Five more companies you may want to know about from Launch Silicon Valley. The general takeaway from this is the preponderance of peer-to-peer services as a way of lowering the cost of streaming content, and the general movement to the cloud.
Update: Here’s the second set of companies.
CellWand isn’t really next generation of Internet; it’s mobile voice apps accessed through abbreviated dialing codes (#taxi #home #pizza). It’s a pay per use app ($1.25-1.79 per call), partnered with carriers. They get big margins from loyal users, and use the wireless carriers, alcohol companies, and media partners for marketing. CellWand is live in Canada, and penetrates at 1 call per 250 mobile phone users. If they penetrate similarly in the US, that would be $1m/month revenue. They also use the carrier billing systems. They have locked up all the Canadian carriers
Surf Canyon – delivers relevant personalized search results. It re-ranks results according to what you might have clicked on from the first search — on the fly, in real time. Another Firefox add-on, also works on IE. And for good measure, it also personalizes the sponsored links. Works with Bing, Yahoo, Google.
Dacast, a product of Andolis LLC believes the future of TV is multicast. The company has a peer to peer system to cut the cost of live streaming and unite all the Dacast users in an ecosystem. That allows for more appropriate advertising to users. So Datacast is free for content owners, cheaper to stream, and more carefully targeted. The company projects profitability by end of 2010. Every player wins: Advertisers get more clicks, users get free content, content owners get more money.
Wowd – is now in private beta. It turns the wisdom of crowds into useful work finding content, tagging itself “the web you want.”
“Wowd connects people to a planet’s worth of content.”
YOICS “Your Own Internet Connected Stuff” Cloud IT services for the rest of us. Private bookmarks only available to you or people you are connecting to, using the internet as your own private LAN. This could also be used for security services, and you would be able to see it on any browser anywhere.
You can use it as a replacement for an FTP service. You can download the Yoics app, drag a file form your computer to it, and make it accessible to a selected group (like a graphic designer could do for clients).
It will be interesting watching these people get acquired by the already-existing companies in the internet space. I think none of them are really stand alones. Again, I’ve jumped to a conclusion here:-)
