Essential Startups from The Next Web - reviews

My TNW-ticket was sponsored by The Bean Machine, the company I'm working for. Thank you!

Here are my reviews of the rising suns (will be updated after hopefully each session):

Best:

Prezi cool new way of making presentations, really visual, spatial... innovative. Most of the other apps were slight improvements (and too much based on web as we know thinking) or reuses of existing ideas (possibly applied to a different domain). So my vote goes to Prezi.

Runner ups:

Mendeley A tool for researchers, helping to orchanize papers. But they have added a social component, trying to become the last.fm for musicians. There have been others before that tried adding social components to online paper cataloging services, but this one seems actually to work (whereas the others don't). Bit boring topic, but think this is really useful!

yunoo cool finance app, but does require you to upload quite a lot (or possibly even to enter yourself)... but recommendations on how to save money, cool! (only bit scared of the privacy issues involved)

Yubby Find videos and make your own channel of them. Sounds like a very nice and handy thing to have... and had this idea also for some years... but yes, good idea with no execution is no success... so I hope the best for Yubby

Additionally, these were up... I hope you can read my opinion clearly enough between the lines:

Tarpipe Makes distributions to all your social networks easier, offering a single point of upload/update and tunnels it to whatever social network you belong to. Nice idea, but I'd think its a hack. Social networks are there, it's a fact, but it drives against the web imho, which is at this moment too focused on a centralized services (e.g. the twitter site, the facebook site). I'd would rather like to see a move to more distributed services, and have social network sites work like aggregation services on top of that. But that might be just me.

Aroxo Allow customers to tell which price they want to pay, instead of companies deciding for them the pricing of stuff. Interesting, hard to tell whether its going to be a success without having being able to test it.

CoTweet Enables companies to organise tweets... never experienced the problem, but might be interesting for those experiencing problems with that.

Yourtour.com Suggesting a tourist tour, sleeping in different hotels, and with attraction suggestions based on your preferences. Cool user flow, starting of with a first suggestion for a trips after only a few parameters, and afterwards open for customisation, suiting your preferences in culture, nature etc. Booking deals are arranged via Booking (.com) i presume, and data about attractions was bought from lonely planet.

IRL Connect Location based communication integrating social networks. Mja... yet another service, right? Location based ads, though, with their product, does seem like a good business model though.

plista Engine powering customisation & recomendation based on profile accross websites. Sound like the 'What's related?' thing that Netscape once had ;) But it is a good thing, allows sites to treat you as a first class visitor.

E automatic contact exchange in real life. Not sure what the crowd was all that excited about. Have been hearing about this all my academic years... maybe because it may finnally catch up with the theorists about rfid?

Kimengi launched a product feedforward, giving related links based on social and content relations. Simple integration and registration. Zemanta isn't really working for Dutch (but Zemanta still a) does more, b) was around before), so it might be checking out for Dutch websites.

Silentale Goal: aggregating of converstions from about any communication device, channel. Nice to have, but will it work. I doubt. How distributed are our conversations anyway?

ShoutEm The Ning for Twitter. So not sucha mindblowing concept. Create your own microblogging community instantaneous. Easy set-up. Asked him later on the API, is twitter compatible. I hope that in the future 'real time search' will not only include twitter, but all these other small networks as well.

Citisins  custom guidebooks (print and mobile app). enter preferences, people you're interested in, and we'll make you a custom guide book. Currently only covering Amsterdam. Content is created by their own reviewers (latter makes me think of toeristiek)

Visibuild Allows for collaborative design of 3D spaces in a virtual world. Still too technical for the average user. Still, concept is ok. Can't really judge its value, since I've never been in the situation. Imho: let experts be experts... let others design the house I need.

yellowBird streaming 3d video, allowing the user to browse around while viewing video. cool ... but not killing :)

Huddle.net add all the apps of 37signals together, integrated... seem to have kind of a similar vision on collaboration, but got to experience it before I can really give my opinion

Quick TV Youtube with advanced control how it is presented, stats on usage, integrate data, chapters, clickable regions. Aimed at enterprise usage, not for customers. Is well done... but we were kind of expecting this, weren't we.

Ready for being trashed:

Klomptek Let's not talk about them, lets not link to them... they're making scary stuff... wouldn't ever want to work for a company that regulates my behaviour that much... damn, why are these guys making money?!!? it's fucked up.