01
June
2005
|
14:34 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Startups on parade at IBD Under the Radar event

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher


Startups-on-Parade.jpgThere was a good turnout at the IBD "Under the Radar" consumer technologies event Tuesday as 32 young startups paraded in front of very skeptical panels of VCs.


The event is partly promoted as one in which startups can potentially raise funds from the exposure to VCs. But at the previous Under the Radar event, VCs told me they would not consider funding any of the startups appearing because they had no exclusivity in the deals.

Nevertheless, the Under the Radar event drew a decent sized group of in-crowd VCs, media and various other Silicon Valley folk.


ibd_logo.gifFrom speaking with various people that had spent the day at the conference, the crop of startups was interesting but derivative. Steve Eskenazi, general partner at WaldenVC summed it up when he said, "They all seem to be variations on Google and other large companies, none of them have an original business model."


I asked how was the energy of the presentations? The complaint last time was that only one startup exhibited any excitement or passion. I was told it was good, that the startups seemed to be well motivated.


Some notable winners in their categories were PeerFlix, the peer-to-peer DVD trading site, and UpSnap, the SMS mobile search company, was an audience favorite. Here is a full list of the winners.


Michael Yang, CEO at Become.com, one of the more interesting shopping search engines, was in a very good mood, he had just raised a $7.2m round all from his original investors.


And a couple of the other companies also said they were not looking for investors. So why appear at IBD? Well, the networking was pretty good when I arrived at the end of the day...