Had a quick scoot around the demo pit, where 50 different companies are pitched up each day. These are the guys that didn't make the 40, so have to pay $2,500 for the privilege of being here.
This session focuses on five sites that help to make money. And a online dental booking system...
Spott: Ad-sharing system for blogging friends - that's them above.
Clickable: A complex management and monitoring system for online advertisers, targeted at smaller publishers that are probably using Google AdSense. These guys got tipped by Jason Calacanis during their introduction although he has done that for several presentations. They announced that Jonathan Miller, ex AOL chief executive, has joined their board.
GotStatus: A system to monitor corporate web server activity. Apparently the market is dominated by a few massive players with closed systems that have control over an $8bn market; GotStatus is more of "user-generated monitoring" model.
PubMatic: Not, as the name by suggest, a system for buying rounds of drinks at the bar virtually, but an advertising inventory tool that, it says, auctions spare inventory to get the highest revenues for it. It scans all the rates across Google, BlueLithium, Yahoo and AdClick et al, and goes for the best. 400 publishers are using the alpha version of the service - one of which has seen a 90% increase in online ad revenues as a consequence, they claim.
ZocDoc: Not something we'll need in the UK (I hope) but a kind of Yellow Pages for dentists and doctors. Search by location, what king of medical insurance they accept and then see their available appointments.
The panel said Clickable is interesting, but in a very competitive space. ZocDoc also went down well, but there's an issue around potentially litigious material on dentists' profiles. Listings somebody's professional medical practice is a whole different game than listing pizza restaurants, said Calacanis, to whihc ZocDoc said they carefully manually checked information on profiles and basically operate a take-down procedure.
"I like the concept as the democratisation of information," said Kawasaki, "but honestly it would just never occur to me to go to a site to find a doctor."
"90% of the people we surveyed go to insurance company websites to find doctors," said ZocDoc's founder, but those websites, he said, are terrible to use. Those members of the panel from the East Coast seemed convinced the site would be a winner.
Roelof, who looks a lot like Suggs, said ZocDoc should branch out and support any type of company; Esther Dyson said that's a good idea, but they need to stay focused to start with.
No sign of MC Hammer yet. ;-(
