Tonight I went with three of my colleagues to this quarter’s BetaGroup conference, which has put forward some very nice web application ideas. Here’s what I highlighted :

Extrafoot – Public Beta on www.extrafoot.be or www.extravoetbal.be
Social football website which is based mainly on the publication of fresh news from the Belgian football scene (with 3 full time journalists currently gathering information in Belgium) and social commenting from the users. With 3.000 to 10.000 daily visits and 3000+ members, it is becoming a strong belgian football community.
The nice approach resides in the fact that the user wins credits each time a comment is posted. These credits can be spent on gifts (city trips, gifts from clubs and players, …). I look forward to see how the introducing of social commenting rewards will boost commenting without being drowned in SPAM.

Moodio TV – Live website on www.moodio.tv
Moodio TV is one more online service that offers free video hosting. But this one is a bit different. Each band that signs up has one webspace where it can group all of it’s online activity : Facebook, MySpace, and others are just one click away from the band’s homepage. Some band even get a full interview and concert coverage from the Moodio journalist team.
But there’s more : the band’s agenda appears a minute or so before the end of the song with info displaying upcoming concerts, album releases, and other. I love the way Moodio TV concentrates its efforts to promote Belgian music.

YourTour – Closed Beta on www.yourtour.com
This website is a smart and condensed way to build a holiday route planning in France. Enter your preferred destination and some other details like budget and number of days and the system will automatically plan a holiday route with selected activities and hotels. Each item can be added, deleted or edited to suit the user’s tastes. And everything can be booked in a few clicks.
I will definitely test this website once it’s going live. Announced launching date : April 2009.

Incloode – Closed Beta
Once in a while you see something that’s really impressive. A guy walks on the stage, has a really nice way of speaking and shows you something you didn’t believe was possible with today’s technology. Well, Incloode is really nice : choose one of the video templates (“videoplates”) available and replace the original video footage with your uploaded footage. A couple drag-and-drop’s later, you have a fully customized video playing on screen in a small size. Buy it (credit card or SMS), and you will be able to download it and post it on your favourite websites. Real-time multi-layered video rendering via the web is what kept my mouth half open for a few seconds. I wonder what kind of servers they have behind this whole thing.

Mollom – Live website on www.mollom.com
This is the kind of service that I have been looking for the blogs I have been setting up lately. This application checks the contents of a blog post (60 languages are supported!) and marks it as spam if there is a 100% chance the message has been sent by a robot. If the system is hesitating, a CAPTCHA is automatically created and presented to the user, which will be able to manually validate the comment. This is one of the little things that will reduce clutter in messages as well on the blogger’s side as on the reader’s side. Thumbs up guys !

That’s all Folks!

Tags: betagroup, conference, website