David Hasselhof got all the attention during the last round of start-ups

The Next Web is about the future of the web, so it is obvious that startups play a significant role during the Conference. 24 startups will do a 5 minute presentation on main stage. During breaks all attendees and press can visit the startups at their booth in the Company Arena (same area as where the coffee and lunch is). This way startups can present themselves in the best way and get the most traction out of the conference.

Symbaloo

This start-up won a Dutch New Media award for the best web concept yesterday, so they probably had a rough night. And you could tell, because they couldn’t really bring over their USP’s on stage. You could tell by the questions of the audience that they didn’t really see what the added value compared to Netvibes was. Yet that’s easy to say: the user interface is more intuitive and therefore Symbaloo is perfect for the ‘normal people’. (That’s certainly a trend this conference).

Beezbox

Beezbox is company that wants to stimulate people to engage in social networks. Yet I don’t really get who they want to reach. Almost everybody is already on a network right? And if some people aren’t, they probably join the one at least has a lot of users. So why creating a network that wants to be a place for polyglots and multiroots global minded people? Better start a Facebook group and gather there.

Goojet

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Goojet wants to bring the world you’ve created with Web 2.0 services to your mobile device, so you always carry your desktop life with you. It’s just a matter of dragging and dropping the services (goojets) – like photos, rss feeds, notes, emails and whatnot – to your phone. And of course, thanks to some syncing magic, you can also check your contact list wherever you are. But aren’t all the big services working on a good mobile version as well? I mean, my Web 2.0 world mainly exists out of Google services and I already have that data synced with my iPod Touch and phone.

Hoera

Hoera is offering those old-fashioned companies about people say about them on the web. Since the marketing directors aren’t able to scan the web 24/7, they just buy this service and see the opinions of users summarized in fancy graphs. I hope they don’t think that they’re up to date then. Since the most important thing in Web 2.0 is participating (!!!). Yet using Hoera will be a pretty good start for them.

Soocial

Yeah! There’s a start-up who knows to entertain the crowd. They’ve set up a funny marketing campaign around David Hasselhof and people really seem to like that. They showed this movie that really made the audience laugh:

Hassle Free from Soocial on Vimeo.
So what Soocial does is syncing your contacts in an effective and easy way. Good product, great PR. Especially when you consider that they featured in last night’s Diggnation show as well.

Locle

I was introduced to someone when Locle came up the stage, so I missed this pitch. Luckily you can always trust on Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK:

Mobile social networking platform which pulls the Cell ID and locates where you are.
Puts friends on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace on a map on your phone. Proximity alerts
messaging over data. Anonomyzed social netwiork. Runs on Java, Symbian, Windows. Location contextual advertising. Premium inMail messaging, Add on services like dataing etc, White labelling for social networks. (Verdict: Good, detailed pitch. Reminds me of Trutap but with location data).