TechCrunch40 - 3 to Watch

A number of start-ups (40 to be exact) publicly demonstrated their product for the first time at TechCrunch40 in San Fransisco earlier this week. A 10 - 15 minute 'dog and pony' to an impressive line-up of industry guru's and Valley VCs allowed these businesses to demo their wares.

I have looked at them all. You too can check out all 40 by clicking here. I thought three stood out.



Yap provides voice-to-text translation services for mobile phones. Users can say anything they like and Yap will send a text copy to anyone of their contacts. The service is completely automated so you won't have intermediary Yap employees listening to your messages, typing them and then sending them out. They also have a text messaging application call Yap9 that allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, and co-workers. Users can also use the application to instantly query mobile web services just by talking. They can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and YouTube, or interact with Facebook without using their phones' miniature keyboards.



Orgoo is your personal communications cockpit, where every tool you need to communicate and express yourself online is organized and integrated together in one place. All of your email accounts, IM accounts, video chat, video mail, SMS, voice, all working together to give you one seamless experience. Orgoo is free, requires no downloads, and can be accessed from any web browser or mobile phone.



Viewdle is a media platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video. The technology they are developing will let video content owners extract metadata from news, shows, movies, and Internet video. Content owners can leverage both their new and old content with Viewdle's internal and white-label search and indexing capabilities to maximize relevance, usage, audience and monetization. This is much more effective than the old method of text-based metadata indexing. Viewdle has a killer feature in its facial-recognition technology. It is able to index video frame-by-frame and create a "real-time index of true on-screen appearances with unrivaled accuracy and relevance." They plan on building one of the largest databases of people-in-video references.

Special mention goes to Ponoko. The world's first personal manufacturing platform, Ponoko is the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a distributed network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas, on demand.

....And it is based in Wellington, NZ. Well done Ponoko. You did the country's ICT space proud.