The battlefield companies have finished their demonstrations, and video of the first session is processed and ready to watch. You can just hit play and watch the whole thing from start to finish, or you can refresh your memory with the summaries and links below, then jump directly to any presentation that piques your interest.
My opinions don’t count, by the way. These were just my personal thoughts on their products and presentations. Hit the links for more in-depth descriptions of the companies as well as rough transcriptions of the Q&A portions.
Qwiki
This was a really great way to kick off the battlefield. Whether you think it has merit or not, it was a fun presentation. Qwiki makes looking things up interactive and beautiful, though not strictly speaking efficient. My advice: find a way around the computerized voice. Get some people mining archives of factual and literary references to the item, spoken by real people. Quotes from local people and mayors from cities, interviews and news coverage for other media. It’ll be like algorithmic NPR. Jump to Quiki at 5:00.
Storify
This social media quoting tool looks very convenient to use, and that’s what scares me. When you make these “frankenstories,” as one judge so aptly called them, so easy to make, I feel you really encourage the dangerously self-amplifying tendencies of the web even further. While it makes original configurations of non-original material easy, it also makes avoiding any real expression easy. Jump to Storify at 16:00.
Gunzoo
It’s… Cool Iris for videos. I suppose it was inevitable, since the only things that separate these two ideas are really processing power and bandwidth. Not even remotely disruptive, but I get the feeling it’s going to be in demand by companies craving flashy presentations or websites. And certainly these guys have some coding chops, so I doubt they’ll go hungry. Jump to Gunzoo at 28:30.
Datasift
Deep social web analytics is a competitive field, and I don’t claim enough familiarity with it to do this startup justice. But they seem to have a powerful and useful platform, and their honesty in not trying to launch a straw product just to demonstrate their service (as we often see) is refreshing. It seems to work best with huge amounts of data, though; noise may prevail with the average user’s inputs. Jump to Datasift at 38:30.
We’ll try to get the rest of the sessions up as soon as the streams are ready. Thanks for watching.
