About a month ago, we did a fun side project collaborating with a the brain-trust of companies listed above: GE wanted to allow people at TED to tweet commentary to digital whiteboards in three different locations.

First, people would draw ideas on electronic white boards, usually around how GE could leverage its massive infrastructure and economies of scope & scale for sustainability goals.

The TED crowd commented on the ideas using Twitter.

The whiteboard sketches, Twitter commentary, pictures from TED on Flickr, and general #TED tweets were all sucked into a real-time content routing platform we built in a week called Germane. Germane divvied up the firehose of content via some innovative server technology and a simple AJAX interface to a team of professional content moderators who took a look at things, and the output was a combined into a single RSS feed output with a developer API inspired by the awesome Summize/Twitter Search.  This approved content was then back on the whiteboards and on http://ge.com/ted within seconds of being sent from TED audience members.

When your real-time content (texts, tweets, RSS, emails, IMs, photostreams, blog posts, etc) needs to make it to public screens, yet be kept on-topic and reviewed for appropriateness –  talk to us about using Germane.

PS – Thanks to Jacob@Syrup, Robert@Publicclass, Maggie@Twitter, and Keith@ICUC – you were all great to work with.