Plum, which I first saw at Demo in February, will be launching in mid to late May, co-founder and CEO Hans Peter Brondmo tells me. If you’d like to be notified the moment it launches, give Plum your email address on their home page. Plum is similar to Kaboodle and Stylehive in that it is a social bookmarking site that allows users to add a lot of metadata about bookmarks (including images). Bookmarked items can tagged and be added to a public, private or shared “collection” (there are a number of defaul collections and more can be added). One key way that Plum is different than other bookmarking site is that it allows users to bookmark items on their computer, not just on the web. A file that is open in certain desktop applications (things like photos, power point presentations, iTunes playlists, address book entries, email, etc) can be added to Plum by clicking a button on the Plummer, a small downloadable application for Windows or Mac. See the last screen shot below for a look at the Plummer. Plum also makes an effort to show related public bookmarked content through a feature called “connections”. These appear in the right hand column of a collection of bookmarks, and are a really interesting way to find stuff related to what you’ve already bookmarked. If Plum suffers from anything, it’s too many features. But the design and flow is intelligent and the help section answers most questions. See here for a video of Plum’s presentation at DEMO in February. In addtion to Hans, Plum’s founders include Margaret Olson and Julie Hanna Farris (founder of Scalix). → Read More
DEMO 2006: 70 companies gather at a hotel in Phoenix, Arizona to compete head on for our attention. $15,000 buys you 5 minutes in front of 700 people, and a chance to make history (which is not recorded real time because the wifi is crushed under the load and no one can get online). At least there is reliable internet access in the press room, along with dozens of free USB drives laying around (this whole “press” gig is pretty damn awesome). A few companies caught my eye today as the ones to watch this year. Here they are: Blurb Blurb will turn your blog or other website into a book. As in, a real, tangible book that you can hold. The service is now in private beta and will be available to the public in March(ish). CEO Eileen Gittins does a great job describing the product and this looks to be an interesting space, especially for ego-type purchases where bloggers buy a copy for themselves.t’ll be about $30 for a four color, 40 page, 8×10 hardcover book with a custom dust jacket. Kaboodle I wrote about Kaboodle, a clip service that is really useful for gathering and sharing information on the web, back in October. They launched some incredible new features this week to normalize data across items: search for items, clone/copy a page, find related items, vote on items, etc. They are also allowing users to create profiles to allow more social aspects. A lot of people are finding Kaboodle to be a very useful shopping tool. Kosmix Mountain View based Kosmix is a structured search engine with three current verticals: health, politics and travel. More are coming soon. Instead of showing linear, Google-like results, Kosmix is categorizing results to create a taxonomy. They claim their engine can be used to create good results over almost any topic area. This is one to watch and I’ll be doing a full profile on them soon. Krugle Fred Wilson wrote about Krugle today as well, saying “It’s a search engine for open source software. Vertical search for open source. Sounds like a good concept. The demo was simple and the proposition was compelling. Not sure how they make money, but the demo isn’t supposed to focus on that.” Knowing how often developers use search engines to find code snippets, this will be an extremely useful. The company is based in → Read More
San Francisco, CA
