When TechCrunch team up with 2pears/Twisted Tree you know you’re going to be in for a day/night of entertainment – and that’s exactly what we received on Thursday 24th September at Café de Paris.

Petra Johansson and Rassami Hok Ljungberg from the newly formed 2pears organised the event, hosted by Mike Butcher, Editor of TechCrunch Europe.

The idea was for 12 start-ups to pitch their business in a quick-burst three minute pitch. Petra and UKTI offered some workshops earlier in the year to help any start-ups with their presentations. This event should silence all the critics out there who claim TechCrunch don’t support the start-up community in London enough.

Here’s a round-up of some of the interesting pitches from the day:

MixCloud
Although we haven’t mentioned MixCloud much in the past, we’ve certainly been watching our friend Nikhil building his ‘YouTube of Radio.’
MixCloud has come a long way since they were at the TechCrunch Europas, and successfully launched out of Beta on Friday. It seems they’re looking for more content partners to join the likes of the BBC, and more sites interested in aggregating the vast content from MixCloud. Of course, like most start-ups they’re also interested in fundraising.
The main goal of MixCloud is to be a radio service, providing a way for people to access/share radio streams (including music and talk shows). This isn’t another website for sharing individual songs, they’re not building another Spotify/Grooveshark.

Notion Learning – Dave Ganly
Notion Learning is a Web based e-learning platform, aimed at being the Huddle/Basecamp of e-learning.
There’s a lot of competition in the market, including Litmos and Articulate.com. Notion Learning are trying to focus more on the SMEs and leaving the higher end to the big boys.
With a slight difference in business model, NL are focused more on tracking data, rather than creating the content – they may stand a chance.

AudioBoo – Nick Hancock
Building up some hype around the Twitterverse at the moment, AudioBoo is a totally free iPhone application and service. The API is open to all, at no cost. Users can upload short audio clips from their iPhone to the website. Think TwitPic for audio.
We see a gap in the market that these guys could fill. There’s plenty of video and image hosting services, but no quick-upload audio services like this. Saying that, Apple could easily crush this whole model with a little adjustment to their iPhone ‘Voice memo’ application.
The idea is to build tools for companies to manage their Boosream, and make a revenue through the Freemium model. The guys are currently looking for around £300k seed funding.
Objectives :
They’d like the API to be taken-up/used by more companies.
They’re aiming to take AudioBoo away from being just an iPhone app, and introduce it to the Android and other mobile platforms which are in currently development.
There will no doubt be a new AudioBoo iPhone app in the near future, with a lot more zest.
AudioBoo also hope to drive market traction in US and start selling the Pro service to companies.
It seems every tech company is trying to create new verbs around their technology these days. AudioBoo are going for ‘Booing’. Which means ‘Brief audio clips posted/shared on audioboo.com’.

Festbuzz – Steven Renwick
Festbuzz say their business is “Trying to understand emotions behind online conversation.” which in fact means they’re crowd-sourcing reviews on  Twitter, blogs, news & review sites. They aggregate all this data and try to extract wether people like/dislike things (bands at festival for e.g.).
Based on a Freemium model, where they hope to offer a free package to consumers and paid premium package to businesses, FestBuzz are looking for seed funding at the moment.
There is a lot of competition in brand monitoring, and although FestBuz try to label themselves as Sentiment Analysis, this is what they actually do.
They offer a semi-open API. But of course can’t release too much data in fear of compromising themselves to the competition, but they say they allow users enough data to make a fun game/widget.
In the Q&A session FestBuzz were asked “How are you going to beat Google?” which they responded with “We think we’e got the best analysis system”. Goodluck.
The website seems to be down at the moment.

Edward VIII was also there pitching Kohive (which we wrote about earlier in the month). We’ll be sure to re-visit this site when they’ve added some of the much-requested features. Things are looking up though, the site offers a lot of potential, as long as Kohive offer the users what they’re asking for.

There was a really interesting array of speakers from the industry. Some depressing, some with really inspiring messages. Will take our hats off to Will Harris, and show a look a confusion towards the last speaker Scott Rafer, who left the crowd asking “who are you and what are you doing here?”.

Speakers on the day included:

• Maz Nadjm, BSKYB
• Wil Harris, Channel Flip
• Scott Rafer, Lookery and Mashery
• Barak Rabinowitz, Amuso.com – TechCrunch London Trivia Skill Game – Butcher vs. Arrington.

The event also had some excellent sponsors:

• Seedcamp – who have announced this year’s winners…
• The Press Association – For more information, please visit www.pressassociation.com
• UKTI – Together with UKTI TechCrunch Europe is running a series of pitch workshops that are free to attend for qualified startups. The next one is held in London on 30th November and if you are interested in attending this, please contact petra@twistedtree.co.uk.
• Bootlaw – Bootlaw is a free boot camp for emerging technology, internet and digital businesses and the professionals working in them who want to learn more about the legal issues they face. For more information go to www.bootlaw.com

Apart from very choppy WiFi and a lack of any working 3G signal, this event was money well spent. See you at the next one!