I went early to an event profiled here to see the companies presenting at the "Startup Fair." Here they are, in no particular order. My pictures of some of the exhibitors is below
Vidcaster – these folks help companies and individuals publish their video content and maintain control of many aspects of presentation and distribution.
browserling - this is a wonderful tool for web designers to check to see how their web pages will be seen by users running different browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.) and different screen resolutions (800x600, 1024x768, etc.) Very cool freemium business model, too. Check it out!
factual – an interesting information broker that develops and grooms (curates) all different sorts of databases – from “businesses in the USA” (good for direct mail campaigns) to Trader Joe’s Product Nutrition Facts.
ecobold – a market space for sellers and buyers to meet and transact purchases of “green” or other ecologically sound products.
Pieceable Software - I love this idea – I’ve seen these guys at other startup events in the Bay Area. Basically they have written some code that allow businesses that sell (or give away) iPhone or iPad “apps” to embed the app on a web page and have it operate exactly as it would on the iPhone or iPad. Great for demos, customer service calls, sales pages and the like. They’ve launched with only minimal seed funding, too. Nice.
Milo (local shopping) - I’ve seen this idea in many business plans – to use the net to find which stores have inventory of the item you are looking for.
h.hypothes.is – this seems more like an open-source project than a business … “An open-source, community-moderated, distributed platform for sentence-level annotation of the Web.” Oy. Seriously, any effort to filter signal from noise on the internet would be a good thing. I just don’t know if this it.
IconFinder – a search engine and marketplace for icons, avatars, clipart and similar graphics.
Blekko – a search engine
capsul8 - this is an interesting concept – a way of preserving “stories” online by aggregate and archving web pages that reflect the story as it develops. Take a look at one of the co-founders’ stories about UC Berkeley baseball – as they were threatened with extinction owing to budget difficulties in California state government, and then spared.
tripping - an interesting site where “locals” and “tourists” can share information and stories and tips.
ActivityHero – a matching service for after-school activities.
OneSchool – an iPhone app that connects university students to the people, places and learning resources around them.