San Francisco is seething with tech start-ups even more feverishly than usual this week.
The TechCrunch40 event here features 40 of the most promising tech companies from around the world pitching for a $50,000 top prize.
They were chosen from 750 submissions and 100 more from these are competing in a “DemoPit” at the event. One of them will be chosen by delegates to join the 40 that are presenting to venture capitalists, the media and fellow companies.
The 40 are being questioned by some high-powered panels: Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, Ryan Block, editor-in-chief of Engadget, blogger Om Malik and Marissa Mayer, head of search products at Google, were the first set of judges on Monday.
The focus was on search and discovery. Powerset showed off a natural-language search engine, Cognitive Code introduced SILVIA, a conversational AI female that could answer questions, Cast.tv demonstrated a more relevant video search engine, Faroo debuted a peer-to-peer search engine and Viewdle showed how it was using facial-recognition software to build the world’s largest people-in-video reference database.
Other sessions focus on start-ups exploring mobility, community, crowd sourcing, productivity, analytics, mash-ups and entertainment.
