One of my main beliefs about blogging and marketing is that the title always matters. It matters in selling a book, driving clickthroughs on blog posts or emails, on placing effective keyword marketing, and the list goes on and on. For just about everything you can do with marketing, choosing the right title is a big deal. 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:
