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Ready for Launch

by Angela Hey

Launch Silicon Valley (launchsiliconvalley.org), organized by Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs and co-hosted by Garage Technology Ventures, recently showcased 29 promising startup companies at Microsoft's Mountain View campus.

Over 170 companies — in application services, business, digital media, energy, next generation Internet and life sciences tracks — applied for 10-minute speaking spots. At the end of each session, the audience voted for the company most likely to succeed.

According to speaker David Crane, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's advisor on jobs and economic growth, 800,000 new jobs have been created in the state since Schwarzenegger took office. Maybe Guy Kawasaki has the best job of all: He managed to generate millions in a few months, after investing just over $12,000, by developing his true rumor Web site, Truemors.com. (Students, what an idea for a summer job: Get creative, team up and build a site with Wordpress and a Yahoo Web hosting account like Guy.)

If you can't create a Web site, then Yodio helps you create a podcast using your cell phone or computer, complete with photos. If you want to speak for free with buddies, Jaxtr has the widget for you. Put it on your community site MySpace, LinkedIn, Blogger, eBay and Craigslist. It lets people call you without showing your phone number. Jaxtr won the "next generation Internet" session.

If your buddies aren't around, e-mail them a recorded video message using Eyejot, one of two winners in the business category.

LogSavvy, the "application services" track winner, is developing analytics software to analyze user behavior on community Web sites. It helps site owners and enterprises understand what makes people connect, who the group influencers are and what pages people read the most.

Sharing expertise and experiences was a recurring theme. Wrike has a clever application that helps schedule projects based on e-mail content. So if I arrange to meet you for lunch on a certain date, it reads the e-mail and puts it in a schedule for me that I can share with my team. If I want to collaborate on a spreadsheet, Datamash helps me to do that. For simple, non-critical applications, an alternative would be Google's spreadsheet, but Datamash works on a user's own computer data files, supporting the richer functionality of MS Excel as well as other applications.

For shared experiences, SnapJot lets each group member upload pictures to a Web site and that can be easily selected and printed in a book as a memento. This would be an ideal way to share memories of a vacation, wedding or sporting event with non-technical friends. Meanwhile, Spresent enables you to share animated presentations on Web sites and blogs using Adobe's Flash technology.

When chatting with a Web cam, my niece had all kinds of advice for me on how to look cool — wear low cut jeans, don't tuck in your shirt. But using fix8's application, I can replace myself with an avatar that moves whenever I do. To complete the look, I gave my avatar a wig and sunglasses. Fix8 plans to add more characters and accessories, which is good as most of the avatars look menacing to me.

If you prefer to meet people in person, BooRah helps choose a restaurant, and even the chef, from over 75,000 in SF, LA and NY. It scours the Web for restaurant reviews, using natural language processing, and promotes them on local sites (including on the Voice's Web site, www.mv-voice.com).

The final keynote speaker was Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, as well as entrepreneur, Oxonian philosopher and investor. Sharing insights from his ventures, including PayPal, he claimed that being an entrepreneur was like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down. Funding is an upward draft — it keeps you aloft for only a while. How you finance building the plane depends on the economic climate; you can be more edgy in good economic times, and go in small steps when capital is lean.

Finally, if you want to check out relationships between speakers, companies, board members and their investors, then LinkSViewer from GroupScope graphically shows connections.

Angela Hey can be reached at amhey@techviser.com.