Startups were displaying their wares last night at the SF Beta mixer held at San Francisco's 111 Minna gallery. They ran the gamut from established privately held companies such as Facebook to completely new launches such as Rightround's BandBot.

While mulling over the evening, I came across a post today entitled "Your Startup Was My 3rd Grade Science Project":

"All 'us web geeks' have figured out how to do is speak one word sentences into a big machine that spits back a list of crap, broadcast music, upload videos, write short rants, publish innane thoughts in broken english, collect fake friends, organize pictures and rank shit"

That captures part of my view about some of the startups on display last night. Most face severe challenges establishing barriers to entry and drawing an audience. Without capital or a differentiated or extremely valuable service, success, if it comes, will be modest.

Here's a complete rundown of the startups in order of preference that I managed to find in the chaotic demo area:

Facebook - Impressive to see them displaying their wares at grassroots events like this. As if any of the attendees hadn't heard of them before.

Prosper - The second most developed of the demoing startups. Its peer to peer lending model fills a void in the marketplace. Now it needs to attract more participants.

Kongregate - Online gaming community competing with AddictingClips and others. Closed an angel round last week which should allow it to further refine its business model.

YourStreet - Online real estate is a good market to be in and this site is well organized and easy to use. Questions remain though. How will the site attract people and how will it convince them to take the time to contribute content?

Rightround - Showed off a new service called BandBot to help musicians manage their online marketing activities across various sites. It's good that they're charging for it off the bat but I wonder if a freemium model might serve them better.

SpotDJ - Integrates into iTunes and allows users and celebrities to comment on songs and then share them with others. Neat service but needs to figure out how to make money from it.

FreePledge - The concept of shaving a slice off of every consumer purchase for charitable organizations is a good one, but this startup's current process for doing it doesn't make it easy enough for retailers or consumers to get involved.

Chesspark - It was a battle for the bottom with FreePledge, but ChessPark takes it for being king of niche. Looks fun but it might be better off as one of the 3000 games on Kongregate.

Others that were there that I didn't get a chance to speak with were Wrike, which was busy demoing its project management service on a laptop after the show was over, and Fliptrack, which could be a hit if it gains initial traction. I never found table 2 so I'll have to learn about SoftSearch and Xcellery another time.

Tags: facebook, sf+beta, sfbeta, vc, venture capital