DEMO 07 - the wisdom of crowds and algorithms

As DEMO 07 enters the final afternoon, the theme is all about wisdom – the wisdom of the crowds as well as the wisdom of the algorithms. You probably have the same reaction to that last concept as I did – what the heck does that mean? Turns out there's some very sophisticated work going on to analyze, filter, and aggregate information based on what we need or want to know.
Wisdom of the crowds – this segment presents new ideas from companies who are thinking about how to leverage the collective intelligence and knowledge of groups in ways that go beyond mere collaboration.

• Boorah – A natural language powered service that searches and summarzes local information  by searching across reviews, blogs, and other social content.
• PairUp – PairUp allows business travelers to share information about their travel plans with other people to synchronize schedules, make plans to meet and interact, and find out who else in their contacts list might be in a destination city at the same time they will be.
• Zoho/AdventNet – I covered Zoho Notebook the other day. The company's latest offering in their growing line of online applications is a shared multimedia information environment patterned after a convention spiral notebook that can capture, organize, and share text, images, web content, video, and audio. Object-level sharing and layering controls allow the creation of collaborative pages in your notebook.
• Me.dium – Me.dium looks at the way you surf the web and finds other who have the same browsing patterns and topical interest you do. A free browser sidebar provides a social interaction space to meet and interact with these people who share your interests.
• CircleUp – Send a question to a group of people and get back a single, organized response instead of a number of individual messages. CircleUp can deliver answers via e-mail or SMS.
• Nexo Systems – a feature-rich tool to create online groups that combines shared calendars, forums, tasks, blogs, RSS feeds, poll, photos, videos, and file sharing.
• Attendio – A free event discovery service that delivers event information via the web and to mobile phones and PIMs like Outlook or Google Calendar.
• DesignIn – a home improvement/redesign site that combines the ability to aggregate materials and ideas from information sources online with a social community that can help evaluate and comment on your redesign plans.
• My Currency Co. – My-Currency aggregates community knowledge in areas like housing, real estate values, and neighborhoods.
• Nextumi – Share2Me is a browser add-in (Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer) that allos you to share web content instantly. Share2Me leverages your contacts list or address book to make sharing a one-click operation.

Wisdom of the algorithms – Moving the chore of collecting, filtering, and analyzing information to the network makes all kinds of sense as smarter algorithms become available that understand what we're interested in and how we want to access that information.

• Aggregate Knowledge – promises to advance search by anticipating what people are searching for based on past behavior.
• ZoomInfo – PowerSearch 2007 collects, analyzes, and organizes information about companies to support sales and market research.
• Trailfire – creates a digital "crumb trail" of the pages people visit. These trails can be shared and comments and ratings can be added by people who follow the trail.
• Reveal Technology – a lightweight application that performs search across multiple machines in real time.
• Helium – a directory or real-world knowledge built on the editorial contributions my site members. Articles are rated by the community in an A-B peer review model comparing two documents. Ranked results are presented in a pro vs. con display on any topic.
• Text Digger – a very cool search engine that uses a text inference engine to use context to figure out what you're really searching for.
• Iwerx – Sentinel is a content protection service.
• blinkx – video search to find content matching a particular interest across the internet based not just on keywords but also on the content related to that video source.