liftConference Venture Night

I am at the Venture Night of the lift conference in Geneva this evening. It's an interesting change from the sort of things I think about in my current day job. Some thoughts about the companies that are presenting their startups on stage while I write this:

• cocomment, UK: Bof. Some negative comments from audience and panel. Claims to be "leading web commenting platform". Can stuff that requires an IE/FF plug-in really make it truly big? Doesn't it overlap too much with existing blogging platforms?
  
• Holistis: Track-your-sites-visitors. Haven't we seen this before? But, uhm - I came late, didn't look closely enough. Maybe interesting... I probably missed where the innovation lies.
  
• iO naturalinteraction.org, Italy: Something else, not yet another Web 2.0. Very cool video of like a kiosk for a shopping mall where you can look at e.g. product catalog like in ... that SciFi movie, with the police that can see the future? Where they move stuff with fingers on a table. Looks neat. Wasn't Microsoft showing off stuff very much like this about a year or so ago? It somehow looks very familiar. Maybe it's actually the same.
  
• Mixin, Switzerland: Calendaring for Web2.0... match up free slots with your friends for fixing up time for a movie or something. People mention doppler and twitter. I wouldn't use it - but I don't use (nor at a personal level really "get") e.g. Facebook either... Still: Thumbs up!
  
• Pixelux, Geneva: Innovative gaming graphics engine, something about new algorithms for simulating material physics or something. More f*# stupid war games. Oh well. Will be used in next StarWars game. Made it!
  
• Viewdle: Face recognition for Videos! Can I get this for Flickr and as an iPhoto plug-in, to tag family photos with who is on it? (I know it exists, saw some other Flickr-like online photo sharing thingie with face recognition stuff a while ago.) Kewl.
  
• Wuala, Zurich: Interesting! Online disk stuff, with a P2P twist. From Zurich, out of ETHZ guys. Maybe I just like it because it actually responds to a need I currently have - I really need to start backing up my files somewhere online. Idea: You share local disk space for others against getting the same space from their P2P network. You seem to know what your doing, I liked the speed of the guy's presentation. Classical business model - advertising and paying power users. - "We want to become the Skype of online storage". Well, good luck, guys!
  
• Clipperz, Italy: Nah. Mixes basically interesting underlying "encryption for Web2.0" technology (something like this should be available in lower-level toolkits?) with not-so-exciting "password manager for all your Web acounts" - tried before, too niche.