It's hard to pick just one favorite, so here are my personal top ten, clustered along leading themes from the evening. Given that most of my interest nowadays follows a mobile <--> social <--> commerce <--> cloud continuum, this high hit rate is no surprise:
Commerce
- Appetizer – Automated mobile app builder for small businesses; the company can deliver a startingly complete app using existing Facebook Page information.
- Daily Gobble – Sabre for restaurants; their go-to-market plan targets fast casual chains.
- LaunchBit – Ad network for email newsletters.
- Snapette – Photo sharing and fashion discovery.
Social
- Loku (FKA Borrowed Sugar) – A Flipboard-like experience for local news, deals, and search.
- OVIA – A video screening platform that sharply reduces the time and expense spent interviewing job candidates. Current clients ran the gamut from Hasbro to Taskrabbit.
- Singboard – Online karaoke, unexpectedly interesting and the best pitch of the night.
Cloud
- LaunchRock – Platform for product launches that moves customer relationships (auth and user management) into the cloud.
- Tinfoil Security – Security screening and live monitoring for SMB web sites. Know where hackers can crack their way in.
- ToutApp - Salesforce–like email and email templates, structured along a freemium model. This sounds bland, but is quite cool in action. I'm definitely signing up as a user on this one.
Note: after a bit of consideration, I removed "mobile" as a theme...given the trends around connected devices, most models incoporate a substantial mobile component. There's also a notable amount of small business targeting, given both the consumerification (an ugly buzzword) of business services and the surfeit of mindshare allocated to local deals.
Though I forced myself to pick ten (leaving out plenty of other interesting companies), the class was uniformly impressive and there are a bunch of betas I'll be signing up for. Check out the bunch for yourself.
