So anything you see about the Under the Radar 2007  event going on today is likely to peak your interest if you are a compulsive seeker of new ideas online.  The title of this event promises to expose new ideas and sites in a way that Demo 2007 did (without the great title).  The scope of this event is far smaller than Demo, though, as it only covers innovations in relation to the office of the future.  In addition, many of the sites featured in the event seemed pretty ordinary – as others have also noted.  Regardless, here are a few sites I think are worth taking a look at as well as some ideas on their potential uses for marketing:

Teqlo

This is a site I have been tracking for some time, but offers a great tool for creating mashups of widgets.  The site features an example of mapping product search with ebay and Google maps to create localized search tools.  There are lots of other unexpected applications, like mapping weather forecasts to upcoming sporting or music events on a site like Upcoming.  Just as Yahoo’s Pipes effort allows you to mash your own content feeds – Teqlo has tons of potential marketing applications for taking the widget trend to the next level.

Stikkit

Winner of the Technical Achievement Award at the SxSW web Awards last week, this site takes a concept that others have tried and uses some smart technology to make it useful and easy for developers to build on top of.  Using these online screen-based stikkits to appear as permanent IM windows of tasks and other notes has lots of potential, especially in the new 3D interface models of screens used in Vista.

Wufoo

Creating forms has always been a big part of site development, but there are surprisingly few widget-style tools that let you create these forms easily.  It’s an obvious idea, after all tools exist to integrate polls, video, lists and lots of other pieces of content.  Yet Wufoo seems in a class by itself when it comes to simplifying the usually complex art of inserting forms into sites and collecting data, as well as receiving it in a format that allows you to actually do something with it.  In truth, it’s really the reporting that makes this a marketing tool worth considering.

For other roundups from the event, check out the following links:

• http://www.undertheradarblog.com/wp_blog.html (Official Event Blog)
• http://mashable.com/2007/03/23/under-the-radar/

Comments

Jeff Nolan, the brave young man who runs Teqlo, a startup that makes widgets work together and allows you to combine and integrate useful web services, has decided to skip the usual private beta and do a public beta instead. That means you can run over there right now, sign up, and build your first monster mash before lunch.

Two key things to remember: this is a demonstration of the technology, not the business; it’s still a little rough around the edges (that’s why they call it beta) and, alas, it only works with Firefox.

"Please keep in mind that this is a development release and we have much more to come that will define how the business is built around it," Nolan says. "Also, in the interests of setting expectations appropriately, there are only a small number of widgets that you can use and that means you shouldnt expect to do anything productive with this. This release is intended to demonstrate how the core technology works and get your feedback about where we should go with it."

Have fun.

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About the Author

Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.

http://www.enterpriseweb2.com

Some of the nitty-gritty:

To expect that users, even power users, will be able to build applications that stitch together web services from multiple vendors is a stretch. Teqlo isn’t attempting to build a new development language like Ruby on Rails that dramatically lowers the barrier, what we are doing is essentially reverse programming. We’re treating development as a data flow problem, not a programming flow problem. If there is a core piece of technology that we have invented, it is the routing methodology and not the semantic definition of components; Teqlo takes web services that are wrapped up as components, we call them Teqlets, and determines the optimal sequencing based on the data inputs/outputs of each component. Yeah, it’s hard and there is a lot more to it than I am revealing here, but the point of this post is not to talk about our technology but rather what it means for users.

Congratulations, Jeff.

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.