Memorial service for Tack will be at the National Press Club at 6:30 March 31.

Until lately. We didn’t catch on until the 2005 season when Jimmy Smits takes on the persona of Matthew Santos, (D-TX), running for president to succeed Jed Bartlett. Even without the prompt on Wikipedia, we’d long known – or at least suspected – that the Barlett White House Chief of Staff character Josh Lyman, masterfully played by Bradley Whitford, was patterned after Rahm Emanuel. (I mean, just check out the hairlines. Add this together with Lyman’s self-conscious yet ambivalent Judaism, the “take no prisoners” attitude that forced a Democratic defection to the Republican party, and the likeness is unmistakeable.) The fact that Sen. Arlen Specter just made the switch in reverse just fans the flames of this debate.

Of course the parallels became more pronounced as we watched Santos announce for the presidency from the statehouse steps. The speech – which occurred in the 2005 season, mind you – was a dead-ringer for Obama’s announcement paean to “hope” and “change.” In The West Wing, Santos is elected after defeating one of the Republican party’s elder statesmen, who hailed from a state west of the Rockies and prided himself as being a straight-talker. (Alan Alda plays the Republican candidate, Arnie Vinick, who refuses to “take the ethanol pledge” before the Iowa Corn Growers in his stump through Iowa.

This much you might be able to chalk up to the contrived intent to have art imitate life and so heighten the believability of a parallel universe where it was a Bartlett, not a Bush who reigned over the majority of the last decade. After all, DeeDee Myers was a consultant to the show. The Guardian Newspaper even made one of the show’s writers admit that Santos was patterned after Barack Obama

But there are other parallels that seemingly defy coincidence:

• Bartlett’s most controversial appointment to the Supreme Court is a Latino named Roberto Mendoza with a chip on his shoulder about racial profiling.

• Bartlett’s trip to China, late in his presidency, is interrupted by a North Korean nuclear test.

• A European passenger jet goes “off radar” while flying near Iran. (In the fictional world, it’s a British plane and the mishap is due to the Iranian Air Force’s mistaking it for a U.S. spy plane, not a French plane and faulty instrumentation, but you get the drift. This episode aired FRIDAY.)

This may only be fodder for collegiate drinking games, who knows? But how much of what happened in this alternate reality can be attributable to the policy roadmap that lies deep in the heart of the show’s Democratic advisors? We’ll know for sure when:

• Obama gets Israelis and the Palestinians to agree on a settlement that puts 20,000 U.S. peacekeepers on the ground in Jerusalem.

• The “college credit” becomes law.

• Both a conservative man and a “liberal lion” woman are appointed to the Supreme Court simultaneously. (The woman becomes Chief Justice.)

* Health care reform passes with $5 million caps on medical liability.

• Or… What can I say? You’ll just have to watch for yourselves.

(Note to speechwriters: Instead of having Obama speak to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner next year, stage a stand-up between Emanual and Whitman. This, I’d pay to watch.)

He chose the latter, and the result of that decision, San Diego News Network, went live March 23 as “Beta 2.9” at SDNN.com. It’s being watched with no little angst by newspaper publishers nationwide.

Why this entrepreneurial journalistic enterprise should merit such scrutiny boils down to a number of factors.
• SignOnSanDiego.com, with revenues of $19 million or more in 2008, was dominant in its market. It was also among the most profitable and heavily trafficked online newspaper sites anywhere in the country when the folks who were largely responsible for its success were given their walking papers. Everybody in our business was left to wonder – if an online newspaper site at the top of its game won’t suffice – what will?
• SDNN is comprised largely of the editorial talent laid off by the San Diego Union-Tribune. So, another point worth pondering is, did the paper sew the seeds of its own demise?
• SignOn and SDNN now battle for ad dollars in an environment where the traditional publisher has to sustain an expensive printing operation, and the upstart doesn’t. The ensuing battle for local digital supremacy may offer the industry a true apples-to-apples test-tube environment to help evaluate new business models.

That’s a lot to throw onto James’ shoulders, but he’s got the experience to be a worthy competitor, and seems to have made a lot of the right moves to date. He detailed the work in progress in an exclusive interview March 25.
First, a bit of background: James has always been an entrepreneur, and has had his own business, The James Gang, with his five brothers for more than three decades. At Time Warner, he pioneered broadband content for Road Runner, and in 1995 he launched San Diego Magazine, along with one of the first local blog networks winning him the first Webby for community. He took his video experience and multimedia storytelling techniques to the San Diego wildfires, and this work was featured and awarded at an NAA CONNECTIONS conference. He was pioneering SignOn Radio, an online radio station, admittedly a little before its time, when the pink slip came.

“I started looking around for other opportunities,” he said, “but that was difficult in San Diego, because the Union-Tribune was the be-all and end-all in this region.” At the same time, he didn’t want to move. While serving as SignOn’s managing editor, he’d done a survey of “who could compete with us online.” The fact is that what he calls the “big dogs” –CitySearch, Microsoft’s Sidewalk and AOL, all had tried and failed to make much of a dent in local reader awareness.

In assessing the local competition, it appeared that the TV stations didn’t have a big enough newsroom to challenge the Union-Tribune’s news supremacy, but did have an effective promotional vehicle with their daily broadcasts. There also were an assortment of community dailies who focused on their local towns and delivered what Web-savvy publishers today call “hyperlocal” coverage.

The question was, could James forge a coalition of enough local media outlets and enterprise reporters economically enough to become profitable? James thought it was doable. He began by getting letters of intent from local media companies to both cross-promote and deliver their reporting to what became the San Diego News Network for a share of the return. He then began recruiting a core staff to cover breaking news, enterprise subjects and other lifestyle areas that are popular online. Within the first week he’d secured San Diego Magazine, Channel 6, three radio stations and several community and ethnic newspapers. “Many of them knew they needed to be online, but they couldn’t compete on their own,” he said. (A full list of current partners is here.)

James, looking to fund the venture, reached out to Neil Senturia and Barbara Bry, well-known local entrepreneurs who had an entrepreneurial show on James’ local online radio station. Senturia, now the CEO, Bry and Kevin Hall forged a partnership with James and spearheaded a capital raising effort where investors contributed between $50,000 and $100,000 each. Together, they raised on the order of $1 million to launch the company.

James now has a staff of 9 full-time journalists focusing on breaking and enterprise news locally, and acting as editors for the different sections. Staffing the lifestyle sections was easy – “we got the best people out there. With the newspaper in a death spiral, they were cutting back on travel, food, gardening and science. These were all people who really love journalism and wanted the opportunity to get back into the business. “I told them that this would be journalism without the BS. Now they’re loving life, covering what they want to cover, how they want to cover it.” There are also 4 full time sales staff, with plans to enlarge this team to 9 by the end of next month.

Aside from the small, core staff, most of the section editors and writers are paid with a share of the revenue delivered by page views to their content. A freelancer might choose to be paid a flat fee, say $100 for an article, or can forgo a flat fee, or receive the recurring revenue from ads delivered by their growing audience. Visceral topics like wine, food, gardening, technology and the environment seem to attract talented writers with a love of their subject matter, and a willingness to join “the long tail.”

The typical ad placement is an IAB-standard big box ad; the writers don’t sell it and have no say in what goes into the ad, so there are no church and state issues, James said. Some 20 percent in commission comes off the top of that ad for the ad sales team, but the writer keeps the other 80%. SDNN derives revenue from other ad placements on the page. “The more quality stories a journalist can generate, the more revenue they’ll make, and it will keep paying regardless of whether it’s three months, six months or 6 years old.”

The truth is, many of the writers laid off by the Union-Tribune received a year’s severance, so they had the time and the inclination to invest in a new venture that could benefit from their expertise. California law bans non-competes.
SDNN’s media partners enjoy the same benefits, but each of the 25 plus is contractually obligated to promote SDNN in their own media. There are 15-16 newspapers, four radio stations, TV ads – James says it amounts to “the largest, longest lasting media campaign in media history.” Radio ads began airing about three weeks prior to launch. On launch day, March 20, the site served 177,000 page views.

There were glitches from the federated nature of the site – while the Word Press blogging platform was ideal to allow category and contributing editors and freelancers to maintain their own publishing spaces, it confounded the publishers’ attempts to maintain a single sign on scheme for users, leading them to have to post an explanation/apology.

James explains, “The first CMS (content management system) we had was so complex and arcane, it required people with HTML experience to pull it off. We needed something really simple so we abandoned the CMS just weeks before launch.” But in every challenge, there’s a silver lining, or as James puts it, “a chance to turn lemons into lemonade.”
“Rather than unveiling everything all at once, we’re now having a kind of rollout launch, section by section. You don’t see all the sections we’re going to have, but this gives our visitors a chance to get to know us and meet our staff.” Staff-generated articles carry the SDNN logo, which James intends to be a kind of imprimatur for the quality visitors can expect from his editorial team. Within 6 to 8 weeks, the site will boast over 24 sections and subsections. But the introduction process means there’s always something new for readers to check out.

James is confident the site will be profitable by year’s end. As for the Union-Trib’s near $20 million mark, that income supported a staff of 70. – “If I could have a staff of 20 people and came anywhere close (to that figure), I’d be in hog heaven,” James laughs.

Fundamentally, SDNN’s model is still ad-supported, but with a more sophisticated kind of search engine optimization model built in. Ironically, by centering on the very categories Web users find most entertaining and targeted, the opportunity exists to build robust channels that can be more easily matched to their corresponding advertising interests. “We’re getting higher CPMs because every story has its own locale, and its own traffic and revenue generation (infrastructure),” James explained. “Instead of going out and just selling to everyone (in San Diego), we targeted five vertical packages for launch. We sold out in three days.”

Media partners will share in a pool of revenue that’s apportioned from gross proceeds once the site is profitable. They all know there’s a building process, so they’re willing to be patient. They deliver SDNN all their stories, from which James and his editors are allowed to “cherry pick.” Each has the same ad inventory ratio as SDNN, so they can sell it themselves, use it to promote their other media, or give it back to SDNN to sell for them. Whoever sells the inventory keeps 80% of the revenue generated.

The beauty of the model is that each of them now feel that they share in a virtual newsroom, with an embarrassment of riches the Tribune decided it could no longer sustain – three former food and wine writers plus one formerly with the Los Angeles Times, just as an example. “We have eight writers in just the food section, and the Union-Tribune now has none. They’re relying now on contributions from writers in other departments.”

James knows he benefitted from a kind of “Perfect Storm” besetting the newspaper industry, and acknowledges that he’s living out a kind of “morality play. A lot of newspapers got very fat and happy. They can be hidebound and very arrogant,” he said. “They didn’t truly exploit the opportunities on the Internet. And it was always a struggle between the online newsroom and the print newsroom.”

On a more basic level, there was an unwillingness to acknowledge that people, especially young people, increasingly weren’t buying the newspaper – they were only getting it online. Rather than blaming online for the shift, the prudent thing to do would have been to channel more resources into the online operation, making Web-first publishing the core of the business. Such a thing would have called for “dramatic changes,” he explains. But, “if (SignOn) had put the resources into their own online operation, and beefed it up with our somewhat unusual strategy, they wouldn’t have left the vacuum” that SDNN now fills.

James acknowledges that, without the disruption caused by the layoffs (especially his own) and the resulting diminishment of the product, it’s hard to see how SDNN could have forged the foundation for success. But he still holds Union-Tribune executive managers responsible for the result. “They had to think outside the box,” and didn’t, he explains. “What was happening was that the online version of the San Diego Union Tribune primarily reflects the newspaper content. The newspaper’s lifestyle sections and business sections continue to shrink, and the online version suffers correspondingly.”

Unwilling to see the success of the online site as the future, managers instead cut back on the whole business. “In reinventing the wheel, they got rid of the people who’d brought them to the dance,” James said. “They knew we had a successful model, but they didn’t fully appreciate our stature as one of the best Web sites in the industry in our heyday. It’s a bit like the prophet never being followed in his own land. They didn’t understand what they had.”
In reinventing themselves, the newspaper lost some of their best talent and most diverse voices in the process, James says; “They set themselves up for this… it’s the ultimate unintended consequence. Instead of being creative and figuring out how the Web site could have addressed different interests, they did what they did with Craigslist. They let someone else jump in and get that business.”

Success for SDNN isn’t assured by any means – “It’s too premature to tell whether this is the ultimate model for regional news and information,” says James, but he adds that the community “response is overwhelmingly positive.” Readers comment that they’re seeing a lot of the names that they miss in the paper, and recognize the quality of the reporting. “There’s always this fear that, if the newspaper disappears, society won’t have a significant journalistic presence – that somehow the disappearance of the newsroom will cause news to disappear,” James says.

“We may never have newsrooms the size that they were again,” he says matter-of-factly. “But there will be organizations like ourselves that excel at entertainment and investigative journalism in a community. People worried about the quality and type of content they were going to get from us. We tried to demonstrate that we could deliver diversity and depth – some fluffy, some in-depth, always entertaining and informative and very well written.”
He adds, “I was at the right place at the right time, with a concept that works.” Newspapers, in order to survive, may have to apply many of the same strategies: leverage your partners, respect your talent, dispense with political games and let your writers and editors do what they love to do, and keep your costs down as much as possible.

Would such an experiment be possible in other communities, perhaps with the participation of the local newspaper? James says, “The answer is ‘yes,’ but it’s not an easy process. It’s not easy putting together a coalition of media companies, and the diverse journalists they comprise, but yes, it’s possible. It’s really the only way you can do it. In most communities you have these local media companies probably doing okay financially, but not doing anything significant online, so it’s a no-brainer for them to want to be a part of something like this.”

The amalgamation that emerges may well capture the best of all contributors, and blur the lines of traditional and Web media. “We’ll have our own SDNN radio and TV programs within a year,” James vows. He adds, without a touch of bravado, “I didn’t do this just to compete with SignOn and bring them down. I did this because this is what I do well, and I just wanted to stay in San Diego.”

The typical defining moment phrases in presidential memorial were reiterated:

Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

John F. Kennedy: “The torch has been passed to a new generation.”

Richard Nixon: “I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”

Ronald Reagan: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Other than Nixon’s assertion, given the lie by truth’s antiseptic, none of these proclamations could be viewed with irony in hindsight. But this one at least opens the door to the obvious Bush declaratory imprint: “Mission accomplished.”

It stands to reason that a generation that popularized the term “whatever” — something that’s always made me cringe for its antithesis of owning up to reality/responsibility — would happily attribute last eight years to a sentiment that reflects the inverse of what was intended.

Unfortunately, in this case the shoe fits. Always ahead of her time, Alanis Morissette wrote the anthem for Bush’s departure in 1995 when she penned “Ironic“. It’s the good advice you just didn’t take, Mr. President. That’s what’s gotten us here.

But America’s too good to wallow in irony. (In my mind’s eye I see the Sunday, Jan. 4 comic Prickly City with the characters atop a giant 2009 asking “is it change yet?“) Change is constant, but those who remark it least are those who work to precipitate it. The one thing that’s got to change, if we’re to grow beyond dyspepsia and truly change America for the better is for everyone to roll up their sleeves and participate.

Belief — living purposefully and in the moment — this is the opposite of irony, and the only way to look back on the Obama legacy with something more than regret for what could have been.

Isn’t it ironic?

Three CT lawmakers have actually appealed to the Commission or the state Department of Economic & Community Development in Hartford to act to forestall the closure of two Journal Register newspapers, the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press. Besides the loss of jobs, they write, “We are equally concerned about what the loss of these newspapers would mean for our communities. There are many, many important ways that a locally-based newspaper is a central point of information and record about a city.” How can a community rebuild economically without the help of its local press? they asked. “Having a locally-based newspaper is important for public accountability,” as well. “As elected officials, ourselves, we want [the] pubic to have access to independent news about what is going on in government and our communities. We share the sentiments of our nation’s leaders who wrote [in] the Bill of Rights that a free press is an essential part of democracy.” (Letter posted at narbosa.com.)

Certainly the lawmakers need help in editing their letters; maybe they can employ someone from the papers, should they perish, as personal correspondents? But, seriously, a bailout? Does no-one worry about a too-close connection to government of an entity that would be beholden to the deep pockets of the very folks making the policies that the public demands it critique? Why aren’t the locals themselves supporting a free press? Do they not care about democracy?

We on the online side of newspapers have long raged against the machine that is the “mainstream media,” but the conundrum of the small town newspaper is especially taxing. Companies that have endeavored to elevate these markets to the level of a national network have largely failed, mostly because of their too great attention to preserving the print edition in lieu of leveraging both print and online for what they each do best. It takes too much money to sustain the kind of print operation that has existed to date; the news is important, as are the ads, but the delivery is all wrong, and it’s too costly and too cumbersome to continue in its current form.

In light of taxpayers being asked to bailout Detroit, think of it as the economic developers being asked to support their father’s Oldsmobile in lieu of a sleeker, more “fuel efficient” newspaper.

If these papers truly are on the chopping block, what does Journal Register have to lose? Sell the printing press to a local printer and outsource the delivery of a weekly shopper. Use the last edition to announce the sale of a subscription-supported email or even e-Edition newspaper, published twice daily, with optional text alerts for breaking news. Say good-bye to the press guys. (Sorry. Unemployed myself, so I share your pain in the loyalty you bear this industry.)

Make money the hard way, by delivering audience where they live and work. Start now by hosting seminars training your most loyal subscribers how to get the news they need, without the wrapper. Put classifieds online, turning them into personalized alerts, and deliver coupons, ads and everything else possible into people’s inboxes. Charge $4.99/month for an iPhone ap that grants one-touch access to the mobile edition.

And leave the government supported news biz to VOA.

As a couple of side notes, the non-profit Wikipedia is halfway to its goal of raising $6 million in donations to keep the doors open. Meanwile, among the Net’s best, NYTimes.com’s Vivian Schiller leaves to join NPR as CEO. There’s something here to the tune of, where your heart is, your wallet will follow.

if you don’t already have a solution for self-service display advertising, look into AdReady. The company offers self-service display advertising from more than 700 templates, sorted by best performing, newest templates and most used. (And, why would any advertiser want to use ads that don’t work?) The New York Times has just launched its self-service platform using AdReady.More…

And there’s even a similar solution for video ads, but Jivox goes the next step and offers to place the video ads users create for free in a geotargeted environment.

Currently, it’s only newspaper affiliate is Brown Publishing, but its network purportedly reaches 40 million users through local TV and niche sites.

“Newspapers are the smallest part of our network but the fastest growing,” said Diaz Nesamoney, company president and CEO. CPMs range around $15, which fee is split between Jivox and the online publisher. The Indian company has raised its series A round and is looking for network partners.

Other very decent technologies or services haven’t managed to make it into our report for lack of space or concentration. We’d suggest that in lieu of a forgettable paperback you invest the time in simply pinging down the list of the AO 250 if only for the entertainment value.

As Bay-area rapper Mistah FAB (http://www.mistahfab.com/) said when asked on a panel what he’d like to see Internet entrepreneurs develop, he said, “Who knows, man? [There are] so many things available to us we may not even be aware of. If you’re smart, you’re smart enough to know you know not much at all… [You gotta] never give up learning. …With the world at our fingertips there’s endless opportunity.”

What’s jarring about this is that everything seasoned observers said at the show seemed to indicate that phone makers will have to start looking a lot more like publishers if they’re to survive because the platform itself is becoming a commodity.

Take Nokia. Kamar Shah, Head of Industry Marketing, Services and Software, for Nokia, painted a picture of the future where Nokia sounds much more like a publisher than a device manufacturer. In Shah’s world, social networks become the crossroads of mobility and the Internet. “People, time, place all start to make sense… Equipped with GPS and a mobile camera, you can take a photo and share it in real time instantly with a network.” Advertising in such a space will bring new levels of relevance. Nokia maps will point to services users can find near them. More…

Shah says Nokia bought M-pocket, a mobile advertising and media company, to begin to monetize this new world. “When you buy your Nokia device, it comes with a subscription to music, and you can purchase games.” Since both this and the Symbian platform it also purchased are “open platform,” Nokia hopes others will use these tools to build services for mobile users.

Shawn Conahan, CEO of Intercasting, a company that builds highly specialized mobile interfaces for social networks, said every player in the mobile space aspires to be the ‘google of social networking.’” What worries him a bit if the interfaces are completely open is that anyone will be able to grab the public friends directories off of sites like MySpace and duplicate users’ whole “social graphs,” a prospect he called scary.

Maybe they should call it a ‘Friend’ vs. a ‘Phone’
But if they’re worried about this, consumers don’t show it. Nokia says its own research shows that mobile users are only talking 12 percent of the time, meaning the rest of their mobile connect time is spent sharing photos, with social applications and browsing. And, in more than 20 emerging markets, he added, for most mobile users, the interactive functions of their phone are their first experiences in social networking.

The trend towards opening the platforms where mobile networks live was in part spurred by Google, which said it would spend nearly $13 Billion on wireless spectrum if the Federal Communications Commission forced open mobile operating sytems. The FCC propagated such rules, AT&T and Verizon bought the spectrum, and google will benefit by being able to furnish its Android OS to any phones that connect to these carriers.

Yet Anthony Lewis, VP of Open Development at Verizon Wireless isn’t bothered by the trade-offs. Claiming he relishes the role of “insurgent,” he says opening up the software for cell phones “gives us carte blanche to line up more cool devices” like Kindle. “We’ll take any device and load any device” onto the network, he vowed. He predicted a wave of machine-to-machine devices such as parking meters that could talk to a central hub using more open software. The issue becomes one of pricing and it’s the one fear he has of making a misstep: “We have to be innovative,” he said.

Was this the kind of “open” system Google had in mind? “It’s going the right direction,” said Rich Miner, Google’s VP of Mobile. “We wouldn’t have AT&T and Verizon fighting about who is more open if it weren’t a value to consumers,” he added.

In this new world, the manufacturer sells a device to a consumer, who goes to a certified Web portal and downloads the usage plan of his choice. It’s up to device manufacturers and carriers to make sure the devices and applications they download won’t harm the network, Lewis said.

The whole reason for Android, Miner said, is that mobile developers needed a common platform for which to develop. “The existing fragmented Lynux world was bad for the mobile space.” Now software developers, OEMs, carriers “are all an important part of the ecosystem and are helping us with the requirements.” Beyond some open source compliance testing, Minder forsees extensive freedom in designing the user interface, so long as it conforms to google’s idea of usability.

As for whether news publishers would ever play in that development space, that would depend on their willingness to get out there and play with the tools, but Mark Rolston, chief creative officer for Frog Design said, that Google had produced “a fantastic toolkit and SDK. Already it’s a really elegant environment to work on. “

What this marks for mobile is a big shift in who is influencing the development of the mobile platform, from phone manufacturers and carriers to people who understand software and user applications.

Apple may be credited in large measure for the shift, said Matt Murphy, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. “The iPhone ap store changed the world in 10 days,” he said. Giving developers a fixed 30/70 revenue share lent a measure of certainty to the environment as well, making the effort of developing to the iPhone worthwhile.

Who will Profit from Location Based Services?
As for who stands to make money with location-based services, most Summit attendees predicted that carriers will take a major share. But with GPS in more than 300 million handsets, the real issue becomes how locally-based information fights its way back upstream to navigationally-empowered users.

Even without its Android operating system installed, google has changed the landscape by making its maps available to mobile users. Where things get interesting is when either carriers make the actual cell-ID location of users available as information to be tapped by potential marketers and information providers, or when landmark recognition databases make even this targeting obsolete.

(That last comment might have whizzed by – as Nokia’s CTO, Bob Iannucci explained it, Nokia is experimenting with landscape recognition software so mobile users in the future might be able to scan in a picture of where they are, and so find things of interest nearby.)

So, who owns the user’s location? The user, said Sumit Agarwal, senior product manager for mobile at Google. “All our applications ask the user whether they want to share their location” to get more information. Today Google’s My Location feature already takes information broadcast from mobile towers nearby and can offer local dining or shopping choices.

“Cell tower information is the property of the carrier, so it would be better if we all saw a way to monetize that and take it out of the closet,” said Iannucci, but panelists agreed that until they see revenue coming their way, carrlers would rather play “cat and mouse games” to mask these location data.

“The question is, how can I create a marketplace for my location information, so I benefit by giving it up?” Ianncci said. “Maybe it’s not just about more targeted ads,” either. Developers have only scratched the surface, he said.

Mobile Favorites
As for what mobile applications that most appealed to me – well this came as a surprise. While mobile video applications like ZipClip (which promises to “fun up” your phone), and GoldSpot Media (mobile industry’s first end-to-end dynamic ad insertion solutions for 3G) captured much of the buzz, it was the personal applications that really grabbed me.

PageOnce is that company that, once you see it, you’ll wonder where it’s been all your life. Billed as a “personal internet assistant,” PageOnce allows you to compile and consolidate on one page all the Web sites that are important to you, including all of the passwords, codes, access keys etc. for which you may rely on any single computer. Imagine if you were to change jobs… suddenly. Do you know all your log-
ons to the sites that help you run your life? What if you couldn’t ask those sites to email you your passwords because you could no longer access that email address? Now you’re starting to appreciate just 1/10th of the efficiencies PageOnce provides.

It was developed with direct-connects to your account pages using the kind of “military level” security you’d expect from an Israeli-based firm. In fact, once your accounts are organized in one place, it becomes much easier for PageOnce to detect and alert you of fraud in any of your accounts. Now, imagine this application not just on the Web but on an iPhone. CEO Guy Goldstein says the company is planning to extend the platform to other devices soon, but it may not be necessary. His application alone could make a market for the device.

Mind you, it does serve to turn advertising on its head. The way the site will make money is in the “taglines” or custom customer communications that each company may make to their own constituents in the interface. Just as your American Express or Dish bill may contain offers, so will your PageOnce page when you pull up any given site’s data. Sort of gives “direct” marketing a whole new meaning.

The second application you’ll wish you’d though of comes from a company called reQall, based in Moffett Field, Ca. ReQall connects all the ways mobile users communicate in one easy, seamless system, and even works free with the technology you may already use to keep yourself organized. Pulling together IMs, news feeds, to do lists and other reminders, it makes ideas almost magnetic. If you’re the kind of person who often has so many things to do in a given day that it almost doesn’t matter which one you pick, just shake your iPhone – reQall will pick one for you and bring it to your opening screen. (Do not attempt with un-enabled phones.)

How reQall makes money is a bit more elusive, but a sponsorship for Adderal seems a likely fit.