Microsoft BizSpark is a proud sponsor of the Web 2.0 Expo LaunchPad. The LaunchPad is an avenue for startup companies to pitch their ideas to the Web 2.0 Expo audience, which includes press, investors, corp-dev folks and others. Of the several submissions that were made by startup companies, my co-judges Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and Matt Marshall of VentureBeat picked five finalists to present their ideas. What we will be looking in a winner is how a product can focus on what is essential and transformational in today’s market.

Each of these companies will get five minutes on stage to pitch:

	80legs provides a web-scale platform for content discovery and analysis.  Developers will use 80legs to analyze the Internet at blazing fast speeds (2 billion pages/day on a 50,000-node supercomputer) and very low costs ($2.00 per million pages crawled; $0.03 per CPU-hr).  With 80legs, the Internet is yours.
	zeaLOG is a place to collect and visualize personal data.  Users graph their data alone or in groups, tracking everything from weight and exercise to drinking habits, mileage, movie watching, even sexual activity. Collaborate, compete and measure up. If you can quantify it, you can zeaLOG it.
	Created by Nitobi at iPhoneDevCamp 2008, PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building mobile applications with JavaScript. With PhoneGap, you can author apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of native mobile device capabilities like geo-location, camera, vibration and sound. PhoneGap applications run on iPhone, Android and Blackberry.
	Bantam allows business teams to create secure social workspaces to share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships inside and outside the organization. Status updating, auto-posting, following, notifying, messaging, and profile pointing features weave purposefully into business workflow objects (activities, CRM, events, project management, etc.) for users to become aware and interact with their colleagues and contacts.
	DUB gives you a simple, smart way to exchange contact information from your mobile phone. Your contact’s info loads directly into your existing mobile address book and is automatically updated whenever your contact changes their information (phone, email, address, etc.). Create your mobile business card with DUB at www.dubmenow.com.

The LaunchPad will be held in the keynote room on Thursday, April 2 at 1:15pm and will be emceed by John Battelle, Founder/Chairman/CEO of Federated Media and Program Chair of Web 2.0 Summit. See you there!

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