[DowJones VentureWire Technology Showcase - EuroTech] I met with Goojet co-founder Marc Rougier at the conference and he gave me a detailed demo of its product. Goojet allows users to easily get various Widgets on their phone and manage them with a user friendly interface from the desktop website. It gives access to a lot of Internet content without having to struggle (for the majority who do not own an iPhone) with the mobile browser... that's cool. Nokia does the same with Widsets, Plusmo and Zumobi offer a similar service; I did not test any of them.

According to Marc Rougier, Goojet has a social component that the competition does not have. In the picture you see that in one click, you can send a widget to a friend via Goojet, email or SMS. Other specific features include the widget viewer in the desktop website and the suggested content pushed by the profiling engine. I tried it on my BlackBerry and it is pretty cool, I love the quick access to all kinds of content, it is available in English and French, and later in other languages.

Yesterday, Goojet became accessible from the Bouygues' mobile portal i-mode. The service was launched in private beta in December 2007 and won the start-ups competition at LeWeb3 in Paris (click on the banner in the side bar, we have a discounted price for this conference).

During his keynote at the VentureWire Technology Showcase, Walt Mossberg told us that his preferred personal technology devices are the Apple iPhone, the G1 and the BlackBerry Storm. For him ,they are the true Internet devices, and not the MIDs which is a marketing name made up by Intel to sell more mobile chipsets. All these smart phones have a virtual keyboard , but I am not sure if it suits everyone's needs. For the majority of the business people who breathe via email, a physical keyboard is required. That's why we selected the BlackBerry Bold over the Storm for our Uber10 list, and kept the iPhone in it for people who need a cool "read only" device.

Walt Mossberg stated that Netbooks are also interesting new devices, much more than the MIDs, and I agree with him, this is a serious trend, read our article. He indicated that the core interest lies in the ability to pull content and applications from the Internet, and it is a trend started by the iPhone and the Apple app Store with its 10 Million downloads in the first week end. When asked about e-books, he stated that the Amazon Kindle is quite good with the WiFi connectivity and the nice display, but he does not believe that it is a true mass market product yet.

To close his keynote, he reminded us that he calls the carriers the "Soviet Ministries" , regretting that they are the only one who define the hardware and the services that the consumers are allowed to access, and stating that this is beginning to break down.

By Ravit Lichtenberg (blog)

YourTour, a Belgian company, is among the demoing companies at the Dow Jones Venture Wire Technology Showcase. YourTour helps people turn highly complex travel simple by enabling them to build full itinerary based on advanced criteria such as budget, accommodation, and attractions.
Users start from the location they want to travel to, their budget, duration, and number of people--and then are able to choose from a number of accommodation options (hotel? Chateaus?), available attractions (Museum? EuroDisney?), frequency of hotel changes, etc.

For their data, YourTour has partners with the hotel database, booking.com and LonelyPlanet.com; their “powerful algorithm” crunches all the data in the back and delivers results within 20 seconds.

Keeping things simple seems to be the guiding principle for this Mons Polytechnic’s department of mathematics spinoff. Still in private beta, the company is focusing on travel in France and plan to extend to Spain and Italy next. The interface is plane but it seems to work. This will make it easy for the company to act on its users feedback. User generated content will also be integrated—for now, user ratings are used to influence the order of displayed results.

Ubergizmo is media partner of VentureWire Technology Showcase 08, an emerging technology Dow Jones conference held in the Bay Area, Nov 18-19, 2008.

The Technology Showcase will present 125 start-ups from the U.S. and Europe, all vetted by VentureWire readers and Dow Jones editors as industry stand-outs in Advertising, business technologies, media, mobile applications, networking, Web and wireless. This conference is great for discovering new technologies and either find deal prospects, acquisition targets, business partners or competitors.

Ubergizmo is media partner of VentureWire Technology Showcase 08, an emerging technology Dow Jones conference held in the Bay Area, Nov 18-19, 2008.

The Technology Showcase will present 125 start-ups from the U.S. and Europe, all vetted by VentureWire readers and Dow Jones editors as industry stand-outs in Advertising, business technologies, media, mobile applications, networking, Web and wireless. This conference is great for discovering new technologies and either find deal prospects, acquisition targets, business partners or competitors.

Panels of high profile industry experts like Walt Mossberg from the The Wall Street Journal, and top executives at Amazon.com, Nokia and Hewlett-Packard, among others, will discuss their perspectives on technology and the current investments trends. If you are interested in mixing and mingling for two days with the tech industry's leading venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, executives, analysts from major firms like Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Systems, JP Morgan, Foundry Group, Google, please stop by our fan page where we will give away two passes. Read the rules after the jump.

Ubergizmo is media partner of VentureWire Technology Showcase 08, an emerging technology Dow Jones conference held in the Bay Area, Nov 18-19, 2008.

The Technology Showcase will present 125 start-ups from the U.S. and Europe, all vetted by VentureWire readers and Dow Jones editors as industry stand-outs in Advertising, business technologies, media, mobile applications, networking, Web and wireless. This conference is great for discovering new technologies and either find deal prospects, acquisition targets, business partners or competitors.

Panels of high profile industry experts like Walt Mossberg from the The Wall Street Journal, and top executives at Amazon.com, Nokia and Hewlett-Packard, among others, will discuss their perspectives on technology and the current investments trends. If you are interested in mixing and mingling for two days with the tech industry's leading venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, executives, analysts from major firms like Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Systems, JP Morgan, Foundry Group, Google, please stop by our fan page where we will give away two passes. Read the rules after the jump.