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Summer was definitely warm in the TechHub, as 30 start-ups had 60 seconds each to explain who they were, what they did, why they were amazing and what they wanted.

Sitting along side were the eagle eyes and sharp minds of Eden Ventures, M8 Capital, Moonfruit, Neuhaus Partners, Whitebear Yard and others.

Lurking in the room were GE Capital and some others.

The prize on offer, after a 60 second pitch was the chance to further explain to the investors in a 180 second pitch. Now that is value!

(any errors in spelling are entirely mine – it is hard to listen, type and understand at this speed, especially given the vast range of accents in the mix, from Eire, UK, Italy, Russia, South Africa, France, Spain and more)

1.    Hullomail – voice mail snippets on smart phone
2.    DAD@com – Sematic Desktop
3.    Zyke – online gambling metrics and BI with significant profit add to companies
4.    Callaboard – video conferencing with Augmented Reality and interactivity
5.    Crowdscanner – event management layer bringing social media into the real world
6.    TR Trader – market-trading desktop for emerging markets and niches nibbling on Bloomberg by using social media tools
7.    Duedil – people reviewer and recommendation app for modern businesses, especially interims and consultants, call it a “reputation wiki”.
8.    AD Avengers – display advertising made super easy (ex-yahoo)
9.    My Art – madrileño collaborative art system to monetise it and change the world
10.    YourNextRead – crowdsourcing how to find your next read (affiliate, recommendation, referral and finder hybrid)
11.    MindQuilt – knowledge management in Enterprize 2.0 social Q&A with gaming dynamics
12.    Me-Stars – mobile social gaming network with emotional animated avatars
13.    Whaddado – social bookmarking to answer ‘what to do’ in a real world. Who’s up for it?
14.    LogEntries.com – Cloud based log management solution for large logs with 100x time save from JLizard
15.    Privilink – top layer over sms, email, social media so private details never revealed, but conversations enabled (think: how does PayPal enable you to pay without revealing an ID)
16.    OneLeap – payment based system for trusted introductions to top people (recipient sets price, proceeds to charity).
17.    Ensyke – Social Search with trust emphasis across multiple social networks.
18.    Ecclecta – online bookshop site builder, white label service with affiliate layer and revenue shares.
19.    The Nudge – a location based social recommendation site plus.
20.    Geomeum – live local, live social, geosocial platform, an Oxford Entrepreneur prize winner.
21.    Pridzenaps – enables the mobile billions to find deals and things to buy. Penny auctions, social sharing and all on mobile. (remember 60% of Kenyans have mobile bank accounts).
22.    Future Content Labs – media content strategy, a step on for the bait-and-switch content for ads model. Matches ads to content using a wonderful algorithm. Easy to install via Moonfruit or WordPress Module
23.    GetYou – digital brochure distribution for large conferences using AT tags and bluetooth downloads.
24.    Moodles – mobile booking of low cost air flights, super simple, real time, go now!
25.    Fubles – ebay of sport. Creates a real time sharing / booking site for players and teams.
26.    FaceValues – allows you to buy and sell directly inside social networks like Facebook.
27.    OnePage – your business card in the cloud, sort of Plaxo for the cloud (myonepage.com), with tag and search and organise functions. Revenue via add-ons / plug ins
28.    Subsifier – simplest online payment gateway for anyone to use. Plugin and invisible layer, no need for a merchant account, revenue via transactions and referrals.
29.    QHUb – build your own Q&A website, deeply thought through plus search, ads, and subs revenues.
30.    Psonar – keep your music online, listen anywhere. Cloud hosted, pay per play (instead of pay per track), with market space for bands to sell their own tracks on same mechanism.

Did you get all that? Hope so, because then there were 15 ‘one sentence ‘ pitches. All too fast to type, but some of them were really fabulous to hear!

I got carried away listening to Oxigen.TV what a pitch.

I’ve already enjoyed listening to MoneyDashboard.com at another event.

HR Locker! That man got the room on its feet. Even Mike Butcher has to bow to the will of the crowd.

[insert small beer break here]

Then the hardcore 3-minute pitches. Much more detail and real business grit, but packed into 3 minutes.

31.    ProspectVision – turns dead traffic into behaviourally analysed sales leads, drives sales for your site, takes a volume-based fee, is cash positive and has customers. Nice customers.
32.    Me-Stars – well, we know what this one does as it is us.
33.    Gourmet Origins – clever white label food origins, information and recommendation site with bolt on market places and social media hooks.
34.    CrowdScanner – explained a little more about how real world socialisation is broken, but can be improved by social media and network technologies. I found it hard to understand the revenue model (unless event organisers pay?)
35.    CalaBoard – “Minority Report” style interaction over videoconferences with participatory diagrams and flip-through media. Early days, but a very cool idea!
36.    Duedil – Looking for advisors and users, so an easy sell in this room. Very clean site that shows what the person you are thinking about working with is really like… Reputation management and job finding, on a trusted and trustable platform.
37.    MindQuilt – brings the corporate headspace out into the semantically indexed knowledge base of the company through social media styles tools and clever indexing. Accessed by mobile and desktop, it cleverly routes the question to the right person, and learns the routings.
38.    OneLeap – it became clear that this is a tool to reach the very creme-de-la-creme of industry, finance and politics. The recipient sets a ‘max messages per month’ and a starting price. If the recipient does not respond, you get refunded. If you get an answer, OneLeap gets paid, the rest is split to two charities nominated by sender and recipient. Cool.
39.    Geomium – Among the huge number of geo-linked social platforms, they have a nice tag line and are really rather nicely backed at White Bear Yard. Problem is, I think they have not read Tomi Ahonen on what location on mobile really means… and I think they badly underestimate the growth time for such a social tool that filters out 90% of traffic.

Wow. So, who says there is a recession?