Tom Willey and I went along to the Expo at the Wolfe Rd facility last week. It was very crowded, maybe 400 people in a space which'd have been comfortable for 250. Lots of enthusiastic young companies, and a few people with more experience.

Having watched 20 or so of the 32 presenting companies, here are notes.

Zeromail reminded me of Microsoft Outlook, about 3 versions back, before it was completely overtaken by featuritis. http://zeromail.com

MediaFunnel is a 'dashboard' for enterprises who need to manage a social media presence over many properties. Use it to find what is being said about the brand, as well as to coordinate a public presence. http://mediafunnel.com

Realglobe Inc run a cloud hosting service called C4SA in Japan - they aim to sell it in the US too. http://www.realglobe.jp

Narvalous is building a social game - avatars, 3D and all.

Carbon Lighthouse will take on energy management for your buildings to save you money and emit less carbon. This would make more sense in geographies with a functioning carbon tax regime. http://www.carbonlighthouse.com

eThor (not a useful name) has built software to connect mobile end systems to retailer's Point Of Sale systems - the example was food orders, but it's broader than that. http://ethorlink.com

Yatown - local neighborhood social networks - deals, news, events. http://yatown.com

Mobilitas SpA have built a platform for designing location-based mobile games - from Santiago, Chile

Snackr is open source code to create an alternative display for things in your RSS feed. I have all I can do to get through the updates for 400+ items in my feed, without having random items from it scrolling on my desktop. Wonder what they are really building ? http://snackr.net

UserZoom does support for user experience testing and measurement for mobile devices. http://www.userzoom.com

Summary - some real products, lots of things which have been done before, many things which hadn't settled on a revenue model. Glad I wasn't judging, though there was a list of 70 companies, investors and big corporations, at least half of whom had actually sent someone to judge, from the look of the crowd at the front of the room.

Video of presentations is here
Set 1 - 16 companies http://www.justin.tv/plugandplaytechcenter/b/288056298
Set 2 - 16 more companies http://www.justin.tv/plugandplaytechcenter/b/288058645

Agenda
http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/expo/agenda.php

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