There are several new companies and products being unveiled at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week. I'll be reporting on as many of them as I can at our new Web apps blog, Webware.com.

Only 13 companies were selected to participate in the "Launchpad" sessions on Tuesday. Chosen from more than 200 applicants (I'm trying to get ahold of that list), these are supposed to be the most promising of the current crop of Web 2.0 start-ups. I'm not sure they are hands down the best the Web has to offer, but they are all very interesting. Here are the start-ups: 3B, Adify, In the Chair, Instructables, oDesk, Omnidrive, Pidgin Technologies, Sharpcast, Sphere, Stikkit, TimeBridge, Turn, and Venyo.

Of these start-ups, I think the most important is Omnidrive [my take], since it has the potential to integrate disparate Web applications. But the most immediately useful may be TimeBridge. Watch for my review.

Keep reading the Webware blog for impressions of these and other products as they are rolled out.

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Microsoft brings 3D mapping to Internet Explorer.
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Microsoft is about to upgrade its mapping product, Live Local, to Microsoft Virtual Earth, a competitor to Google Earth. [See news story.] We got a live preview of the product a few days ago and will have a hands-on review shortly. These impressions are based on the demo.

In a word: Wow. Microsoft is doing with its Earth program what I've wanted from Google for a while: creating one integrated mapping and globe-exploring service, not two products with different interfaces. With Virtual Earth, you get all of Microsoft's Live Local features (traffic data, e-mail integration, bookmarks) with the additional capability to zoom around the 3D planet and see your locations from any angle.

Microsoft, like Google, has 3D buildings in its virtual world, but Microsoft's are photo-realistic, not just gray boxes. There is expected to be 15 cities with 3D buildings at launch, with 100 by next summer. In the San Francisco city demo, the buildings looked great.

The service will have an API, so people can use the Virtual Earth globe in their own apps and mash-ups. However, don't expect too many people to create Virtual Earth mash-ups, since the service works only in Internet Explorer.

There are some other snags. The super-zoomed "bird's eye" view continues to have a different interface than the map and globe tools, and this might cause some confusion. And there's no Sketchup-like building-creation utility.

But Virtual Earth is great eye candy, and if you're an Internet Explorer user, the integration between it and Microsoft's online mapping product is very powerful.

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Creating a chat for your site (or sites) can't get much easier.
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In the last few days, I've written about ways to integrate files and personalities across Web sites. You can also integrate chat room discussions. As TechCrunch reported, GeeSee enables you to create a chat room and make it accessible from any Web site, or take an existing GeeSee chat and embed it in your own site. So if a bunch of bloggers got together on a topic (such as parenting, for example), they could share a chat room. Theoretically, all their readers would benefit from the larger community.

There's an even easier solution than GeeSee, though: Chat Creator. Creating a chat widget with this site is absurdly easy, especially if you use the "Add chat to your site" function. That will give you a link to embed in your site. Anybody who uses that link will get the same users and conversations in their chat room.

[I removed the sample chat window I had here previously.]

There are other options you can apply if you want to put your chat on the site's directory, or if you want to make the chat private or password-protected. But for setting up a quick chat, I cannot imagine a simpler tool.

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FindMeOn manages your online profiles. The interface needs work.
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There's an interesting but rough new service, FindMeOn, that's tackling a problem a lot of Web users have: too many personal profiles. This service is designed to let you create one personal profile on its site, and then export the data to other sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, and Match.com.

FindMeOn will let you export pieces of your profile to specific sites. You might want to leave out your age or religious affiliation on MySpace, for example, but include such info on a dating site. (What if you want to say different things on different sites? I don't know if FindMeOn will address that.)

The site is in the preview stage right now, and from a usability perspective it's pretty much impenetrable. So I can't recommend you put effort into it yet. But it's a neat idea and I hope the team does the necessary work on it to make it easy to use.

There's another site in development, and not yet open to users: Profilactic (normally I don't comment on product names, but I will here: Yuck). This service will aggregate the content from your various social sites, such as MySpace, Flickr, and Digg, into one place. It sounds to me as if it'll be creating, essentially, a metaprofile page--one that's made up of all your online personalities. If you want to keep your personalities different on different sites, that's not something you're going to want to share. It might be useful to see what people are saying in the comments fields on all your profiles, although many profile sites now have RSS feeds, and simply subscribing to those would do the same thing.

These two services (writing multiple profiles and tracking their activity) really should be available as one product. Anything that can make it easier for users to manage their participation in the increasing number of online communities is a good thing--but we shouldn't need more than one service to do it.

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A PR person sent me a wrong link, and I reviewed an old version of Omnidrive. Instead of covering the upcoming release, which will make its public debut on Tuesday, I covered the version that's been in private beta for most of this year. CEO Nik Cubrilovic gave me a call to clear this up and to walk me through the upcoming rev of Omnidrive. I'm glad he did, because it's a much more important product than the one now in use.

The beta of Omnidrive that will be unveiled at the Web 2.0 conference next week is not just an online storage service. It's also a system that integrates the files you've stored on various Web services into one virtual drive, which you can access from your own computer's desktop (or from its Web interface). The service will launch with hooks into Flickr and Zoho, and the Omnidrive team is working on integrating it into other services. The 1.0 release of the service is scheduled for January.

Omnidrive will make it possible to work with online files as if they were on your own PC. When you're done with the file, any changes will be saved back to the online source. So, for example, if you have a folder pointing at your Flickr photos, you'll be able to edit a picture in Photoshop on your PC and not have to worry about transferring it back to Flickr--it will happen automatically. Likewise, if you have a folder pointing to your Zoho Write files, anything you create or edit in the online Zoho application will show up on your Omnidrive, and you'll be able to work with it just like a local file.

Omnidrive technology could also mean that people building new online applications won't have to write uploaders. They'll just hook into Omnidrive. So if you want to use some hot new video editor, instead of uploading your file to that particular service, you'd just specify the file's Omnidrive path.

Omnidrive isn't the only company working on this. Microsoft (Live Drive), Google (GDrive), and Amazon (S3) are all working on integrated network storage. Omnidrive is a small Australian company and can hardly win this battle alone, so it's working the politics in standards bodies to come up with a solution that everyone will be able to use.

Regardless of which standard or company wins out, this is going to be an enormously important shift for Web applications. (Ideally, there will be one online storage standard and not multiple competing systems, but realistically, it's going to be a mess for a while.) Integrated online storage should encourage the development of better applications by removing the need for every company to invent and invest in its own storage and access technology. It will also make it easier for you and me to try out new apps and to manage our online data.

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EveryTrail saves your favorite hikes, runs, walks, and flights
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MapMyRun is a trail saver exclusively for runners
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Several very interesting location-recording Web sites are online right now, such as Platial, 43 Places, Wayfaring, and Flagr. They all record locations and let you tell a story about them. EveryTrail, a new site in early development, adds a wrinkle: It will record your path between waypoints, not just the stops you make.

Why would you want this? To record a favorite hike or bike ride, perhaps. This site lets you share your route with others, for those trips where the point is the journey itself.

EveryTrail requires that you have a way to record your movements, of course. You'll need a recording GPS device--a hiker's gizmo like this Garmin, a GPS watch, an airplane navigation system, or perhaps a GPS-equipped phone. And you'll need to download an app from the EveryTrail site, which can then take your GPS data and transfer it. I don't have a suitable device, so I was not able to test this.

Once you have uploaded your trail, you can add placemarks, notes, and photos. The photos feature, in particular, is very cool: The service correlates the time stamps on your photos with your GPS trail and automatically places photos along your route (if your camera's time is set incorrectly, you only have to tell EveryTrail where one particular photo was taken, and it will calculate the positions for all the rest).

You can see your trails on the site's Google Maps mashup page (EveryTrail also includes a topographical map option, a nice bonus), or on Google Earth. You can also upload the trail to another portable GPS device. There's still no good way to print the trail, though, which is kind of a bummer, because being able to output your path overlaid on a topo map could be extremely useful.

While I was watching the EveryTrail presentation at the New Tech Meetup last night, the fellow sitting next to me said to me, "This looks like MapMyRun." That site does pretty much the same thing as EveryTrail, although it's designed with a laser focus on recording runs and jogs. So if you find yourself in a new city and want to go for a jog, check it out. MapMyRun doesn't have the photo feature of EveryTrail, but it does offer more runner-friendly features, such as a workout calculator. The MapMyRun team has also launched a new site, MapMyRace, a simplified site where runners can scope out race routes (including elevation maps).

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Google's Java-based Gmail app will come with new Sprint phones
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The new Google Reader gets its own mobile version, too
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Google is very smart about mobile devices. On a PDA or a cell phone, the Google search experience has been, for quite a while, very different than it is on a full-size screen. Google even parses Web pages it links to and tries to repackage them in a mobile-friendly way. (To force the Google mobile version, go to www.google.com/m.)

Gmail, though, has not been a great experience on mobile devices. But today Google is releasing a mobile Java Gmail application for cell phones that makes using your Gmail account much easier [news story]. The new app, which will be preloaded onto some new Sprint phones or available for download for anyone else who has a Java-capable phone here, is a very good mobile version of the Gmail Web app. The app gives Gmail its own custom menu system, which is much easier to navigate than a Web-based app would be on a cell phone. Gmail's message threading also shows up clearly, and the site displays attachments (such as photos, Word documents) in the app. One snag: In my tests on the phone Google sent me to try the product, links to documents on Google Docs and Spreadsheets did not work. Oops. (A new WAP version of the reader is available, too, which I have not tried.)

In related news, Google's new RSS reader also now has a mobile interface. It's a subtly different application from the full-size Web version of Google Reader. In the mobile app, you're presented first with your "reading list," the nine most recent stories to come into your feeds. You can select one by pressing its number (1 to 9; or 0 for the next nine), and, as with Google.com on a mobile, you'll get a special lightweight display of the story instead of the fully loaded page. You can also select a feed to read or search through your tags, but the cell phone interface is better suited to the task of skimming feeds.

Google clearly recognizes that when you're using its services on a mobile device, you probably want not just a different user interface, but different content as well. These are good mobile apps.

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Scrybe's calendar looks great, and it works offline
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Scrybe opened up its online calendar beta to some folks late last night, which gave me a chance to work with the product and see if it lives up to the gorgeous video demo that's been circulating.

As a calendar, Scrybe has two big things going for it. First, the interface is almost as fluid and intuitive as it looked in the demo. As you navigate from months to weeks to days, calendar boxes zoom in and out beautifully, and days scroll by as you go forward and back. It's like using a Macintosh: these UI cues make it much easier for your brain to follow what your hands are doing with your mouse. Adding and modifying appointments is easy and intuitive. There are no awkward page loads or jarring pop-ups as there are in lesser online calendars. Everything works just as it would in a real app.

The other huge benefit: Scrybe works offline. I'll say that again: it's a Web application, but when you're not online, it still works. You can view your calendar, add things, move items around, print, and so on. This shouldn't be a big deal, but it is, since other online applications don't work at all when they're not connected. When Scrybe goes online, it synchronizes the data from your local machine to the Web.

Scrybe does all this magic by using Flash, but Scrybe doesn't feel like a Flash application. The right mouse button does context-sensitive things, and the application responds quickly. However, the Scrybe window does not scale to your browser's window, and the back button doesn't work at all.

One other great feature in Scrybe: it prints useful calendars. Two of its formats fold up (there are instructional icons printed on the pages) into nice little pocketable booklets. My only beef with the printing function is that it's accessed from a right mouse-click and bizzarely called PaperSync.

In this first beta, Scrybe doesn't have enough of its features built out yet to make it a useful calendar (there's no sharing or inviting, for instance). The Web clipping function in the video demo isn't in yet. But more importantly, I'm not convinced that Scrybe's great user interface will be enough to win over users already accustomed to the full feature sets in Outlook and Google Calendar or in upstarts like 30 Boxes. Scrybe is solving the calendar problem in a neat new way, but some of the old ways aren't all that bad. The offline function is awesome, though, and might make the difference for users who spend enough time offline to get frustrated with online applications.

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Here's the Windows version of my Omnidrive...
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...and here are my files in a Web browser
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The online storage service Omnidrive is in private beta right now. This is an eagerly awaited product, partly because the CEO of the company got a lot of cred by writing for TechCrunch until earlier this year. The public beta will launch during the Web 2.0 conference next week.

It's hard for online storage companies to differentiate. Omnidrive, though, has a feature that's missing from many of its competitors: It integrates into your Windows or Mac file explorer and operates as a virtual hard drive. This means you can drag and drop files to your online drive just like it's a hard disk connected to your computer, or you can save files to it directly from your desktop apps (but not, alas, from your Web-based apps, although an API makes that theoretically possible). You don't need the virtual drive to use Omnidrive: You can also access all your files through the Web interface.

Though not completely implemented at this beta stage, Omnidrive also lets you share files and folders with individuals or with the entire Internet. Missing--so far, at least--is the media viewer/music player, which has been promised for the future. And there's no indication of any kind of an included backup program.

The service will be free with 1GB of storage. 10GB will cost $40 per year. Omnidrive's closest competitor (in that it has a virtual drive too, although not one for the Mac) is Xdrive, which offers 5GB free. Xdrive also has a backup program. However, many users (like me) have been so burned by buggy Xdrive software and services in the past that we'll probably never go back, even though all indications are that the newest version is pretty good in addition to being free.

There are a lot of solid online storage products (for example, Box.net has a very attractive online storage site that's well out of beta, and Carbonite, which I'm now happily using, offers unlimited storage for backups). Omnidrive looks like it will be a good product, but it's late to the party.

Related: Hear Tom Merritt and me discuss online storage on the Real Deal podcast.

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The site designer has attractive templates and is easy to use.
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Microsoft supplies a basic, but capable, CRM application.
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We got access to the new version of Office Live today. The service is scheduled to leave the beta phase in mid-November. Office Live is a suite of online applications targeted at the small business; it's not Word and Excel online. A quick look at the product (a full review is forthcoming) leaves a very positive impression.

Office Live is designed to get a small business on to the Web--both publicly, with a Web site, and privately, for collaboration and back-office work.

The service seduces the new user quickly: domain registration is easy, and most importantly, it is free. Microsoft supplies both e-mail and Web site hosting, and the tools to manage both are quite good. The hosted e-mail/calendar application is slick (more like Outlook than Gmail), the site designer is basic but easy to use, and it apes the new look and feel of Microsoft's upcoming Office suite. The service also provides clear statistics, including data on which search terms are landing users at the site. The smallest business could stop right here and be happy with what Microsoft is offering.

There is more to the suite, although additional features are not free. Office Live also has an advertising manager (it places ads on Windows Live search, not on Google, of course). There also are service levels beyond the free Office Live Basics. If you want to sync your e-mail with Outlook, for example, you'll need the Essentials ($20 a month) or the Premium ($40 a month) package. Both give you more storage space and more e-mail accounts. Workspaces, Office Live's wiki tool, is also part of the paid subscriptions. (I think that's a mistake--small businesses aren't going to know what they're missing unless wikis are free. I bet Google's new wiki service will be available for no charge.)

Paid users also get a business contact manager, a basic competitor to Salesforce.com. This module doesn't have the extensibility of Salesforce's service, but it's probably got enough oomph for many small businesses. It's also very clearly organized--beginners won't have to spend much, if any, time in training to begin to use it.

The Premium version has more back-office tools, such as a project management application and a time manager.

There are pieces missing, of course. There's no accounting built into the system, and no inventory management. The Web designer doesn't offer an easy way to put a blog on your site. And Office Live's composition and back-office tools only work in Internet Explorer (many modules download ActiveX components). But even so, Office Live is one of the most important online products I've seen--a very compelling suite of Web services for small business. I'm sure some pieces of the suite are better than others, but a quick look tells me Office Live delivers, for the most part, what it promises: easy-to-use Web publishing, communication, and collaboration features, all at a very reasonable fee.

Related stories:
News: Office Live almost out of the gate
Comparison: Office Live vs. Google Apps for Your Domain
Column: Office Live: The first hit is free

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