Community Managers Valencia, Social Media, Salud 2.0

I had the chance to attend Betagroup 15, held at ULB on Jan 21st. If you don’t know what a Betagroup is, check it out here. Room was packed and among the attendants you could find -apart from representatives from the startups presenting-, investors, designers, coders, and all other geeks.

The apps:

1. Tinkertouch
TinkerTouch offers touch screen interface software and hardware. Aka, the end of mouse. Interesting though I think the starting price for the hardware is too high (did he say 10,000 euro?). It wasn’t explained how many finger/hand movements are actually rendered or if complex movements are supported. Wonder what they’ll offer to elbow their way in a pretty competitive field: by far the most impressive work is Oblong’s g-speak, remember Minority Report? well, one of Oblong founders worked as an advisor on the famous movie scenes with this technology. Also from MIT, but with a different target, we have James Patten’s work “Audiopad“, an impressive touch-based interface for music composition. And let’s not forget what the not longer Almighty has to do on the field: Microsoft Surface.

2. Whitepaper Central
Whitepaper Central is a place where businesses and professional can give their whitepapers some exposure, for free (so far). Users can download, rate and comment on them. I wonder whether companies and businesses would prefer this to offering the whitepaper for download at their own sites (traffic wise). Rien van den Bosch, one of the founders, announced they’re working on CustomerStory Central, which would focus on real user cases and would help readers relate whitepapers from Whitepaper Central to the user cases at Customer Story. He didn’t go further on how it would work, but to me that’s definitely a winner.

3. LiveResto
LiveResto is a CMS for restaurants, developed by Agilitic. I can understand it can be an easy way for many restaurants to have their own website, with updated menus and prices but I am not sure what the toll might end up being (locked in, walled CMS). I mean, WordPress.org is free, kind of easy to set up and there are some cool templates out there targeted at restaurants. Besides, you have a bursting community developing widgets, plugins and all sorts of updates. Anyway, it’s an interesting attempt to have a vertical (targeted) CMS. Some other good thing is that if you’re looking for bespoke design, you get it -of course, paid.

4. Pic2Shop
Pic2Shop, developed by VisionSmarts, is “is an iPhone app that lets you quickly scan barcodes using the camera to lookup prices and product information online”. To me, it was the weakest presentation of all. As the presenter said (sorry I don’t know his name: guys, what a nice way of letting the audience get to know you: a pervasive slide with name, email and or Twitter account would suffice): it is an app for the old iPhone 3G, because the newer 3GS already scans codes with a better resolution. So it’s basically an app to get the best performance of an old product? Well, I don’t have an iPhone, I am a pretty happy owner of a HTC Hero, but if you are, here’s a comparison review on different barcode scanners and Pic2Shop seems to be doing some good job.

5.WooRank
Woorank is an automatic website analysis tool with personalized recommendations to improve your website. It’s aimed at webmasters and SEO professionals, also at marketing managers and, so they say, at ‘communication agencies’ (can’t agree on this). It’s free and gives you feedback on 50 criteria. Woorank has been developed by Jean Derely (Betagroup’s MC and founder) and 1MD.Though you can pull the same analysis by using simultaneously different web-based tools, that’s precisely one of Woorank main advantages: all-in-one. However I think there’s a lot to improve on the ‘tip’ feature: I’m sure this tool can do a good job as a diagnostic tool, but then you’d need the know-how of designers, SEO professionals, marketing experts, community managers, etc. to improve performance on each criterion (or missing criteria, i.e. the ones related to interaction and community engagement).

6.Knowledge Plaza SaaS
Our turn. Antoine Perdaens had the challenge of being the last one presenting. Read full post on this presentation.