Joseph Smarr from Plaxo is next. He’s got an MS in Artificial Intelligence from Stanford so I figure I should be listening carefully. I need some artificial intelligence to digest the mashup data stream.

I just had a nice pre-presentation talk with Joseph who’s really bullish on the future of Plaxo. He explained that integration with AOL messenger is adding a lot more Plaxo users, now totalling over 10 million users. He also had some very interesting observations about AI in search and how early we are in that process. Matt Cutts was noting the same AI challenges at a Webmasterworld chat I had with him last year.
Social networking is a key web concept. Many – nearly all – sites should be using address book info. Viral propagation is critical to success but not a core competency for most companies.

How to get users to fill in their address book info? Plaxo Widget solves this challenge. Here’s the widget code.

Many services maintain their own address books yet users need a one stop solution. That is Plaxo which synchs via plugins to gmail, yahoo, aol, etc.
AOL Instant Messenger uses Plaxo to provide richer contact info for existing buddies and find new ones.

Plaxo handles the tricky parts. Plaxo books are *self-updating*

10+ million members >2 billion contacts 500 million uniques in all address books. Wow.

Heavy backing from Sequoia Venture Capital. About 50 working here in Silicon Valley – the Plaxo offices are right down the street from here. (Of course that can be said for literally hundreds of web companies.

A very impressive presentation, and I always like to see the level of enthusiasm and brilliance from guys like Joseph.

Plaxo API

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David Berlind:  Plaxo vs LinkedIn 

Plaxo “spam” debate

Mark Jen, the former Googler who was banned for what Google felt was inappropriate blogging, now works at Plaxo.

LignUp is demoing PropAlerts, which he says can beat MLS database by 48 hours to give users early warning of property listings. They also are working on Voice over IP to put users in touch with agents and using text to speech to … read alerts to users.

PropSmart.com

Why Voice Mashups?   Communication as key element in biz process, significant revenue opportunities, more.

Commendo.com‘s Voyager is an application that will:

“Assemble content in a different way in a personal library”. Experience in Enterprise Mashups. Look at web as a content repository for your personal use.

This looks really neat, though seems there may be challenges for turning this towards commercial use since the content you are nabbing is mostly copyrighted. HOWEVER, are they focusing on the developers creating a form of mashup API that is then distributed to others who are all using the content for personal use – clever and I think fully copyright cool. …I’m not sure if this is possible though and I don’t think it’s the key idea.  They are geared to users not developers?

Allows personalization of the mashup and content experience.

Mashery will support developer networks. Six weeks old. They are just getting off the ground but will try to facilitate the use of all those APIs out there. “Creating a series of services to provide to API vendors”.

I’m not sure that logo is going to be understood by the whippersnapper generation who a) don’t cook much and b) don’t use a potato masher when they do. But I like it for the symbolism!

Clay, cofounder of Mashery and former feedster (programmer?), is showing us a mashed up blog demo “core” that can be skinned to other applications. However… “We are not a Wiki Company, we are here to enable …. cool web services”.

Here’s a brief on Mashery’s funding

This is a cool concept I think, but ..dudes… you need a better demo pitch for the main mashup camp!

After a tasty lunch it’s back to the mental grindstone. Intel introduces the creators of a mashup they built over the past few weeks. I’m not getting everybody here but he intros: Jeff Barr (Amazon), Mike Fisher and Ben (founders of Elephant Drive, an online backup and storage company). Sean Casey and — (Intel).

Elephant Drive outlines the demo task:

Identify a real business problem
Identify mashup enabler APIs
Show the code and demo

Problems – lost power and connectivity and ?

Intel’s Mobility SDK helps solve these and was easy to integrate. Ben introduces the code, which I’m pretending to grok right now using the classic developer conference intense-stare-and-nod-at-presenter-even-though-you-have-no-idea-what-
they-are-talking-about. I shall coin this as the WTF-DEV mode.

OK, they are now showing the very nice user interface which allows you to set threshold. When reached the application will pause things so you don’t lose data.