There were a lot of good startups at the Techcrunch 50 today. I saw just about all of them, liked some of them, and will comment on the ones that I thought were most interesting.

iThryv

“Teach kids how to save.”

They recommend ways for kids to save money. They have different layouts that are tailored to the financial needs of different age groups and they are solving a real problem by trying to decrease the rampant debt problem that teenagers and young adults face.

I agree with Marissa Meyer’s sentiment that kids want to save money up for something. iThryv has a system of “business plans” for young people that doesn’t seem to jive well with how kids really use the web. There is also the question about adoption by banks, their business model relies on licensing their technology to banks. It’s unclear whether they will they be able to get enough banks to partner with them to stay afloat.

Hangout Industries

“It looks a little like an embeddable version of The Sims.”

The basic idea of Hangout is to make a virtual world complete with video, audio, furniture editing, avatar creation, Threadless T-shirts and other brand placements and shove this all into a widget that you plug into your existing social networks.

The million dollar question is whether you can do all of this and make it relevant when the real-estate you plan to work with (social networking profiles) is so small. They might want to consider building a destination site but even if they do then they are fighting against the fact that kids already have Social Networks they are committed to.

Blah Girls (Ashton Kutcher)

“It’s a convergence of celebrity news and interactive entertainment”

In reality it’s an interesting experiment in interactive video. The show is funny, but the part that really matters is all the “interactive” elements that they are building in. I put “interactive” in quotes because Ashton probably used the word 15 times to describe his product.

At it’s core, the site tries to pull you into the Blah Girls universe. If you leave a comment, you’ll get a canned reply from the girls and you can also ask them questions.

Like Hangout they are relying on integrated product placement. A hint for rich media producers, product placements seems to be where advertising is heading. If you want to be in on the ground floor, my suggestion would be to jump on the boat.

Tweegee

Simple lesson: Tweegee as a product was OK, however, if you hire kids to be a part of your presentation and they sound like they are straight out of Children Of the Corn, your startup immediately loses credibility.

Dotspot

Dotspots lets you annotate websites with text and video and share those annotations with your friends. At scale, this is an entirely new way of interacting with the web. It lets anyone “correct” and expand on articles that are either incorrect or undersourced. Since they have strong filtering technology running in the background, a lot of the spamming that one would expect is mitigated.

This is a great idea, the only problem is that it’s a “feature” it doesn’t give me a strong enough reason to install it. Will it increase my pageviews, traffic, advertising? When you have a product that requires an install, you need to provide value above and beyond the “neat idea” shtick in order to get wide adoption. It’s unclear whether Dotspot does this yet.

I would like to see an testbed for this application that encourages people to download the extension. They will need a gimmick to spur adoption.

Angstro

Import your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, have the semantic engine parse their profiles for relevant keywords and then have Angstro feed you news about your professional network based on this parsing.

This is a feature, an interesting feature but a feature nonetheless. The best chance they have is to align themselves with one of the major social networks. While there might be an advertising play in here somewhere, it’s not strong enough to be worth the effort.

Stock Mood

“We have computers reading the news”

Stockmood is kind of like Google’s Stock page but with some AI wizardry in the background. You can get perspective on the distribution of news around a stock.

• You can get a perspective on how the news is flowing (whether it’s positive or negative). They call this sentiment.

• You can also get a feeling of “mood,” the relationship between the sentiment and the price.

• The alerting system alerts users to high probability times in price. If you buy into stock analysis (see Random Walk On Wallstreet for a counterpoint) then these alerts could give you insight into when to buy.

• Finally they let you track the trends of mood, sentiment and price in easy to read graphs.

This is one of those products that becomes amazingly useful if it works. The big question is whether the market is big enough to support it. Day traders probably won’t be able to understand the statistics, and large institutional investors already have their own ways of tracking the market — until they have some strong use cases it might be difficult to get people to convert.

Copybox

“The copywriters Photoshop”

Copybox lets you create If . . . else trees in copywriting. It will display different text depending on factors ranging from location to weather. For instance, if someone is writing an ad for New York and San Francisco, they could use Action Script to make certain that each city saw the copy that would be most relevant to them.

This is a big idea that is being treated like a small one. They want to focus strictly on big advertisers (for now) and what that ignores is a huge market for anyone who does copywriting for dynamic text. If they expanded their offering to make it easy for any content producer to use Copybox they would see much faster adoption.

Adgregate Markets

Adgregate Markets is a company that creates cobranded Flash widgets that allow you to change the point of transaction from your advertisers site to your own. The idea is that by reducing the number of steps necessary for a conversion, you will increase the percentage of conversions for the advertiser while keeping people on your site longer — since they don’t need to leave to visit your advertisers.

The question is whether advertisers really want to give up their portals. I think that Adgregate underestimates the power of driving people to a portal site and being able to control the experience. Only time will tell if enough of the notoriously slow to move ad business adopts this new way of looking at advertising.

Other Inbox

It helps you fight spam. It was the darling of the shows final act. I’ll leave the details for another post.

Parting Shots

It’s important that if you have a conference based on startups showing off web applications you have functioning WiFi. It also helps keep the antsy bloggers from mutiny.

I really appreciated the tenacity of the Demopit participants, they were working under non-ideal conditions and they manged to show off some interesting technologies.

As an industry we really need to stop building the: “same old things.” If I hear the words collaborative or interactive one more time . . . The startups are interesting but I can’t help to feel like we’re covering the same ground.

The highlight of today had to be the interview with Peter Thiel, even though Mike Arrington’s interview manner could use some serious polishing.

All in all it was an exciting day in the breach, and hopefully only the beginning of more interesting days to come.

(Forum)