Pitch overload at AlwaysOn

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Another line of start-ups made their case at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit here on Thursday. A mix of more established and fairly new companies with services that are in beta--some that have already had one or two rounds of funding but are now seeking investors' attention again.

Here is a chunk of the start-ups: Technology enablers
• Flock is a Web browser that lets you add tools and applications to share media and interact online. We have mentioned it before and the last version of the social browser is now up for beta before its official launch later this summer.

• Nextrials is in the Life Science space and has a software solution for clinical research. The company started in 1999 and the CEO James Rogers says their software is already used on 850 sites. Their product manages inventory, patient randomization and brings data together to lower costs and bring products to the market faster. Nextrials is focused on the middle market of biopharmaceutical and medical devices companies.

• Genius.com provides sales companies with a platform to track clients browsing on a company Web site. The company found that many sales representatives send tons of e-mails but there wasn't a way to track them. So they created "Genius e-mail," allowing them to follow customers' page-by-page visits to see "who's hot and who's not," said the CEO David Thompson.

• EffectiveUI is a company using rich Internet applications to provide interface solutions for clients like Adobe Systems, eBay and Discovery Channel. Its eBay platform, which is now in beta, is intended to give eBay customers tools to search and compare companies and products. It has a function that sorts pictures of a product one after another like it's done by hand. But users are accustomed to having the buttons where they've always been so it's a challenge. One admirable thing EffectiveUI did with Discovery Channel is an interactive platform for a cancer collage, where survivors of cancer tell their stories.

• Infopia is a platform where companies can manage transactions, inventory and customers. It feeds Web sites with information and keeps track of orders and market output. CEO Bjorn Espenes says the company has 350 customers and is partnering with companies like eBay and Salesforce.

Web services and collaboration
• Mindtouch provides a wiki platform for online media and brands. It pitched its Nexus--a white-label version publishing platform that can be implemented and customized in a company's own style.

• Box.net offers Web-based online file storage and sharing. This was one of the more straight-forward and clear presentations of the day, but what they're doing is not unique. They have been online for a while and claim to have more than 1 million users who share 700,000 files per day. What is new is a plug-in on Facebook to help share files with friends.

• Leads360 is targeted to the mortgage industry to streamline leads and turn them into customers. CEO Jeff Solomon says they have 10,000 subscribers and 500 clients using their software to get return on their investment on their leads.

• LongJump is offering companies an online platform for secure solutions of their catalog of applications and sharing information with colleagues and partners. They have a drag-and-drop interface where each application can be customized by the users.

• Forterra Systems supplies a virtual world applied to business applications. They want companies to start doing business in a virtual 3D environment with avatars while conducting real tasks like training, collaboration and real-time meetings. Pity though that the sound didn't work during the presentation, so we couldn't see the demo.

• Collarity wants to help companies monetize products online. Its tool is intended to help users to find good stuff. Many sales are lost because visitors can't easily find the products. Through search on what customers are looking for, Collarity generates recommendations such as "customers who liked this also liked this." This is also done by others, such as Cleverset and Aggregate Knowledge.

Mobile and wireless
• Nuvoiz is a Japanese-American company enabling voice over IP with a soft phone through Wi-Fi for small and medium-size businesses. Nuvoiz claims to be "the Skype for the enterprises".

• Azaire Networks is providing a broadband mobility infrastructure. Still it has not reached the U.S. market yet even though it is an American company. It mainly has customers in Europe using the 3G technology. CEO Bill Howe wants to "free my phone" and get more U.S. carriers than T-Mobile to support Wi-Fi.

• Digislide is an Australian company developing video projecting technologies. The device the company demonstrated projected a video from a laptop, but was big and boxy. Its latest project is Digismart Miniature Projection, which is expected to be launched in early 2008, where a projector as small as a finger can be integrated in to a cell phone or a laptop. You can also chose between different resolutions and you get an hour viewing time from a cell phone. Among the competitors are Nokia, Samsung and Light Blue Optics.

• GoWare provides what it calls DoMo--a do more platform, first launched at DEMO in February, with an open API allowing users to create a personalized homepage on your PC that is formatted to be used on your cell phone. The company also showed off plug-ins for World of Warcraft in which users can take their characters to their phone. GoWare is partnering with 4Info for personal ads put into the content.