Launchweek08

Footnote is trying to create "Facebook for the deceased." It's the obituary 2.0 meets the social network, but likely without the permanence of a tombstone.

The site gathers timeline info that you can match up with a person's life. The service also scours public records you can attach to profiles, as Ancestry.com does. The presenter said Footnote now has 80 million profiles online, which are not available anywhere else. All it needs is for those peoples' friends to come online and add the remembrances -- stories and photos -- that aren't in the … Read more

From deep inside TechCrunch50... Although there are 50 companies presenting on stage, even the companies that didn't qualify for stage time get attention at the event. I explored the demo pit yesterday, where the runners-up pitch to the passers-by.

Companies covered in this video:

The idea of tying online games into the real world isn't completely new, but there were two companies at TechCrunch50 with interesting spins on the concept.

First, Akoha. It's the card swapping game "Magic" with an evangellical twist. The cards are do-good tasks. Plant a tree. Read this good book. Smile at a stranger. You do the task, go online and tell the story of doing it, and then pass the card along to someone else.

For each individual card you get, you can see the path it took around the world (assuming people tell their … Read more

Atmosphir is a software-based game building tool for PC and Mac users that lets users put together their own gaming levels. Like many consumer-facing game creators you're only limited by the tools that have been given to you. In this case the tools provided are split up into packages of "blocks" that are both interchangeable and feature simple gameplay devices like moving platforms, and various themed texture elements that let you build worlds with grass, dirt, and sand.

The builder actually reminders me a lot of Cubescape, a product I looked at back in May. In Atmosphir'… Read more

Most rousing demo award at TechCrunch50 goes to Bojam, simply because they had the music ("Africa," by Toto). The service is a music mixing product and online store.

Artists can lay down new sounds on top of tracks other people have recorded previously, and anyone with access to the tracks can mix music.

New completed songs can then be sold on the site.

The demo was loud and entertaining, and the technology is cool. If you're a musician looking for a jamming product, also check out eJamming, which I covered from the at the January 2007 Demo … Read more

Following the killer demo of video search engine VideoSurf at TechCrunch50, the team from the Hitachi project GazoPa took the stage with a similar product, but for photos.

GazoPa is a pattern matching service. It matches color and shape. Or -- and this is cool -- just color, or just shape. Found a picture of a product you like, but want to see it, and only it, in other colors? Filter by shape. Or for similar products in the same shade, filter by color.

The presenter said the database handles 50 million images. But while it recognizes faces, it can'… Read more

An estimated 500 million images are captured every day, but less than 5 percent end up on major photo sharing sites. Uploading photos is not the easiest task and most photos are locked into a specific photo sharing service and have all rights reserved licenses. Jean-Marie Hullot, wants to liberate photos from silos and offer news ways to organize and discover images.

The former CTO of NeXT and Apple's application division, Hullot showed off fotonauts,a kind of Wikipedia for photos at TechCrunch50. Currently in private beta for Windows and Mac users, the Web application stores 1080p thumbnails of … Read more

At Wednesday morning's TechCrunch50 demo of video search engine VideoSurf, CEO Lior Delgo showed off how the technology would be useful for finding a single moment from your favorite TV series. Delgo used HBO's Entourage as an example, picking out a few lines of dialogue from a 30-minute episode.

To make all of that happen, entire episodes--in this case illegally hosted ones on YouTube--get crunched through VideoSurf's servers. It's an entirely automated process that scans videos faster than real-time, and does not require people to do the heavy lifting.

What makes the technology special is that it picks out characters from these series and lets you see individual moments where they appear. The same thing happens when you're viewing any episode through the service--it'll pick out who it recognizes and put up a character list next to the clip. … Read more

Let's face it: Video search blows. It's easy to use YouTube's search box to find straightforward Internet video memes like cats playing pianos, skateboard tricks, or Rick Astley remixes; try for anything more intricate and you might be out of luck. There are established companies in the space, like the U.K.-based Blinkx, but none of them has captured the market share that video search potentially could.

Enter VideoSurf, a company launching later on Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference that's been getting a choice spot in the tech-blogger limelight thanks to a Los Angeles Times preview.… Read more