Last night I had the opportunity to attended the monthly Web Innovators Group at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge. In short this is a place for people working in, or looking to join, Internet and mobile technology. The scene was basically this: 3 main presenters called the “main dishes” and 8-10 other companies scattered around the hall called “side dishes.” The main pdishes were given 5 minutes to present their technology and at the end everyone was given the chance to text/vote on their favorite. The place was packed; 500 or so techies were out and you could feel the geek rush over the Royal Sonesta. There were more iPhones, Blackberries, texting, and twittering then you could count and the conversations ranged from a) where do you work? to b) where do you work? I met some nice people, however, and it was great to see such cool technology. Yeah, some of the stuff will never see the light of day but it was cool nonetheless. Here are some of my technology hight lights:
Snipd (snipd.com) - Think super granular Digg. Allows a user to “snip” out content from a page and share just that content. Lets say, for instance, I see a quote on a blog somewhere that I think is really good, rather than send a link to the entire page to my group of friends (or Digg or Del.icio.us) I can simply snip the quote and send that. Snipd allows you to mash-up all sorts of content in this same manner including video and pictures. A link to the referenced site is always included so the authors needn’t worry about not getting credit. Still in private beta but they promised to give me an account so I’ll post more after I test it. snipd.com.
Webnotes - A main Dish. Webnotes is like it sounds. It functions primarily as a browser plugin (both IE and FF) and allows you to highlights text in a page and create sticky notes on that page. It saves that information to their servers to be displayed on-demand either on your customized Webnotes page or in a browser sidebar. What’s very cool about this is that it allows plugin-free sharing, meaning that I can highlight text and create stickies and share it with you and you do NOT need to have the plugin installed. For a test of this check out this article in boston.com. Still in beta but sign up is allowed. webnotes.net