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SF New Tech event – Oct. 8, 2008 at Mighty in SF: The following companies presented:

http://apture.com allows publishers, bloggers and advertisers to add depth and multimedia to keywords, article references, product listings, and movies. The sources for pop-up depth are from Wikipedia, Amazon, and IMDb, and they also have multimedia search and linked item history, with the ability to link to any specific URL, media, or text giving you full control, in addition to the above sources for content.

http://www.lefora.com/ - these folks have developed a new type of community forum software which they host for free, and all of the setup is through a web based interface. It appears to have several advantages over vbulletin and phpbb, but it is not open source and must be hosted by lefora. Lefora launched in May, 2008, and now have over 20,000 forums. Cool features include built-in spam protection; ability to embed youtube videos and flash widgets in posts, RSS feed scraping from blogs, and support for advanced CSS and forum customization. I think lefora has tremendous potential for the smaller and medium sized forum administrators who don’t want to get involved with the setup and maintenance that many of the other forums require.

http://chi.mp (Chi.mp) owns the .mp Top Level Domain, and gives you your own domain name (e.g. matsumura.mp) and controls logins (supports OpenID) to all of your favorite sites, as well as storing your passwords for your favorite sites. It appears to be a useful aggregator of login info. and provides data portability so you can get your data out if you decide the service is not for you. Since the names available with .mp extensions must be unique, check it out and register for the beta to get the name you want!

http://reframeit.com lets you comment in the margins of websites, through plugins they developed for Firefox and IE. Unlike Delicious or Faviki which let you share pages, reframeit allows you to highlight sentences or page sections, but all parties need to have the plug-in. No Safari support yet.

http://www.goldmail.com lets you create voice and rich media flash messages combined with the flexibility of email. Basically you talk while creating visual slides, and send a link as your email content. Your recipients hear your voice and watch the slide images giving a richer experience than either text email alone, or voice mail alone. The question is, why not audio/video email to show AND voice expressions when you don’t want to just draw or send slides? Appears to be Windows Outlook based only at this time.

http://www.snappr.net is a gate from the real world to the internet. Snappr allows you to create product or event 2D-Codes (they categorize as classic, social, and snapper) from their website (currently in public beta) which you can then print and any standard bar code readers can interpret and link back to the data or products which you associated with the code. SnappR has also created tools to allow your iphone or any cameraphone to take an image of any barcode and text it to their site for decoding.

http://pbwiki.com showed their new API which leverages their hosted wiki collaboration solutions for companies, groups, and individuals, which leverages their extensive hosted and security infrastructure. At the show, they wrote an application in a couple of minutes with the new API, and it appears they will continue to lead with flexible online collaboration solutions.

After the companies above presented, about a dozen entrepreneurs spoke for about a minute on jobs, or services, and video clips of these short requests should be on the sfnewtech.com site soon. 

# posted by tedm @ 1:26 AM