Pick of the bunch from EIE11

Yesterday myself, Chris and Finbarr got up at a ridiculous time and made our way across to Edinburgh for the final day of the Informatics Ventures Engage Invest Exploit event. The event puts investors in front of a range of high quality technology prospects. Sadly the event was a bit too soon for us to have anything to show but we had the excellent opportunity to observe and learn.

For me the stand out was Cosneta, a pen like tool that turns any monitor into an interactive whiteboard. Very nice bit of kit and Stuart Jamieson, Director of Cosneta, gave an excellent pitch. Confident and comfortable on stage in front of a room full of potential investors, Stuart was excellent and sold his business and product very well. The Cosneta website is currently under construction Cosneta but will keep an eye on it, could be the perfect companion to a Pico Projector.

Another standout pitch was HuzuTech. This a business all about social games, an area where there is plenty of money these days. Zynga are raking in money at rate of knots with games like Farmville so social gaming is something companies will need to consider either as a pormotional tool or as a source of income. This is where HuzuTech come in with their platform to create virtual worlds. HuzuTech is bit further along than Cosneta but again well worth watching.

Another few companies with talented people behind them that I’m going to be keeping an eye on are:

• TigaTag by Bruno Panara is a new take on location based checkins. Playing games with your friends and those around you. Tigatag could be a nice twist on location checkin services and will hopefully make its way over to Glasgow soon.
• SourceRail by Stephen Shepard for tracking online media. Allowing webmasters or PR agencies to track what is being said across the web about a given topic or product. Had a nice working demo with a nice interface.
• Zoom2Work by Jonathan Millin based around car pooling. This is a neat idea in theory and would be great if it could work in practice here in the UK. Selling branded social car pooling tools to companies is an innovative approach to a problem that nobody has been able to solve.

EIE was full of plenty more cool startups and talented people that I hope to meet again and see doing well. Big thanks to Danny Helson for being able to fit us in at the last minute was an excellent experience and I hope at EIE12 (with a Keynote by Sir Jackie Stewart) I will be there to pitch.