At Launch Pad, the elevator pitch session of the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, half a dozen entrepreneurs pitched their companies Thursday to a panel of venture capitalists and the audience. The theme was "Web meets world" -- the ways in which stuff we do online connects to stuff we do in the real world.
Here are three of the most interesting start-ups:
Some companies are trying to do more than rule the Internet. GoodGuide wants to help you find a safe and environmentally friendly shampoo and save the world in the process.
The company rates more than 60,000 products on their environmental, health and social (whether they use underage labor) impact. GoodGuide's founder, Dara O'Rourke, said here this afternoon he was inspired to create the site after discovering his daughter's kid-friendly sunscreen contained two chemical components known to be carcinogenic.
"I realized I knew almost nothing about products I was bringing into our house every day," said Mr. O'Rourke, who in his other life is a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, studying global supply chains.
Mr. O'Rourke demonstrated the company's new iPhone application, which lets iPhone owners check product ratings when they are away from their PCs, such as in a store. He also showed off a new text messaging service. People can text a product's name to 41411 and quickly get a text back with the ratings on that product. The company also makes suggestions for similar products with better ratings and gets a commission on those sales when people buy.
The company plans on expanding the service into food, toys and electronics, with the goal of changing the way Americans shop -- and ultimately, what manufacturers put in their products.
Solar panel installation companies are all over Silicon Valley. Sungevity is yet another one, but it offers something different.
Buying solar panels for your house takes a lot of time and effort. The installer has to visit your home, often more than once, to measure and fit the panels to your roof, all just to give you a quote. When you visit Sungevity's Web site and enter your address, it uses satellite and aerial imagery to measure your roof and delivers a quote within 24 hours, often in 15 minutes, said Danny Kennedy, its co-founder and president. It charges 10 percent less than most installers, saving the consumer money and time.
"The real opportunity with clean tech is to make it easy and efficient for consumers," Mr. Kennedy said. He plans to eventually offer Sungevity's software tools to other installers over the Web.
For some, recording a video, downloading it to a computer and uploading it to YouTube is too time-consuming. Qik lets you broadcast video, live, from your mobile phone to its Web site or to any Web site where you embed the player. To demonstrate, Bhaskar Roy, Qik's co-founder, used his phone to record himself speaking on stage and then played back an echo of himself.
On Halloween, a woman giving birth used Qik to send her relatives live video from her hospital bed. Priests at the Vatican have used it too, Mr. Roy claimed.
One of the venture capitalists on the panel praised it for being "dead simple."
