We were fortunate enough to witness a lot of fascinating startups strut their stuff here at TechCrunch Disrupt, not just on the main stage but also in the Startup Alley and beyond.
But of course the event is and remains a competition, so the experts have been working hard to select those startups with the most potential to be genuinely disruptive, and vote them into the second round of the pitching contest. Just ten of the original twenty startups have been invited back to round two.
The final few startups will be announced tomorrow, and they’ll be back on stage for the final round of demo and rapid-fire Q&A with our experts.
Appbistro is an application marketplace for Facebook pages. At Appbistro, page administrators can quickly find applications that they can easily plug into their pages and quickly increase the engagement and reach of their pages. The applications within the marketplace are built by known and vetted Facebook developers, and feature applications for Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and more.
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.
Appbistro is an application marketplace for Facebook pages. At Appbistro, page administrators can quickly find applications that they can easily plug into their pages and quickly increase the engagement and reach of their pages. The applications within the marketplace are built by known and vetted Facebook developers, and feature applications for Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and more.
Betterment is the replacement for your savings account. It’s a smart investment that’s easy to use, and you have access to your money at any time. You invest in our two portfolios—a diverse basket of stocks and a portfolio of ultra-safe bonds—in a blend of your choosing. There’s no minimum balance, no transaction fees, and no investing experience required. So you earn more from your savings with fewer hassles.
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.
Betterment is a goal-based online investment company delivering smart, personalized financial advice paired with low fees and a superb customer experience. Launched in 2010, Betterment’s automated platform eliminates the typical complexities and time of the traditional investment account, freeing up time for other important things in life. Behavioral guardrails built into the account help users make savvy, rational decisions with their finances. For more information, please visit http://www.Betterment.com and follow @Betterment on twitter.
Compass Labs is a social e-commerce company, which increases the effectiveness of social networks for both users and advertisers. Users obtain timely, highly relevant information, and advertisers to precisely reach users at the right moment. Compass Labs’s solutions are effective in extracting precise meaning from social media communication, and leveraging that for timely and precise ads targeting, and for enabling content/user discovery.
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.
Compass Labs provides a self-service or fully managed advertising platform called CLIQ (Compass Labs IQ) that makes targeted, scalable social media ad campaigns easy to execute and measure for agencies and brands.
LiveIntent‘s mission is to help you create meaningful connections on social media. It helps answer the question: “Who do I follow?”. For publishers, having a LiveIntent window on your site is opening the door to let in engaged and repeat users to your site, significantly increasing pageviews, ad impressions, unique visitors, and revenue.
For advertisers, it’s an enabling technology that builds stronger and longer lasting relationships between brands and consumers in social media.
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.
LiveIntent solves a universal problem faced by publishers, advertisers and agencies: How to effectively sell and buy email ad inventory. LiveIntent for Publishers (LFP) combines a powerful prediction engine with an ad management and targeting facility that works in the inbox making realtime ad serving a possibility for the first time. Before LiveIntent, buying display in email was operationally inefficient, expensive and unscalable. Limitation imposed by email - no iframes, no javascript, no flash and spotty cookies prevented...
MOVIECLIPS.com is a premium online video destination offering audiences the largest and most diverse collection of movie scenes. It allows fans to find, watch and share more than 12,000 movie clips. Each clip is tagged with up to 1,000 pieces of data (dialogue, actor, director, action, mood, etc) to make the most searchable collection of movie scenes on the web. Users can also compete in movie trivia games and create hilarious movie mashups.
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.
ZEFR is a premiere network on YouTube and the solution for content owners in movies, television, music and sports. ZEFR’s unique technology identifies and claims licensed content on behalf of the owner so that it can be monetized, allowing advertisers to buy against the most premium content online.
Plantly is a risk-aware investment tool. They use a lot of advanced tools to show users exactly what will happen to their investments based on various scenarios. “We want you to touch this to get a feel for what will happen to your money,” is the way they put it.
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.
Plantly is a new breed of online investment advice service that helps everyday Americans find a better place for their hard-earned cash. They are part of a new movement of start-ups that want to see a better breed of financial tools come out of their city NY. Plantly offers top-notch investment plans that accommodate a wide range of needs. We guide our customers to their perfect plan by revealing important and objective information that traditional advisors do not disclose. Our...
Publish2 is an ambitious new project trying to find a fix for the Associated Press nightmare that newspapers are forced to deal with because of a lack of any viable alternative. It is the easiest way to share and distribute news for print and web publishing. Publish2 News Exchange enables newspapers to create a comprehensive, customized newswire for print, combining content sharing networks with the highest quality free and paid news sources. Publish2 Link Newswire captures the collective editorial judgment of journalists, based on what they read every day, to create engaging news aggregation features for multichannel distribution.
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.
Publish2 is the easiest way to share and distribute news for print and web publishing. Publish2 News Exchange enables newspapers to create a comprehensive, customized newswire for print, combining content sharing networks with the highest quality free and paid news sources. Publish2 Link Newswire captures the collective editorial judgment of journalists, based on what they read every day, to create engaging news aggregation features for multichannel distribution. The company announced an initial $2.75 million round of financing in March 2008....
Soluto brings an end to the frustrations PC users encounter, with transparency, honesty, killer technology, and your help. Its software combines advanced technology with collective wisdom, to detect PC users’ frustrations, reveal their cause, learn which actions really eliminate them and improve user experience. Soluto is mapping the PCGenome, a knowledge base of frustrations and solutions built automatically through the usage of Soluto software, for the benefit of all PC users.
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.
Soluto is a powerful PC management tool for small business IT and IT providers that lets you easily manage and support PCs over the web. With Soluto, you’ll get: Proactive support: Soluto notifies you when there’s a problem with actionable email alerts, allowing you to remedy the issue from any PC, laptop or smartphone, saving time and reducing frustrations. You can also remote access the PCs anytime in case you need to. Offline cloud-based service: take actions on PCs even when...
UJAM (CrunchBase) is a cloud-based platform that empowers everybody to easily create new music or enhance their existing musical talent and share it with friends. Like Jason wrote: “it can turn your humming, whistling, kazoo-playing or not-so-in-tune vocals into something people might actually want to listen to. And it’s really, really cool.”
Here’s our review (there are links to other coverage from around the Web in there).
Bonus: a video of Chris Sacca singing.
UJAM is a cloud-based service enabling everyone, musician or not to produce great sounding music and share it with their friends and the world. UJAM aims to be the go-to place to create music easy, fast and from everywhere UJAMs core technology augments simple user input such a singing or whistling into fully-fledged, studio-quality songs by interpreting melody, composing chords, arranging song form and rendering the result with professionally produced musical styles. Long-term, UJAM can be integrated and embedded with other...
WeReward is a mobile incentive platform that rewards consumers for actions they take in the real world. Consumers earn points for photo-verified location check ins or performing tasks. Each point is worth a penny, consumers can cash out directly from their mobile device. Businesses utilize WeReward’s self service platform to incent customer purchases and drive loyalty. The platform lets them see who their customers are, what their experience was and how often they purchase.
Here’s our review + video.
Seattle, WA
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Berlin, Germany
