It is worth quoting just a little from the original post introducing Startup Row:
"""Since the beginning, Python has always been strongly associated with startups and entrepreneurs.... For Startup Row, we wanted to look toward the future - companies that are just starting today, but may become household names in the future."""
The founders of these companies will be at PyCon for the mail conference days, and for one day they will be participating in the Expo Hall. The other days they will be participating at PyCon with everyone else, so look around - the person next to you may have just started a company.
So without further ado, here are the fifteen Startup Row Finalists:
Friday
- CollectorDASH: One of the things that make us unique is that we collect things - stamps, dishes, pennies, blue glass vases, art, everything. This is a vibrant part of our culture, but the tools to empower collectors are stuck back in the last century. CollectorDASH builds applications and marketplaces for collectors, applying modern technologies to make collecting more efficient, fun and affordable.
- CrowdBooster: Everything is social these days - and Twitter is the fastest-moving social platform of all. Crowdbooster gives you twitter analytics that let you understand who is talking about you in real time.
- Stormpulse: Are you tired of watching the news only to find out where a thunderstorm was 20 minutes ago? It is especially important to have up-to-date information if your business depends on the weather. Stormpulse delivers high-fidelity weather intelligence to a broad range of industries including energy, manufacturing, transportation, defense, healthcare, and retail. Businesses and government agencies subscribe to this intelligence to improve their long-range planning and daily decision-making surrounding the arrival and impact of significant weather events in the continental United States and Caribbean.
- AppNest: AppNest is a distribution platform for mobile applications. Specifically, they are making the installation of private applications really simple. Ad-hoc distribution is the current technique used by iOS developers - but the publication and distribution process for ad-hoc applications is byzantine and difficult. AppNest makes this process a lot simpler. With AppNest, users can install the application using nothing more than a web browser and a native iOS application. No iTunes required, everything can be done on the mobile device.
- Saaspire: Saaspire is building a suite of products based around "behavioral data": the data that you create when you say or do things on the Internet. Saaspire is launching their first product, FocusLab, right now. It's a behavioral data analysis tool. They are also rolling out a SaaS platform that will allow developers to easily add personalization and other behavioral data services to their apps.
- Olark: One of the most frustrating things for any business is having people come into your store, put items in their carts, and then... leave. Olark helps businesses engage with customers before they leave the site, increasing the numbers of visitors that become customers.
- Ep.io: Ep.io is a smart Python hosting platform. Not only do they take care of your load balancing, database configuration, redundancy, backups and code pushes for you, they support any WSGI-compatable framework or application, and any Python library we can install from PyPi. By running things in their secure, shared environment, they can keep costs down. Within their free resource limits, if you have a small site you just want people to see, just throw it up - a few minutes, and it'll be up and running at no cost. Above that, they bill you only by the amount of resources you actually use.
Saturday
- DotCloud: DotCloud takes Platform-as-a-Service to the next level by allowing you to choose your /own/ platform that will be supported by DotCloud. DotCloud allows developers to be developers and not system administrators. DotCloud has recently received 800K in Angel Funding and is growing like mad.
- Mailgun: Email is an essential part of doing business today - but building proper email interfaces can be tricky and error-prone. Mailgun provides an email interface for your app, allowing you to integrate email into your existing processes in a simple and easy way.
- Glancely: Just one look at Glancely and you get it - instant product search. Not thousands of clicks through various confusing catalogs - just see what you want, click it, its yours.
- NodeRabbit: NodeRabbit is all about it easier to build and deploy web applications. Our first product is DjangoZoom, a Heroku-like platform-as-a-service that radically speeds up the deployment of Django apps. Early adopters have described DjangoZoom as "magical" and a service that they can't live without.
- ACL Systems: ACL Systems is a new startup focusing on the next wave in education - online education. For some aspects of education, there is nothing like being in class with a teacher. For everything else, the cost and availability advantages of online education are disrupting this established business. ACL System's online education platform makes online education effective and affordable.
- MBA Sciences: MBA Sciences is a self-funded startup focused on allowing programmers to exploit parallelism and rapidly create scalable, fault-tolerant distributed applications that are rock solid from day one. MBA Sciences was highlighted by the Supercomputing 2010 Conference as a Disruptive Technology due to the ability of SPM.Python to perform the non-differentiating heavy lifting by removing the pain typically associated with authoring, testing and maintaining parallel capabilities.
- Eldarion: Eldarion builds and runs great websites like Quisition and Typewar and helps you do the same. They get you from idea to launch sooner by developing custom and open source components for Django/Pinax and providing hosting on the Gondor platform.
- Beautylish: Beauty products is not where you would necessarily expect to find Python - but it is there. Beautylish is a social network for beauty, cosmetics, and brands. They focus on video tutorials, candid product reviews, and conversations amongst users. The service actually launched in beta form this past January, and has already accumulated a small but loyal user base. They have already raised $1 million in seed funding from a group of prominent angel investors, including Ron Conway's SV Angel.
Edit: Hacker News Discussion Link.
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