TechCrunch Disrupt has always been a great opportunity to see new startups emerging. This year we saw no shortage of startups, but we struggled to see anything really groundbreaking.
The amount of innovation offered by most of these products was more or less zero, a feeling echoed anecdotally by other attendees this year. For sure, there there were a few companies that really had awesome products, and we have listed our top five startups from TechCrunch Disrupt below:
Very innovative conference calling application created by the same gentleman who created what the world calls Google Voice. They ended up winning disrupt, which was personally no surprise to me, they had the best product, design, and were the most ‘together’ product in the battlefield.
Again, very innovative company that’s disrupting the design space. They offer a great platform for creating innovative walkthroughs of web designs and have a very polished product. The demo of their upcoming 2.0 release had some fantastic stuff in the pipeline.
This startup really solves a big problem in my book. I shall ask the question: “How many of you have ever slept or tried to sleep/lay down with headphones?” It’s a real pain in the rear end and very uncomfortable. Bedphone’s has the world’s thinnest headphone that easily wraps around your ear, I had the chance to demo a pair and you could not even feel that they were there. They retail for around twenty dollars and come with a case and a cool sleeping mask.
An Israeli company out of Tel-Aviv, Dateini (ini as in Houdini) offers consumers a way to seamlessly plan out their date nights. Plug in your budget, where you are, what you want the theme to be etc… and it comes up with a custom itinerary for you, integrating groupon and living social deals to give you the best bang for your buck.
They won the award for most innovative startup at disrupt, a well deserved honor. What OpenGarden does is sort of hard to explain, but more or less it let’s you share Internet from any device you own to any other device you own. Think of a really large Internet sharing ad-hoc network that is very secure and interconnects all your devices. They’re already out for android and mac, so be sure to check them out.
