Forget about checking-in to venues. Apparently, the new thing to do is to check-in to whatever you’re doing — like watching television shows, or reading a book. It’s something that Hot Potato offers, and they’re in the process of being acquired by Facebook. It’s what GetGlue offers as well, and they’re already seeing over 4.5 million ratings and check-ins a month now. And today, the service is announcing a new exclusive partnership with HBO.

Starting on August 1, when you use GetGlue to check-in watching one of HBO’s hit shows, you’ll earn exclusive stickers designed by HBO. If you’re aware of Foursquare badges or Gowalla pins, it’s the same idea, except based around content. The three shows HBO has selected for this promotion are True Blood, Hung, and Entourage — three of their hottest shows.

To earn these stickers, all you have to do is use the GetGlue iPhone app or one of their web browser extensions and check-in to say you’re watching one of the mentioned shows. There are also several other stickers for each show that you can earn by doing other things such as commenting on shows or checking-in multiple times to a show. GetGlue won’t reveal the secrets to earn them all (it is a game, after all), but they make it seem as if loyal fans (meaning loyal GetGlue users in this case too) will be able to get all the stickers.

GetGlue also sets itself apart by sending users actual stickers when they ask for them. Thousands of these stickers have been sent out to users already, I’m told. It’s a gimmick, but an interesting one that seems great for promotional purposes.

These types of deals are becoming an increasingly important means for these services to rope in users. Rival Miso has also been doing similar deals (here’s one for the movie Hot Tub Time Machine). Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, and all the other location check-in services have also been signing similar deals left and right in an attempt to lure in users to their respective games. And it’s more than that, as we’ve seen with Foursquare, if a brand is really sold on the idea, they’ll even start promoting you — like VH1 and Bravo.

That said, these deals usually don’t mean a lot (if any) money for these startups yet. These badges and stickers aren’t easily monetizable, GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold tells us. That said, they establish a relationship with the brand, and eventually the plan is to offer other things to them in exchange for money — such as detailed analytics about who is checking-in to their products.

It was just last month that GetGlue said it was doing 1.5 million ratings and check-ins every month — again, now that’s surged to 4.5 million. The plan for the service’s over 500,000 users is to offer up content recommendations based on these check-ins and ratings. So the more, the better, obviously.

You can find GetGlue’s iPhone app here. Iskold says iPad and Android apps should be out in a matter of weeks as well.

If you want to add social smarts to your browsing experience, Glue by Adaptive Blue just got better. Glue is a Firefox add-on that uses semantic technology to understand the subject of the page you are on and shows you via a bar at the bottom of your browser whether your friends have commented or liked the item anywhere on the Web. Glue works for movies, books, games, restaurants, wines, stock charts, and more. (It is very product oriented).

The big new feature being rolled out today is product recommendations. Every time you click on the “like” heart, it recognizes what you are liking (movie, book, wine) and recommends other items in the same category based on your previous likes and those of your friends. You can now share your likes with your friends on Facebook as well (via Facebook Connect) or Twitter (which you could do before).

There is also a new “Shuffle” button which works like the Stumble button on StumbleUpon or the Random button on the Diggbar, except that it randomly generates a recommended page on the same topic. So if you are on Amazon looking at books and hit the “Shuffle” button, you will get another page with a recommended book, If you are looking t wines, you will get wine. And not necessarily from Amazon. The nice thing about Glue is that if a friend of yours “likes” a movie on Netflix via the Glue bar, it counts as a like when you look at that same movie on Amazon or Fandango or Yahoo Movies. (Here are all the sites Glue supports).

I’m still on the fence about having a bar that pops up as I browse because sometimes I don’t care what my Glue friends think. But I’m definitely going to give the recommendations a whirl. Discovery is always good.

This provides third-party developers with a way to connect to and tap into the databases and semantic recognition engine the company has been building over the past few months.

Glue essentially leverages information that already exists inside Web pages, and enables users to interact with things like books, music and movies from a toolbar layered on top of the pages in a frame when browsing with Firefox. It tells you more contextually relevant things about what you’re browsing, and also lets you interact with friends or unknown people who also visited, liked, or purchased those things.

With the API, developers can dive into the information that’s been pulled together by the Glue add-on over time: things that a particular user has displayed an interest in since he or she installed the extension, but also lists of users that liked a specific book, music album or movie. More on the surface, the API can be used to fetch information from ‘the Glue activity stream’, which shows a continuous influx of semantic data generated by its users.

But the most interesting use for the API as far as I’m concerned is the ability to link to a certain object on any Glue site and receive structured information about it straight away. I can see a lot of potential for other web services to integrate that information into their own tools. Finally, the interactive features Glue users enjoy from the toolbar (think likes, comments and replies) can henceforth be built into third-party applications as well.

Developers, go check it out and let us know what you can come up with. Don’t forget to tell AdaptiveBlue about your app(s) either: the company is running an API launch contest which gives you the chance to win some prizes and swag in return for the cool stuff you create with their data.

(Image from Webmonkey)

Blue Organizer was developed by Alex Iskold, a frequent contributor to ReadWriteWeb. He raised $1.5 million from Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures back in February 2007, and is going to try to raise a B round soon.

Baked into Indigo is semantic search technology that acts more like a discovery engine than a traditional search engine. It is limited in what it can recognize, but it does recognize certain things and concepts and matches those with other Webpages about the exact same thing. You never have to go to a search engine, you just have to surf the Web and hop from concept to concept. The software can make inferences about entire Web pages, text inside those pages, and links inside those pages.

When it recognizes that a Web page is about a book, a movie, a recipe, or some other thing, the Blue Organizer icon at the top of your browser changes to an appropriate image (book, movie reel, chef’s hat) to indicate that it has identified an “object” on the page. And it offers a series of appropriate links, such as the Amazon page for a book or a list of reviews, as well as other links based on the way you use the Web, such as “Save to Delicious,” “Share on Facebook,” or “Digg This,” options. The software studies your Web history to surface links to Websites you already frequent. And Adaptive Blue has created a customized Google search engine for each class of objects it recognizes for more relevant search results.

Within a page, if you highlight the name of an author or a movie, for instance, a little SmartMenu box will pop up with links about that person or thing. If it recognizes the name of a book or restaurant that is already hyperlinked, a little blue folder icon will be embedded right next to the word. Click on that, and you get a bunch of associated “SmartLinks.” The SmartLinks also appear in search results pages, much like the Stumbleupon icon does when a you have the StumbleUpon Firefox add-on and you come across search results which have been rated by that community.

As with the previous releases of Blue Organizer, you can also save objects in the slide-out sidebar. This is a bit different than just saving links because you define what kind of “object” you are saving (blog, book, image, stock, toy, etc.), and you get the associated SmartLinks, custom search pages, and other categorization that goes with it.

Thinking of the Web in terms of things instead of Web pages does not come naturally. I installed the old Blue Organizer add-on more than a year ago, and have maybe used it twice. It was too advanced and didn’t fit into the flow of how I use my browser. (It is not just me—the add-on has been downloaded 1.3 million times, but only a couple hundred thousand people use it actively). The new features in Indigo, however, surface the utility of the application implicitly as you surf the Web. You don’t have to remember to save anything. You see a little blue folder, click on it, and get helpful links about that concept. You see the toolbar icon change, and you click on the pull-down menu to do something useful.

Complex apps need easy entry points, and Indigo has plenty of those. There is a lot more to this app than I can go through here. It makes it easy to create smart widgets, supports microformats, recognizes common names and addresses, and lets you highlight any text and send it as a message on Twitter, Tumblr, or Lijit. You can find more details on the Indiigo release here and here. Check it out and tell us what you think.

The new SmartLink Feeds from the companies flagship Blue Organizer Firefox Add-on now include a “Grab Me” button that allows anyone to copy a list of favorites and place it on their web sites and social networking profiles. SmartLink Feeds can also be customized in appearance, content and users can also plug in their personal affiliate ID to monetize traffic to participating sites.

AdaptiveBlue will also now publish and update popular SmartLink Feeds to enable anyone to paste them into their own sites without having to be a regular user. SmartLink Feeds include the New York Times Bestsellers, Netflix Top Rentals, Amazon Hot Gadgets, iTunes Top Albums, and Wine.com Top Wines.

See our previous coverage of AdaptiveBlue Smartlink here.

Adap.tv – They’re like adsense for video, tying contextual text ads based on the content of a video. When videos play, Adap.tv digs up relevant Amazon products and Looksmart ads to populate an ad bar on the bottom of the video at key moments. They use tags and other meta data, as well as speech to text translations to find out what the video is about.

AdaptiveBlue – Makers of the Blue Organizer, a Firefox bookmarking and tagging add-on that parses web pages, adding contextual information where appropriate. For instance, if you go to a web page about a band, Blue Organizer’s right-click menu will show you more info about the band drawn from sites like Odeo or Wikipedia. The plugin also has smart links that let you easily push the link to services like Digg or LibraryThing. More coverage of the recent feature additions here.

Aggregate Knowledge – One of the more established companies at the event, they work with online commerce sites to provide personalized recommendations by looking at user’s collective behavior. They just closed a large round of financing and are rumored to be profitable after a little over a year in operation.

CastTV – A video search engine that pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. The service performed well in our earlier review. They recently raised a $3.1 million round of financing from DFJ.

Critical Metrics – A music recommendation service that aggregates music reviews from around the web. Each song includes an audio and optional Youtube sample and purchasing options from services like Yahoo Music, iTunes, or Rhapsody.

Jangl – They specialize in anonymous phone communication. A Jangl is a real phone number lets people call you with knowing your real number. The first time someone calls you they have to leave a message and request permission to connect to you directly. You can ban a number at any time as well. They just recently launched a service that lets you generate a Jangl number for any email address and leave a voicemail for that user and number for a callback. Calls are served over a VOIP bridge, so it also makes long distance calls cheaper.

Pando Networks – Desktop peer to peer file sharing service Pando speeds up file transfers by torrenting files and buffering them over their higher speed network of servers. At Supernova they’ve announced their Pando Publishing Platform that lets users easily publish to the web with the cost savings of peer to peer. The platform gives publishers the benefits of P2P video streaming amongst their users and CDN peering service. P2P streaming lets users view video incrementally instead of after a lengthy download. Their CDN peering service will let turn a regular CDN server into a supernode that will save on bandwidth by balancing load between users and the main servers. They’ve already lined up content partners NextNewNetworks, Blip.tv, and Rever.

SodaHead – A polling destination site that lets users poll their friends, SodaHead experts, or strangers. Polls are embeddable widgets that can be voted on at the destination site or any page featuring the code. Polls also feature comments so users can express opinions that don’t fit into any of the options.

Spock – A people search engine that automatically aggregates information linked to a person along with support for updating contacts.

Wize – Wize is a site that tracks expert and user product reviews across the Internet and churns them through an algorithm to create a single, 1-100 “WizeRank.” Earlier this year they got a $4 million round. We have a review of other review services here.

ZapMeals – Adding a little levity to the event, Zapmeals is a startup spoof (e.g. the fake) that aims to be a marketplace for meals, hooking up hungry stomachs with nearby home cooked meals or caterers. You choose your cook based on a member rating system and their fleet of couriers would deliver the meals to your home.

ZenZui – A new way of surfing the web on your mobile phone browser, Zenzui economizes on your phone’s screen space by displaying sites and services as icons on a grid display. You can scan the 36 slot grid using your numbered keypad and zoom in for more detail on a specific service. We covered their launch here.

Zing – Zing enables mobile music players to connect to music libraries over WiFi. They’re currently powering the SanDisk devices for Yahoo Music and Pandora.
You can see a Wink powered group for the event here.

The 12 real start-ups were hand-chosen from more than 130 applications. StumbleUpon, one of the 2006 Connected Innovators, has already enjoyed great success as a newly acquired eBay business. We have high hopes for more great success stories from this year’s crop of Connected Innovators.

Disclosure: While these companies were selected from 130+ applications, they were required to pay a fee to participate once selected. As a partner to the conference, TechCrunch received a percentage of that fee.

We’ve covered Adaptive Blue previously. Blue Organizer has grown since we last wrote about it to 600,000 downloads with what Michael Arrington called a very impressive add-on. The new version builds on what is already a quality product and delivers an even more compelling user experience.

The biggest change in the new version of Blue Organizer is “smart links”. Toolbar and in-page pull down menus are supported with an improved contextual engine that delivers results based on data pulled from the page being viewed. The options provided have evolved; where as previous versions provided only static lists of external links, the latest version of Blue Organizer dynamically personalizes link options based on browsing history. For example if you used Facebook and De.licio.us regularly but didn’t use Newsvine, Newsvine would not be listed.

Adaptive Blue also enters the widget market. The new “sharing links” feature allows users to embed semantic links into any webpage, include bookmark style lists in a sidebar or just embed a traditional widget. Affiliate programs are fully supported with no revenue sharing; if a user includes their affiliate code for programs such as eBay and Amazon they keep 100% of any associated revenue.

The new version of Blue Organizer is an appealing package. Power users are supported through right-click support. The semantic engine provides one click dynamic short cuts to useful information that is bound to be a time saver. I installed the new version of Blue Organizer in preparation for this post and I can’t see myself uninstalling it any time soon.