The biggest problem to trying to navigate a few dozen startups in a few hours' time is that there's only one thing guaranteed - I won't get to them all, especially when I'm trying to vie for attention in competition with early-stage investors who could mean the difference between their seeing another six months, or looking for work. I did manage to talk to 10-12 of the companies at reasonable length, and found some services I'll definitely use, while others just simply weren't built for me as a consumer.

The conference, organized by the PlugandPlayTechCenter (yes, all one word) in Sunnyvale, aimed to put entrepreneurs in the same room as VCs and have them make their case in rapid fire. A representative from the three dozen companies was given all of two minutes to deliver their elevator pitch, and based on a vote, four were selected to move to the next round, where they got all of ten minutes to elaborate on their offering, and business model. (Most, of course, were ad-based. Others looked to take a portion of revenue generated from their own users' sales.)

I showed up to the conference around 4, as soon as I was able, and tried to catch up for lost time - visiting many displays and talking to CEOs, CTOs, co-founders and the occasional VP of Marketing. And while some were very pleased with the close quarters and rigid schedule, I did hear complaints. As one exhibitor put it, "If you're the 28th presenter out of 37 companies, the audience is pretty glazed over. You don't even know who the investors are!" You can be sure that he hadn't been selected as one of the final four, and was all too eager to pick apart the process.

Two highlights for me were speaking with Spokeo's Mital Poddar, the company's VP of Marketing, and Jeffrey Tannenbaum, CEO of PhotoCrank. Mital, only a month or so into her new role at Spokeo, did a great job demoing the social network data aggregator, and were we in another situation, I'd have tried to recruit her away from her current job. Needless to say, I'll have a follow-on note around Spokeo shortly. Jeffrey also was all too happy to demo his photo and image annotation tool (now live on this site), and thought of some unique applications for it - which I'll discuss in a bit.

I also enjoyed talking with Leonard Backus, CEO for Datamash, Tomás Zeman of Wirenode, Steve Gibson of CCube.com and Ernstjan Albers of Headr.com, to name a few.

Depending on who I talked to, you could see differing levels of strain or excitement on the exhibitors' faces. Some were hard core geeks who didn't like public speaking and couldn't wait for me to stop asking questions. Others, after finding out I had no money to give them for an "A" round of funding, were all too happy to cut their pitch short. But the good majority seemed to enjoy demoing their service and walking me through, screen by screen, how they planned to change the world. Maybe some will. Many won't. But it was a unique Silicon Valley experience. More soon.

If at all possible tomorrow, I will try to zip down a few blocks from my home and catch a good portion of the PlugandPlay Expo at the PlugandPlay Tech Center, here in Sunnyvale. The show promises to feature three dozen of Silicon Valley's unknown startups looking to make a name for themselves, the second tier, if you will, when contrasted to all the noise around this week's TechCrunch40.

I received a list of the companies looking to make a name for themselves with VCs, press and other entrepreneurs, and ... who ever said all the good names were taken in tech? Just check these out!

1) Lending Club 2) Broker Storage 3) Pixsy 4) Vator.tv 5) Ccube 6) PhotoCrank 7) ScreenerKey 8) Ceino 9) Planaroo 10) MyMagMedia 11) BlueGem Security 12) Souki.com 13) QbizTech

14) SueEasy 15) TechDirt 16) Zephyr 17) Spigit 18) Geejo 19) UrNetlife 20) Paybl 21) Spokeo 22) Pollection 23) College Wikis 24) GetQuick 25) FuGen Solutions 26) Bizy

27) Apsoftek 28) DataMash 29) StrayForm 30) Xpree 31) QClip Media 32) CopaCast 33) Zipidee 34) Gigya 35) Twiki 36) UserZoom 37) Moowee

Some of the companies listed above are, in fact, so brand new that their Web sites aren't even live.

Depending on when I can break away from the office, and other priorities, I hope to give you an update tomorrow and see if any of these hard to pronounce names will soon become household names. And if not, it's always a lot of fun to surround myself with people even geekier than me. For more on the conference, check out their Web site.

A few weeks ago, we offered a free Ballhype t-shirt to a randomly selected individual who left a comment on the blog stating why they most deserved to win. In the end, with help from our 18-year-old beagle, Dharr18 was the lucky winner.

Well guess what? We won yet another Ballhype t-shirt again this week, after a controversial record-setting week of long shot picks aimed at predicting upsets. (See some discussion here)

It's once again time for you to put your name in the ring, and possibly walk away with a brand-new shirt from one of the hottest Web communities to debut this year.

To earn the Ballhype t-shirt, I ask only you comment to this post, and list:

1. Your login at Ballhype.com (or create one).
2. The game you most enjoyed watching in the last week.
3. Why you enjoyed watching.

It's that simple. Assuming we have more than one respondent, the rules are:

You must respond by 11:59 p.m. PDT, Mon. Sept. 24th.
Ballhype management will ship in USA only.

As with the previous contest, it is highly likely that Molly, our beagle, will be selecting the winner. We will cover that process at the time the winner is awarded. But until then, take a look at the Ballhype T-shirts available, and see what you could win!

Good luck!

With Apple's relatively recent move to Intel processors, it seems everything in Cupertino is up for grabs. Just yesterday, I received a visitor to this blog from "APPLE COMPUTER", one of the few thousand checking in on last week's surprisingly popular post on the growing practice of internal linking. While that in itself isn't all that newsworthy, the visitor's configuration caught my eye.

The APPLE COMPUTER visitor was running not Mac OS X, but Windows. And not Vista, but Windows XP. And their browser? Not the new Safari for Windows, but Firefox. Do you think Apple knows that a "Firefox" has gotten into the henhouse?


Above: The Win XP/Firefox user caught red-handed.

Update: The prior version of this post said the visitor was running NT. That was due to a combination of sleep deprivation, carelessness, and the NT 5.1 designation next to the Firefox detail. Mark, in the comments, noted my mistake.