I am excited to be headed back to Cali, Cali next week as I am a judge for the Twiistup 5 event in Santa Monica. It has been awhile since I have been to southern California as I attended the first Twiistup event on my birthday back in 2007. It was a great event but this event is going to be 5 times as big and is actually taking place at an airplane hangar.
I am judging the Twiistup Showoffs which include 10 startups as follows (in no particular order):
Causecast, dubbed “a one stop philanthropy shop” by TechCrunch, is a platform where media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose.
Cogi set out with a simple goal – give professionals a way to effortlessly recall and track everything in their important conversations through the use of an intuitive, browser-based service that seamlessly transcribes the important parts of conversation – the ‘COGent Ideas’ or Cogi.
More than 27 million people visit eHow.com each month to search more than 300,000 articles that are professionally written with clear and concise directions on how to do things. It also has a rapidly-growing library of articles created by eHow’s members and a large library of professional instructional videos.
FixYa empowers individuals to repair and improve upon their already-purchased possessions. The company also offers business services to manufacturers and retail businesses through its custom partnership opportunities.
GoGreenSolar is global group of professionals dedicated to improve the distribution of renewable energy products, services and financing for people everywhere.
Meebo is a new communications and media company that’s re-writing the way people have conversations and communicate on the Web.
RoboDynamics is built by passionate people who want to use technology to shift the status quo and leverage state-of-the-art technology in robotics to change the way people live and work.
The Scene connects individuals to the hottest places, people and events in their area. The Scene’s trendsetting community is on the pulse of nightlife and entertainment in various cities throughout the world.
Viewdle is a facial-recognition powered digital media platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video assets.
Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you working on?’
I am pleased to be joined by Sarah Lacy, Brian Solis, Jackie Peters, Peter Pham, Andrew Warner, Richard Wolpert, Will Jessup and Devlyn Steele as judges for the startup competition. I got a chance to chat with my pal and Twiistup founder Mike Macadaan over iChat the other morning and talk about the upcoming event (below). Also check out this preview of Twiistup 5 on ZDNet.
