Anyone needing reassurance that California hasn’t lost any of its high tech luster should have stopped by the DEMO Fall 2012 conference last week in Santa Clara. DEMO attracted 77 ambitious tech start-ups from around the country, competing with six-minute pitches for their apps, services and products. Just the fact that this event takes place in Santa Clara reinforces the reality that California is still the epicenter of America’s high-tech Internet economy. We’re still the place where budding tech stars come to be discovered. And we have a huge stake in seeing that our innovative technology isn’t smothered by unnecessary regulation.
Of the top start-ups selected at DEMO 2012, the number one spot went to RentLingo, a startup just up the road in Palo Alto, founded by Stanford graduate students Dan Laufer and Byron Singh. Their winning product is a social networking approach to finding an apartment. But RentLingo wasn’t the only California start-up in the top echelon. They were joined by Birdeez. From its humble beginnings as a student project at UC Santa Barbara, this central coast-based startup launched a smartphone app called Bird Alerts. Amateur Ornithologists can give Bird Alerts a list of the birds you most want to see and the app will send you an alert every time one has been spotted within 30 miles of your location.
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