Last night, I attend the Silicon Valley NewTech meeting. Four companies presented, but I really only heard two talks.

The two companies that I did hear present had some interesting ideas. The one with the mobile outlook is called chacha.com. It combines a basic search engine with freelance human experts to return answers back to people who call or send text messages to the site. The answers are researched and returned within an average of 2 minutes. AT&T is helping to roll out this service. But I am still a little unclear on their revenue model. The presenter, Brad Mays, said that the service would make money on mobile ads. My understanding is that the mobile ad business is pretty small and may take time to build out.

The second business is called tipjoy.com. The idea is to use their service to add a tip jar to your site or to allow users to tip other sites that they support. The part that should encourage people to tip to things that they support is that there is a social aspect to the tiny tips (which can be on the order of only a few cents). When you tip a site, a message is sent to all of the friends in your social networks. It is like Digging something, but the monetary cost that the user pays actually shows that they value this resource so much that they are willing to spend cash on it, even a very small amount of cash. It could have a huge effect on non-profits and donating. It may also give the people who create viral videos a chance to make some decent money off of their good fortune in creating a viral product.

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