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11 Startups Show-Off at Twiistup 4 Tonight in Santa Monica

Heading over to Twiistup 4 tonight in Santa Monica and looking forward to catching up with some fellow entrepreneurs. I'll second Brady Brim-DeForest in saying a big congrats to Mike Macadaan for pulling this all together and showing that the LA Tech community is alive and well.

Some intriguing startups showing off tonight, including Twiddla, which I wrote up a few months back.

From the Twiistup site:

Showing Off at Twiistup 4

Keeping with Twiistup tradition, we were going to select ten local start-ups. Due to the overwhelming interest, we expanded the list of featured companies to 11, including seven of Southern California’s best and brightest and four ‘crashers’ from Texas, Vancouver and the Bay Area.

South Pasadena - Big Stage is a media company whose breakthrough technology allows users to easily create and integrate a life-like 3D avatar of themselves into everything from famous movie scenes, TV shows and video games, to music videos, short video clips, virtual worlds, still images, user-generated content, instant messages, emails, social networks and more - instantly.

San Jose - BookRenter is the first online book rental service. BookRenter.com replaces traditional bookstore sales with online book rentals for students at schools throughout the nation.

Venice - Compulsion is a simple, easy to use tool that makes video clickable. The clicks become links that turn the video into an entire interactive universe of an individual’s design. Users can offer or sell those links for click and shop, gossip, trivia, news, music, more video, or anything imaginable.

Los Angeles - The LOUD3R Enthusiast Network is made up of in-depth, topic-oriented Web sites that are designed for the enthusiast and the curious who want to quickly find the best, richest content about a specific topic.

Austin, Texas - Minggl is a social interaction manager. The Minggl toolbar makes it easy to manage information, communication and navigation across social networks.

Los Angeles - Musicshake is the world’s first online UGM (User Generated Music) creation service that provides music composing solutions aimed at the general public (a.k.a. music dummies) without previous musical knowledge or expertise.

San Jose - Phonevite is the new, fun and simple way to send announcements and reminders over the phone, in the user’s own voice.

Los Angeles - Seethroo’s smart targeting technology allows advertisers to connect with individual social website users, creating more relevant ads and higher revenues for everyone.

Vancouver, BC - From grassroots scrappers to all star pros, Strutta brings players together from around the world in the spirit of true competition.

Santa Monica - Tools To Life is the world’s first free online self-help social network with real programs and community-driven support networks.

Los Angeles - Twiddla is a free, real-time online collaboration tool that offers simplicity and accessibility. It doesn’t require plug-ins, installs or downloads, and users don’t have to work around complex firewalls or advanced scheduling.

Sunday fun with Wordle

Had a little fun with Wordle today, a java applet that builds a word map out of a chunk of text or someone's del.icio.us tags. I used the seedWatcher blogroll and post categories to whip this one up (font is called Gnuolane Free):

It's a nifty little Java applet, outsourcing the CPU-intensive work to your local machine, rather than bog down the server of what is essentially a side project of IBM Research developer Jonathan Feinberg. In fact, though it's free to use and the images are yours to do whatever with, the code isn't open source and is actually owned by IBM.

Raising the video quality bar: Vusion's WARP video player delivers

Online video is on fire these days. I'll once again cite the recent numbers out from  Ipsos MediaCT, showing that 19% of all video watched anywhere, including traditional TV and DVD is now done online. With YouTube commanding about a 70% market share of all online video viewing, it means we've pretty much just accepted the lower picture quality for web video, at least for now. YouTube of course now offers higher-quality streams of videos where the publisher's have uploaded the larger versions. Still, it's not TV quality. 

But true HD quality video is coming. We've seen a leap forward from Hulu with their HD content, along with blip.tv and Veoh setting a higher standard in terms of picture quality. What's the next step?  Vusion (formerly Jittr) provides what they call "instant-on, full-screen, high quality streaming video." The Milpitas, CA-based company recently snagged the prestigious “Judges Choice” award in the video section of Under the Radar 2008.

Right now, they just have a handful of  demo videos on their site to show off their next-gen WARP player. The player requires the WARP plug-in and is well worth the minute or two it takes to ge it setup. Since they don't yet allow embedding of their demos , I've posted a screen shot from Kanye West's "Stronger" video. Click on the image to watch it on their site. I recommend the full-screen version which is really what the WARP player is all about. It  enables a TV-like full screen viewing experience while eliminating buffering and pausing so common with other streaming media players. It's basically a bit of hybrid between pure streaming video and downloaded video since it temporarily stores video chunks on your hard drive to enhance the streaming performance, without fully downloading the video to your machine.

CrunchBase Information

Vusion

Information provided by CrunchBase

Twiddla shows off at April NY Tech

Coming off a nice win (SXSW Web Award for Technical Achievement) last week in Austin, the Twiddla team demoed their collaborative whiteboard app to the crowd at the April NY Tech Meetup tonight in Manhattan.

Very cool tool for quick remote brainstorm sessions, all web-based and flash-free. I love how quickly the audience was able to log in and start marking up the page during his talk. They definitely get the simplicity that a Web 2.0 site needs to gain traction. Twiddla founder/developer Benjamin Satterfield noted that they are at 45,000 user signups so far, aided nicely by the SXSW win it seems.