2 The Next Level

Unfortunately I could not attend this years TechCrunch50 but I watched a good amount of the conference on Ustream.tv. I have posted the video demos of the three companies that impressed me the most on day one.

Angstro delivers critical business news about people and companies across professional networks. By leveraging existing services such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, Angstro helps users to easily discover and share news about colleagues and clients. Unlike clipping services that confuse different people with the same name, Angstro both disambiguates names and analyzes social graphs to prioritize those relationships that matter most. Founded in 2007 by serial entrepreneurs with decades of experience developing real-time notification solutions, Angstro is located in Palo Alto, California.

OtherInbox is a new way to manage email overload. You probably have an “other inbox” already, and it’s probably a Yahoo or Gmail account that you give out because you don’t want receipts, newsletters and social networking notifications to clutter your main email. OtherInbox introduces a clever twist. Instead of just having a single email address such as johnsmith23@gmail.com, each user gets assigned their own domain name such as johnsmith.otherinbox.com or a vanity domain like johnsmith.com. Any address @johnsmith.com goes to your OtherInbox, so you can easily give a different email address to every website. For instance, Amazon gets amazon@johnsmith.com and Facebook gets facebook@johnsmith.com. Without having to set up any folders or rules, your email gets organized so that it’s easy to jump right to the messages you care about. If a website sells your email address to spammers, you’ll be able to tell and can BLOCK it with a single click.

Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?” As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge base where past conversations can be easily accessed and referenced. Anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. The privacy of each network is ensured by limiting access to those with a valid company email address. The basic Yammer service is free. Companies can pay to claim and administer their network.

If I had to pick just one winner for the day that most impressed me it would be Yammer.com. Even though this application is slated for Enterprise use and not for Solopreneurs I truly liked the Twitter like functionality and its ease of setup. If you are familiar with Twitter and would like to exclusively communicate with other employees in your organization the same way then Yammer is for you.

All you need is access to your corporate email address to sign up. You can then invite other employees with the same corporate email address. Once invited your invitees are ready to answer the question “What are you working on”, build their profile page and then commence to Yammering. Its that simple. If you don’t get your confirmation email right away give a Tweet to http://twitter.com/yammer_team and they will help you immediately.

All the best

JB

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