The TechCrunch 40......

From yesterday the whole global 'Nethead startup scene focusses on the parade of the TechCrunch 40 - forty startups chosen by a panel of luminaries as "the best" startups on the globe (or of those that applied anyway)....and the drumroll call is for.....:

Paul Boutin, who outed them first using the nefarious practice of walking past the event and seeing them written on a banner before they were published on-line. Who said old Media was dead

Here they are courtesy of Don Dodge (go to Don's page if a link to the company is desired)

Search and Discovery

Powerset - semantic NLP search
Cognitive Code - AI for Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Cast.tv - video search
Faroo - distributed P2P search
Viewdle - video indexing/search

Mobile and Communications

Cubic Telecom - Wi-Fi for cell phones - sort of like Skype
Yap - voice UI for SMS, texting, and web apps
Trutap - cell phone UI to connect social networking sites
Ceedo - virtualization for mobility
Loudtalks - like an Internet walkie-talkie

Community and Collaboration

Story Blender - online video collaboration
TripIt - organize your travel
Flock - social web browser
MusicShake - User created music
8020Everywhere - community created travel magazine

Crowd Sourcing

Cake Financial - personal investing social network
DocStoc - File sharing for business, legal, and technical documents
TeachThePeople - social network for sharing educational documents
CrowdSpirit - crowdsourcing for electronic products
Ponoko - Community to buy, sell, and share product designs

Productivity and Web Applications

Xobni - an organizer for email, inbox spelled backwards
Orgoo - all your email, IM, video, and SMS organized in one place
App2You - User built application framework with process and workflow built in
Mint Software - web based personal finance tools
Kerpoof - fun web apps for children. Like Club Penguin.

Revenue Models and Analytics

Spottt - a free banner ad exchange
Clickable - manage ad campaigns across all networks
GotStatus - stats and analytics service for any system or service
PubMatic - For web publishers to manage their ad inventory
ZocDoc- dentist and doctor appointment management

Rich Media and Mash Ups

Xtr3D - Extreme reality, human interface to computers
BroadClip - Scans Internet radio for music you want on your phone, iPod, Zune
mEgo - a site to share all your personal photos, notes, social network stuff
Wixi - All your media stored in one place
BeFunky - Funky avatars and ways to express yourself

Entertainment

FlowPlay - social entertainment platform for social games
Areae - Links to deep content organized by topic
WooMe - Online speed dating
Zivity - A site for glamour shots of beautiful women
DemoPit WildCard - one company from the 100 in the demo area will be invited to present to the full conference.

Don Dodge is also reviewing them 10 at a time (start here), and TechCrunch over here. As always there is lots of breathless commentary in the blogosphere (after all, where would we be without hype in the Hype Cycle) but Umair Haque is underwhelmed, pointing to this article suggesting that Web 2.0 is a spent force (or at least the cash has largely been spent).

Not had a lot of time to go through them here at Broadstuff (though some of them seem extremely new - not so much start-ups as dream-ups) but the New Search, Communications and Personal Finance ones look interesting.

Postscript - Mint won...first post past my reader was from Jemima Kiss. Great for Mint and PF startups (another one recently won at SeedCamp) but we must admit to being a bit confused - we thought the event was about new startups, turns out that Mint is already funded (and by some of the TC40 voters apparently).