Guidewire Group's Guide to Innovative Start-Ups
There's more happening on the Web than snarky celebrity blogs and Facebook.
July 23, 2007 — -- With so much publicity devoted to the latest social network, snarky celebrity blogs and the newest video sharing sites, it can be hard to find out what's new and exciting online.
But Internet "bubbles" in which your kids can safely surf, online dating outside of the house and conscience-easing donations to help erase your carbon footprint are just a few of the technologies that the San Francisco-based market intelligence firm Guidewire Group has seen lately that prove to us that true innovation still exists online.
Once you've waded through the hubbub and updated your Facebook profile (you do have a Facebook profile, don't you?), you can find hundreds of companies putting technology to truly useful purposes that affect our everyday lives for the better. Here's a sampling of the most intriguing and innovative ones that we've seen recently.
A plug-in for the Firefox browser, Glubble lets parents create a personalized Internet bubble in which their children can safely surf online. Instead of traditional filtering, Glubble restricts kids to sites that have been specifically approved by their parents. The company provides a starter pack of 350 kid-friendly sites and allows parents to add sites of their choice.
If children find a site they want to add, they can request permission from their parents via e-mail. Parents can then approve the entire new site or only specific pages. Kids are also able to perform searches on Google and Yahoo with only approved results being displayed.
Additionally, children are given the ability to chat with anyone in their Glubble. If they wish to add a friend to their chat, invitations are sent to both sets of parents, and both must approve before the friend can be added. The chat feature and ability to search freely on Google, not an option with other filtering software, are the icing on the cake. For more information, check out www.glubble.com.
A mobile dating service for people who are impulsive or just don't like planning ahead, MeetMoi allows users to include their general locations in a text message and receive profiles of other members in the same neighborhood.
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