Tim Bray, the company's founder and CEO, is also known as a co-inventor of XML, or Extensible Markup Language, which is creating such a stir in the technology industry these days. He took me through a sample of Antarcti.ca's work, a different kind of Internet view. I preferred the 2-D one, because I found it easier to use. Either way, what you get is a diagrammed view of the Web that can be useful to look around and see some relationships. Keep in mind that the Web map isn't Antarcti.ca's actual product.
Visual tools tend to work in lots of arenas.
It'll be interesting to see who else uses this one. ActiveBuddy is all about creating little programs that users will add to their instant-messaging buddy lists to get services. The company showed one program that gave out stock prices, and another that compared statistics of some basketball players. And as ActiveBuddy's CEO, Peter Levitan, noted, the buddy list is tantalizing real estate for companies trying to do business with customers. Maybe the members of the California Public Utilities Commission had a spy in the room Monday night when Steve Kirsch, the serial entrepreneur whose current start-up is Propel, got up and raised hell about the California energy situation.