Group items tagged

first in the demo area at TC40 and now a full demo at DEMO. I had the chance to meet Maggie Tsai from Diigo and she took me through some of their new features. The initial product was a Web annotation tool which in itself is very cool. Maggie then showed me another piece of their technology called WebSlides. Now this is cool and useful. I could see Web (and other) agencies loving this along with bloggers! Basically its a PowerPoint for the Web. You annotate the Web pages for your presentation, and then WebSlides takes each page live and creates a fully-functional presentation. No more screenshots in a ppt, instead you save each page as a slide and then you can move just as you would in a ppt. Maggie called this an "innovative way to repackage content and the publisher gets all the traffic." The new "layer" they are presenting at DEMO is a social layer. Diigo will now find neighbors who might be close to the things you are. You can search by tag and find other users who also are interested in that tag. The messaging system between neighbors was twitter-like. From their official press release, "Diigo offers a variety of productive ways for people with common interests to easily find one another and aggregate into specific groups or communities. "Interest Neighbors" help people identify other users who share similar interests; "Site Communities" unite users who annotate the same website; "Advanced People Search" identifies users based on reading interests and their profile information; and "Friends" creates a connection between people." "Diigo combines the best of social networking, bookmarking, highlighting, and annotating to let people discover, save, and share the information that is important to them personally or professionally," said Wade Ren, CEO of Diigo. "Not only can people find a collective repository of searchable and relevant information, but they can markup and save information along the way - all while connecting with like-minded people for future collaboration." The Diigo HQ is located in Reno, Nevada and their development team is in China. Maggie was quick to note that it's not an offshore relationship, the developers are all Diigo employees. The leadership team are all former investment managers. I like the annotation and social layer tools, but the WebSlides tool is the strongest of the set and could be an invesment opportunity for a company such as Zoho.

(I-Newswire) - OFFICE 2.0, SAN FRANCISCO-- Sept. 6, 2007 – Diigo, www.diigo.com, is previewing WebSlidesSM, a browser-based player that displays any list of URLs complete with integrated annotations, sticky notes, and highlights as an interactive slideshow.  Diigo is also demonstrating WebSlides during the official Demo tracks during Office 2.0 conference.  More information on the demonstration schedule here: http://www.o2con.com/docs/DOC-1017. Diigo's patent-pending WebSlides, available at http://slides.diigo.com, enables a new way to easily create and share unique presentations based on web content and user annotations. To experience WebSlides, users simply collect and organize any set of links into a list, and add background music or voice narration.  By clicking "Play," the list transforms into a slideshow bringing Web pages and user comments to life. The player can then be sent to friends and colleagues and also posted on Websites and blogs. Viewers of the slideshow can interact on the slides through highlights and sticky notes directly on each page, without installing any software. This incredibly easy-to-use web-based software has many potential applications such as: - Create a guided tour for any website- Show a list of houses to real estate clients- Review a list of job candidates found online- Bundle important course resources for students- Provide a quick briefing, or a simple tutorial or guided tour on any subject- Share the favorite places you would like to visit with your friends and blog readers Diigo is a powerful, yet incredibly simple to use research tool that allows people to annotate, bookmark, highlight, save, and clip Web content that matters to them, for future reference or to share with others. They can also comment and add sticky notes directly on each web page, which are viewable by other Diigo users when visiting the same pages. About DiigoDiigo provides a suite of online research and collaborative research tool for individuals and small to medium-sized work groups. Diigo enables seamless bookmarking, tagging, highlighting, clipping, sharing, annotating, and searching of information to deliver a new level of productivity for knowledge workers. Diigo Groups also offer a simple and cost-effective platform for collaborative research. Upcoming releases will transform Diigo's powerful social bookmarking, social annotation and social networking suite into the next-generation knowledge management platform for large enterprises, through both hosted and appliance-based solutions. Diigo is privately held, and is based in Reno, NV.

The twice-yearly DEMO conferences, now in their 17th year, are known for seeking out and showcasing important new technologies that usher in new methods of computing. [DEMO is produced by Network World Conferences, a unit of tech publishing giant IDG.]

DEMOfall '07 is taking place September 24-26 at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina. It will introduce 69 carefully vetted products and services (see below) to "an audience of investors, business development executives, media, pundits, and fellow entrepreneurs."  I would expect attendance in the neighborhood of 700, based on past experience. Presenters include both early-stage and established companies.

We had a blast meeting with David LaPlante, chairman of the State of Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology and CEO of Twelve Horses and his crew, Mike Henderson, Earl Spriggs & Leilani Schweitzer. Twelve Horses is a full-service relationship marketing and messaging company specializing in designing interactive communication solutions. It’s great knowing that many workgroups and companies are discovering and finding Diigo to be quite useful for both personal productivity and effective collaborative research… reasons that inspire us to create Diigo in the very first place. Besides “What / Why Diigo”, we also chatted about “Why Reno / Tahoe” To find out the inside scope, be sure to check out our interview and podcast