These days, we're all making a lot of our shopping purchases online. The most significant challenge e-commerce sites face is translating the experience that consumers get in store to a similar one online. With regards to book buying, that's exactly the experience that Zoomii is trying to build.

Chris Thiessen, operator and founder of Zoomii, loves bookstores and would spend afternoons wandering throughout shelves of books, browsing and stumbling upon books he had never even heard of. That's the magic of bookstores that any booklover can identify with. Browsing the hundreds of books, waiting to see what catches your eye and imagination.

The objective of Zoomii is to bring that experience online. Zoomii is a place where users go on and hang out rather than leave an e-commerce site having fulfilling a specific purpose.

The user experience is ver unique. Just like any other bookstore users can select a bookshelf with the genre of book they'd like to browse. They can then scan through the various shelves and check out the different titles available to them. Zoomii boasts an inventory of books from Amazon thanks to their Associates Web Services.

Zoomii already enjoys 350,000 users to date and a monthly average of 10,000 users. For those of you out there who love the traditional book shopping experience, Zoomii is definitely an e-commerce experience for you to check out.

Imagine being able to express yourself to a computer in a way that they understand you. Imagine having a computer make your online experience so simple that you are able to complete tasks faster than ever. Seem unimaginable? Not for the team at Primal Fusion.

What the Waterloo startup is accomplishing is having your online experience automated for you by your computer. It's called Thought Networking with the idea of thinking online and acting online. You put in a request to your computer and it will automatically search the expansive database of information online to find you the data you need.

Think about it. There are billions of web pages out there that currently host various types of information. Imagine a student trying to write a term paper. They start out with a topic that leads them to begin researching. This kind of thing can take weeks or even months to find all of the information they need, digest it and put it in a form that they can use to write their paper. What Primal Fusion and their idea of Thought Networking is trying to shorten that experience and have it done for you.

How this works is users shorten the research process by brainstorming with Primal Fusion about the topic: what's needed, desired outcome, outlines, etc. Once that's completed, they will send out “agents” into the Internet that will find the relevant information and digest it for them in minutes, which allow the user to get started with their project faster.

But this isn't just for students. Peter Sweeney, co-founder of Primal Fusion, says, “It's for anyone who has a sustained interest in a topic. For example: house hunters looking for their dream home, a marketer who has to deliver a report or even someone who's looking for the love of their life.” Users simply describe what they're thinking about and how they want it delivered and the system will conform all the relevant data that's out there for them.

Primal Fusion operates with a very talented and experienced management team, thirty-five employees and a research advisory board with talent in the areas of patents and IP strategy, data mining, data visualization, statistical computing, probabilistic databases, query optimizations, information retrieval, knowledge representation, rhetoric, and interaction design.

If Thought Networking seems like something you'd like to try you can register to the private alpha and try it for free. If Primal Fusion seems like an organization you'd like to work for you're in luck as they're always looking for new talent to add to their ranks. Simply check out their careers page for opportunities.

This startup profile has been brought to by by Sun Startup Essentials.

Exactly one year after Jeff Fedor and Terry Goertz started their company, ParkVu has launched its first product.

i2b is a BlackBerry application that gives users mobile access to their iTunes libraries (typically on their home computers) and automatically updates the BlackBerry so that it has all the tracks from selected iTunes playlists, which can include the most played and most recently added playlists.

So, now you can access all of your iTunes library at any time (if your home computer is on—if it isn't, i2b still makes 100 tracks available). And there's no more need for USB cables—tracks can be moved to your BlackBerry through a Wi-Fi connection or through the cellular network. Cost for the service is $2.99 a month.

Full details are available from the ParkVu website.