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Trying to weed through the 50 companies that launched over the past two days is overwhelming for you, and us. As done in years past, we’ve picked five of our favorites from TechCrunch50. These are all consumer-oriented services that bring innovative ideas to the table and have a good chance at succeeding.

Note: CNET’s judges for this article were Josh Lowensohn (me) and Caroline McCarthy, both of whom watched all 50 on-stage pitches.

Story Something

Story Something is one of the few kid-oriented products we’ve seen in the past few years that doesn’t have some crazy scheme with virtual worlds, virtual currency, or a way to suck kids dry of their hard-earned allowances. Instead, Story Something is set up to create personalized stories for kids that the parent can set up and read with minimal effort.

Much like Mad Libs, parents can insert the name of their child, and things they can relate to (like their friends, or parent’s names) into an existing work. The service then goes through existing stories and inserts the names. Children also have the option of picking what happens next if it’s a multipart story, akin to the Choose Your Own Adventure series.

Stories can be printed, and e-mailed for reading on mobile devices and e-readers like the Kindle. It even includes illustrations in these copies. As a time saver, the service can also be set up to e-mail you new stories as they come in, using information about your family that you set up in previous sessions.

The service is currently in private beta, and is planning to have a free version with a handful of sample stories, as well as a premium version which includes a full library of content for $3 a month.

ToyBots Woozees

ToyBots Woozees isn’t a product as much as a platform. Think of it like Teddy Ruxpin, but Internet-enabled, and available in a whole slew of smart toys. ToyBots wants to get toy manufacturers using their standardized firmware, which lets toy owners swap personalities, and run downloaded software like games and stories.

This whole idea of shared content is hosted on a large network, kind of like Apple’s iPhone and iPod App Store, so that games you buy for one device can work for another. It also lets third-party developers program new ways for consumers to interact with that old toy.

As a business this can bring something toy makers don’t currently have with most stuffed animals: a revenue flow post-purchase. Instead of relying on accessories like additional outfits, and other characters, they can make money off software sales. Of course before this happens, ToyBots has to get toy manufacturers on board.

ToyBots envisions a future full of toys that share a similar hardware profile, letting users swap personalities among their Web-enabled stuffed animals.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Spawn Labs

Spawn Labs was pitched as a “Slingbox for video games” and that’s exactly what it does. The $199 box is a one-time purchase that users hook up to their home game console and their Internet connection. It then lets them play video games from any Internet-enabled computer as if they were playing it on their home TV.

The service has three big things going for it: One is that it pipes the content in 720p HD, which is the proper size for most laptops and what its creators tell us is as good as you can get for real-time streaming without bulging the price tag to around $5,000. It’s also a one-time purchase, which means there’s no monthly service fee beyond whatever you’re paying for electricity and Internet. And, the company tells me it plans to offer compatibility with future game consoles through updated hardware drivers, meaning that you can buy the box now and not worry about having to upgrade it when the next generation of consoles arrives.

Considering it costs close to what most current-generation game consoles do, it may be a hard sell, but after having tried it out at the company’s demo booth we definitely want one–and think many other gamers, and people in one-TV households will as well.

Spawn Labs' box can hook up to your game console and let you play your own games over the Web, free of charge. All you need to buy is the box.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

SeatGeek

Similar to what Bing Travel (formerly Farecast) does with airplane pricing forecasts, SeatGeek does for other types of tickets like concerts and sporting events. The service doesn’t do this for main ticket providers though. Instead it tracks prices on secondary markets like Craigslist and StubHub where tickets are being resold, then tells you whether the price is set to go up or down with 80 percent certainty.

Where this service has the most potential to succeed is helping people who don’t know a great deal about a particular event they want tickets to. It’s taking the guesswork out of the buying process, as well as instilling extra confidence in transactions where people would have otherwise been reluctant to spend a few hundred dollars.

It’s also got the makings of a great business. According to its founders, it’s already become profitable based on a small scale alpha test.

SeatGeek can predict whether a ticket to a concert or sports game is going up or down, just like some travel sites do with airplane tickets.

(Credit: CNET)

AnyClip

AnyClip was the only video platform introduced at this year’s show. It solves a really basic problem of helping people find specific parts of a movie, then sharing it elsewhere.

In the early days of YouTube, before the site really started locking down on copyrighted material, this was common practice. AnyClip’s (legal) answer to that is getting the studios on board, with the promise of reinvigorating DVD sales and interest in a large back catalog of movies–all of which are linked to sales sites like iTunes and Amazon where users can buy a full copy of the content.

Right now it has a database of around 100 films, all of which are split up into four minutes or less clips. It has a group of users that are going into full film files and tagging specific moments so that its search engine can index them. The service eventually plans to expand into other types of media like TV shows and sporting events.

AnyClip can pull up short clips from a large catalog of films. Perfect for when you're trying to remember a movie line or action-packed moment.

(Credit: CNET)

Click here to see our complete coverage of the show.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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Best of show: Our top five from TechCrunch50

SAN FRANCISCO–Two new companies are launching products designed to get the news to users faster–and from a wider variety of sources. Both are in private beta and not yet available to the general public but were demoed live at the TechCrunch50 conference.

Thoora is a new tool that clusters and aggregates news. It offers people a way to track the latest headlines with a simple ranking tool, ordering incoming stories by “Web reaction.” It uses a mix of sources, including Twitter messages, blog posts, and breaking stories from more traditional news outlets. These stories are then filtered and pushed to a front page as well as Thoora’s category pages.

One of the things that factors into what ends up on Thoora’s front page is real-time chatter. The company tracks how many news-related tweets there have been about that topic in the last hour, as well as “Twitter impact,” which is a percentage of density about that topic per 500 messages across all of Twitter over the past hour. It also tracks things like blog comments and linkbacks.

Thoora tracks hot news topics across a variety of chatter networks including blog comments, tweets, and news stories.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Insttant, on the other hand, cuts out traditional news sources entirely and uses Twitter’s public stream instead. It takes these tweets and turns them into an interactive news page that covers people, places, and companies, including a way to track trending topics and user sentiment. All of this goes on a front page, which can be reordered and personalized with topics the user wants to see.

One of the service’s more interesting tricks is that it automatically creates profile pages for people containing links and interests based on what they’ve shared in their tweets. This also happens for trending news topics, which makes for a more in-depth news-reading experience, since you can drill down on any topic and see things like recent mentions, related news and links, and a history of how popular it’s been in the past few weeks.

Instant's front page is made up entirely of real-time chatter.

(Credit: Insttant)

Related:
Yahoo’s Delicious adds a little Twitter
Full TechCrunch50 coverage

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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TC50: Two new ways to get the news

Perpetually is a new Web archiving tool demoed at the TechCrunch50 conference. It saves entire instances of Web pages, then lets users dial back to older versions. You just point it to a site or entire domain name then tell it what you want it to archive and for how long. It then does the hard work of saving pages to its servers.

Included is a visual browser that shows you visual history of pages in thumbnail form. You can simply flip through these before viewing the full-sized version. There’s also a way to pick specific parts of a Web page and dial back such as a breaking stories box. And for those who want to find a specific archived page, or piece of archived content, there’s a search engine that lets you go back without having to browse.

The service is not free; in fact, it’s not even aimed at consumers. The lowest plan costs $99 a month, all the way up to $499 month, each with a higher level of monthly archiving storage. Considering each page takes up some storage space, it can fill up quickly, which is why the pro plans offer more.

The company said it’s aiming Perpetually at media networks, historians, and PR companies. It also butts heads with Iterasi and its Positive Press product whose core technology was first demoed in January 2008.

(Credit: Perpetually)

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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Perpetually archives the Web for you

I recently talked to execs from two companies that do exactly the same thing but in completely different ways. In one corner, Yammer, the 2008 TechCrunch50 darling. It’s a Twitter-for-the-enterprise service that’s hosted by Yammer. Any company can get its employees on to the service, but all the data is run through, and hosted by, Yammer itself.

In the other corner, Presently (found at Present.ly), another Twitter-for-the-enterprise product. Customers can use Presently in the cloud, just like Yammer, but the company makes its money from, and has most of its users on, its software that customers can install on their own networks, “inside the firewall,” as they say.

Which is better? Dave Naffis, co-founder of Presently maker Intridea, told me that most of his customers are on the self-hosted version. “They try the SaaS (software as a service) version briefly then install the on-premises version. Over 70 percent of our customers are hosting internally,” he says. Presently is installed at more than 50 companies, he claims.

Given what Naffis’ customers are saying and paying for, it’s understandable that he’s going in the software direction. Just announced is a new self-install kit: Companies can sign up for free online and get a 30-day free trial license for the Linux version of the software (for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or CentOS 5). There’s a predictable, one-time license fee of $2,000 (for up to 1,000 users) with maintenance fees running 5 percent to 20 percent a year on top of that, depending on services needed.

Naffis does believe that, “Over time, customers will get more comfortable with data in the cloud.” But, he says, “a lot of these large companies are not there yet. Maybe in three to five years.”

So the Presently strategy is to sell companies an architecture they can get behind today and will presumably be there for them when they drop their objections to running a corporate communications system through a hosting service. But the company will have to wean its customers off the installed software and back to the hosted service, and there’s no way that will be easy.

Yammer keeps getting better, but its critical advantage is its architectural philosophy.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Meanwhile, Yammer, which has more funding, has dropped its downloadable software strategy entirely. CEO David Sacks did tell me that early in the young company’s life he heard the reservations of corporate IT guys about running a service like this off-site. His company announced that it would create a downloadable version of Yammer.

But over time, Sacks says, he came to believe that all his clients were all going to get with the program on cloud-based computing eventually. And, he says, Yammer-as-a-service started selling. The service costs $3 to $5 per user per month, depending on features needed.

Yammer has stopped work on the hosted version of the product and is now aligned completely around the SaaS service. Sacks cites a few Fortune 1000 customers using the product, like AMD. The market for his type of communications service is not as big as he wants it to be yet, but, he says, “It’s big enough to support us today.”

And, of course, Sacks is happy to rattle off the advantages of focusing on the service-based product model: No tedious and expensive upgrade distributions; no need to support legacy users who don’t upgrade; the freedom to spend 100 percent of product development on one version of the product (and features for it); and the speed with which updates can be rolled out to customers.

Yammer has the strategic advantage in the hosted-vs-software model due to its deeper pockets (it raised $5 million in venture funds), which allows it to bet on the future instead of selling products based on today’s architecture.

I didn’t really like Yammer when it launched a year ago. In fact, I liked Presently a lot more and awarded it a special Webware 100 award in 2009. I felt Yammer was too spare. Since then, Yammer has added features (such as integration with Twitter), and rolled out more client apps, including one that embeds Yammer into enterprise e-mail client Outlook. It’s a much better service now than it was when it launched.

I don’t have enough information to judge the products on purely technical merits. Corporate customers will want to talk to Yammer and Presently reps themselves to see which service they’re more comfortable with when it comes to scalability, reliability, and security.

Regardless of the feature comparisons, and even regardless of numbers of current customers, I give the strategic nod to Yammer, because it’s not building for today’s market, but tomorrow’s, and it has the resources to wait it out. The whole enterprise Twitter space may collapse (if, for example, Twitter releases a strong business-focused service on its own), but if it does survive, over the long term, it looks like Yammer is better positioned to slide into the market that will be.

Originally posted at Rafe’s Radar

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For biz microblogs, hosted services or installed software?

Yahoo Search Pad will sit in the upper-right corner of search result pages.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Yahoo will launch a new tool on Tuesday to help people organize research they do on the Yahoo search engine. The Yahoo Search Pad will automatically save search results when it notices the user is doing research, which should make it easier for people to come back to a project on subsequent days to do more work.

Other Web notebook projects have notably failed, or at least failed to become important. Tools like Google Notebook and JetEye are (or were) all very strong tools for saving Web search results, but they require intent on the part of the user. They save nothing without the user asking for it to be saved. Search Pad, in contrast, watches what the user does (as long as they’re doing it on Yahoo), and, according to Yahoo VP of Consumer Experience Larry Cornett, “uses deep science to recognize when someone is doing research.”

In other words, if you’re scanning for a funny video of a cat to occupy yourself during a conference call, it won’t kick in. But if you’re searching on a medical condition or researching a car or other major purchase, it will notice that you’re clicking a lot of links, create a dossier for you in the background, and start to catalog your search results.

In my testing, it didn’t work quite as advertised. While the service, which sits innocuously in the corner of Yahoo search result pages, collected Web site titles, pictures, and URLs in a little notebook, it never popped up to help me organize them despite me clicking dozens of times on sites during a test on a medical condition. However, the product is still a day from launch and the on-screen demo I got on it earlier was compelling.

The service collects pages and links for you, although in my testing it just saved everything without categorizing it.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The entries that Search Pad saves can be added to with text, or deleted, moved, printed, or e-mailed, making a well-stocked “pad” a potentially very useful reference even when a user is not on the Yahoo search site. And as I said, the idea of a notebook that automatically stocks itself is sound, especially if it proves to be accurate in noticing when you’re doing research and if it makes it easy to remove entries you don’t want to follow up on (that, at least, I can confirm it does).

The service separates Yahoo from Google and Microsoft search engines. Were it working, and were I doing research on a complex topic, I would strongly consider using Yahoo search instead of an engine that gives only results, and then leaves it to you to sort and save them. Search Pad adds real value to search.

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Yahoo Search Pad: An online notebook that watches you