to find meaningful content, but unlike Friendfeed and the like it doesn’t require that you play well with others.

You import information from your current social networks and it parses interest profiles. There are sliders to change which content you want to weigh most heavily on your interest profile (if you like photography, your Flickr account might be more important than your Facebook).

I like this a lot, if it works. There is a question as to whether real people would actually use this. It suffers from the Friendfeed problem, it’s only valuable if you are already a social media addict. Would I use it? Yes. Does that mean it’s a business, not at all.

Exchange P

Exchangep is a virtual, private stock exchange. It’s a game that lets you bet on the valuation of privately held companies.

They will have monthly prizes, let you trade shares, and allow you to learn a little bit more about private companies.

As it stands they don’t let you trade with real money, but it is under consideration.

I agree with most of the judges that you need to give people more of an incentive to play. Prediction markets work best when people have “something to lose.” Also, I think Mark Cuban had the right idea when he said that a white label prediction market might be a stronger business model than focusing strictly on privately held companies.

iCharts

“Youtube for interactive charts.”

iCharts is a good product with an awful tag-line.

40 Million charts online. 900 Billion charts exist overall. Why can’t we move charts online.

iCharts is a really simple concept, it lets you make prettier charts, make them interactive, make them SEO friendly and post them online.

Everyone liked this idea and I can see why, it’s a really neat tool with wide applications. I would get more excited about it but honestly, I can’t throw too much passion behind charts. With that said, this site has one of the highest monetization potentials of the batch I saw.

Mytopia

Mytopia is a development schema that lets you create applications that will run natively across all mobile OS’s. This is a game changer if porting is not too difficult.

Tonchidot

Remember the future? This is it. Whether it has practical applications, that depends on a lot of things.

It’s an augmented reality system. If you look at something using the iPhone camera and it’s tagged, you can get more information. You can add additional tags using your voice and filter them (if, say, you only want to see restaurants).

It’s hard to describe how incredibly cool this is. There are still some visualization issues that need to be worked out (mostly due to the fact that it’s a camera) but as a concept it is brilliant.

The big “If” is whether this can actually scale to a reasonable size. Who will be adding all of these tags? How do you deal with events that rearrange the world? It’s a small solution to a massive problem with no business model to speak of, but the fact that it exists at all is heartening.

Fitbit

“We want to make America a healthier place”

66% of all adult Americans are overweight or obese.

Fitbit is a device and website that makes you aware of how active you are and what you eat. It’s small, light and really easy to attach to your cloths for all-day use. Inside there is an accelerometer that calculates all sorts of health related variables (cal count, distance traveled, pedometer)

They also have a cool visualization and a seamless WiFi sync with a base station. You can get a real time feed of friends activity, see your sleep patterns, have a group page to collaborate or compete with friends and log nutrition as well.

This is easily the most practical of all the products showcased and is one of my favorites. It will be available late December or early January for $99.

Swype

Swype is a really cool information input device. You Swype a stylus or your finer across the screen and it traces the word.

This was a crowd favorite and for good reason, just seeing it in action is mesmerizing. They also have a great model if they can get handset providers to license their technology.

Parting Shots

Food is really important. There is nothing more frustrating than to realize you paid $3k for chips and salsa.

Mark Cuban is a fantastic VC, if you have an opportunity to work with him you should. I hope one of the projects I’ve worked on makes it into his pipeline.

Never assume that “runners up” are worse than the “finalists.” Most of my favorite ideas were found traveling the Demopit.

Someone will need to tell me how the Symantec party was, I fell asleep in front of my computer trying to write this post the first time and missed it.

(Forum)

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