A few people asked what are the cool innovations out there. Despite the current economic climate, there are still a lot of innovation companies launching new services. i can think of four. May have a few more.
First one is Babbel, it is an Internet application for playful language learning. Their intuitive lessons allow people to connect and interact. It's intuitive interface, audio cues and user-generated visuals allow people to virtually travel around the world and learn different languages. They include German, English, French, Italian and Spanish for now. Babbel also features game-like multimedia “trainers,” exercise applications lasting 2-5 minutes. Each lesson package contains material pertaining to a different theme, such as travel or business, so you can learn a series of words and phrases within context. I think this is very smart idea.
The second one is CalliFlower, it is an Ottawa-based company called Iotum that develops applications for free conference call service integrated into a web app. It is more than just conference call, they have spent years working on a revolutionary approach to teleconferencing. Call it Voice 2.0. It allows the callers to see pictures of all of the attendees to the call, and see their status (muted, hand up etc) and there is also a "live wall" feature; a back-channel that allows a shared IM chat to go on between attendees at the same time as the call. I am sure they are working on many more new features. They have a Facebook app and you can manage all your calls there. Once you've tried it , there's no reason to go back to conventional conference call. They are onto something.
The third one is called SocialThing. The Colorado-based received $300,000 in early-stage funding from eonBusiness, as part of a $500,000 convertible note round. It is still in an early private beta, and is looking to launch in the 3-4 months. What it does is offer a centralized place to manage your digital life, moving a bit beyond traditional profile aggregators. You can take your profile anywhere and manage your online identity. I think we can all find that useful. Let me count how many online profiles I currently have...
The fourth one is a video-indexing and search platform Viewdle, it is based on a facial-recognition technology. It allows users to search for videos, going straight to the part of a video where a specific face appears, or where that person talks about a specific topic (hence, the tech includes voice/text recognition). It is a pretty cool idea. The system works in two stages: when a person's image is run through the system for the first time, Viewdle's development team has to identify that person (either using metadata -- accompanying text, tags, captions, etc -- or probably manually); from the second time on, the system recognizes the person with a 90% accuracy, by comparing the new picture with the one that's been identified and tagged in the system. I can see the use of this technology for other applications.
