Dealmaker Media may have put together its best annual Under the Radar conference yet. This Thursday in Mountain View, California, more than 30 selected startups will show their wares and some world class technology speakers will offer their perspectives on the state of the industry. It's not cheap to attend UTR, but RWW readers can get a $100 discount by following this link.

Those of us unable to attend should be able to see some of the highlights live via Robert Scoble's cellphone and the streaming video service Qik. Speakers include the WSJ's Kara Swisher, NYT's Brad Stone and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Presenting companies, which both Richard MacManus and I helped select, include:

Act-On Software | Blist | Cozimo | DeviceVM | dimdim | DocSyncer | ELASTRA| Eyejot | FeedbackFx | filtrbox | Get Satisfaction | HiveLive | HubSpot | JumpBox | kwiry | LiquidPlanner | Magento | Marketo | Mumboe | NetBooks | NuConomy | Orgoo | PageOnce | Ribbit | SlideRocket | SlideShare |  SupportSpace |TimeBridge | Tripit | Universant | Vello | Yoics

How "under the radar" are these companies? Some of them aren't so much at all, it's an increasingly competitive startup market for media to be first on. None the less, the UtR folks always put on a great conference. It's one of the few tech events where sessions are as worthwhile as conversations in the hall. I'd planned to be there myself but have been incapacitated by the SXSW flu.

Check out this very well produced video from our friends over at Webware from last year's Under the Radar.

Semantic search engine hakia is announcing today, at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, that it is licensing its proprietary OntoSem technology to other companies. This will enable third parties to build semantic search applications. The first such customer to be made public is RiverGlass, Inc, a provider of real-time analytics. RiverGlass will integrate hakia's OntoSem technology into its analysis software.

This is an interesting development by hakia - and has some parallels to the young Google, which you'll recall started out by licensing its search technology to the likes of Yahoo. But the parallels end there, because this move by hakia is more about licensing their underlying search technology to power the proprietary applications of other companies - whereas Google was a branded search app integrated into Yahoo's front-end.

According to hakia, this is what their OntoSem technology does:

• information retrieval, analysis, and distribution
• text summarization
• information assurance and security
• machine translation
• ontology support
• terminology standardization
• supply chain automation

Essentially, it will enable third parties to find and use "the meaning of language" in their applications. Hakia's definition of 'semantic search' by the way differs from the traditional Semantic Web definition, in that hakia search aims to automatically determine meaning from search queries using its algorithms - whereas Semantic Web is all about adding metadata to information to enable connections between data.

At this early stage there aren't any visuals from RiverGlass showing how they're using hakia technology, but the company told us that "we will see the biggest boon in increased relevancy of results".

Disclosure: hakia is a RWW sponsor

Moconews posed an interesting question this morning: will wifi go the way of the public phone booth? Their premise was that public wifi (i.e., at conferences, or busy coffee shops) is often slow and hard to use, while mobile broadband is more reliable. Further, mobile broadband is spreading like wildfire and becoming more ubiquitous. As that happens, is wifi in danger of becoming no longer useful?

There's no question that wifi is great for certain things. For a home network, it can't be beat. But for larger scale deployments, such as at conference, it can be slow and maddening to use. While I love the coffee shop atmosphere, most days I generally work from home because I can't take the slow speeds on coffee shop wifi for more than an hour.

There's also a problem of congestion. In densely populated areas, as more and more people set up home networks, throughput is dropping as the airwaves get cluttered. David Heinemeier Hansson posted today about noise on his urban wifi connection, and judging from the comments his post received, it's a common problem. The solution? Perhaps mobile broadband.

Moconews pointed to Ericsson’s marketing chief Johan Bergendahl, who said mobile broadband will supplant wifi hotspots as the preferred method of on-the-go web access. "Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era," he said. Moconews also pointed to a report that mobile broadband uptake is on the rise, and another report that city-wide wifi deployments are also growing -- perhaps indicating that wifi isn't ready to go away yet.

But let's just suppose that mobile broadband does become the dominant method of connecting to the Internet. Let's pretend that high cost, limited service territories, and speed barriers are overcome. What would the result be?

Perhaps the most interesting result would be that cellular voice networks would be forced to give way to VoIP, and services like Skype or JAJAH might be well positioned for a mobile broadband dominated world. With fast, reliable, and ubiquitous mobile broadband access, cellular voice plans would be irrelevant given cheaper VoIP options. We've already seen some voice-over-IP services target mobile users, such as JAJAH's iPhone optimized version.

That would be mean less costs for consumers -- no more free public wifi (presumably), but a slimmer cell phone bill and a single broadband connection that could cover mobile phone, web access, and landline telephone. Throw in a VoIP television service like Joost (which is starting to test live streaming this month) or Livestation, and the future might be one connection that covers all of your media and communication needs.

That simple future is a ways off, though. Mobile broadband isn't cheap, it isn't as fast as wired broadband, and it doesn't have the coverage necessary to be a truly reliable alternative to wifi hotspots (let alone voice networks). But is that future coming? Probably. HSPA+, which may arrive late this year, will offer speeds of up to 42 Mbps down and 11 Mbps up, which is significantly faster than my 20/2 Mbps cable line, and astronomically faster than the iPhone's current EDGE network (which is around 240 kbps down).

There are a lot of barriers to overcome -- not least of which, how to handle billing consumers when roaming on other networks and how to make the various competing standards play nice (or get networks to conform to a single standard). But once those issues are solved, fast, cheap, ubiquitous mobile broadband may be on the horizon.

When do you think mobile broadband will be fast enough, cheap enough, and ubiquitous enough to supplant wifi? Will that ever happen? If it does, what other side effects will we see? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Moconews posed an interesting question this morning: will wifi go the way of the public phone booth? Their premise was that public wifi (i.e., at conferences, or busy coffee shops) is often slow and hard to use, while mobile broadband is more reliable. Further, mobile broadband is spreading like wildfire and becoming more ubiquitous. As that happens, is wifi in danger of becoming no longer useful?

There's no question that wifi is great for certain things. For a home network, it can't be beat. But for larger scale deployments, such as at conference, it can be slow and maddening to use. While I love the coffee shop atmosphere, most days I generally work from home because I can't take the slow speeds on coffee shop wifi for more than an hour.

There's also a problem of congestion. In densely populated areas, as more and more people set up home networks, throughput is dropping as the airwaves get cluttered. David Heinemeier Hansson posted today about noise on his urban wifi connection, and judging from the comments his post received, it's a common problem. The solution? Perhaps mobile broadband.

Moconews pointed to Ericsson’s marketing chief Johan Bergendahl, who said mobile broadband will supplant wifi hotspots as the preferred method of on-the-go web access. "Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era," he said. Moconews also pointed to a report that mobile broadband uptake is on the rise, and another report that city-wide wifi deployments are also growing -- perhaps indicating that wifi isn't ready to go away yet.

But let's just suppose that mobile broadband does become the dominant method of connecting to the Internet. Let's pretend that high cost, limited service territories, and speed barriers are overcome. What would the result be?

Perhaps the most interesting result would be that cellular voice networks would be forced to give way to VoIP, and services like Skype or JAJAH might be well positioned for a mobile broadband dominated world. With fast, reliable, and ubiquitous mobile broadband access, cellular voice plans would be irrelevant given cheaper VoIP options. We've already seen some voice-over-IP services target mobile users, such as JAJAH's iPhone optimized version.

That would be mean less costs for consumers -- no more free public wifi (presumably), but a slimmer cell phone bill and a single broadband connection that could cover mobile phone, web access, and landline telephone. Throw in a VoIP television service like Joost (which is starting to test live streaming this month) or Livestation, and the future might be one connection that covers all of your media and communication needs.

That simple future is a ways off, though. Mobile broadband isn't cheap, it isn't as fast as wired broadband, and it doesn't have the coverage necessary to be a truly reliable alternative to wifi hotspots (let alone voice networks). But is that future coming? Probably. HSPA+, which may arrive late this year, will offer speeds of up to 42 Mbps down and 11 Mbps up, which is significantly faster than my 20/2 Mbps cable line, and astronomically faster than the iPhone's current EDGE network (which is around 240 kbps down).

There are a lot of barriers to overcome -- not least of which, how to handle billing consumers when roaming on other networks and how to make the various competing standards play nice (or get networks to conform to a single standard). But once those issues are solved, fast, cheap, ubiquitous mobile broadband may be on the horizon.

When do you think mobile broadband will be fast enough, cheap enough, and ubiquitous enough to supplant wifi? Will that ever happen? If it does, what other side effects will we see? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Venture Beat is reporting that cross-platform web Instant Messaging service Meebo is raising a substantial amount more money at a valuation of more than $200 million. Consensus among the community of VB readers seems to be that such a valuation is insane. Looking at the details about Meebo indicates otherwise, however. Meebo is a simple, solid service that serves a clear need and has amassed large user numbers.

Relative to, for example, the purchase prices of YouTube or Beebo - a $200m valuation for Meebo seems to acknowledge the monetization challenges at hand. Web IM certainly has the potential to gain far more users than a User Generated video site or any particular social network.

Mainstream Users

We talked to Meebo several months ago about the company's business. Venture Beat writes that the company currently reports 29 million unique users each month. Based on what Meebo told us, those users aren't interested in the higher-tech innovations that many pundits and readers are saying would deliver more substantive value to the service. The vast majority of users login in to a single IM account and IM with their existing friends on that platform. They don't use it to communicate with people on multiple IM services. They just want to IM from school or work without installing the desktop IM client they use at home.

Add in Meebo chat functionality on a swath of new sites looking to offer video, voice and other functionality available through the new Meebo developers' platform and you've got a recipe for rapid proliferation.

Instant is Good

People love IM, synchronous communication and the smooth flow of information IM-style are why we've written here that XMPP (Jabber) could be key to the next generation of web applications. Meebo isn't even alone in rocking the web IM space - Amsterdam's eBuddy is racking up the millions of users and venture capital as well.

Relative Valuations

Early Meebo money came from Sequoia Capital, funders of YouTube and Google. Did YouTube have some drastically innovative technology? No. Could a large company have spent a few million building a great MySpace-clone from scratch? Of course. That's not what it's about, though, in some cases. The ability to get in early on a basic social activity, whether it be online video, social networking or web IM, and then ramp up user numbers - is far easier said than done.

Is Meebo worth upwards of $200 million? It may very well be.

Give it a try, discuss amongst yourselves and witness the handiness of Meebo's embedded "rooms" feature.

.mcrmeebo { display: block; background:url("http://widget.meebo.com/r.gif") no-repeat top right; } .mcrmeebo:hover { background:url("http://widget.meebo.com/ro.gif") no-repeat top right; }

Sarah Perez wrote today: "When Amazon introduced their e-book reader, the Kindle, Steve Jobs made a strong proclamation regarding the book industry that received a lot of attention: "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore... The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore." As it turns out, he was only half-right. People read, even those in the younger generation, they just prefer to do it online." Backing that sentiment up was a comment by Sean Mulholland, who said that he's a good example of a digital native: "I hardly ever read books. Probably only about one or two a year, and even then they're typically non-fiction as opposed to 'literature'."

Congratulations Sean, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Netflix Queue Widget.

Here's Sean's full comment:

"My 'gut feeling' thoughts exactly...good to hear them supported with data!

I'm a great example of the digital native (though I haven't been a teen for some time, I was an early net adopter in the early 90's when I actually was a teen). Like you mentioned, I hardly ever read books. Probably only about one or two a year, and even then they're typically non-fiction as opposed to 'literature'. Magazines? Only during flights.

Despite that, I scored a perfect 6/6 GMAT writing score, and my while I forget the specific verbal vs. quantitative, my overall was in the 97th percentile.

Granted, one could argue I'm missing out on the cultural value associated with great literary works, however because I tend to lean toward heavier reading (quality news, science, etc) I don't think I'm missing out too much with regards to developing or maintaining my reading ability. And because of blogs, forums, and email, I probably write several dozen pages worth of text each week, which is probably more than many members of previous generations can claim!"

In the early days of the web, going online was heralded as a great way to connect with other people who have had experiences similar to your own. The web was a place to get answers, advice and community no longer limited by the geographic location of the individuals you connected with.

While all of that remains true today, the ubiquity of the internet, the ease of publishing and the rise of online advertising has lead to the emergence of new kinds of websites: productivity, how-to and advice/Q&A sites that broadcast, scale and monetize that kind of information.

Then there's people who make lists of those types of sites. Many readers love those lists, but how useful are they really? They could be a whole lot more useful than they are. One way for that to happen is to turn such lists into Custom Search Engines.

Productivity Sites

This post was inspired by a list I found on the very top of Del.icio.us Popular last week, titled The Top 100 Productivity and LIfehack Blogs. Posted to a site called CollegeDegree.com, it clearly took some work by someone to put together and will probably bring in a steady flow of traffic for some time.

Making Productivity Productive

Ironically, the list isn't very conducive to productive use once you've found it. Imagine all the time you could waste exploring all those sites! None the less, hundreds of people bookmarked the list and probably intended to come back to it later. It served the publisher well, but how well do such lists really serve readers?

The first thing I think of when I see a list like this is: how much more useful would this be in a Custom Search Engine? A whole lot more useful.

It's in that spirit that we offer you the first of three CSE in this post: the Productivity and Lifehack Multi-site Search. (Note that if you are reading this post in a feed reader, you won't be able to see the embedded search boxes below. You can click through to see the full post.)

I've bookmarked that engine's page and will refer back to it whenever I find myself struggling with a productivity problem that I think someone else has probably solved before.

Curious about how Google Custom Search Engines work? See our previous coverage, Google Custom Search: Setting The Bar For Vertical Search Engines.

How-to Sites

Sometimes we make lists of our own here at RWW. The most successful (and fun) so far has been Josh Catone's Big List of Sites to That Teach You How to do Stuff, a collection of the best How-to and Tutorial sites around the web. Readers loved that list and many contributed more high-quality suggestions in comments. Many of the sites are filled with video tutorials, including on some really obscure topics.

Shortly after we published that list, I threw the URLs in the post and comments into a Google Custom Search Engine. It's proven really useful to me, so here it is for you to use as well.
How-to Site Search.

The How-to of the How-to

Making custom search engines is pretty easy once you've got a list of good sites on a topic. If you've got a list that someone else has already posted somewhere, just run that page through a service like the link extractor from Webmaster-toolkit.com. Then you can copy and paste the relevant links into the very easy-to-use Google Custom Search Engine creation service.

I make these all the time, the hardest part is to compile the list in the first place. The easiest way to make use of this tool is to keep your eyes peeled for lists that other people have already created. That's what I did for the Semantic Web search engine in the RWW toolkit for top issues of 2008, for example. If you're a link-baiting blogger, though, why not offer your readers the added value of putting your lists into a CSE?

When I make one of these CSEs for publication, I try to give it a title and a description that refers back to our brand and URL too.

Advice Sites

Once you've got work (productivity) and weekends (how-to) taken care of, what's left? Love, of course! What better place online to answer your questions about live, love and other non-technical matters than advice and Q&A sites?

If you're looking for a linkbaity list on almost anything, you'll probably find one at Mashable. You'll probably find it through Google, on Mashable, actually. Link list posts have served that site very well, they're undoubtedly one of the biggest contributing factors to Mashable's position as the 8th most linked-to blog on the web and recipipient of millions and millions of monthly pageviews.

I found Mashable's list of advice sites on their list of list posts (sheesh!) and ran that puppy through the Link Extractor.

Take out the internal links, check out the comments to see which links there are good and paste that list into a Google CSE. What have you got? An Advice and Q&A Site Search Engine.

Some Advice

Some lists of sites will make for a better search engine that others. Blogs are particularly good because there's lots of content and Google indexes almost all of it. Company sites aren't as good and application sites aren't much good at all to query. I ask myself whether I can see myself or others querying whatever collection I'm thinking about assembling; it's easy enough to set up that you may as well give it a try, I've set up some search engines that I use regularly, others that I never use anymore.

Obviously this is just one of many ways to add value to a list. Other things we've done here include filtering the feeds in a list through AideRSS to create a "greatest hits" feed for top sources on a topic, we've displayed recent items from or search results regarding the resources in a list using FeedDigest and we've put together Google Presentation slideshows describing how we assembled collections of resources so that other people can repeat the same process.

The point is that linkbait style lists are often not as useful as they might seem. Readers are growing increasingly cynical. They are much better served if you can put just a little extra time into offering them tangible value and demonstrating meaningful investment of energy on your part.

For more on this subject, check out Del.icio.us Popular for the tag Linkbait and ask how you might be able to raise the bar on resource aggregation in the blogosphere.

Slideshare is growing and may even have become the leading pure play online presentations app. Two years ago I lamented the shortage of 'online powerpoint' services and noted that it was a product category "up for grabs" in the Web Office market. But now it is flourishing - Web Office leaders Google and Zoho both have good online slideshow offerings and there is no shortage of other startups doing it. But Slideshare is the service that is grabbing attention.

Both Marshall and I have picked up on its popularity in recent weeks. And judging by the amount of Slideshare embedded presentations in blogs that I've come across lately, we're not the only ones. Let's take a closer look at Slideshare's rise...

Firstly Compete's data shows that Slideshare has been ramping up:

I have to note though that Scribd, which allows you to upload any type of document (not just presentations), is also ramping up according to Compete. The following chart shows that Scribd is far more popular than Slideshare:

Nevertheless there's no doubt that Slideshare is growing. I would guess that it is the leading pure play online presentations app - but please leave a comment if you think otherwise.

What impresses me about Slideshare is that it has a thriving community. I uploaded my Media08 presentation, Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond, to Slideshare (link) a couple of weeks ago and within days it had thousands of views and some comments. As of today it has been favorited 49 times and embedded (in other blogs etc) 67 times. I also noticed many people friending me via Slideshare. This tells me the community at Slideshare is vibrant and they enjoy viewing and discussing slideshows.

Slideshare has some neat features: tags, ability to post to various sites such as Facebook and Blogger.com, good privacy options, transcription of the slideshows, widgets, and more.

The Groups feature is something that could be utilised by a lot of people. For example the XMediaLab group nicely rounds up all of the presentations from the recent Media08 event that I presented at. So if you weren't in Sydney to attend that event, you can at least browse through all of the presentations (and if new media is your thing, it's well worth your time!).

Individuals can also make use of Slideshare to store all of their public presentations - check out Dave McClure's large collection for example.

If you needed any more proof that Slideshare rocks, they also have an API - check out SlideShare Karaoke, which ProgrammeableWeb describes as "a PowerPoint mixer to select a PowerPoint presentation on the fly from SlideShare".

Slideshare isn't perfect - e.g. it currently doesn't convert from Mac Keynote. It may not even have the biggest store of online slideshows - Google, Zoho, Scribd are just a few competitors that potentially have more. Also possibly some of its competitors have technically better solutions. But even givenn all of that, Slideshare looks to have tipped amongst the hip web 2.0 crowd; and more importantly it has built up its own community of presentation-lovers.

What app(s) do you use for online presentations?

Slideshare is growing and may even have become the leading pure play online presentations app. Two years ago I lamented the shortage of 'online powerpoint' services and noted that it was a product category "up for grabs" in the Web Office market. But now it is flourishing - Web Office leaders Google and Zoho both have good online slideshow offerings and there is no shortage of other startups doing it. But Slideshare is the service that is grabbing attention.

Both Marshall and I have picked up on its popularity in recent weeks. And judging by the amount of Slideshare embedded presentations in blogs that I've come across lately, we're not the only ones. Let's take a closer look at Slideshare's rise...

Firstly Compete's data shows that Slideshare has been ramping up:

I have to note though that Scribd, which allows you to upload any type of document (not just presentations), is also ramping up according to Compete. The following chart shows that Scribd is far more popular than Slideshare:

Nevertheless there's no doubt that Slideshare is growing. I would guess that it is the leading pure play online presentations app - but please leave a comment if you think otherwise.

What impresses me about Slideshare is that it has a thriving community. I uploaded my Media08 presentation, Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond, to Slideshare (link) a couple of weeks ago and within days it had thousands of views and some comments. As of today it has been favorited 49 times and embedded (in other blogs etc) 67 times. I also noticed many people friending me via Slideshare. This tells me the community at Slideshare is vibrant and they enjoy viewing and discussing slideshows.

Slideshare has some neat features: tags, ability to post to various sites such as Facebook and Blogger.com, good privacy options, transcription of the slideshows, widgets, and more.

The Groups feature is something that could be utilised by a lot of people. For example the XMediaLab group nicely rounds up all of the presentations from the recent Media08 event that I presented at. So if you weren't in Sydney to attend that event, you can at least browse through all of the presentations (and if new media is your thing, it's well worth your time!).

Individuals can also make use of Slideshare to store all of their public presentations - check out Dave McClure's large collection for example.

If you needed any more proof that Slideshare rocks, they also have an API - check out SlideShare Karaoke, which ProgrammeableWeb describes as "a PowerPoint mixer to select a PowerPoint presentation on the fly from SlideShare".

Slideshare isn't perfect, e.g. it currently doesn't convert from Mac Keynote. It may not even have the biggest store of online slideshows - Google, Zoho, Scribd are just a few competitors that potentially have more. Also possibly some of its competitors have technically better solutions. But even given all of that, Slideshare looks to have tipped amongst the hip web 2.0 crowd; and more importantly it has built up its own community of presentation-lovers.

What app(s) do you use for online presentations?

Leave it to Radiohead, the pioneering alt-rock band that released its latest album last fall under a pay-what-you-want price scheme to a lot of fan fare (and some criticism of gimmickry), to push the envelope further. The band is now asking fans to create their first music video for the album in a contest utilizing online YouTube of animation (and Crunchies finalist) Aniboom.

Radiohead is hardly the first act to call on fans to create a music video. In the past couple of years the Decemberists, Modest Mouse, Junior Boys, Willie Nelson, Bjork, Jonathon Coulton, and The Hold Steady, among others, have all held video contests. The Beastie Boys went a step further and relied solely on fan footage for an entire concert DVD. Even Madonna, known for lavishly expensive music videos, held a "Make My Video" contest with MTV for "True Blue" in 1986.

The Radiohead In Rainbows contest is being run a bit differently in that they've partnered with an independent video site, are focusing on animation, and are using a tiered voting approach that allows fans to be involved with picking the winner. Further, any song on the album is eligible for being turned into a video, which means fans will in many ways get to define the band's first single.

Until April 27th, anyone can submit a storyboard or clip to Aniboom detailing their idea for a Radiohead video. Users will vote on the 10 best, who will then each be given $1,000 to create a one minute version of their concept. The band will choose the winner, who will receive a $10,000 budget to make the full video for the band in June.

Check out the storyboard example below: