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the brainchild of former PayPal executive David Sacks, Geni does for genealogy what Cogmap is doing for organizational hierarchies. the collaborative online-tool for building family-trees is Flash-based and persuades new users with a very low entry-barrier: start mapping your tree just by entering name & email…add your immediate family-members and they will automatically receive notification on your genealogy-research (including direct-links and the possibility to add detail-info). the user-interface is dead-easy and much more responsive than Cogmap’s AJAX-solution. the official blog emphasizes the obvious importance of privacy when dealing with these sort of data. while I tend to agree I still hope that Geni will find a way to build a semi-anonymized, worldwide-mashed-up familytree someday… wouldn’t that be cool?

yes, there are indeed webapps coming from Austria (my home-country, in case you wonder)! although, tag2find isn’t really a webapp, but rather a local application migrating the highly successful web-metaphor of ‘tagging’ to local (Windows XP-)desktops. tag2find integrates common tagging-functionality for local files into Windows Explorer, displays tagclouds and offers a handy TagBox to tag or search on-the-fly (check their official blog for a full feature-list). tag2find is currently in private beta.

(screenshot courtesy of techcrunch.com)

I got an invite to Hey!Watch’s private beta today, and after trying it out I agree that it’s a very useful tool for collecting online-video. after installing the firefox-extension (works with Flock as well) or the provided bookmarklet, it’s just a single click to bring online video to your mobile player. Hey!watch seems to work with most video-sharing sites, I successfully tested it with content from YouTube, Google Video and Metacafe. video-clips can be converted into mpeg4, mpeg2, flash, divx, mov and dvd, with optimized presets for various devices (iPod, PSP, Wii, PocketPC and many more). what’s really great about Hey!Watch: the application exposes an RSS-feed containing all encoded clips - subscribe to this feed in iTunes, and you’ll have all your video synched to your iPod video-player. currently in private beta , Hey!Watch is obviously processing requests for invitation pretty fast.

in yesterdays exclusive preview, TechCrunch referred to Swivel as the “YouTube for data”. though the term might not seem very easy to grasp per se, it really describes the web-application, which launched into public beta today, in a nutshell: Swivel allows users to upload & share arbitrary data-sets, containing all sorts of information organized in records (like f.e. a spreadsheet-data). data-sets can be shared, visualized, rated and mashed-up against each other. Swivel includes basic tools for statistical analysis like calculating correlation between two data-rows. for an example graph, check this comparison of subscriber-growthrate in Second Life and WoW.

Swivel’s data-import works pretty well (though their servers seem to be a bit overloaded at the moment, I’m receiving plenty of 500-errors). users can upload local .xls- or .csv-sheets or enter data into a html-form directly. features like importing .pdf/.doc-files and syndicating data from other websites obviously aren’t deployed yet - I figure a flexible XML-/RSS importer would be really nice too. while it’s easy to get your data into the system in a meaningful way (including common web-techniques like tagging), the user-interface needs a bit of polish in some other areas. in particular, I found it rather challenging to edit and filter data-sets or even to create graphs upon uploaded data (my guess is, that Swivel takes some time [hours?] to pre-process uploaded data, but there wasn’t any hint in this regard, hm). again, the application throws errors on certain actions (f.,e. hiding data-fields), but I guess that’s why it’s called a ‘preview’.

besides teething problems, Swivel seems to be one of the most innovative webapps I’ve tried out lately. for me, the biggest caveat seems to be the inability to assure data-integrity & -quality (in the end, what stops me from uploading, lets say, faked crime-statistics of Vienna?). assuming this way of sharing raw data takes off in a Wikipedian-way, Swivel will have to show us some innovations in this area too.

FeedShake is a lightweight tool allowing feed-junkies to merge an arbitrary number of RSS- and atom-sources into a single target-feed. word-filters allow further refinement of resulting feed-items, which could be easily used to create vertical meta-feeds similar to earFeeder. on the downside, FeedShake does neither cache feeds nor straighten out invalid XML in source-feeds.

Adobe released a versatile online color-picker coined kuler a few days ago. the flash-application not only suggests matching color-schemes by pre-defined rules (analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary etc…), but also allows registered users to store, share & rate schemes. as a bonus, color-schemes can be downloaded for use in Adobe CS 2. a nice tool, not only for the color-blind

Zamzar is another competitor in the market for free, online file-converters. up to 5 source-files can be uploaded from local disk (each max. 100 mbytes in size) and converted at a single click. the resulting files are stored for 24h hours on Zamzar’s servers. since the file-link is returned via email, users have to provide a valid address.

I did some random test-conversions to see what Zamzar is capable of:

• .pdf to .doc: worked quite well, even a watermark-image in the background was maintained. tables, headers & footers are converted into text-frames, though.
• .doc to .pdf: quite perfect.
• .mpg to .flv: depending on the source-file, I got postive and negative (=not working at all) results.
• .mp3 to .aac: worked, but with a bitrate reduction from 128 to 64 kbit/s.

the full list of supported source-formats includes csv, doc, OpenOffice (odp, ods, odt), pdf, ppt, xls, bmp, gif, jpg, tiff, ps, mp3, mp4, au, wav, wma, wmv, flv, avi, mov, 3gp and mpg - with even more formats to be chosen as destination-format. while this sounds impressive, Zamzar is missing to support some very basic formats like .png on the input-side. more advanced formats like .psd or vector-graphics would be a nice addition as well.

oh, and here’s a little hint on the service’ name :)…

The name “Zamzar” is based on a character from the Bohemian author Franz Kafka’s book “The Metamorphosis”. In the novel Kafka describes the extraordinary story of a young man who is transformed whilst sleeping into a gigantic insect.

The man’s name - Gregor Samsa - was used as the basis for our company name because of its’ powerful association with change and transformation.

Media Convert is a similar tool, supporting even more formats (png, various archive-formats) but limiting uploads with 50 mbyte each.

TechCrunch reviewed version 3.0 of social bookmarking- & vertical search-tool BlueOrganizer by Adaptive Blue. the Firefox-plugin (also working within Flock) allows users to freely tag webpages similar to deli.icio.us, but also offers tags automatically extracted from the pages’ content. furthermore, BlueOrganizer recognizes lots of different content-items (like movies, books, music, aritsts, products) which can be fed into the appropriate search-engines/-portals by a handy context-menu. the engine delivers intelligent search-results, f.e. starring artists or the director of a known movie-title (with further possibilites to search for related movies). sounds quite smart, right? since BlueOrganizer synchs with del.icio.us (thanks to their API), it might be worth giving a try…

I just happened to read about partyStrands, a music-service demo’ed at yesterdays TechCrunch 8 party in NYC. partyStrands tries to replace oldschool club-DJs with a collaborative, SMS-based voting-system. to get things started, venues hook up a video-beamer or -screen with a PC running the locally installed partyStrands software (the music-library isn’t provided by partyStrands, venues have to provide their own media-library - and of course pay royalties for public performance). during the party, on-screen instructions encourage the party-crowd to join the voting by texting their song-requests to a special phone-number provided by the service (which is, of course, a value added number). partyStrands not only cues up the requested tune (if available, that is), but also considers the request for auto-generatig a playlist fitting the “overall-mood” of party-attendees (sounds a lot like a collaborative music-recommendation engine). other than song-votes, users may also send greetings & MMS-pictures for public display. in addition, partyStrands is marketing the display-estate for advertising to 3rd parties - revenue from both ads and messaging-fees are split with the venue.

I don’t see partyStrands as a DJ-replacement accepted by the average club-head anytime soon. the service is probably better aimed at DJ-less lounges & bars which are playing the same old compilation-CDs over and over again. and of course tech-events like mentioned TechCrunch party

update: a friend of mine just told me that he had seen a similar setup in a London-club recently, people seemed to be kinda into it. what do you think about systems like partyStrands? any chance to get into the groove while fumbling away on your mobile? or, imagine a sequencer-based system that could acutally mix (i.e beatmatch etc.) tracks? now that sounds interesting to me…

cogmap is definitely among the more interesting web-apps popping up these days. best described as ‘the Wikipedia for organization charts of real-life companies”, the application offers a graphical Wiki specialized in mapping of organizational hierarchies. using an AJAxified editor, contributors - weither they officially represent the mapped company or not - are invited to collaborate on charts. as rev2 points out, reliability of data is not always on par with reality. the AJAX-interface seems to be rather unresponsive, and MBAs might miss basic organizational elements like staff units.

No Inc, builders of cogmap, need to round off the featureset of what could evolve into a serious resource for business-research. for liable, up-2-date information, cogmap will probably need to implement functionality, allowing officially approved company-representatives to freeze in organizational structures. until this has happened, anybody can be CEO of Google for five minutes