If you think a new web app comes out nearly every day, you’d be partly right - it’s actually closer to about five per day. Google has popularized the practice of crowd-sourcing product development by releasing “beta” versions of unfinished products into the world for its customers to play with.  I admit to being a bit of a beta geek; the lure of being the first kid on the block to know about the coolest new web toy is irresistible to a futurist who loves to see around the corner to the future.  There are thousands of betas in the marketplace, which made finding a handful of them to feature for this week’s Friday Five more than a little difficult.  That said, here are five products in beta that we think are worth keeping an eye on.

Grand Central

Grand Central seeks to solve an increasing problem in the mobile age - converging multiple points of contact into one. The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.”  The service provides a single number tied not to a phone or location, but to you.  According to the website, with GrandCentral “you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, as well as check messages by phone, email or online.”

(Thomas Friedman’s talk at Pop!Tech, subtitled in Kiswahili)

dotSUB

dotSUB is quietly staging a revolution on the web. Its mission:  to make online video content accessible to the millions of non-English speakers by offering open-source translation services. The idea is deceptively simple: think YouTube meets Wikipedia: users can upload videos, films (even TV programs) for either the rest of the world or dotSUB’s team to translate. Translation services are either “closed” (utilizing dotSUB’s team of freelancers) or “open” (posting a video on the site and letting volunteers translate it for free, wiki-style).  For a great example of the service in action, check out Pop!Tech speaker talks (called Pop!Casts) which are translated via dotSUB into nine languages.   

MetaNotes

MetaNotes is “social graph paper” on which users can paste stickynotes containing text, images, videos, and widgets, creating scrapbooks to track and remember any topic.  It won the top “Experimental” website at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Awards last week, the category which tracks “cutting-edge and trend-setting destinations that are pushing the envelope and challenging our perceptions of the web.” While it still has a ways to go (i.e., it really needs private spaces for users to post notes); MetaNotes’ intuitive interface is familiar and user-friendly. And: it plays well with others, integrating with sites like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Pownce, and Photobucket.

Google’s Experimental Search

Courtesy of the brainiacs at Google Labs comes the Experimental Search project which offers new visualizations of search results including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, G-Tech (the ambiguous but patent-pending-sounding term for “Google Technology”) extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view results in multiple dimensions. Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB)

Aptly named, the Museum of Modern Betas is the go-to place to check out and track web apps that are in beta.  In fact, we think it should be called the Motherload of Modern Betas - since it opened in two years ago its listed over 4000 sites that are in beta, helpfully organizing them into categories such as Top 100, Most Anticipated, Recently Added and by Language.  The large number of sites it tracks makes getting in-depth information about each one difficult, but active links are provided.  The MoMB is a like a giant playground for the future of the web, perfect for those who don’t want to wait for the new ‘new thing’ to arrive.

P.S. - Last but not least, here’s a bonus track: keep Wello Horld on your watch list; it’s still in alpha and very hush-hush, but I want to go on record as being (one of) the first to say “I told you so!” when it launches.  

P.S.S. - If you’re wondering why I didn’t include PMOG as a beta to watch, stay tuned.  It’s so cool it deserves it’s own blog post.

One the best things about Pop!Tech is the richly diverse community of people it brings together. This year was no exception, so we decided to devote this week’s “FringeHog Friday Five” toa few of theamazing women we met at Pop!Tech 2007:

Dr. Victoria Hale

Dr. Victoria Hale could be described in many ways: a renegade, an entrepreneur, an activist, a scientist. She is the Founder of One World Health, the first US-based non-profit pharmaceutical company. No, that wasn’t a typo: funded not by shareholders or venture capitalists but by philanthropic organizations and a network of research collaborators, One World Health (OWH) develops drugs for people with neglected diseases in the developing world, what Hale calls “diseases of poverty.”Most recentlyOWH developed paromomycin, an antibiotic used to treat Kala-azar, the world’s second most deadly parasitic disease following malaria.?

Katrin Verclas

There aren’t many people who love mobile phones as much as Katrin Verclas. But then again, where most people look at a cell phone and see, well, a phone - Katrin sees a revolutionary tool for social change. Ask her how mobile phones are being used to change the world, and she ticks off an ever-growing list: to ensure impartial elections, free political prisoners, stop human trafficking, distribute HIV/AIDS information and help farmers in the developing world get their crops to market. In her day-job she directs NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network; she also coordinates the global “mobilist” practitioner network MobileActive.org.?

Stacey Aldrich

Stacey Aldrich has spent her career advocating for one of the arguably most significant, yet often undervalued, social institutions in America - the public library. In the era of Wikipedia, libraries may seem like an endangered species, but she’s convinced that public libraries can not only respond to change, but become vanguards of the information age. A librarian and a futurist, Aldrich is the last one to call attention to herself, but thankfully others have, including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently appointed her Deputy State Librarian of the California State Library. It’s no small job: with a budget rivaling the size of many private-sector companies (nearly $90 million), Aldrich is poised to bring the public library system into the future.

Zainab Salbi

Zainab Salbi believes there are two sides to war: victims and survivors. The first we hear about on the news: about guns, bullets, bombs and the number of people killed. Survivors, especially women survivors, are often invisible; their stories of keeping life going in the midst of war are rarely told. Yet it is with the survivors of war that the future depends. Drawing on her own experience growing up as a survivor of war under Saddam Hussein, Salib created Women for Women International, a humanitarian organization that has provided financial and emotional support to tens of thousands of women to deal with the aftermath of conflict.?

Dr. Sarah Otterstrom

Ecologists often have a gift for seeing the future, and Sarah Otterstrom is no exception. Looking out at a field in Nicaragua, she doesn’t see abandoned pasture land, but rather a future forest, lush with previously endangered trees and a thriving population of native animal species. Tocreate that future forest, Otterstrom created Paso Pacifico, a non-profit organization whose aim is to build wildlife corridors along the western slope of Central America by supporting private landowners and small-scale farmers in sustainable land use and conservation activities. Paso Pacifico’s “Return to Forest” project has planted 850 acres of native tropical dry forest trees which will restore the land, curb greenhouse gas emissions and provide job opportunities to the local villagers.

Carl Honorgot on stage at Pop!Tech and spoke to my soul. Yes, I’m well aware that I’m being hyperbolic, and that it was more likely a case of the right talk at the right time. After all, his message to “slow down” isn’t exactly rocket science; my mother has been saying the same thing for years. Yet Pop!Tech was the next-to-last stop for me in a five-week personal travelpalooza. I’ve been on the road for 4+ days a week for over a month; in the course of ten days I’d been through Amsterdam, Hawai’i and finally, Camden, Maine. Maybe it was his sincerity, his humor, or perhaps it was just the slightest hint of the sexy accent, but at last I was finally ready to listen. Aside from the message to eat slower, cut out unnecessary trips and trim my calendar, what I heard Honorsay was: start to blog slow.

Let me be clear: I love - make that LOVE - the fact that I attend many of the same conferences as two of my favorite bloggers, Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani. These “twinbloggers” sit tirelessly in the back of conference rooms and crank out crystal clear renditions of the speaker’s presentations - in real time. Ten minutes after a session is over, while the rest of us are still catching our breath, they’ve posted an online record for the world to see (Ethan, while at Pop!Tech, wrote over 20,000 words in three days). Moreover, I’m grateful for the fact that they attend many more conferences than me, and so I reap the benefits of their parallel-processing brains; reading either one of their blogs is like getting a masters degree in global current affairs.

But.

Yes, there’s a but. Here’s the thing: I want to liveblog. I aspire to liveblog. But the truth is, I’m not all that good at it. I’m a futurist and as such I’m hard-wired to think before I type, to process things, to connect the dots and consider the systemic implications of any newly presented idea. Moreover, I invariably find that the most interesting people at any given conference are NOT the ones on stage, and so I instinctively spend my time meeting people and sniffing out the stories no one else is paying attention to. It’s also why I spend an inordinate amount of time talking to cab drivers, but that’s another story.

And as much as I admire Ethan and Bruno and the cadre of other livebloggers, I’m continually troubled by the sense of personal inadequacy and guilt (thanks, Mom, for the Catholic upbringing) that their presence initiates. The truth is: I can’t type as fast, I can’t think as fast, hell, I can’t LISTEN as fast as these guys. It’s a little like being at the local ice rink, casually skating around on a Sunday afternoon, and Michelle Kwan shows up and starts throwing out triple solchows.

Which brings me back to Carl Honor?, whose message I internalized as: “it’s ok to blog slowly.” If it takes me a few days (or a week) to let the ideas marinate and get my thoughts out, then so be it. I don’t know if the result will be any better, but at the very least I hope I will stop suffering from idea indigestion. And so, in my Pop!Tech haze, I make myself a promise to live less frenetically. I will practice deep breathing. I will do yoga. I will not get on airplanes before 6am. And from now on, I will slow blog. Thanks, Carl.

?

These two images, separated by nearly half a century, represent the dreams of human exploration of space. Together they tell a story of lost opportunity and future promises.?

Forty five years ago today Astronaut John Glenn completed an epochal space mission which made him the first American to orbit the Earth. The Port Arthur News reported: “Glancing at the Earth at altitudes ranging from 100 to 160 miles, Glenn had a breathtaking panoramic view stretching 1,800 miles from horizon to horizon. He described the view as ‘tremendous’ and a ‘beautiful sight.’”

Just a few weeks ago the Cassini spacecraft snapped the above picture of Titan, the biggest of the 56 known moons orbiting Saturn and the second largest moon in our solar system. The Cassini spacecraft is the first to explore the Saturn system of rings and moons from orbit.

As planetary scientist Carolyn Porco writes in a fabulous New York Times Op-Ed piece published today, in the 1960’s the possibilities for human space travel were intoxicating: plans were laid for the establishment of a 50-person lunar base, a 100-person Earth orbiting space station and human landfall on Mars by the 1980s.

Instead, by abandoning the Apollo space program the country lost a capital investment of close to $160 billion and the collective knowledge of the tens of thousands of space engineers and scientists.

Yet she also paints an amazing vision: one of a revitalized NASA with plans to return to the Moon with a party of humans by 2020, a solar-powered human-tended research outpost by 2025 and preparations for a Mars trip soon after.

As she says: Humanity’s future need not be confined to mere survival on our home planet. Other worlds beckon, we know how to reach them and we will once more be outward bound.

Porco offersan ambitious and inspiring vision for the future - and one that maybe this time around, we can get right.