Supernova's Top 2007 Innovators

At Supernova 2007 this week, TechCrunch co-hosts a session that is centered around start-up product demos. Below is a handful of the ones that were selected and a summary on each of them.

Paul Marino talks about Aggregate Knowledge, which they launched at Demo last year. Where is it today? It is centered all around discovery. One of the sites they power is Delightful Deliveries. If its Father's Day, you may do a generic search for things you father may like and in that process, it may bring you results or ideas you wouldn't have thought of but is relevant. They're also powering discovery for Answers.com, which is integrating human behavior and navigation. Discovery is not about search - its about serendipity and surprise.

CAST TV is about connecting users to videos they want to watch online - from news to viral videos. Husband and wife team show video search through a more traditional Google video Search and YouTube model before they turn to CAST TV.

You can subscribe here to paid quality episodes. They sort videos from numerous sites into various shows. The CAST TV Show Page shows you videos that are organized for users that are automatically generated. The unique aspect is that "they've focused on video search. Crawling, indexing and relevancy are their key differentiators. Funded by DFJ, they're currently in invite-only beta.

Critical Metrics helps aggregate the best music according to 'you.'
It filters all strong recommendations (i.e., all reviews ranked four stars or greater) during the selected time period, displaying the most recent, the most widely recommended, and the highest-rated results first. They claim to be getting very positive responses from sites like Blender.

Client Spock is also on the Supernova stage showing the latest features of their new people search site, due to go live sometime in July. Spock's Jay Bhatti shows a handful of useful searches, either by tag, i.e., democrats, useful venture capitalists who can fund my new great idea, those in Los Angeles who are single and even those who have been arrested for drunk driving. You can really drill down into each of these searches by taking it a step further, i.e., clicking on any of the tags within that search, which brings you to a whole new set of data. It combines really really smart search, focused around people with content discovery but discovery that is relevant to your search criteria.

Jangl (without the e) of course, is 'communications in the context of social networks,' he says? Hmmm, now there's a unique differentiator. If you want to call someone but don't have their number, you can do that through your social network with Jangl To-Go. Your numbers are not disclosed but people can find you through a virtual number that is kept private, i.e., through Match or a social network.

Pando Networks was primarily about sharing really large media files. It is essentially free P2P software that makes publishing, sending and downloading large media files faster and easier. The old way of delivering media was one server or series of servers that get called upon to deliver content. If a million people show up, you're going to have performance problems and it doesn't scale. In Pando's world, the server co-exists with your delivery network.

The more people request content at the same time, the faster it gets. He referenced Balmer who talked about how the future of all media will be delivered across IP networks. Old model: 1 GB movie to 1 M viewers cost $200,000 but they'll be able to do this for $5,000. Their network platform is made up of a Pando Client, a Pando Network and a Pando Publisher, which they're introducing today. Pando Publisher lets content owners deliver HD videos through P2P streaming, giving them detailed user and usage reporting as well as the ability to monetize video ads. Some of their partners include BlipTv, Revver, and Podbridge.

And then for the FAKE (canned) presentation: ZapMeals helps consumers find fast food in an eBay-like way. It is an online food ordering & delivery marketplace, matching hungry consumers with independent local food. After you have ordered a few times, it will recommend interesting food that you may like in the future and gets it to you quickly. 4% of people are ordering take out food online.

In five minutes, it is estimated that it will be up to 25%. They plan to charge a 15% food preparation fee. Their competitors: offline: mom, McDonalds, Subway, online: "we're it," says Wayne.

VC and visionary judges listen and look on at the innovators' demos and presentations from the stage, including Werbach, Kopelman and Arrington.