I attended Dealmaker LA event last night and would like to say that it was a very good event. There were tons of startups, VCs, angels, attorneys, bloggers, high profile tech gurus (Pete Cashmore of Mashable), and advisers in attendance, which is no surprise seeing as the event was hosted in Santa Monica's Clear Stone Venture Partners.

The premise behind the event was a small and select group of startups were able to run their pitches by 10 different VC's in a "speed dating" session where each session lasted 5 minutes. After that it was a typical tech schmoozing party that was open to the public where everyone exchanged business cards and talked...and talked.

I will be reviewing some of the following companies in the weeks to come but here is a short list of some of the presenters I found to be interesting:

Black Closet: A fashion site that lets you see what designer clothes looked like matched together on a model, there business model was the most intriguing part of their business.

Call Fire: A VOIP company that has already surpassed $1 million in revenue.

Travature: A travel startup with an intriguing value add proposition.

HeavyBag Media: A Marketing firm whose goal is to build community around a company or product.

Overall I had a great time here and thought this event was a notch above many of the other events that have been going on in LA this week. For now I am going to take a break until the next big LA tech event. Which incidentally starts in 15 minutes.

The hype and popularity of sports is something I may never understand but that being said I hear coworkers, friends, strangers, family, and the guy who sits next to me at the bar drone on and on about their favorite sports team. Moreover it seems that everyone of them can give me a detailed analysis why Shaq going to the Suns is a good/bad trade, comments on Joe Torrey's weight, and a strong opinion with reasons why Rodger Clemens should/should not be let into the hall of fame. So needless to say I realize this market is huge and there is a huge potential for growth with anything that allows sports nuts personalize, customize, and shout out their opinions to the world.

Jacked is taking a stab at this by making customizable widget pages so you can keep your eye on all of the sports games going on. The widgets vary from play by play to you tube videos of the teams playing. They are VC funded with at least $6.5 Million and are based in Santa Monica, CA.

The Good: There web site is about a slick as it gets and even better than that the whole site is very easy to use, navigate, and customize. Also to their credit they have a ton of money and make it apparent that they have more sports related offerings (besides the widget platform) on the way. Most importantly the widgets they offer are rich in information and gave me more than I ever wanted to know about the games I was widgeting in on.

The Bad: I understand that this is supposed to be something you look at in addition to watching TV but why does it have to be that way? I would find Jacked much more useful if they had a live stream of the game(s) you are receiving information on. My idea here is that when I am watching a game on TV I really do not want to be checking my computer for other information, however if I am on my computer watching sports (ie no TV) I would gladly watch the game on my computer surrounded with the loads of data that all of these widgets can give me. Bottom line is that I want to see the actually game live broadcast along with the widgets!

Also there should be some sort of communication with other fans that getting the same information so there is a meaningful interaction going on. Let everyone share their so called sports knowledge and see what unfolds. This seems natural to me, most people have strong opinions about every aspect of sports so let them let loose, I could see a very dedicated (and violent) community developing from connecting sports users.

Overall: There is certainly room for some money to be made in this arena and Jacked.com might just be the one to do it, but until they add more user interaction and live streaming videos I do not see their idea gaining significant traction.

is what I would call an enhanced social Q & A site, the idea is that you ask questions to the community and get answers back. They are based in Santa Monica, California and are part of parent company Demand Media. If Demand Media does not ring a bell their CEO Richard Rosenblatt has had a hand in some major internet acquisitions in the last 10 years including but not limited to Myspace and iMall.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a site with an extremely active community dedicated to answering one another's questions? It is a great idea that answerbag is executing as well as I can imagine but that being said answerbag is far from perfect.

The Good: Well if you are an investor or just a speculator Answerbag has just about everything going for it, they have money from their parent corporation, strong management (see above), and a very strong growth pattern. As for the site the utility is high, they do a nice job of letting everyone rate both the questioners and the answerers so you get a sense of who you can trust on the site. More importantly they only archive unique questions with good answers which means that you do not have to sift through 15 similar posts to find the best answer. Finally the community responds to most questions rather efficiently (however I have been waiting over and hour with no answer to my question).

The Bad: To harness the power, energy, and utility of their many thousands of users there will be some evil and this evil takes the form of endless opinions. One thing I do not want on a site dedicated to answers are endless opinions about religion and politics. If there is factual information that one can contribute to a political or religious question that is great but there is a whole lot of annoying (and useless) opinions on the site about democrats, conservatives, immigration, and everything in between.

Summary: Although it can be a pain sorting through all of the opinions when I am looking for an answer they do a good job of having an easily searchable archive of questions and answers which can provide a high level of utility to just about anyone (I found out the best way to remove dog poop from a carpet in seconds!) so I will not be surprised if Answerbag's strong growth continues.

Apparently Hulu is what you get when two of the major networks (NBC Universal and News Corp) get 100M to build a next gen Internet TV platform.  Hulu is well situated in the hub of the media industry basing itself in the center of Los Angeles.  Much like Gmail was for a long time, Hulu is currently in private beta, you need an invite to get access to Hulu.  Though again like Gmail if you really want access, invites aren't that hard to come by.

Los Angeles based, iRent2u.com, launched two weeks ago as an online marketplace for consumers and business to rent and lend, just about anything.  So basically Ebay, but here you rent instead of buy.

I recently had the opportunity to watch one of the TutorLinker founders (a student from UCLA) pitch to a group of angels in southern california.  The pitch was rather rough in a couple ways: it didn't address what their market was, how they were going to bring any return on the investors capital, or really what their product was.  They assumed many of the angels were well versed in web 2.0 and how that applied to finding a tutor.  Needless to say the angels weren't and thus Tutorlinker didn't make it past the first round of pitching.

A startup company out of Pasadena, CA has an interesting proposition; have users enter their measurements and their preferences in how they want their clothes to fit, and Myshape.com will in give them their own "Personal Shop," featuring only clothes which fit their preferences.

The Positives:
Their concept is simple and gives them direct access into a very lucrative market, from their site they mention that the women's apparel market is around $30 billion per year. Also I am not a female but I do know that women never hesitate to complain how nothing fits them and how they hate trying clothes on so MyShape.com seems to be angled at an open market gap. Their website is also simple to use, user friendly, simple return process and they really seem to keep customers needs first which is always a key to success in retail. Finally they have recently received millions in Series B funding so if they are smart with it they can leverage this money and place themselves at the forefront of personalized online clothes shopping for women.

The Negatives:
Getting well tailored clothes just by collecting a few measurements seems feasible from my poorly dressed perspective, but I question if it will actually work. Women judge clothes on more levels than just a few simple measurements, and to get clothes to properly fit many women I have a feeling many more detailed measurements are involved than just the few simple measurements that MyShape requires for creating your own personal clothing shop.

Overall great concept and they are executing it well.

TechCoastReview is a new weblog dedicated to tracking newly launched tech startups located in Southern California. In addition to new companies, we will profile existing southern California based companies that are sufficiently innovating in the areas of Internet and Technology.

Tech Coast Review is a response to the "Bubble 2.0" phenomena. A notion that the Internet and Technology Industry is in a rebirth of sorts; a gradual return to the highs and lows of the Internet bubble of the late 90's. New companies are forming everywhere, and many are touting the "power of web 2.0". While the definition of Web 2.0 continues to be fuzzy (Wikipedia entry on web 2.0), the excitement of leveraging, wikis, blogs, social networks, mashups, etc, through application frameworks like AJAX and Ruby on Rails, and open APIs such as Google, Yahoo, Flickr, et all. is palatable.

New companies are emerging at a rapid pace, and the venture capital and angel community have once again began bullishly investing in the online tech market. None of this, is "new" news to anyone who has been following the industry for the last 2 years or so. It is all well covered in the "valley".

But apart from Silicon Valley, areas such as Seattle, New York, and Southern California are hotbeds for innovation and investment. Despite the relatively small geographic distance between Socal and the Valley, cultural differences abound. In many ways the net result is that technology companies in Southern California tend to get underrepresented. Yet companies that have the potential to make a profound impact are emerging from areas like Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego. This collective region, known as the "Tech Coast", has some of the greatest concentration of R&D efforts in the world, and its high time that someone was profiling it. So welcome to Tech Coast Review.

If you’d like to contact us with suggestions, comments, corrections, errors or announcements, feel free to email us at editor@techcoastreview.com.