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
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.
Betterment
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.
Compass Labs
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.
LiveIntent
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.
MOVIECLIPS
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.
Plantly
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.
Publish2
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.
Soluto
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.
UJAM
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.
WeReward
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.