Web 2.0 Expo Buzz – Part 3, Companies to Watch

After leaving a conference my adrenalin is always very high. I’ve taken in so many new ideas in a short period of time that I feel like I’m suffering from information sickness (coined by Don DeLillo in “White Noise”). And yet I am not anxious to see it soon part. I’m eager to incorporate all the data and make sense of it as fast as I can. 

So was the case this past week in San Francisco as a fairly broad community gathered for Web 2.0 Expo. Here’s how I’m making sense of it all in 3 parts.

Part 3 – Companies that are doing interesting things. 

In keeping with the purpose for starting this blog, here are some Web 2.0 companies to watch (I have no affiliation with any of these companies). 

• Sprout (www.sproutbuilder.com) does for Flash what Front Page did for HTML, only better. It brings Flash development to the masses. 

• Beeweeb (http://www.beeweeb.com/mwt/) is a Rome-based engineering and design company that builds mobile applications for large mobile carriers. I’d say they are akin to Ideo but with a very heavy coding pedigree. I shared a lunch table with their president and was amazed with the kinds of things they have already built for mobile phones: mapping, video and music players. 

• Blist (www.blist.com) promised to bring databases to the masses. Their UI is very slick. 

• LiveMesh (www.mesh.com/web20) from Microsoft connects all of your devices (not mobile yet) together so you can easily get at our files. Many people have tried to solve this problem such as WebOS and Groove which is now part of Microsoft. LiveMesh is clearly leveraging features from it. They have not yet made it possible to run applications from any of the devices – that would be a killer feature. 

• BigString (www.bigstring.com) offers self-destructing email, instant messaging and chat rooms. From what I can tell, they do this by converting text to an image which can then be deleted off the server. 

• SpringNote (http://springnote.com/en) comes from Korea. If it was my call I’d position this product to go after the technical documentation market. Take a look and you’ll see why.