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A small, digital book startup thinks it has a solution to the age-old student lament: overpriced textbooks that have little value when the course is over. The answer? Make them open source -- and give them away.

E-mail is no longer just e-mail, and it arguably hasn't been for some time. Webmail clients like Yahoo's have offered IM and calendar integration for a while, and now Gmail allows video chatting and embedded gadgets. Zenbe, a new startup, is bringing social features, collaboration, and a new perspective on our e-mail routine with things like a sharable wiki, discussions, and even a Twitter sidebar.

The most disruptive idea being explored by startups is to channel coal stack carbon dioxide emissions into water filled bags with carbon-eating algae which can re-purpose carbon and hydrogen into fatty acids which can be used to create liquid biofuels.

Semantic Cloud is the API that powers semantic search engine SenseBot and contextual linking tool for bloggers LinkSensor. The API supports SOAP and REST protocols (HTTP GET). The idea is to empower semantic startups or any ventures that are looking to utilize an affordable high-quality semantic solution to build their applications. Semantic API features include: * extraction of semantic concepts from a page or document; * creating a "semantic cloud" of concepts describing a group of documents; * generating a multi-document summary of a set of pages; * generating an essay on a topic based on a set of documents. Multiple parameters allow the client to control the type and format of results.

"Ambiently is a startup company developing web discovery engine applications. Envisioning the broad usage and benefits of creating a page-centric "ambient web" for every page on the web, Ambiently aims to create a new, richer web browsing and search experience for all web users."

Silobreaker is a search and aggregation service for news and current affairs that looks at the data it finds like a person does. It recognizes things - companies, people, topics, places - and puts them in context. By filtering out the noise and building up a meaningful picture from the information that matters, Silobreaker enables its users to spend more time learning from the web, and less time searching it.

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