Last week was Demo Day for 500 Startups' fifth batch. A professionally produced event; it's challenging to give 31 companies a few minutes each to say something meaningful about who they are, what they are doing, and what money they'd like to raise. The Mountain View Microsoft campus space works well for presentations - was too crowded to actually meet and talk to people afterwards.

TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOm all covered the material. The emphasis on non-US companies increases - to me, the most interesting was one of those, WhoAPI. They are making DNS information available to non-specialists, and offering availability monitoring.

List of companies

BabyList – A baby registry that works like Pinterest, allowing you to add anything on the web
Chewse – A marketplace for groups to easily order great food
Club W – A curated, personalized wine subscription service
CompStak – Creates transparency in commercial real estate by gathering information that is hard to find, difficult to compile, or currently unavailable
Cubie – A free messenger app for creating drawings and sharing them with friends
Cuponomia – A marketplace to search, discover, and share deals and online coupon codes in Brazil
Curious Hat – Builds mobile exploration tools for curious children
Dealflicks – Offers movie tickets and concessions for up to 60 percent off, like Priceline or Hotwire for movie theaters
Everbill – Provides an easy way to issue invoices and estimates
Femeninas – A fashion and beauty portal for women
GazeMetrix – Looks at videos and pictures and help brands measure their visibility
Hunie – A community that helps designers get constructive and honest critiques from fellow designers
Iconfinder – the world’s leading site for icons
iDreamBooks – A Rotten Tomatoes-like ratings site for books
Instamojo – A marketplace for selling your digital creations with just one click
Kickfolio – Helps brands promote their iPhone apps by embedding interactive iPhone app demos on any web page
LaunchGram – Aggregates news about products and launches coming soon in verticals such as movies, electronics, video games, and cars
Markerly – Increases publisher page views and engagement by providing next generation social sharing and discovery tools
Pick1 – Provides retargeting via automated market research
Privy – An automated digital ad agency that lets customers set a budget and promo, and automatically delivers customers
Qual Canal – Tracks conversations about TV shows in social media to deliver audience information to broadcasters, brands, and agencies
SupplyHog – Creating a better way to purchase building materials
Tealet – A marketplace that connects tea drinkers with tea growers
TouristEye – A travel planner application for the web and mobile devices
TradeBriefs – Empowers Indian professionals through industry expertise and jobs
Traity – Measures people’s reputation in worldwide 360 feedback to improve transactions between strangers
Translate Abroad – Building a suite of simple translation apps that use your smart phone camera to instantly translate text
UniPay – A mobile payment platform for Brazil
WalletKit – A SaaS platform to create, manage, and deliver digital passes to mobile wallets
Wideo – An online platform that will allow you to easily create, quickly edit, and share your own animated videos
WhoAPI – Delivers extensive information about domain data

References

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/31/500-startups-batch-five/

http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/06/500-startups-demo-day-round-1-disrupti...
http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/06/500-startups-demo-day-round-2-from-und...
http://gigaom.com/2013/02/06/500-startups-shows-off-accelerator-programs...

Notes from the last batch http://www.cunningsystems.com/2012/08/500-startups-demo-day-17-july-2012

Cunning Systems evaluates product and service ideas in computing and communications. If you would like to discuss an idea, contact us at info@cunningsystems.com