The ZBoard was undoubtedly my pick of the show at last month’s DEMO conference. Over 75 companies each had six minutes to rock the stage and pitch their startups, yet none came remotely close to having the enthusiasm, confidence, and coolness of the ZBoard crew. But as a recently released list of unused names shows, ZBoard could have been a lot less cool….

“[My favorite was] ‘Electrobolt,’” says Intuitive Motion’s Ben Forman. “Blatantly and intentionally cheesy, I think this name would’ve reminded people of childhood memories of favorite toys. Also it has a Jetson’s-esque quality.”

Forman notes the “Ooh Board” was the least favorite pick of the bunch. “We probably thought this one up after a late night in the lab without enough sleep. We wanted to build a product that would make people go ‘ooh.’ A very stupid name.”

So why did the team finally settle on “ZBoard”? What does it mean? “The ‘Z’ in ZBoard refers to the Z-axis,” explains Forman. “When ZBoarding, the rider moves around the XY plane by applying force parallel to the Z-axis (down). We liked it because ZBoard works well as both a noun and a verb e.g. ‘I ZBoarded over to my friend’s house to play Fifa.’”

The full list of scrapped names can be found below:

• techboard
• switch
• switch board
• freeboard
• chariot
• 8skate
• switchdeck
• skate-tour
• hotfoot
• electrobolt
• skatepilot
• dashdeck
• flashdeck
• switchboard
• switchdeck
• ingo
• ingo board
• ingaboard
• propel
• regatta
• i-fly
• momentum
• o-mentum
• omicron
• the osiris
• rawboard
• gboard
• the “q”
• infiniboard
• zooboard
• zoomboard
• ooh board
• nemesis
• marathon
• muse
• zipboard
• jetaround
• alicorn
• phoenix
• spectre
• gaea
• da vinci
• aeolipile
• martlet
• pit bull
• rising sun
• no tech
• question mark

So, which one’s your favorite? Personally, I have to say the “Da Vinci”–while making no sense–best represents the sort of pompous exuberance with which I like to wield all of my pricey tech toys. But “ZBoard” is cool, I guess….

The other day I was walking through San Francisco’s Westfield Mall when I came across an EcoATM. I had never seen one before, but after figuring out what the ATM did, I wished I had been carrying around one of my many old dumb phones that will never see the light of day again. The kiosk prompted me to insert a defunct electronic device into its deposit slot. The screen said it would scan my old hunk of plastic and metal, tell me its second-market value, and ask if I wanted money in exchange for saying a final goodbye to my old device.

“We read a report from Nokia that three percent of cell phones were being recycled and felt that needed to change. So we thought, how can we make it really easy and rewarding?” said EcoATM chief executive Tom Tullie in an interview with VentureBeat.

EcoATM knows that most people want to keep e-waste out of landfills but also don’t want to part with their $500 phone and get nothing in return. In order to get more people to recycle their electronics, the company will make it worth your while to part with your old device by giving you money or discounts on new phones. If you feel really, really nice, you can donate the cash to charity.

The idea of device-recycling ATMs has gained a lot of attention from investors. Coinstar even dropped some cash into EcoATM’s bucket with an investment two years ago. EcoATM also won the Best Clean Tech Startup Crunchies Award for 2011. Investor Randy Hawks of Claremont Creek Ventures is clearly impressed.

“They’ve got a great business model, [with the] idea of having kiosks that are convenient for consumers. They are constantly updating their price estimates for devices, so you know you are getting the best pricing for your 18 month-old Android phone,” said Hawks during a phone call with VentureBeat. “They have a stellar management team and have a great way to monetize the value of old devices.”

Claremont Creek Ventures, Coinstar, and TAO Ventures led the $17 million second-round funding, with PI Holdings, Moore Venture Partners, AKS Capital, and angel investor Koh Boon Hwee participating. The money will go towards a national rollout of EcoATM kiosks.

“[There are] 50 units in the field now, and we plan to deploy nationwide. We will be buying kiosks to deploy and building our infrastructure of sales and marketing,” said Tullie about how the company will use the funding.

EcoATM unveiled its kiosks at DEMO Spring in 2011 and has since raised a disclosed total of $31.4 million in funding. The company is based in San Diego, Calif.

After enjoying all of the great companies and speakers on stage at DEMO Spring, we’re already gearing up for the next DEMO event. DEMO Fall is six months away, and we’re not going to waste any time before we start hunting down the best companies for it, which is why we’re heading to New York in two weeks to host a day of presentations with RRE Ventures.

If you’re based in the New York City area and are working on the next big tech project, come join us at RRE’s Manhattan offices on Wednesday, May 2. We’ll be bringing in up to ten companies to present. This will be a fairly casual day of meetings, where we’ll be at your service to provide feedback or advice on anything you’re working on. If you’re interested in attending, fill out this form by April 26, and we’ll be in touch with more details shortly if you’re selected.

Also, make sure to check out VentureBeat for extensive coverage on all of the companies that launched at DEMO this week, and we’ll see you in New York!

After two days and 81 companies, it’s time to find out which startups had the most gumption, the best product, the best business model. Though we love everyone at the DEMO conference equally, it’s still a competition, so here are the DEMO Gods!

DEMO God Awards

TourWrist – PEOPLE’S CHOICE

Virtual panorama photography app TourWrist gave the DEMO audience a sneak peek of two new features due out in May. First are PanoSpots, which link multiple panoramas together Google Street View-style, and give them more depth by linking to photos, videos, brands, audio, websites, and Facebook profiles. The real fun demonstration was of the trippy planar acceleration controls, which will allow you to physically step forward or back while holding up an iOS device to move between panoramas, go through doors, and check out other linked panoramas or information. As the People’s Choice winner, TourWrist receives a $1 million marketing package from IDG.

ZBoard

Zboard is saving the Razor and Segway genre from insignificance. The San Francisco-inspired board has a stronger motor to handle the big hills, and a Giants orange-and-black design. The Santa Monica special edition (pictured above) has increased range and a surfer aesthetic. Coolest of all, the Stereo Special board has Bluetooth-enabled speakers so you can play tunes directly from your smartphone or music player.

Voxeet

Voxeet is a startup attempting to bring radical transformation to the infuriating space of conference calling. The company focuses first on crystal-clear conversations, where you always understand perfectly who is talking and what’s being said. It accomplishes this through an app — for Windows PCs and Android phones, for now, but later for iOS devices and Mac PCs. The app provides greater clarity through sophisticated audio processing and also lets you manage your call and the people in it through an attractive visual interface.

VisApp

The Showoff Home Stager hopes to give contractors, interior designers, landscapers, and more an opportunity to digitally reach customers, despite being a very off-line industry. It does this by allowing customers to request quotes from contractors in the Showoff Home Stager community while playing with the visualizer. Those contractors know these requests are valuable because the homeowners, in theory, are showing an intention to buy while digitally renovating their homes.

Jumala

With Jumala, you can create 3D games using an interface that requires no technical skills. The more you create, the more you can unlock the ability to create more complex and interesting games. You can collaborate with friends and earn in-game currency that you can spend on virtual items to use in your games. The Jumala Marketplace has thousands of game content items.

Alpha Pitch Winner

Tosigram

Terms of service agreements suck. They’re long, no one reads them, but they’re still pivotal to understanding your privacy. Tosigram instead provides outlines of terms of service agreements and creates a simpler way to view how your privacy is going to be protected.

My Coupon Doc, a Chicago-based startup, gives you access to coupons that can save you hundreds of dollars in prescription and over-the-counter drugs.

The company launched its website today at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

The site couldn’t be simpler to use: You type in the name of a condition or a drug, press the red “Start Saving” button, and the site displays a list of relevant coupons. For example, we typed in “allergies” and found coupons for $2 off Dimetapp, $20 off Singulair, $3 off Claritin, $1 off Tylenol, and so forth. Drugs are accompanied by simple, plain-English descriptions of what they are for, whether they’re over-the-counter or require a prescription, and what the savings amount is. To redeem a coupon, you just click on the “Redeem” button and the site redirects you to the source of the coupon, where you fill out any needed information to get the discount.

One VentureBeat staffer saved $180 in 60 seconds by finding discounts on regular medications.

The company has partnerships with 500 pharmacies that will go into effect in June, so consumers can push their discount coupons electronically to their local pharmacy, and it is also working with doctors’ offices to integrate with their systems.

“I think My Coupon Doc has the highest probability of success of what I saw,” said Shervin Peshavar, a managing director at Menlo Ventures, on a panel discussion after the set of presentations in which My Coupon Doc appeared. “It was very simple to explain, and I can see it reaching a large number of users.”

Greylock partner James Slavet was less optimistic, saying, “I don’t think it has as much upside as other things we saw, but I think it has a business model.”

My Coupon Doc is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

“Figuring out how to make it go took about two months. Figuring out how to make it stop took about two years,” founder Ben Forman told VentureBeat. The board is unique because instead or requiring manual controls, it senses the rider’s weight, surging forward when they lean forward, and slowing when they lean back.

Ben Forman with the ZBoard

At the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. this week, the company unveiled three new 2012 special editions of the ZBoard, each costing $1,000.

“Who here likes cool new shit?,” Forman said before introducing the new ZBoards to the DEMO crowd. “This isn’t Twitter for dogs,” he added, calling the ZBoard a “sidewalk-shredding” and “Segway-smoking” transportation device.

The San Francisco-inspired board has a stronger motor to handle the big hills, and a Giants orange-and-black design. The Santa Monica special edition (pictured above) has increased range and a surfer aesthetic. Coolest of all, the Stereo Special board (pictured right) has Bluetooth-enabled speakers so you can play tunes directly from your smartphone or music player.

The original $500 ZBoard was first launched in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. While not yet shipping (the first boards should be ready in May), the company is taking pre-orders and has hosted a very successful Kickstarter campaign. To date, Intuitive Motion has raised $35,000 from friends and family.

A panel of experts was completely wowed by the futuristic skateboard. Cisco’s SVP of IT communication and collaboration Sheila Jordan said she would be buying one for her son tonight but added that she’d like to see future ZBoards built with the female rider in mind. And Menlo Ventures managing partner Shervin Pishevar said the ZBoard reminded him of Back to the Future.

The Hermosa Beach, Calif.-based company is the brainchild of mechanical engineers who met at the University of Southern California. They wanted something faster than a skateboard, cooler and smaller than a bike, and able to lend a hand going up hills.

ZBoard is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

We’ve all shared the experience of awkwardly refusing to give out an email address when the cashier finalizes your purchase, even if you actually like the store. The same is pretty much true for daily deals and online bargain shopping newsletters. Either that, or you create a dummy email account to filter all that mess from hitting your “quality” email inbox.

But if you’re frustrated at the number of deals you’re missing out on, you should check out LykeBox, which launched today at the 2012 DEMO Spring event in Santa Clara, Calif.

“We were tired of being inundated with marketing in all aspects of our lives and believed that everyone needed a better place to interact with the companies they like and spend money with,” LykeBox told VentureBeat. “Every day we’d go through ‘select unread – delete’ in our inboxes and then be pissed later when we realized we’d missed a great deal at an online or real store.”

LykeBox is basically a new app that lets people follow all communication and deals from brands they like in one place. It promises to clean up your inbox and social streams in the process. “If Facebook is for people you like, LykeBox is for brands and products you like,” the company says.

The service automatically imports companies whose newsletters you receive in email. It also aggregates all the company/brand accounts for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and others. The idea is that you shift your focus on the companies/brands you like to LykeBox, and ignore all the rest, which is nice since those social networks are already a tornado of communication from friends, family, and acquaintances.

The startup also gives affiliate brands a LykeManager, which lets them create unique deals, games, and communication with fans. The manager service also gives those brands a set of analytics to find out how best to market to their customers.

Founded in 2011, the startup is based in New York City, with its six employees working across the globe. The company declined to share its investment history. LykeBox faces competition from Slice, OtherInBox, AdKeeper, and others.

We’ve embedded a demo video and some screenshots from the LykeBox service below.

Following the startup’s presentation at today’s DEMO conference in Santa Clara, Calif., investors made somewhat pessimistic statements about the overall value proposition of the startup, but Greylock partner James Slavet said, “The founder has a strong and relevant background … There’s something there.”

LykeBox is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

The tiny startup Whiteman Technology unveiled a Windows-based set-top box that will handle many living room entertainment tasks, which are various enough to include displaying cable TV programming and playing 3D games for the PC.

The Clovis, N.M.-based startup made the announcement of the all-in-one Delta digital video recorder (DVR) device today at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The company is trying to take advantage of a lull in the launch of high-end consumer electronics equipment. Companies such as Microsoft and Sony have delayed the launch of new video game systems, leaving an opening for the firm, said Ryan Whiteman, president and co-founder, in an interview with VentureBeat. The idea is to consolidate multiple boxes into just one.

Whiteman Technology at DEMO

“We can handle the recording of six channels at the same time,” Whiteman said.

The Whiteman Technology box will be able to handle cable card programming and store a whole entertainment collection on a three-terabyte hard drive. It will have the hardware to handle advanced 3D gaming and plenty of space to store pictures, music, movies, and videos. It could use both voice control and gesture recognition for input.

It may not be easy for the company to pull off. Whiteman acknowledges that it is tough starting a company in a small town in New Mexico. And with only five employees, the self-funded Whiteman Technology could have its hands full if the product takes off.

“We’ve taken people off guard with a hardware startup,” Whiteman said. “We have gotten a lot of attention, and we intend to build this in the U.S.”

The device will have a Blu-ray playback drive, and it will be able to run Android apps via the Blue Stacks emulator software.

Whiteman hasn’t set the price yet, but it will be comparable to Tivo-like DVRs. He said it will use a new multicore accelerated processing unit (APU) from Advanced Micro Devices, which can put a microprocessor and graphics chip together on the same integrated circuit. It will run the Windows 7 embedded operating system from Microsoft, and it will have the Windows Media Center user interface. Over time, it could be upgraded to use Windows 8. Whiteman hopes to launch the product in the fourth quarter.

Rivals include Sony, Microsoft, Ceton, Dell, Scientific Atlanta, Tivo, and Motorola.

Whiteman came up with the idea in 2008 and started the firm last year with co-founders Blake Jordan and Shaffin Baldwin. Whiteman was previously a contractor for the Air Force and spent five years in the U.S. Navy.

Whiteman Technology is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

As a native New Yorker I’m familiar with tales of parents spending tens of thousands of dollars to get their children ready for kindergarten. It seems kind of sick, but it’s certainly a very big market opportunity.

Tucoola’s premise is fairly simple. It offers a wealth of fun online games that children can play for training in everything from spelling to math to spatial intelligence. Parents who register can track their kids’ progress and see where their strengths and weaknesses are.

Tucoola founder Eli Porat

In an onstage presentation at DEMO Spring 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif. today, Porat walked the audience through Tucoola’s site, which, in addition to educational games for kids, includes games for moms and dads and an area for the entire family.

“Baby Einstein can’t give you feedback on how well your kid did this week to the next, because they don’t have that data. We can help parents understand their kids’ educational needs and adapt the program to fit that,” said Porat.

Tucoola received $350,000 in angel funding back in 2009. With no outbound marketing, Porat says the site has signed up tens of thousands of users and attracted 300,000 visitors in the last month.

Porat is a mechanical engineer by training and worked at Intel building semi-conductors, but he says he has the neccessary experience to design educational games and software. “Father to six, grandfather to four, I understand how children learn.”

Tucoola is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

What if your search engine doubled as a web browser? Would you flit about the web and quench your queries in record speed? That’s the theory startup Slikk is testing with a two-for-one search engine that includes embedded browsing features.

Slikk’s search engine, launched today at DEMO Spring 2012, melds search with web browsing in a single page experience meant to provide you with more information in less time.

“We are trying to help you find what you’re looking for faster and easier when you search the web,” Slikk founder and CEO Feivi Arnstein told VentureBeat.

click to enlarge

What’s different, you ask? Like Google and Bing, Slikk takes a standard approach to search, so you’ll enter your queries and get results as usual, but here’s where things get interesting: On the results page, you can click the “open” button next to each result to view the destination page in full. You can even browse the destination site on the results page, just as you would if you navigated to the site itself.

In essence, the feature, called “SearchBrowsing”, is like Google Instant Previews, but with a completely browsable webpage in place of a page preview.

Slikk also includes multi-view functionality that lets you view different types of search results — videos, news, images, tweets — all on the same page.

Multi-view

The startup’s stance, like many novelty search engines that have come and gone, is that innovation in web search has been stagnant over the past 10 years, leaving room for a new entrant to capture the attention of searchers with something more efficient. “It’s not a question of competition, it’s a question of innovation,” Arnstein said on stage at DEMO.

But Slikk will need to do more than deliver an incrementally more elaborate offering than Google should it wish to convert searchers away from the market leader and avoid the fate of long-forgotten Cuil.

One investor found the idea behind Slikk impressive but thought the product lacked a fresh design. “I think taking clicks out is a great idea,” Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Aileen Lee said in a panel discussion following the demonstration. Lee added, however, that she wished the user interface was much better.

And slick or not, Israel-based Slikk will need millions more than the paltry $560,000 the small company has raised to date should it wish to become a formidable competitor. For comparison, search upstart Blekko, just one of a handful of alternative search engines semi-successfully forging ahead, has raised more than $53 million in funding.

Founded in 2010, Slikk has been in closed beta since January of this year and has roughly 1,000 early users.

Slikk founder and CEO Feivi Arnstein on stage at DEMO

Slikk is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

If you found that 60 to 80 percent of your customers belonged to a particular demographic, you’d probably retarget your marketing and product development efforts to focus on that market.

Yet many internet companies are failing to do just that.

The population in question is the growing slice of the American population 50 years old and up. According to Steve Jurvetson, a managing director at venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Jody Holtzman, a senior vice president at AARP, many digital companies are doing nothing to accommodate older consumers. The two spoke in a panel discussion today at DEMO Spring 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif., an event co-produced by VentureBeat.

According to Jurvetson, people in this demographic:

• consume 60 percent of all consumer goods,
• consume 80 percent of all leisure travel, and
• shop online 3X as much as 18-34 year olds.

“Demographics is destiny. This is going to shift markets all over the world,” Jurvetson said.

Additionally, the total annual consumer spending by baby boomers is $2.5 trillion, with $1 trillion of that spent by those 65 and up, Holtzman said. By comparison, people in Generation Y spend only $800 billion per year.

“You go onto Expedia, or Travelocity, you wouldn’t know that 80 percent of leisure travel buyers are 50+ from looking at those sites. It’s like they don’t know who their customers are,” Holtman said. For example, fonts are small and difficult to read with older eyes, and there’s no option to make the type size larger.

Travel sites aren’t the only unwitting beneficiaries of an older user demographic. For example, in the popular PC multiplayer game Wizard 101, which is aimed at 7-12 year olds, it turns out that many players are quite a bit older.

“The amount of intergenerational play between kids and their parents and grandparents is a huge part of the game,” Holtzman said.

Similarly, startup LegalZoom, which provides legal documents, has found that many of its customers are 50 or older.

In the end, designing for the broadest possible demographic just makes sense, because it opens you to the largest market.

“It’s an opportunity for making sure that you maximize your market,” Holtzman said. “When you build something that a 5-year-old or an 85-year-old can use, like an iPad, you’re maximizing your market opportunity.”

[Update: Jurveston has just posted some more thoughts on this, including the observation that children hit their peak at 2 to 3 years old, with 10x the synapses and 2x the energy burn of an adult brain, but that adults can slow their decline through mental exercise.]

Photo: Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, Steve Jurvetson, and Jody Holtzman (L-R). Photo credit: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

Fantasy Politics is a new site that combines Fantasy Football and politics. Sign in with Facebook or Twitter and start building your own fantasy team of politicians and pundits. You can organize a league of four to eight friends, or go all in and join a public league. You can play daily and rack up points, draft or drop players, and pick a starting player. It’s free to play, but there’s a fee if you want to compete in the national championship. The startup showed off its game at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Thursday.

Fantasy Politics CEO Aaron Michel

“It all started with a really bad idea,” said CEO Aaron Michel. “In 2010 I decided to put together a political game … I threw $1,500 into it, hired an outsourced developer and a young guy right out of college to run things. It wasn’t good.”

The pet project got some media coverage and over time grew into an idea for a real company. The San Francisco-based startup’s first investor was treasurer of the DNC, Andy Tobias, who also happens to be a software entrepreneur. Between Tobias and family members, Fantasy Politics has raised $50,000 in seed money to date.

The two-year-old startup was founded by a cadre of five founders with an impressive mix of political, programming, game, and business experience. CEO Aaron Michael is a Harvard Business School grad who spent two years working on a presidential campaign. Chief technology officer George Marootian has 15 years’ experience building equity trading platforms. Head of product Matt DiVito is the token expert fantasy-game player. Morgan Muchnick has tons of political experience as director of government affairs for a lobbying firm. Finally, Deepak Saxena, head engineer, previously founded a fantasy sports company.

Michel described the game as “a gateway drug to a great civic education.” The founders are hoping what begins as a time-killer can grow into a genuine interest in and understanding of American politics. Judging by the great team, slick interface, and lively political climate in the U.S., they’ve got my vote.

Fantasy Politics received mixed reviews from a panel of expert judges following the company’s demonstration. Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar said it was too niche, but Cisco SVP of IT Communication & Collaboration Sheila Jordan appreciated the potential political educational value of the startup.

Fantasy Politics is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

The popularity of open-ended 3D worlds peaked with Second Life around 2007. But for e-commerce companies, the dream of virtually replicating the experience of going to a mall lives on.

Yogurtistan is a 3D world aimed at simulating real-world retail environments for e-commerce companies on Facebook. With this technology, retailers can create 3D environments where customers can make custom avatars, try on virtual clothing, interact with one another online, and make purchases.

It’s built on Adobe’s Flash player version 11.2, and is accessible to users on Windows PCs, Macs, and tablets (via an Air 3.2 app). It’s also integrated into Facebook.

“We are creating a new experience by mimicking real-life engagement by going from store to store without changing a tab, or entering the web site address of the store,” said Yogurt AS chief executive Cemil Turun (pictured below), in a press release. “This is one centralized system. I can run into a promotion, a friend, or simply begin to chat with a stranger in the street, all of which is accessible on any browser or even an iPad.”

Yogurt presented its new 3D world today at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Currently, Yogurtistan is a small, retail-focused universe with just one plaza. On that plaza are several stores, including Migros, which is Turkey’s largest supermarket chain, and Quiksilver, a global clothing brand for surf, snow, and skate enthusiasts. Other Turkish and international brands building presences in Yogurtistan include TheFirstClub (an online games, books and music site, based in London), BiggShop, Aral, Oxxo, iddaa (online betting) , Tefal (a French kitchenware brand), Swissotel, Yummy Cupcakes, Magic Form, Fenerium, Intema, and Babylon Jazz Club.

To set up shop in the universe, retailers first need to create a storefront, using industry-standard 3D editing tools, such as 3D Max, Softimage XSI, AutoCad, or Maya. Yogurt AS provides guidance about how many polygons the files should use and the kinds of texture files needed. Once the retailer delivers a 3D file to Yogurt AS, the company converts it and annexes it to Yogurtistan, then delivers an Adobe Flash file (.SWF) that the retailer can embed in a website or Facebook page.

There’s no upfront fee for the service, but Yogurt AS charges a percentage of the transactions made in Yogurtistan. The amount varies, but currently runs about 10-to-15 percent for apparel retailers. Yogurt also provides CRM tools for engaging customers.

As a bonus, real-world apparel brands can cash in on the craze for virtual goods, because they can sell virtual clothing for customers avatars within Yogurtistan.

An additional attraction, Cemil said, is that “It is very cool to have a virtual 3D store.”

Cemil started out as a programmer and 3D animator in the 1990s, then founded Yogurt technologies in 1997, providing corporate customers with 3D development as well as making games. In 2007, he pulled together a team of former colleagues to build an open-source 3D engine, which now forms the basis of Yogurtistan.

Yogurtistan is currently in private beta.

The parent company, Yogurt AS, is based in Instanbul, Turkey. It has 20 employees and has raised a total of $3.8 million in funding to date, led by Golden Horn Ventures.

“Ecommerce in Turkey is really taking off,” said Menlo Ventures managing partner Shervin Pishevar said in the judging panel following the startup’s DEMO presentation. I can see it being popular there and… expanding to other markets, but I’m not sure U.S. consumers will shop in that way — yet.”

Yogurt AS is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Screenshots courtesy Yogurt AS.

When was the last time you were 100 percent confident that the price you paid for a hotel stay was a steal? Just-launched hotel search-engine and aggregator DealAngel eliminates the guesswork with an at-a-glance look at the quality of the deal you’re getting.

“Who’s got the time and patience to go through nine pages to find the best deal?,” DealAngel co-founder and CEO Roman Peskin said about competing hotel search engines on stage at DEMO Spring 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif. today.

DealAngel analyzes historical hotel pricing data and spits out rankings meant to help you determine how the available rate at Caesars, for instance, compares to the fair market value. Basically, the site will let you know if you’re getting a bargain or being ripped off.

click to enlarge

“The lowest price isn’t always the best deal,” Peskin told VentureBeat. “DealAngel’s mission is to give peace of mind that you’ve paid the least for the best hotel. We crunch the numbers, you get the deals.”

But does DealAngel really work? Without the test of time, we can’t say one way or the other, but we do know that if consumers feel like they’re getting a great deal, the startup will be rewarded with repeat business and some word-of-mouth referrals. With stiff competition from well-known incumbents such as Priceline, Hotels.com, and Kayak, and even up-and-comers like Hipmunk, the real challenge for DealAngel will be campaigning for consumer attention.

The consensus of a panel of experts was that DealAngel is on to something pretty big. Sheila Jordan, SVP of communication & collaboration IT at Cisco System, and Shervin Pishevar, managing partner at Menlo Ventures, both put DealAngel at the top of their lists. Jordan went on to say that she hopes the company applies its model to shoes.

The San Francisco-based DealAngel was founded in 2011. So far the startup has raised an undisclosed sum of seed funding and has a staff of 10 people.

DealAngel CEO Roman Peskin at DEMO

DealAngel is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: throgers/Flickr

Looking for a three-day cruise to Mexico in mid-July? Startup Evature aims to help ease the pain of searching for said vacation via web or mobile.

Evature, a business-to-business search service provider for online travel companies, today launched a version of its text and voice-based travel engine, called “Eva,” for the cruise industry, and has released a mobile app platform for Android.

Natural language processing is the name of Evature’s game. So a search for “Mediterranean cruises from Istanbul in July on a sailing ship” will yield real-time search results just as if the searcher had queried using more robotic terms.

As Menlo Ventures managing partner Shervin Pishevar said in the judging panel following Eva’s DEMO presentation, “We seeded Siri when it was a research project at Stanford… What Eva showed was actually pretty magical.”

The Israel-based company has already received acclaim for Eva (Expert Virtual Agent), an algorithmic engine capable of deciphering free-form text and voice speech and meant to take the hassle out of your online travel search experience. Eva can automatically parse travel queries to identify key travel elements in real-time.

Founder Barry Volinskey describes the offering as a, “unique technology based on cutting edge algorithms, enabling high precision understanding of requests in the travel domain.”

But, in the simplest of terms, Eva is to travel search what Siri is to search on the iPhone. The intelligent travel search assistant is already being used by Skyscanner, Fight and Hotel, and 118 Travel.

On Thursday, iCruise.com launched Cruise Finder Plus, a free-text cruise search tool powered by Eva. Evature is also open sourcing its mobile technology and enabling developers to add voice search capabilities to their mobile travel apps.

Founded in 2009, Evature has raised $100,000 in Angel funding and is currently profitable.

Evature is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: ecstaticist/Flickr

Diet and exercise tracking service NeedToEat helps you stay on top of what you eat and when. It uses real-life factors such as mood, habits, and preferences to track your health and keep you on a healthy eating regimen.

NeedToEat is hoping to cater to people who want variety in the diets and who would rather throw a dry chicken breast through a window than eat baked chicken four nights in a row. Instead of strict meal plans, which is one of the most common reason diets fail, NeedToEat offers alternatives based on the weather and your mood.

The company debuted its app today at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

NeedToEat iPhone App

Created by a physician who wanted a smarter health tracker, NeedToEat is designed to understand that humans have good and bad days. The app isn’t just for dieters, it also creates meal plans tailored for people with medical conditions, such as diabetes or high cholesterol.

The app works by tracking what you eat, how much you exercise, and taking into account life factors that can get in the way of a healthy living plan. You might be a gung-ho exerciser and eat a balanced diet all week, but on Friday you want to go out for drinks with friends. If you tell the app about your plans, it will help you amp up your workout or suggest a less-caloric meal to balance out the booze you plan on drinking.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the app on stage at DEMO Spring 2012, CEO Dan Nguyen first showed a old picture of himself at a heavier weight and then ripped off his shirt to show off his leaner body (pictured below).

MyFitnessPal, a popular online diet and exercise tracker with an iPhone and Android app, is the service to beat for NeedToEat. Other weight loss and exercise websites Fitocracy, Swole.me, and FitDay have strong fan bases and offer similar features. The idea behind this new app is novel, but in an already crowded space, NeedToEat will need to impress users and offer something truly unique to edge out the competition.

At the very least, a panel of experts were impressed by the shock value of NeedToEat’s presentation. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Aileen Lee called it the most creative demo of the day, and Greylock Partners partner James Slavet said he hasn’t seen an entrepreneur tear off his shirt in six years of venture capital.

NeedToEat is based in the Los Angeles area and has seven employees. The company is self-funded.

CEO Dan Nguyen rips off his shirt at DEMO

NeedToEat is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Woman on a diet image via Shutterstock

Every time I try searching Google for images marked with Creative Commons licensing, I can’t help but feel like there’s plenty of stuff that’s incorrectly listed. This isn’t something that’s specific to Google, as most sites don’t always keep the best records for attribution.

Image analysis startup Verifeyed wants to bring a new a sense of legitimacy to the world of digital images.

“Today, digital images are everywhere. But, image editing tools like Adobe Photoshop easily allow the creation of fake images with just a few clicks,” the startup told VentureBeat. “As a result, digital images have lost their trustworthiness. This situation only worsens as products such as Photoshop become more prevalent, sophisticated, and easy to use.”

But hey relax, Verifeyed doesn’t want to abolish the use of Photoshop, or any other image manipulation software for that mater. Instead, it plans solve the problem using its patent pending technology that is able to certify the originality (or absence of modification) for digital images taken from any device. Also, it uses math (a lot of it) — a product of the founders specialty as PhD researchers in the area of applied mathematics.

Verifeyed explains:

“Each device (cameras, cell phones, scanners, etc.) produces a unique mathematical fingerprint. Our database consists of almost all existing capture devices and is constantly being updated. When verifying an image or searching for traces of image manipulation, we automatically extract hidden fingerprints from a photo and compare them with the mathematical model of its acquisition device. Based on this, we are able to accurately determine if the photo has been tampered with. Several methods are applied to detect traces of tampering on each image.”

I think I speak for most people when I say, that’s kind of incredible.

Founded in 2010, the startup’s four employees are based in New York City. Verifeyed hasn’t raised any outside funding, and relies on its founders for money. It faces competition from Digimarc and Mitek Systems.

[On stage, Verifeyed pretended to have a copy of President Obama's birth certificate. They marked it up and altered the birth location and noted how their own technology would be able to discover a fraudulent document such as that one. And they say that they can do these kinds of authentications in a matter of seconds.

In the DEMO Sage panel that followed, moderator Jolie O'Dell said that she could see how this could be valuable for insurance companies authenticating claims. Christine Herron, a director at Intel Capital, said that she could see how merchants authenticating checks might want this. But Jeff Clavier, managing partner at SoftTech VC, said he wasn't sure if the level of fraud was so high that there really was a big problem to solve.]

Verifeyed is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Image courtesy of Cartoon Network

For deals too good to keep to yourself, email service ZigMail has created a simple sharing tool designed to help you pass inbox offers on to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ friends.

ZigMail, as a refresher, is the Chicago-based startup that helps you filter “transactional” emails such as bank mailers, retailer goodies, and Groupon offers out of your cluttered inbox and into a separate hub where you can engage on your own terms. The startup launched its elegant box two months ago and has today enhanced its product with ZigIt, a referral engine for emails worth spreading.

“Email has been evolving over the past five years from personal to transactional communication. People have become overwhelmed and frustrated and they’re disengaging because email interfaces haven’t changed,” ZigMail co-founder and chief executive Richard Gerstein (pictured above, right) told VentureBeat.

The premise behind the company’s latest product is that consumers, when presented with transactional content that they can process at times of their choosing, will once again find value in these emails and go on to spread the best messages to their favorite social networks. So, for instance, that totes adorbs Antrho dress in this week’s email blast will capture your imagination and you’ll then want to show off your fashion prowess by posting it to Facebook.

The logic is sound, even if the product lacks integration with today’s most appropriate social network for inspirational email sharing. Of course, we’re referring to Pinterest, the place where fashionistas, foodies, and home-improvers trade ideas by “pinning” their favorite web finds to collections called “boards.”

Jeff Clavier, a managing partner at SoftTech VC and a panelist who commented on the ZigMail demo at the conference, wondered what the consumer incentive is.

“It’s a pain to get those (marketing) emails, why would I share them with my friends?” Clavier said.

Still, ZigIt seems like a smart step in the direction of social commerce, where the consumer and not the marketer has the ultimate power.

“It’s a powerful new way for consumers to advocate for the brands they love, while bringing great value to friends in their social network,” Gerstein said.

Founded in 2011, ZigMail is an Angel-funded service with 4,000 users.

ZigMail is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

The debate club is coming to Facebook, and no, I don’t mean the after-school activity. CrowdFanatic is pitting Facebook fan pages against each other today, opening up the “walled garden of fans” that are social groups for lively back-and-forth.

“Facebook’s groups and pages act as isolated islands with no bridges to other groups and limited ways to promote their causes or challenge rivals,” said CrowdFanatic founder Yaron Bazaz in an e-mail to VentureBeat. “There is no place on the internet that acts like online Tahrir Square, where rival groups can engage online directly to advance their cause or create a democratic dialog with opponent.”

CrowdFanatic’s new social app acts as layer over Facebook, so that fans from, say, Obama’s fan page can go head-to-head with Mitt Romney’s. Users can “create arenas” in which these fans will suggest debate topics, play games, vote in polls, and perform other Facebook-oriented actions such as liking and commenting. On either side, fans can become “top supporters” depending on how often they engage with the arena. The end goal is to win your debates and spread your side of the story on the biggest social network in the world.

Bazaz notes that EnemyGraph lets you find people with rivaling opinions across Facebook, but doesn’t give you a place to hash out opinions in a public forum. Of course, you could also just like a fan page and put your opposing views on that page’s wall, but that’s poor Facebook form. Twitter will undoubtedly remain the most popular debating destination among social networks.

Currently, CrowdFanatic is getting interest from sports organizations, non-profits, as well as protesters to use the app.

Bazaz started the company in 2009 and opened the beta destination site crowdfanatic.com in 2011. So far the company has raised around $300,000 from friends and family, as well as government grants. CrowdFanatic has six employees and is headquartered in Vancouver as well as Sunnyvale, Calif.

[Update: On stage at DEMO, Bazaz and his colleague Chris (pictured below) showed how you could easily create an arena. They created a Hunger Games vs. Twilight movie battle. Then they activated it with one click and then shared the link with friends. Friends could then pile into the discussion and vote. In another ongoing battle, they showed that The Hunger Games was beating Harry Potter, 518 to 307. 

Bazaz said, "In a fun way, you can fight for the group and win the social media battlefield."]

[Photo Credit: Heather Kelly]

CrowdFanatic is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Arm wrestling image via Shutterstock

JockTalk is a social network for sports nuts and the professional athletes they love (or perhaps love to hate). The new site, announced today at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., combines profile pages, back-and-forth conversations, and original sports content.

There are already plenty of ways for famous types to communicate with their fan bases online, including Facebook fan pages, Twitter, and personal blogs. However, JockTalk founders see those as limited “one-way communication” tools, and wanted to create something with more engagement. With the newsite, jocks, not usually know for their communication skills, will have one place to share their deep thoughts which can then be automatically reposted on other social networks.

“I launched JockTalk to enable better communication between athletes and fans, as well as provide athletes with an opportunity to generate income and awareness for the causes they care about,” said co-founder and former MLB All-Star Shawn Green (pictured above, on the right).

“As an athlete on JockTalk, I’m not changing my online behavior, I’m just changing the location of my behavior, and now I can share in the revenue,” Green said at DEMO.

The site is open to all sports, and has a starting roster of 60 athletes from the NBA, MBL, NHL, NFL, and MLS, along with some Olympians.

The site will face stiff competition from the plethora of sports fan sites out there — as well as Facebook and Twitter. “If it’s for the fan, there’s enough solutions out there … I don’t know if I need yet another way to interact,” said Christine Herron, a director at Intel Capital, on a panel after the company’s presentation.

Founded in 2011 by Brendon Kensel (on the left, above) and Green, JockTalk has raised $375,000 in funding to date. The company is based in Newport Beach, CA and has four full-time employees. The site is currently in private beta.

JockTalk is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

Unhappy with the current state of collaboration in social networks, Luan Ngo-Tran decided to build one of his own: Tablen, a social network that harkens back to having conversations around a table with friends.

The company is making its debut today at DEMO Spring 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif., an event which is co-produced by VentureBeat.

The Tablen concept (illustrated above) is admittedly confusing when viewed from afar. But Ngo-Tran believes that by focusing on a few friends at a table, instead of your entire Facebook or Twitter network, you can have a better conversation. At the same time, he believes the connections you make on Tablen can grow your social graph much faster than other networks (yes, I realize this is at odds with the whole focus-on-quality conversation).

“The nature of exclusiveness in a table surprisingly lets you expand your social reach at supersonic speeds,” Ngo-Tron said in an email to VentureBeat. “Just like you go to my party and become friends with all my guests. If you do this on a table of 20 mates, the speed at which your social graph expands is 21 times faster than Facebook or Google Plus.”

The inspiration for Tablen came when Ngo-Tran hired co-founder Tri Tran’s company to build a custom corporate network. Ngo-Tran’s employees ended up loving the service, and asked to have recreational tables created, in addition to tables for work collaboration. In April 2010, the pair pushed the social network forward to create Tablen.

[Update: On stage at DEMO, Ngo-Tran showed how it was easy to create tables with different friends. You can add "table mates" to the table, and they can converse with everyone. You can drill down on information about friends, or start side conversations from directly within the table. In that way, a Tablen group is different from a Google Circle, which is a way to divide your friends into groups.]

The Saigon, Vietnam-based company clearly has some maturing left to do, but Ngo-Tran says he already has 500 friends testing out the service, who have created 1,200 tables so far. He’s managed to raise $80,000 from an angel investor.

[Photo credit: Heather Kelly]

Tablen is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

[Photo credit: Heather Kelly]

Figuring out what events you want to attend has only gotten more complex in the age of social media, something new startup Sched.it is keenly aware of.

Describing itself as “Twitter for events,” Sched.it offers an event discovery service that goes beyond a simple calendar listing. Users are presented with a stream of event activity that’s based on overall popularity and their social circle. The basic idea is that you’ll be able to more easily see the hottest events in the area, as well as which of your friends are attending.  You can follow specific venues that you like, such as a nightclub or a performance hall. And as you’ve probably guessed by the company’s name, Sched.it helps you keep track of the events that you do plan on attending.

However, the feed of activity is what sets it apart from other, more notable event services like Facebook, Google Places, and Yelp.

Ultimately, Sched.it wants to improve the social lives of people when they actually get off the computer, according to founder and CEO Omar Tellez, who says the service is all about “connecting you with the right people, right places at the right time.”

“I would like to think that we are shifting the paradigm of the event discovery process,” Tellez said onstage at DEMO Spring 2012 today.

The service, which launched in February, is currently only available in Boston — an ideal area for what Sched.it is trying to accomplish.

“We live in between two of the most event active cities in the world (NYC and Philly). Figuring out what’s going on in these cities is a complicated task,” Tellez told VentureBeat earlier.

It has been incorporated into Boston.com, the New York Times-owned website of the Boston Globe. Since the launch 8 weeks ago, Sched.it has delivered information on over 6,000 events and has processed 4,000 transactions, Tellez said. (Transactions include scheduling an event, favoriting an event, or buying tickets for an event). The company said its bringing in about half a million monthly impressions.

Last week, the company also launched Sched.it Sports, a version of the service that’s focused solely on sporting events.

“It looks like a very complex flow,” said Jeff Clavier, a managing director at SoftTech VC, who spoke on a panel after Sched.it’s presentation. “I think it’s interesting, but there’s a lot of work to do on the product side.”

Founded in 2011, the startup has four employees based in Princeton, NJ. Sched.it has raised a total of $500,000 to date from a handful of angel investors, including Dennis Phelps, John Hanke, Jonathan Harris, Ashim Mehra, and Ed Ruben.

Sched.it is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

Lots of tool makers claim they can enable anyone to build games, but that usually just applies to professionals who already have development experience. With today’s introduction of Jumala, Blade Games World wants to extend game creation to just about everyone.

Jumala isn’t just a set of development tools. It’s actually a destination world where you can make and share 3D games with your friends. It is jumping on the twin trends of gamification  (the use of game-like rewards in non-game applications) and user-generated content.

“We make building a game into a game itself,” said Virl Hill, chief executive of Blade Games World, in an interview with VentureBeat. “It is a way to make it fun and accessible for everybody.”

With Jumala, you can create 3D games using an interface that requires no technical skills. The more you create, the more you can unlock the ability to create more complex and interesting games. You can collaborate with friends and earn in-game currency that you can spend on virtual items that you can use in your games. The Jumala Marketplace has thousands of game creation content items.

The company showed Jumala off for the first time today at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, California. The trend toward game creation is clear with the popularity of titles including The Sims, Minecraft, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. All of those titles allow users to create their own experiences and share them with others, but they limit how much users can create.

On stage at DEMO, Hill said, “Jumala makes a game out of making a game.”

With Jumala, players can mix and match art styles, game behaviors, and visual and sound effects. Players can also collaborate in game creation. While other worlds are block-oriented, Jumala’s world is more realistic and visually rich. I’ve seen a demo and it’s easy enough to create things. You can, for instance, plop down trees in the world on angled hills and when you flatten the ground, the trees will face in the correct direction, upward. You can also link objects such as a hidden switch. By clicking on a “link” button on the switch, you can order it to operate a far away gate. The gate will open when the switch is on, and it will close when the switch is off. You could hide the switch to make the game harder. It is simple things like this that make it easier for a novice to design a game.

Enemies have artificial intelligence and will attack you if they see you. As the game creator, you just plop them down in the environment. You don’t have to program them.

Once you are done creating your game,you can test it with your friends and then invite the larger Jumala public to play the game. At some point in the future, it might be possible to take your creation and put it on another platform. But for now, your game stays in the Jumala world and you can share links to it on places such as Facebook.

The beta is available for Windows (7, Vista, and XP) users. Hill said the key is making game design simple. Jumala uses templates (such as a spooky marsh or alien galaxy) as the foundations for game settings. Users can fill out the games by dragging and dropping objects into the terrain. They can change the lighting, backgrounds, and behaviors of game characters. The result is a unique experience that others can play. The more your games are played, the more you earn rewards.

Bellevue, Washington-based Blade Games World was founded some time ago when startup game tool developer Digini acquired Chinese game content outsourcing company Vyk.

It shifted into this different direction in 2009 when the new leadership realized that the technology could be used to “democratize” game development. The company has 13 employees and competes with rivals such as GameSalad and Roblox. The company is targeting game fans from ages 13 to 35. The initial games will be simple, but over time, Jumala will expand to enable the creation of racing games, shooters, and educational titles. In the future, third parties will be able to add additional content to Jumala and sell it to users.

The business model is not built on creating hit games, but in enabling millions of people to create games just for fun. Revenue will come from the sale of virtual goods. Hill said that the beta test so far has produced interesting results.

Investors include California Technology Ventures, China Seed Ventures, and private parties. The company raised $4 million in March 2009 and intends to start another round of investment. The title is free-to-play and the company makes money selling virtual goods. Eventually, third parties will be able to upload their own virtual goods for sale.

“Our business model doesn’t require a hit game to be successful,” Hill said. “We make it possible for everyone to create a game.”

Blade Games World is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Surfacing the long-lost tips from people you trust is the promise of newly launched startup HashTip.

HashTip is a social network and content aggregator that collects, stores, and categorizes the tips previously posted by your friends on other services. The company ultimately aims to simplify the decision-making process around products, services, and activities by appending extra social insight to the nuggets it surfaces.

“People who are confused and frustrated with numerous options and a deluge of information on products and services are looking for a platform that can simplify all three aspects of a decision-making process: narrowing down options, deeper research on selected options, and finding the best price for the chosen option,” HashTip co-founder and CEO Rohit Vashisht explained to VentureBeat. “Most people perform these steps offline and online, spending hours to make the final decision.”

The startup’s best asset is its ability to grab status updates on Twitter and Facebook with the #tip hashtag, pull them into HashTip, and then tack on all relevant review data from places like Amazon, Yelp, and Rotten Tomatoes. The company can also track down daily deals associated with tips to help members save as they revisit friends’ recommendations.

But HashTip, at first glance, looks overwrought and lacking in a real answer to the, “Okay, I’ve found a great tip, now what?” question. There’s far too many icons mushed together in a muddled interface for the first-timer to understand why she should come back.

That’s not to say HashTip is doomed to irrelevance. The young company will need to move away from the tired social network design to something a bit more novel, focus on mobile discovery, and do more to showcase the underlying technology should it wish to win over web folks.

Edison, New Jersey-based HashTip has raised $200,000 in seed funding.

HashTip is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Shutterstock and Dean Takahashi
 

NetworkClean, a new tool that scans your Facebook profile and flags anything it finds that could damage your reputation, thinks I should tone it down with the booze talk, aggressive and offensive lingo, and naughty adult-content on my Facebook profile. I admit, I was a bit surprised at the findings, but not so much that I had to put down my glass of pinot.

The free new reputation-monitoring service, launching at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. today, is like a watchful, literal adult protecting you from yourself. It is aimed at individuals worried about their online reputations, as well as companies that want to protect their brands. You log in with your Facebook information and NetworkClean does a full scan of your profile. After the initial check, the tool monitors your profile or page constantly, and can send you an alert as soon as it spots some potentially damaging content.

The main NetworkClean page is a dashboard with widgets for trends, flagged content, and custom alerts. There is a box showing you who your favorite friends are (my husband is No. 9, oops!), a pie chart that breaks down horrible things you’ve said into an enjoyable graphic, and a list of Facebook security and privacy concerns with links to fix them.

I took NetworkClean for a little test drive to see if it found anything worrisome in my profile. My overall tone is “partly positive” and, as with all humans on the Internet, cats and birthdays are popular topics for me. My profile had 89 alerts for flagged content, helpfully divided into categories such as Profanity/Derogatory, Adult Content, Alcohol/Drug, Aggressive, and the mysterious Slang.

Some of my more g-rated flagged words included beer, dumb, crap, attack, hell, wine, stupid, poo, poop, gun, chubby, rumor, and Uncle Tom (referring to an actual uncle, named Tom). One post had the triple threat of stressed, suicide, and banging, however I was just talking about adorable tarsirs, which have been known to off themselves in times of stress by banging their heads on something hard.

The service is easy to use and, perhaps accidentally, a very entertaining diversion. There are similar reputation monitoring services, such as Radian6 and BuddyMedia for companies, and Reputation.com for individuals, but NetworkClean claims its service is more real-time and individual-friendly.

At launch, the Culver City, Calif.-based NetworkClean only supports Facebook, but the company hopes to add support for other social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn in the future.

“If you’re going to get on Facebook and other social networks, you’re just going to have to deal with it,” said Harshul Sanghi, a managing partner at American Express Ventures, on an investor panel after NetworkClean’s demonstration. He seemed skeptical of the need for a reputation-monitoring service. “The cat’s out of the bag, so just deal with it.”

Christine Herron, a director at Intel Capital, was more intrigued by the business possibilities. However, she said, “They’re going to need to make a call between, is it a consumer product or is it a brand product?”

The bootstrapped company was founded by Kishore Mamillapalli (pictured above) and Doug Haustein after the duo heard stories about people losing their jobs, getting bullied online, or not getting admitted to college because of poor social networking choices. I did some searching to see if I could find anything scandalous about two, but of course, their online reputations appear to be spotless.

NetworkClean is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

On the social web, memories take the form of check-ins, photos, videos and comments. But, because it’s the social world, your memories get fragmented across different profiles. LiveAll wants to save you the ginkgo biloba and bring them all together.

“Liveall is just another way of saying, ‘Don’t miss a thing,’” said co-founder Brian Shen at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Years ago you could ask a friend to print “doubles” and put that extra photo in an album. Today many images are lost in the digital soup that is Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Twitter. And while Facebook does act as a good spot for organizing your photos, videos, and conversations about an event in your life, it doesn’t actually aggregate them. LiveAll, which is both a website as well as an iOS application, allows you bring all of those digital memories to one place.

You sign up for LiveAll using Facebook Connect. From there you can invite others to dump any digital memories into that event account. LiveAll will then organize it into an online-magazine type format, with pictures pieced together in a Pinterest-like fashion. LiveAll says the product is best for events such as birthdays, weddings, baby showers, and other milestone events. You can control privacy on the service with two settings: share publicly or only share with those invited.

“I don’t think they’ve taken advantage of the phone in some unique amazing way yet,” said chief executive of Color Bill Nguyen at the DEMO sage panel following LiveAll’s presentation.

“We were investors in Instagram for about four days, and I think mobile social networks are going to be important. Native social networks,” said John Lilly, partner at Greylock Partners. “It’s a brutal private space.”

Kate Miller, Brian Shen, and Ryan Pan create LiveAll after meeting through investor Trend Micro, which coincidentally has also employed all three founders.

You could argue that this is just another social network to add to the digital soup, but for the individual throwing the event, it might actually be useful. LiveAll was founded in 2011 and has already taken on $800,000 from Trend Micro. The company currently has seven employees and has offices in both Taipei, Taiwan and New York.

Competitors include Pictarine, Momoland, Pinweel, and Erly.

LiveAll is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Business people have LinkedIn, journos and techies have Twitter, most of the world has Facebook, and now athletes have their very own social network. It’s My Play, from Max My Play, connects professional athletes with coaches, agents, and sports employees.

Going from playing sports in high school to playing in college, and making into a professional draft can be a complicated process. Coaches from universities scout out kids to play out their schools and connect with high school coaches, students try to market themselves on Facebook and Twitter, and agents are always looking for players once they get drafted to bring on as clients.

It’s My Play is hoping to be one spot where everyone involved in sports can connect with each other. Players can market their skills and show off highlights, coaches can scout new players to bring to their teams, and agents can find the new athletes.

It's My Play founder Momir Gajic

The social network is divided into two parts, one section for sports employees, such as coaches, agents, and recruiters, and one section for athletes, both pro and amateur. The hope is that players can connect with each others, amateur athletes can get advice from professionals, and recruiters can keep tabs on players they might want to add to a team.

While the idea is novel, it will need the scale of a Facebook or Twitter to make it valuable. Athletes are already marketing themselves on Twitter and Facebook, trying to put their name out there for the millions of people already using these top social networks. In addition, It’s My Play competes with LockerDome and World Sports Hub, two sport-focused social networks, as well as JockTalk, another company presenting at DEMO today.

Max My Play is hoping its social network will be better than others out there because it caters only to sports and provides a place for athletes to share stats, such as weight and sports records, that they wouldn’t share on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Players can also upload highlight reels and images of them playing their sport.

One expert had nothing but positive things to say about the niche appeal of the focused social networking app. In a post-demonstration panel discussion, Color CEO Bill Nguyen said that he really liked the app because it’s “hard to market yourself as an athlete.” Nguyen went on to say that he believed in the company so much that, in theory, he would even work for them.

Founded in 2010, Max My Play has raised an undisclosed amount of funding. The company has 20 employees and is based in the Los Angeles area.

It’s My Play is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Football player image via Shutterstock

The company has been running in beta for a while, focused on the demographic of Facebook moms. Today it’s launching version 2.0, which focuses on strengthening connections and incentivizing people through gifts and donations.

Ticklr co-founder Voloe Scott on the DEMO stage

“Maybe you’re trying to get your teenage daughter to finish her homework on time each week or pump up your division to crush its sales goals,” said Ticlr founder Chuck Digate. “We let you set the parameters around the gift and automate the process for giving.”

Digate says they have seen a lot of success with Facebook moms, but have a much bigger target in their sites. “We want to corner the ‘first date’ market. How can you break the ice and incentivize someone to grab that cup of coffee?”

On stage at DEMO, the company walked the crowd through the Facebook and email “tickling” process. Digate proceeded to send a “conditional tickle” to a woman he has a crush on. And, because it was a demo, the woman accepted the tickle — which was an invitation for a sushi dinner date — despite the unfortunate email subject link: “Someone tickled you with something special.”

“When thinking about asking someone on a first date or sending a gift, Tickle them instead,” co-founder Voloe Scott said.

Ticlr is also introducing a crowdsourced gift locker where people can surf for ideas and easily purchase that last-minute gift.

Tickling jokes aside, a panel of experts appreciated the idea behind Ticklr. In a post-demonstration discussion, Greylock Partners partner John Lilly said that though the app is a tad too complicated, he would consider investing in the company. Panelists Bill Nguyen and Larry Augustin both said they appreciated the silliness of the application, though Nguyen added that it may be hard to get people to give gifts in that format.

You can get a sense of how the service works from this animated video the company launched on Youtube.

Ticlr is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Image from Flickr user Asenat29

In 2009, Seuk Weon Song of Seoul, Korea, realized the Internet had a fundamental flaw: Google.

The dominant search engine for the majority of Internet users was giving websites top billing for all the wrong reasons — SEO, keyword stuffing, tricks that most users would never see.

“Google made $37.9 billion last year mostly from search engine ad revenue … They merely connect Internet users to content others created,” said exec Joseph Lee Stanfield at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara, Calif., “We create the content that is the life blood of a search engine. So, isn’t it fair that we receive a share of the revenue?”

Instead, Song posited, the system could be fixed with a simple arrangement of payment for content that users found valuable. In other words, capitalism might be able to fix web search.

Song founded Ecobe with exactly that proposition in mind. “Because existing search engines focus only on speed and technology, Song felt confident that a search engine built upon a business model could succeed in overtaking Google,” said Stanfield in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Here’s how the Ecobe system works: Ecobe gives website creators 40 percent of its profits. The cash gets divvied up based on each website’s “contribution” — that is, how many users click through to see the content on that particular website. Website owners can collect their payments once a month. Websites’ revenue starts adding up before anyone from that site formally registers with Ecobe; starting with the very first time a web search user clicks on that site, Ecobe is tracking the contributions.

“Ecobe restores balance to the Web ecosystem,” Stanfield continued. “Content providers are [currently] not motivated to create better and higher quality content for the web, resulting in a dire situation.”

Stanfield also noted that the startup acknowledges the origin of each geographical region’s intellectual property and promotes growth around the globe, making its scope truly worldwide. And the Ecobe model also shows a unique respect for content creators, copyright, and intellectual property, as well, putting their money where Google’s PageRank is.

“I have a dream that through Ecobe, a sustainable Web ecosystem can be created that can give people a chance to be happy,” Stanfield concluded.

Ecobe has taken a little more than $1 million in seed and angel funding to date. During DEMO in Santa Clara, the startup hopes to be able to talk with Microsoft and Yahoo, both of which also have a vested interest in creating better, more sustainable search experiences than that currently offered by Google.

Ecobe is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Image courtesy of Semistach, Shutterstock

Eager amateur photographers with the desire to practice their craft should take notice of new startup Rawporter.

“We are creating an army of cameras, on location, on demand,” said co-founder Rob Gaige at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, Calif., “You can earn a little extra cash just from being in the right place at the right time.”

Rawporter is a free camera app for both iOS and Android smartphones that helps photographers earn money by selling their photos and videos. The app sends you location-based assignments from media partners and bloggers who will pay you for getting a pretty visual to compliment whatever piece they might be working on.

Outside of people who enjoy taking pictures, the app will likely get some interest from traditional media because of the low-cost, high quality photos, Rawporter told VentureBeat.

“It’s no secret that the AP and Getty Images are way outside the price range of the average blogger. So, if that blogger wanted to add photos or video to a story they were doing, they’d need to source that themselves…or hope they could find something off YouTube that fit their needs,” said Rawporter co-founder and CEO Kevin Davis.

Rawporter faces competition from big players such as CNN’s iReport and AP-partner Bambuser. What sets the startup apart, however, is fairly compensating and crediting the people who send publications videos and photos, as well as sending specific assignments out based on location so the photogs don’t have to guess what the news organizations are looking for.

“I think that’s a space with Getty Images…that’s right for disruption. I don’t know if they’re really got it figures out,” said SugarCRM chief executive Larry Augustin during the DEMO sage panel following Rawporter’s presentation.

Founded in 2010, the startup’s four employees split their time between Charlotte (N.C.), New York City, and Vancouver. Rawporter is currently in bootstrap-mode and hasn’t raised any significant funding. The startup launched a beta of its service in November that gained a decent amount of traction — thousands of videos from users across 40 different countries, according to the founders.

Check out a screenshot of the Rawporter assignment page below. (Click to enlarge)

Rawporter is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.