Social Matchbox DC Spring 2010 - Recap

Earlier this week in DC was the Spring installment of Social Matchbox, an event that brings together promising startups in the community to present their business ideas, seek funding, and gather feedback from a crowd of passionate digital media fans.  It was an impressive roster of presenting companies with a heavy emphasis on consumer facing concepts.  I fully expect at least a few of these companies to get funding.  In particular, here are the ones who stood out:

 

 

Love this concept.  I walk around with CVS, Barnes & Noble, and grocery store loyalty cards in my wallet, and each time I visit these places, I need to empty out my entire wallet to reach them.  CardStar takes the hassle out of managing each card and makes the card available on your phone by re-creating the bar code associated with the card.  The best part is that beyond the simple convenience factor, this allows retailers to push down special, personalized deals to your phone.  This app is going to make my wallet seriously thinner...literally. 

 

 
This was by far the most entertaining presentation of the night.  In the spirit of Seinfeld’s NBC show “The Marriage Ref”, CouplesSpark aims to help couples “win” arguments by letting the general public weigh in on a dispute.  For all us guys, we know we will never actually “win” the argument,  but this kind of service can serve as an entertaining way to help support our point.  Hard to say if the company will be able to create an active community of commenters, but the concept is hilarious.

 

 

 
While there were many ideas integrating services like Twitter and FB, Replyz had an interesting concept to help people get answers to questions they post on social networking sites.  According to the founder, 85% of questions posted on Twitter go unanswered, so Replyz scours a variety of social networking sites and search engines to try to match up an answer and post it directly into the thread of your discussion, no matter if you started it on Twitter, FB or something else.  I like the potential utility of the service and am curious how it will stack up against the variety of other Q&A type sites like Ask that exist out there.