DemoFall and TechCrunch50 debrief

Add newsletters@cnet.online.com to your address book to ensure CNET newsletters reach your inbox.

	View online  | Share on Facebook	September 26, 2009

	DemoFall and TechCrunch50 debrief In the last three years, September has become a busy time for Web start-ups and other new companies looking to make their mark. Warring start-up conferences TechCrunch50 and DemoFall take place within mere days of one another, leaving a wake of more than 100 companies that are launched within just a week's time, all vying for media and consumer attention. We've narrowed down some of our favorite new products and services that launched at both shows, as well as which ones you can actually use. See all of this week's DemoFall coverage  The most promising launches at DemoFall 2009  Best of show: Our top five from TechCrunch50  TC50 vs. DemoFall 2009: What can you use? Rafe Needleman Editor, Webware.com New on Webware.com Google Toolbar adds comments with Sidewiki Posted by Tom Krazit Sidewiki is a new addition to the Google Toolbar that will let users read comments on any Web site and add their own in a special interface on the left-hand side of the screen enabled by the toolbar. This idea has been tried before by others, but Google is proposing to use an algorithm to rank comments by quality and to link comments to a user's Google Profile.  Read more  Bored? Goby helps you find things to do Posted by Josh Lowensohn New search engine Goby really is a "decision engine"--enabling users to very quickly find something to do nearby or in a far away place. Its task-centric search tool is made up of three boxes--a "what," "where," and "when." You just tell it what you want to do and where you want to do it, as well as some general date (or no date at all), and it goes through its index to find you places or activities that match up with those simple parameters.  Read more  Picasa 3.5 brings facial recognition to the desktop Posted by Josh Lowensohn Roughly a year after rolling out facial recognition on its Picasa Web Albums site, Google this week introduced an updated version of its Picasa software that can recognize faces in photos stored on users' computers.  Read more  Study: Microbloggers are really boring Posted by Don Reisinger A study from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) has found that most microbloggers are updating their status with "mundane" messages. In sifting through 400,000 messages on Jaiku, HIIT found that the most common messages users send out include the words "working," "home," "work," "lunch," and "sleeping."  Read more  New Evernote beta brings face-lift, drawing tools Posted by Josh Lowensohn This week Evernote gave its Windows desktop application a huge face-lift. The new version of the writing and archiving tool has more in common with its Mac counterpart, borrowing features like thumbnail previews and a three-pane view that lets users quickly hop through notes they have saved in one of their Evernote notebooks.  Read more  Webware for your browser Google plug-in builds Chrome browser into IE Posted by Stephen Shankland This week Google released an Internet Explorer plug-in designed to let Microsoft's browser use the features and performance of Google's own Chrome browser. The software, called Google Chrome Frame, lets IE 6, 7, or 8 use Chrome to render Web pages and execute their JavaScript programs.  Read more  Firefox gets an early taste of 3D Web standard Posted by Stephen Shankland A nascent technology called WebGL for bringing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web is getting a lot closer to reality. Last week, programmers began building WebGL into Firefox's nightly builds, the developer versions used to test the latest updates to the open-source browser. Also this month, programmers began building WebGL into WebKit, the project that's used in both Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.  Read more  More Webware  Webware RSS feed  The Webware 100  About Webware.com
	Copyright 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. News 235 Second Street, San Francisco, CA 94105, U.S.A.