Yesterday at NodeSummit 35 startups competed in NodeJam. We couldn’t interview all of them, but we had several on theCube and we interviewed a few others from the demo floor. Ranging from online foreign language tutoring to an engine that adds multithreading and other features to scripting languages, these companies displayed a wide array of products and services.

The big winner was Quizlet, an online flash cards application that is catching on in schools. ServicesAngle editor Alex Williams says his daughter, a senior in high school, tells him she can’t imagine her life without the tool and credits it for her high GPA. She wants to know when there’s going to be a mobile app.

My personal favorite, Safer Aging, won best use of Node.js. Co-founded by JSConf co-organizer Chris Williams, the company created a sensor system that can be deployed in a senior’s home to monitor for a number of signs and can notify family or caretakers if something seems wrong. According to Williams the big problems that other senior care technologies have is that they are very expensive and/or require seniors to make lifestyle changes and wear monitors on their bodies. Even if the senior wears a device all the time, devices with motion sensors send too many false positives.

At $50 a month Aging Safely is more affordable than most senior care technology, and by focusing on sensors positioned around the home the person using the system doesn’t need to wear any sort of technology on their body at all times or change their behavior. To detect whether someone has fallen, for example, the sensors will monitor the amount of motion in the home and can also notice if someone has spent an abnormally long time in certain rooms such as the bathroom.

At a conference full of young people it was refreshing to see a project dedicated to helping our oldest citizens. It was also great to see a project that interfaces with the physical world and not just another mobile app. It also points to the broad range of applications that sensors can have for other uses, and the way Node.js can enable development of new physical world solutions through sensors.

Another project that brought some physicality to a conference full of screen gazing was SimTable. Here’s my short interview with founder Stephen Guerin and along with a demo of what the company has built:

Second place winner MapBox was a favorite among the Noderati in attendance, and got a nice shout-out from Node.js creator Ryah Dahl during our Cube interview with him. I interviewed MapBox’s Eric Gunderson and Will White:

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Leaving the physical world behind, the virtual world builders Worlize are doing some interesting work. This is a consumer focused business, but it’s a great example of what Node.js is capable of. It’s sort of a cross between Second Life, Mine Craft and a social network, with video conferencing thrown in. Here’s Brian McKelvey talking about the technology used in the project:

Finding developers capable of working with this sort of cutting edge technology is a real problem for companies wanting to adopt Node.js. And one company in the contest is taking on this issue directly: Geeklist. The company is building an alternative to resumes by letting developers build their own achievement-oriented profiles that integrate with GitHub (Bitbucket integration is also on the way). With more followers on Angel List than any other competitor, Geeklist is definitely one to watch.

And that’s just scraping the surface of the variety of work coming out of this new generation of startups. In our wrap-up session, SiliconAngle founder John Furrier expressed doubt that many of these startups will take on traditional rounds of funding and go on to become established companies. He said that with the amount of angel and seed funding out there, and the ability of these companies to operate with relatively small amounts of capital many of them can continue on their own without VC funding. He also mentioned that many of them seem more like features than like real companies, and that some of them might either be acquired or simply fail, only to come back with something better later.

I take a different view – given the recent “acquihire” trend and the talent shortage, I think most of these companies will probably be attractive to both investors and to acquirers. Some will be more attractive for the talent alone, but there’s some interesting IP being created as well. For example, Observe.It (here’s our interview, which starts at around 14:30) is an impressive real-time Web analytics company and was the winner of the Node Knockout competition. There’s some great IP there – it’s a Web marketer’s dream to be able to see not just heatmaps but the exact clicks that a user makes. But it’s going up against many entrenched competitors like Google Analytics, Crazy Egg and WebTrends. Maybe the company can make it on its own, but it seems more like an acquisition target.

Services Angle

Of course it’s not just startups using Node.js. Yahoo, eBay and even Walmart are using it in production. There remains controversy over whether Node.js is truly “enterprise ready,” but it’s already in use. Looking at the NodeJam contestants provides a great sense of what the next generation of near real-time applications will be like, whether they’re built on Node.js, Erlang or some other platform.

Here are a few more interviews we conducted with NodeJam participants:

Colingo

Nodefly Systems

WebMobi

Observe.it

Watch for more to be added on theCube.