Last week, 25 selected applicants presented to a “group of peers and investors” at the Data 2.0 Pitch Day. From that crop of startups, only five made it past the judges. Today, those five startups took the stage at the Data 2.0 conference in San Francisco to battle for the crown of Data 2.0.
What do they win? Well, nothing tangible, unless you count being the favorite of a well-versed group of VCs and one Robert Scoble to be a tangible prize.
Each startup got three minutes to present and then three minutes to answer questions before Bipu Sinha of Lightspeed Ventures, Andrew Jenks of EMC Ventures, Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures and blogger Robert Scoble of Rackspace.
In no particular order, here are the companies that made it to the final stage at today’s Data 2.0 conference:
- Micello, billed as the “Google Maps for the indoors,” offers indoor maps for a malls, plazas, stadiums, airports, conference centers and any variety of buildings. The site has maps for more than 4,000 places in the U.S., Japan and Singapore and offers APIs to create services on top of its data. The company launched at DEMO 2009.
- Mashape is “your place to easily build, distribute and hack badass APIs.” The service provides a central directory of APIs, as well as simplifies the ability to generate a simple, ready-to-use API and add it to a marketplace. The company launched November 2010.
- PlantSense “brings sensors and simplified web technology together to help home gardeners grow flourishing fruits, vegetables, flowers, trees and shrubs.” The company has worked with Black & Decker over the last year to sell sensors to consumers. These sensors detect environmental and soil conditions, correlate that with plant type, and make recommendations on how to better help the plant to grow. Plantsense launched in 2006 and has raised two rounds of funding since.
- Min.us calls itself “the simplest and easiest way to share” and, indeed, when the service launched last November, we wrote that it made sharing “as easy as a quick drag and drop.” Min.us has moved being simply sharing on the Web to becoming multi platform, working not only on Mac, Windows and Linux, but also Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7 and with an extension on both Firefox and Chrome.
- Chart.io is “Google Analytics for your database.” The site works to make analyzing data simple and intuitive for the average user, instead of the data wizard. It works to help users visualize data in real-time charts and “make sense of all the data you collect every day.” Chart.io launched as part of YCombinators 2010 class.
The winner of Data 2.0’s Startup Pitch, and receiver of one handshake, was Micello. Said the judges, they chose Micello both for its potential for real-world use cases and its ability to go hyperlocal. We agree.
