OPLS blog

Since 2007, Techcrunch have hosted a conference for online start-ups in a bid to attract further investment. Called Techcrunch Top 50 in 2008, there are some interesting ideas in development.

To help you navigate your way through, I thought I’d pare the list down a little, in so far as the ones listed below have some resonance for teaching and learning. Hopefully you’ll find it useful.

Youth and Culture:

• Blah Girls - Backed by Ashton Kutcher, Blah Girls is a gossip site that features a group of animated teenage girls who provide opinions on what’s going on in the world of entertainment
• Tweegee A hub for tweens, Tweegee offers the youth market a suite of online tools for social interaction and organization
• Shryk Web-based financial software for children aimed at promoting financial literacy and good saving habits
• Hangout Industries Blends social networking with virtual worlds by creating a 3D, online environment where 16-24 year olds can chat and share media.

Memes & News:

• DotSpots Tracks the memes spreading across the web, aggregates the content associated with them, and gives everyone Wikipedia-like control over that content
• Angstro Lets you set up a feed of news about your friends, instead of news by your friends
• LiveHit Tracks the music, videos, and entertainment sites people are clicking on right now
• Quant the News Creator of StockMood.com, a service that tracks the sentiments of online news stories about stocks and then measures their potential impact on the direction of those stocks’ prices.

Advertising & Commerce Monetisation:

• Burt Collects user data to tailor individual advertising campaigns and target users more effectively
• Adgregate Markets Brings online stores to consumers through a display ad that is a fully transactional widget
• Adrocket Contextual text-based advertising for email; assigns keywords to each address depending on known demographic and contextual data.

Collaboration:

• Tingz Offers a unified platform for delivering internet content across multiple devices including mobile phones and PCs
• MIXTT A group based social network/dating site that encourages real world interaction that’s more comfortable than the 1-on-1 format of most similar sites
• Imindi Based on neuroscientific principles, Imindi’s Thought Engine tries to exceed human thought and help its users find new ideas, concepts, and questions on the Web
• Popego Surfaces the most meaningful information from within your social graph based on your interests and other factors.

Finance & Statistics:

• PersonalRIA Allows users to shadow a professional investment advisor’s portfolio, automatically executing trades (which most brokerage sites cannot do)
• Emerginvest Offers commentary and analysis on Emerging Markets and tools that provide you with information on how to diversify globally
• ExchangeP Dubbed a ‘fantasy stock market’, ExchangeP’s service allows users to sign up for free and start investing in private companies
• Me-trics Lets you see how mood, weight, and goals correlate with other metrics, including web services like Facebook or RescueTime
• iCharts YouTube for embeddable, interactive charts (link not working at time of post).

Mobile:

• Mytopia A gaming platform that lets players compete across mobile devices and social networks
• Tonchidot Makes the Sekai Camera, a camera system that aims to merge the virtual and real worlds by using a digital device as a viewfinder
• FitBit Developing a small wireless sensor called the Fitbit Tracker, which automatically records data about a person’s activities, calories burned, sleep quality, steps, and distance throughout the day.

Language & Communication Tools:

• Alfabetic Translates any blog or Website into another language and places ads alongside it in the new tongue
• Postbox Based on Mozilla technology, Postbox saves users’ time when looking for particular information within their email
• Swype A new method of text input on touch screens; does away with traditional “hunt and peck” in favour of a more fluid motion
• DropBox Provides an easy way to backup your files, share them with co-workers and friends, and synchronise them between computer.

Rich Media:

• VideoSurf A visual video search engine that allow users to search across millions of videos for a given actor and to view summaries of videos through a series of detected keyframes
• GazoPa An image search engine developed by Hitachi that uses visual similarities between photos to suggest matches (rather than simply relying on keywords)
• Fotonauts A photo sharing application that turns every album instantly into a Web page
• Bojam Although there are a slew of online music services already on the Web, Bojam is trying to do something a bit different: it wants to connect musicians and allow them to collaborate over the Web.

Games:

• Grockit A “Massively Multi-Player Online Learning Game”
• Akoha A web-based social game played with trading cards aimed at spreading good deeds around the world
• Atmosphir A platform for creating 3D interactive games by selecting blocks (such as a sand castle tower, fireball-breathing bird, or trap door) and snapping them onto a grid
• PlaYce Provides a 3D virtual world inside the browser for games and social interaction that is based on the real world
• Shattered Reality Interactive A new massively multiplayer online game (think World of Warcraft) that lets the crowd guide the direction of future expansions.

Research & Recommendations:

• GoodGuide Provides information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of products and companies
• GoPlanit A one-click travel planner that assembles a customized trip itinerary with the click of a button; also supports mobile microblogging
• Goodrec A mobile and online recommendation service that provides brief, to-the-point recommendations from friends and trusted sources.

Not sure if this is a trend that has caught on in other countries, but there has been a spate of television programmes over the past few years in the UK devoted to lists. Top 100 films, Top 100 Britons, Top 100 children’s programmes, etc, ad infinitum.

I blame Nick Hornby, of course, and his first novel, High Fidelity (1995), in which the owner of a record shop, Robert, and his two employees, Dick and Barry, create all manner of lists to help them get through the day. Memorable examples include “Top 5 musical crimes committed by Stevie Wonder in the 70s and 80s”, or “Top 5 songs about death”.

Well, I don’t blame him really, since it was a novel idea at the time and, as Heppell says, one of the true measures of creativity and ingenuity is the extent to which it is copied by others.

I doubt, though, if the compilers of this latest list I’ve come across were thinking of Nick Hornby when they created the Top 100 tools for learning - a list generated from 158 learning professionals (from education and workplace learning) who shared their top 10 tools for both their own personal learning/productivity and for creating learning.

I think the list is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly it has a browser, Firefox, in the top 2. I’m assuming, here, it is more to do with the plethora of add-ons and extensions available and the fact that it is making significant advances in terms of discoverability.

Secondly, Microsoft Word has fallen from 10th position last year to joint 22nd in 2008. With the growth of Google Docs, Zoho and wikis etc, I wouldn’t mind betting Word falls out of the top 50 completely this time next year.

Thirdly, I was struck by the number of wikis in the top 50 (wikispaces, PBwiki and WetPaint) and certainly from my own experience, I would see these moving up the list next year, with Google Sites (formerly know as JotSpot) perhaps making an appearance too.

I encourage you to look at the list when you have time. There are some good pointers and it was good to see an IB teacher as one of the contributors, namely Richard Allaway, head of Geography at the International School of Toulouse in France.  Richard has been a leading light in terms of using Web 2.0 technologies to support teaching and learning, and collaborated with Natasha Lardner and Geography Jim on this wiki development in Wikispaces (something we blogged about here).  He’s worth following.

Oh, and for those who don’t have time to look but are curious as to what came out at No.1…

…it was del.icio.us.