Company Name

Faviki

20-word Description

Faviki is a semantic bookmarking tool which allows people to organize bookmarks using Wikipedia concepts as tags.

CEO’s Pitch

Faviki is a tool that brings together social bookmarking and Wikipedia. It allows you to tag webpages with Wikipedia concepts, categorizing them automatically. This solves the problem of having different tags for the same concept and makes your tags better organized. Faviki is powered by DBpedia, which extracts structured information from Wikipedia. It also uses the Zemanta API for automatic tag suggestions, and mashes it with Google AJAX Language API to make multilingual semantic tagging possible. There are currently 5.6 million tags you can choose from - 2.7 million English and 2.9 million tags from 13 other languages.

Mashable’s Take

The main aspects of the Faviki utility have already been written out by the company’s founder, Vuk Milicic. So rather than get deep into detail about the Zemanta and Google AJAX Language APIs, let’s explore what Faviki can be to the average user as the social bookmarking tool it is designed to be.

The connection made between bookmarking and Wikipedia might be lost on some, and perhaps a bit purposeless for the diverse number of reasons people interact with websites and their individual pages. Not all subjects have ample representation within Wikipedia. But the suggestions made via the tags provided through Faviki can be helpful at times. And users can always add their own tags if need be. As with most bookmarking services, it can keep your list of bookmarks better sorted for future reference if you’re collecting items to group closely together. And the ability to share links with friends and view topics that Faviki finds applicable to one or more bookmarks is an intelligent way to manage information.

Much of its effectiveness of course depends on how extensively you use the service. The quick transfers of a bookmarklet in your browser’s standard toolbar facilitates the process considerably. Plugin installations in Firefox, for instance, can be a hurdle some don’t wish to jump past. With Faviki, you don’t have to.

Another great item in Faviki’s arsenal is the ability to present notes along with a bookmark. Tagging is a useful search feature, for sure. No question about that. But to have the option to tell friends or the entire membership at large what it is exactly you’ve bookmarked or why you’ve chosen to share it can bring a superb level of guidance into the system.

Sign-up is as easy as you’d like it to be. Enter an email address, choose an account name and password choice, plus a language specification (15 in all), and you’re set. If you’d like to make a change to your username, time zone, or determine whether or not you want to be sent a newsletter, you can do so simply by clicking the ‘edit profile’ setting in the top right section of the page.

Is Faviki a smarter engine than, say, the newly revised Delicious? I have no reservations in thinking that many won’t convert, if only for the very sensible reason that they’re already well-invested and attuned to the ways of the sector’s benchmark. Others will enjoy this beta more than the Yahoo-owned favorite, though. If you’re willing to try something different, or have never fallen under the Delicious spell, Faviki is quite good. Simple and powerful are two elements it exhibits, and the smart design can grow on the user rather quickly. Altogether, Faviki is impressive. For a social bookmarking service, that’s certainly saying a lot.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

But say you’re a simple person. A real purist when it comes to loving anything basic and elemental. If you want to chat via IM, for instance, you just want to chat via IM. No VoIP. No video conferencing. None of that. Just text relay. If that’s your situation, and you’re one to enjoy telling people where you are, but don’t actually want to tell them all the time, with cumbersome note-making or whathaveyou, a service called SeeMyWhere might give you what you need.

First, just so you’re aware, this service-plus-software setup (software is called Xtify) is only available for download to BlackBerry devices at present. Greater compatibility is “coming soon.” But that said, there are a whole heck of a lot of QWERTY crazies out there, and a ton of them are walking the walk as RIM prescribes. So it’s a decent start for SeeMyWhere.

Once you’ve got the software on your mobile, and you’ve activated the GPS or cellular-tower-based location pinpointing process, your corresponding account on the Web is given the necessary data to show visitors to your personal URL a look at your present position. That’s it. A red pin on a Google Maps embed, with lovely yellow font telling the viewer where it is you were “last seen,” and when it was updated. That’s the extent of SeeMyWhere. (You can turn your account on or off as you please, and even delete it if you find no use for it.)

Yes, this might seem completely purposeless for many people. Some might argue the reason for location-aware services is to help users communicate more effectively with one another and with their real-world surroundings, and would find SeeMyWhere to be greatly lacking in key features. And, well, who can fault anyone for feeling so? In some sense, it is lacking. But, to offer an analogous example, there are so many flavors gleaned from foods for the very purpose of satisfying varying tastes. The same might hold true for our world of Internet utilities.

Mind you, SeeMyWhere’s designers are contemplating the integration of buddy lists and multiple user placements on a single map and so forth. But in the words of SeeMyWhere team player Juston Payne (sample page), they will “roll out new features as we get feedback from our community.” So unless you demand some extensions to the core premise, things will stay as they are. Would it be good to maintain the status quo? Well, I suppose it’s all about perspective, isn’t it?

You might wonder why it is that I raise a point raised so many times before. The health of the music industry has been opined over ad nauseam, and to do so once more is to toss tired copy on a pile of wasted wordplay, right? Well, it depends, really. The story of the digital sales model is far from complete, and with new developments happening in the land of Apple and Amazon, as well as a steady flow of stories occurring along the fringe of the market, there still is room to press points further along and observe the space from underrepresented perspectives.

The last 24 hours or so, for example, have brought items having to do with a Napster letter addressed to shareholders, in which it notes that it is “open to a sale,” according to Joseph Weisenthal of PaidContent, as well as something or other to do with recently launched LimeWire MP3 Store and a marked 100% growth in its music catalog, to a mere 2 million in total, as noted by Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica. These you might think to be insignificant. And taken as they come, I would admit that they are not very impactful. But if you consider them to be the newest round of pockmarks in the middle- and lower-class digital music scenes, they add to the subtle signs emerging each season that tell us the market’s bottom feeders are not long for this world.

Is that a good thing? Well, only the best survive, yes? Sure, ideally. It’s hard to say who would be left standing. Rhapsody? Maybe. The Zune Marketplace? That’s quite a variable at this point. Microsoft doesn’t seem to be “in it to win it.” On the upside, the loss of such actors - if indeed they do expire in the next year or two or three - would perhaps uncomplicate things more. Too many choices can be more detrimental than few in some cases.

But, just for kicks, imagine a world that doesn’t have the spread of choices that we have today. If we start to see Napster, LimeWire, et al., start to drop like flies, what’s to say the consumer will really benefit? Those interested in music subscriptions, say, may no longer have such options. And labels that currently opt for one outlet or another due to variations in revenue agreements, might have to succumb to less advantageous contracts elsewhere. Which could hurt their bottom line. And though more musicians are taking an entirely solo route to promotion, the role of the studio, big or small, remains important. The music industry is busy enough as it is with a small set of great sounds and a vast amount of non-sellers. Some editorial is a good thing.

Granted, there are quite a number of ifs to take into account as things in the digital industry progress, but it’s certainly worth contemplating its evolving dimensions. It’s not been a decade since music downloads became “popular,” and already we’ve seen it balloon, we’ve seen its squeezed, and we’ve even seen it begin to consolidate.

Some might argue that where one gets his or her downloads won’t matter much. But I disagree. Businesses in a complex market such as media move to higher ground at the expense of others. And the “others” don’t simply get to continue on when left behind. So just know this. It may now seem purposeless to quibble over the failed and the failing. But if all but a few disappear, the consumer experience that might have been - that you can get what you want, how you want - probably won’t be realized. And that’s a shame if proven true. If any paradigm shift of modern making in the media world could be taken closest to an ideal, it is the convenience of the digital music download.

(Image source: Flickr/peymon)

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: GeoGraffiti

20-word Pitch: Your free verbal message board for exchanging location-specific community information…any place with any mobile phone!

CEO’s Description: GeoGraffiti enables the open exchange of location-specific opinions and advice in Voice Mark™ form with any phone. Users can virtually “mark” real world places by publishing a Voice Mark message. A Voice Mark is a short voice message captured via phone that shares information (e.g. opinions, tips, warnings, advice) about a venue, event, promotion, or really anything else one cares to share. Voice Marks are linked to a locality using a zip code, or geo-tagged to an exact spot on the earth using latitude/longitude coordinates.

While visiting different places throughout the day, GeoGraffiti enables anybody with a phone to express opinions and local insight by publishing a Voice Mark – leaving a virtual information mark behind to be heard by those who follow. Conversely, those who follow can search GeoGraffiti for Voice Mark content while on location when the information is most pertinent.

GeoGraffiti’s community-driven voice platform was built to collect and organize the public’s “wisdom of crowds” intelligence and satisfy some of today’s on-the-go informational needs. The name GeoGraffiti is a combination of the prefix “Geo”, meaning earth or land, representing our location-specific focus, while “Graffiti” represents the expressive and informative content marking those locations. GeoGraffiti is accessible to everybody, regardless of phone type or carrier network…no fancy phones required, and thus provides a voice information exchange platform that unites the entire mobile phone community. GeoGraffiti is in public beta and provides its service via a free phone call to (213) 221-3802 or online via its Google map mashup. The online Google map mashup is made available so desktop-bound Web surfers can more easily search, publish and create Voice Marks around their social network and community.

Mashable’s Take: For those who imagined the GeoGraffiti title to be associated with something entirely different than what it is, we understand. The name would seem logical to affix to a Web service that perhaps documented instances of graffiti across the world in a unique way. Alas, GeoGraffiti is all about voice. Yes, voice. Voice and graffiti. Two quite separate things. Or are they?

The idea of GeoGraffiti may still take a fair amount of time to really sink in. You might question the very reason one might have to geo-tag voice messages. It almost seems purposeless. Yes, people regularly choose to attach location-based metadata to their photographs (Flickr is a perfect example of end product of such efforts) or videos (Google Maps recently enabled YouTube video embeds) or even website data (again, Google has worked in include webpage search in its Maps utility). But voice messages? It seems odd trying to put those two together.

Well, maybe not. Maybe it takes a certain application for GeoGraffiti to really shine. Perhaps it can be used as a simple discovery tool. You may have heard radio shows that play back voice messages left by listeners that are oddly interesting, and all compiled to form a sort of audio scrapbook. Could GeoGraffiti be made into a sort of short-form podcasting platform, with the intent being an abstract collection of voices? If one is to keep an open mind about it, the possibilities of it are really only limited by the time allotted for each message. It’s sort of an audio whiteboard. It’s a finite space. But that may work in its favor.

Can it be considered an artistic medium? It’s certainly not practical. There’s no reason to use it as some kind of social service. That wouldn’t prove very effective. So it might be fitting to call it a free-form creation, a startup whose reason for being is up to the user to decide. Unusual and peculiar, yes. But heck, that’s what lots of folks said about Twitter when it first arrived. Even today some are still saying so. So, there you have it. Geograffiti is live. How would you propose to use it?

Sun Startup Essentials

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Earlier today, we referred you to some findings having to do with global growth of BitTorrent usage. And if you happen to be into technological expansion and all the fun stuff that goes with it, you may have enjoyed that story. Now we share some ugly. According to the Canadian music, film, and television industries, a BitTorrent tracker known by the name of QuebecTorrent is a decrepit invention and must be eliminated.

Indeed, the power-packing acronyms known as CRIA, CIRPA, ADISQ, and APFTQ will be charging into Montreal’s Court of Justice three months hence to give the enemy its comeuppance, reports Enigmax of TorrentFreak. Or attempt to, anyway.

Its geek baby David against steroidal Goliath. Quite an odd picture. Almost humorous. The Canadian media elite have essentially declared open war with a single torrent tracker which claims to serve some 46,000 members. This is a near perfect example of the misapplied energies of the media elite, as was mentioned Saturday here on Mashable concerning the story of the US-based RIAA and its purposeless court battle with a Ms. Tanya Andersen.

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