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The ongoing Mashup Camp show in Palo Alto, Calif. is teeming with companies claiming they’ve found features that search giants, in particular Google, haven’t yet, rejected, or just flat missed.
For instance, PodBop‘s feature searches based on a geographic location and podcasts by bands set to appear in those locales. It’s rumored to have won best-of-show honors.
By finding niches, these companies seek to prove there’s room for new firms despite the significant share of the overall search market captured by Google and the majors have.
Don’t look to Google, Yahoo, AOL or the other majors for something anywhere near like TwoCrowds, which lets people contribute the predictions and share them with others. The search engines top two most popular predictions, and by theory the ones most likely to actually come true, are now “Apple Computer will release a phone” and “Google Will advertise on TV.”</ p>
There’s room for more search engine business models, believe firms like Edgeio. The search engine plumbs RSS feeds, an increasingly popular self-publishing technique, to give Web interests “of all sizes the means to control how their content is published, discovered and consumed.”