ApolloIM is a instant messaging application for the Iphone. It supports AIM, ICQ, .mac, and MSN. This was one of the main setbacks from the first gen Iphone. The alternative everyone had to use was Meebo, but this will now be a very useful app for many people. There may be several more of these apps coming out since it is one the higher demands from Iphone apps but as long as this is one of the first apps to come out and people are comfortable using ApolloIM, then it should be able to keep some loyal customers happy.
Triggit is a new web application that basically takes WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) to another level. It allows you to drag and drop pictures, videos, and text to and from webpages. I have gotten a personal product demo from Zach Coelius, the CEO of Triggit, and I thought it was pretty impressive and easy to use. It basically takes the idea of websites and implements the ideal user interface you think of doing for taking things and dragging and dropping them onto your page. Of course taking images and videos from the web can be a iffy subject so their main focus is on promoting it to advertisers and publishers. It can make advertising easy for you by allowing you to put ad, links, text, etc without the need of using any kind of embedding, ftp, html, or coding. Triggit has gotten some positive feedback and has also recently been selected as one of the companies most likely to succeed at the SVASE Launch Silicon Valley 2008.
Powerset, a natural language processing search engine company, isn't a new startup but it had a interesting timeline. The company started out back in 2006 but has been in stealth mode for a long time. There was a lot of hype over the company and the Powerset had a total of more than $20 million in funding in 2007. The company launched a limited version of its search engine in May 2008 and was acquired by Microsoft in July 2008. So I am sure there is plenty of surprises and technology that is being developed by Powerset that has impressed many people to receive this much attention.
RoamAbout by Vysr, is an interesting application that can simplify your web surfing and cut down on some of time you may spend finding information without the application. It basically installs a sidebar that allows you to add application buttons to easily search for keywords in websites such as map or weather info, youtube, flickr, twitter, wikipedia, news, or stock quotes. Normally, you would do all this by opening up another browser window or tab and then going to the corresponding website to search. The advantage of using this tool is that it will save you that time by allowing you to just click on the icon and popping up a small window on top of your current web browser so that you can easily look for that information. The demo above was created by Molly McDonald of Demo Girl. You can download the RoamAbout tool to use for Internet Explorer and Firefox here.
