LAUNCH conference, which I attended, is positioned right before DEMO and SXSW, and I have to say,I wondered how many startups need to launch at one time. The answer is many, and a lot of them rock.

The turnaround was impressive: 100 startups launched a new product, either on stage or at one of the dozens of demo pits. The were no keynotes, no speakers, and no panels.  Just launches. Despite the rumored obstruction by Techcrunch, quality seemed largely unaffected. The judges and jury were a mixture a usual suspects and A-listers, many of which gave their time for speed mentoring sessions. Below are my four personal favorite startups:

Cabana is a drag and drop app builder for Android and iOS. The interface is very similar to Yahoo Pipes. You can select different modules that make an app (camera, rss parser, buttons, etc.) place them in the virtual app and test it.  Their goal is to allow people with little to no coding experience to create mobile apps in minutes. There’s a marketplace that will offer both free and paid app modules, so developers can create additional widgets and monetize them, in a similar way to the WordPress ecosystem, for example.

Room77 solves the biggest problem in booking a hotel. Every hotel site shows you generic photos of their rooms, without any real information on how the room looks, what the view is like. Room77 combines Google Earth with the hotel info to give you an idea of what you’ll be seeing, and what you’ll be getting, so you can make better decisions about whether you want to book that room or not.

Greengoose wasn’t originally selected to be on stage, but the judges liked it so much that it was brought there. The company makes small stickers that sport chips inside them and can be programmed to detect certain actions. For example, you can place a sticker on a bottle, your toothbrush, your vitamins… to detect whether you’ve been using them or not. Those chips are web capable, so they update your stream once you’re done. This might be the first killer app of the Web of Things vision. In a very Hollywood-esque turn of events, the company got a $100k investment commitment while on stage, with another $400k the next day.

NeuAer makes an app that lets you program certain things to happen when it detects wireless interactions. If you get in range (or out of range) of a bluetooth object, or a certain WiFi access point. In the demo,  they made it so that it would auto check-in when you’d reach your home’s WiFi, leave your car, ping you when a friend is near. It reminds me of the powerful Android app Tasker, but for wireless. The potential scripts for this are quite amazing.

Lastly, Domo reminded everyone about the value of showmanship in a pitch. The presentation (watch the video here) made it quite difficult to understand what the product actually does or how it will stand out. The presenter seemed to misunderstand some questions as well, and simply answered “YES”. However, the sheer passion, energy and absurdity of the pitch won the audience. George Zachary of Charles River Ventures said: “I’m not sure what it does, I just feel really happy”. The demo coined the word of the conference: “BOOM!”.