It’s all well and good to pick out the best, but what do you do with the rest? At every startup conference there are a few groaners. Bad demos aside, that’s not a big deal, but which startups just have no business model? At the same time, which are going to rocket out of the box? Hell, if you only pick one winner, you miss the picture. Here they are, the top five and the bottom five, as selected by the TG team.
The Best
Sprowtt: Initial review. 
If you could break the VC/Angel/Seed cycle, you would turn the world of startups upside down. We have no idea if Sprowtt can actually do this, but at least they are trying. We support their work so much that even though we have no clue exactly how Sprowtt works, we are going to trumpet their every move as if they were god herself. Consider us smitten. Now go make some VC’s cry, Sprowtt!
CitySourced: Initial review. 
CitySourced is a great idea because it provides an actual twenty-first century answer to the age-old problem of interacting with local government. Everyone is going to have smartphones in a few years, and all of those phones will be able to take pictures and attach location data to them. So using that data to actually do something about problems around cities? Brilliant. And it’s not just the tech that’s solid – the business model also rocks. This is the sort of thing that cities are dying to get their hands on. Even if they don’t actually want to do anything, local reps try to at least pretend they might be able to do something useful. That means they’ll pay to use the service.
SeatGeek: Initial review. 
SeatGeek is going to make serious, serious money. Taking percentages off of a market that large is going to bring in more revenue in a year that most startups will do in ten. They could launch the thing right now – 80% is more than good enough to get started with. Once they manage to get tickets for all types of sporting events, they can do concerts. Then they can do parties that are hard to get into. Hell, they could have handled the sold-out TechCrunch50. Color us impressed, this startup is going somewhere.
AffectiveInterfaces: Initial review. 
Tracking the emotions of someone while they do anything is a fun game. Don’t believe it? Head over to YouTube and watch some reaction videos, you’ll see. AI (great acronym, well thought out) is going to bring the best facial emotion sensing technology and blow the world of focus groups up. The technology is great, the business model is great, and we love the idea. Hell, they even got Kevin Rose to play with it.
Perpetually: Initial review. 
The reason why we love this company is because they’re betting on something pretty surefire: that not too far off in the future, companies will be required to keep records of their websites. As things such as Sarbannes Oxley continue to tighten the noose around companies, firms, or any real public enterprise, people are going to need to be able to go back, and yell “See, I was not lying!” Alternative business model: taking kickbacks from companies looking to tamper with their past. Either way they make money. They will be the Iron Mountain of the internet.
The Worst
HealthyWage: Initial review. 
If were overweight and had a thing for Twinkies, would I really care enough about a few bucks a day, tops, to get healthy? I mean, for hell’s sake, if I lost the weight my insurance would cost less, which is more than HealthyWage is willing to pay. Besides, what percentage of people are going to make gigantic lifestyle changes ever? As of now, practically none, and trying to pay people to go to the gym won’t work any better. See “Predictably Irrational” for further details.
The Whuffie Bank: Initial review. 
Not to knock the idea of Karma, we love it. Reddit, have a shout out. But if you offer me 100 Whuffies (which sounds like “rufies” which is quite bad) to do something, I am going to laugh at you. Approach me with a sixer of something delicious and we might strike up a deal. Their demo was great, the site is beautiful, the name is atrocious, and the concept of giving something of no value to someone and getting them to do something is just not going to work.
Now pass the Flooz for my Beenz.
LearnVest: Initial review. 
This one just doesn’t add up. The point is to offer fun little games to further the financial information of users, but there’s a fundamental disconnect between what this company thinks it can do and what it can actually do. See, people who want to go online and learn about financials are generally not the same people who get in debt. Also, who wants to be a level thrity-eight bankruptcy wizard?
iMO: Initial review. 
Aside from having by far the best demo of the conference (the RedBeacon cupcakes were pretty good, though), what iMo does is pretty uninspiring. Take your iPhone, and make it into a controller! Now you can game with built in lag! All kidding aside, its a feature that any team could hack up in house, what is the value add? Now Swype, that was some cool shit, what happened to them?
SealTale: Initial review. 
Ok, so we had no idea what this was about. The fact that the demo team didn’t really speak English, though a little frustrating, in no way impacted our decision. No, the real problem is that we have no idea what the company does. They have “widgets for blogs,” apparently, which they somehow presented through interpretative song and dance. Not sure how this one even got into the TechCrunch50, but hey, thems the breaks.
This post written by Alex Wilhelm and Michael Klurfeld.
