Attended the NewTech meeting last night.  Came late and left early because I have so many other things to do.  It is really terrible because it is a great meeting to network.

Of the presentation, the two best were neighboroo.com and thinkfree.com.  Neighboroo was one that had popped onto my radar earlier, but I did not have a chance to research them.  They are essentially a mashup between statistical data and local market locations.  For example, they mash Google maps with the U.S. census data to show in visual format the percentage of people between the ages of, say, 20-30 year old that live in a certain zip code.  They can also how areas are divided based on numbers of Democrats and Republicans or Muslims, Jews, and Christians or by level of income.  Basically, if someone has polled for this data and they can get their hands on it, Neighboroo can show it.  It is a great use for people moving to new areas and for retailers interested in opening new stores in other locations.

Thinkfree is essentially Office-on-the-web.  You can work on and create your own doc, xls, and ppt files in your free account at their web site.  This company has been working on creating the software from scratch since around 1999.  It is based on Java and should be pretty solid.  This service would be great for people who want to collaborate over long distances or who are traveling and want to use Office products from anywhere in the world without having to drag all the files with them.  Basically, it would be great for any world travelers to work as they travel. The best feature is that it is supposed to work almost seamlessly with Microsoft products.  So you can open a basic Office file in Thinkfree (they support 85% of Microsoft features), work on it on the web, and then save it back to your hard drive in the future as a completely compliant Office doc. The one feature that they seem to be missing is the ability to trace changes at the line level for groups of people working on a single file.  This feature will probably be added in the future.

Technorati tags: NewTech, Neighboroo, Thinkfree, networking, Silicon Valley, travel, travel tools