Original text, written by Douglas Crets.
Ed Tech Enthusiast -- Social Media Director and Audience Evangelist at Microsoft BizSpark. Posted: 05/31/2012 11:51 am.
The origianal version of the post can be found on http://www.huffingtonpost.com.
My colleague Daryll McDade is a senior Startup Evangelist in Microsoft's Emerging Business Trends team. He's based in Seattle, but he made the big haul to come out to New York City and see Disrupt, and talk to teams. Here are some of his thoughts on what he liked, even among the groups that didn't win big.
Of the Battlefield, he said:
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Not sure how Cardify didn't make it into the finals; IMO, they have by far the most disruptive solution; it's loyalty that requires next-to-zero work for either merchant or consumer. Mark my words ... this one is going to be BIG.
I was also super impressed by Sunglass and their in-browser collaborative 3D modeling; I've seen a few others in this space but considering that Sunglass is Web standards-based requiring no plug-ins, the performance and capability were pretty stunning.
Koemei, which enable the real-time transcription, captioning and [semantic] searchability of any video, is another game-changer. If they can make progress with YouTube to get programmatic access to their library it will be "game over" in video search. Interesting to note that they've been working on this since 2003 but only now in a position to try to commercialize it. I'm going to be watching this one for partnership announcements.
Ark gets the award for "most guts" as they walked away from acquisition talks with Facebook AND told everyone who would listen that they did so. Cracking the code on people search has been the "white buffalo" in Search for years and these guys have legitimately cracked it. That said, I can't see this as a standalone business ... Search needs consolidation to draw (and retain) consumers en mass. May not be Facebook but I'll be looking for someone to acquire these guys.
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