[Posted on January 30, 2008 - 6:26 PM]
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DiggPalm Desert, Calif.-While it might seem difficult to classify 77 presenting companies into a few broad buckets, most of the startups presenting at Demo this week can be placed into three major segments:
Social Media - The number of startups displaying features that enable collaboration over the web was astounding. Nick Sturiale (pictured at right), who joined Carlyle Group from Sevin Rosen to invest in startups that have already received seed funding, said he's wary of, but open to, social media startups. I thought social search companies Circos and Delver were particularly interesting. Scott Smith, an angel investor in Circos and managing director of San Francisco investment banking boutique Viant Group, said that predictive search startup HubDub might be one that rises above the clutter on the exhibition floor.- Enterprise 2.0 - The inclusion of collaborative web technologies in the enterprise is finally now being applied intelligently by startups. Examples include online recruitment technology company Standout Jobs and online project management company Huddle.net.
Content Creation - David Lane of Onset Ventures (pictured at right) believes the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is still underway and provides users with new ways of creating and interacting with content on the web no matter where they are. The best company I saw falling into this category was Xtranormal, a Canadian company that has allows users to create avatar-based stories. It's being launched in April and should be very popular among kids between the ages of 5 and 25. Other interesting ones were View22's fast growing SceneCaster service, Ribbit's online phone service and Skyfire's mobile browser.
Despite the fact that more than 30 venture capitalists attended Demo this year and could be seen roaming the exhibition hall, they didn't hit all of the promising companies in attendance. The CEO of SproutBuilder, a widget creation tool which received rave reviews, told me that somehow no venture capitalists had spoken to him yet. While the company has raised a total of $3.3 million previously, it's surprising that all the investors missed a company getting a lot of buzz in a hot segment. But, then again, as one venture capitalist told me, 'The real value of the conference is the hallway chatter." - Joshua Jaffe
Joshua Jaffe is general manager of TechConfidential.com.
Joshua -- sorry I missed you at DEMO. Thank you for the brief writeup - I appreciate it.
We had a lot of strong interest from a number of people - VCs, partners, customers, press, etc. - so it was great to present at DEMO.