From the 'Demo Pit' at TechCrunch40

I spent the morning checking out some promising new Web startup companies at the TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco. I spent most of my time in the "Demo Pit," a large room just off the main meeting room where around 30 young companies vied for the attention of investors and press.

I noticed several themes as I took my initial pass through the room--a few companies were porting Web sites and services over to mobile platforms, a few companies were doing online dating and social networking, while a few others were providing places for people to collaborate on video or music production.

Before the morning was over, I had looked at perhaps 20 new products and found five or six that I thought were filling a real need with a good solution.

LineUpNewYork aggregates the profiles of online singles from a variety of dating sites. When singles sign on to the site and search for potential dates in the area, the search might bring up members of match.com, Yahoo Personals, eHarmony and other dating services. So it's a bit like belonging to ten different dating services at once. If a user begins to notice that the profiles he/she likes come from one particular dating site, he/she might go off and join that site. Right now, LineUpNewYork serves only singles in the New York area, but it plans to branch out to other big cities across the U.S. soon.

AllPeers (one of PC World's Fantastic Freebees) provides a Firefox browser extension that makes it pretty easy to share large files like music and video with your friends. The extension makes a buddy list (your list of peers) appear in a window at the left side of the browser. You just drag-and-drop the files you want to share over to the buddy you want to share them with, then hit the Share button. AllPeers recently began supporting BitTorrent files, too.

At Dopetracks.com, hip hop emcees (rappers) can find DJs (music producers, beat makers) they like and make recordings with them online. Rappers come in and sample some of the 60,000 or so rhythm tracks that have been uploaded to the site by DJs. When they find the one they like, they use the simple Flash recording application provided at the site to put their rhymes to the beats. There's also a notepad where the rappers can work on, then publish their lyrics. One of the Dopetracks founders, Tal Pink, told me the site is a great way for rappers and producers to find each other; and yes, non-rappers are welcome to give it a try too. Dopetracks is just a few months old, and is based in L.A.

Kaltura also provides an online collaboration platform, but is focused on the development of video and animation projects by groups of people. Various members of a group--any group--can upload their own source material to the Kaltura portal, where they can then use a simple, multi-user editor to piece it all together and add effects. Kaltura says it'll not only offer its collaboration platform at its own site, but will also license it to other sites that want to make collaboration possible among members.

Boulder, Colo.-based Kerpoof provides yet another online content creation platform, but one that's designed for the entertainment and education of kids. The online app's simple timeline-based interface lets kids make short stories using sounds, video and animation. When they're done, they can save their creations to their own galleries, share them with other kids, and vote on their favorites.

Another site, YourStreet.com, is a mash-up application that plots the physical locations of news stories on a map. How? The company wrote an app that searches out the location information in news stories, blogs and conversations. If the word "Springfield" appears, the app looks for other clues in the text to determine whether the story refers to Springfield, Ohio or Springfield, New Jersey. The end result is the reader's ability to find news that's happenning close to home. Yourstreet also hosts discussions of the news, which CEO James Nicholson says fosters community. Yourstreet will launch with coverage of every city in the U.S. in early October, Nicholson says.

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