Vator.TV's VatorSplash Makes a Splash

Bambi Francisco and her team at Vator TV pulled together an incredible evening of start-up pitches, networking, table-top demos and music, at San Francisco's Cafe Du Nord earlier this week.

VatorSplash was the first event they've done in this format, hopefully the first of many others we'll see on the calendar in 2010.

Client Answers.com sponsored the event, one which brought start-ups and emerging technology companies to the front stage and demo-pit from as far away as Europe.

The RentCycle won the crowd and judges over, winning the best of at the end of the night.

Other companies that presented new and innovative solutions on-stage included Control Box, which is all about protecting consumers from fraud.

Your Version's Dan Olsen started his pitch with the notion that the current ways of finding content is broken. As a real-time discovery engine, their goal is to help people share public discoveries, by incorporating autotagging, bookmarking, and allowing you to upload your interests through a thumblist. "RSS for the rest of us," touts one of their users.

Robert Scoble acted as host, moderating questions from the audience in between demos and pitches.

Myegamer connects all video gamers through one website. Given a growth industry that they tout was $5.3 billion in December, they feel that they're primed to tap into an audience who is yearning for more. With 3,000 gaming cafes in the U.S. alone, these two very young entrepreneurs who drove 28 hours from Kansas to participate in the VatorSplash event, feel that their solution is filling a missing hole.

Cuneyt Özveren of Intelligent Papers shows a demo of iTextbook. Their goal is to do for education what Apple has done for entertainment. iTextbook allows students to highlight text in an e-book. It supports notebooks, video, flash and video, and you can pick your own paper types. "It's also incredibly durable," he says as he throws it down on the floor. Their goal is to sell it for about $100 a device.

Those who didn't present on-stage took a table upstairs and practiced their pitch.

Bambi and Scoble unveil the winner....drum roll please....

Judges Patrick Chung, Dana Settle, Ezra Roizen and Brian Ascher drill winner RentCycle at the end of the evening.

Cortexica's Steve Semenzato demos Winefinder

The below photo was taken to demo Pixelpipe at their booth. It was immediately sent to Twitter, as well as to my email. The goal is to upload photos, video, and audio files once through the Pixelpipe Media Gateway and then be able to distribute your content across over 100+ social networks, photo/video sites, blogs, and other online services.