• Adstruc makes an online market in the large but offline world of outdoor advertising. The team clearly knows their industry and their recent Tech Stars bootcamp training was apparent in the smooth presentation. The product seemed to work; beyond just selling advertising space on billboards, it also lets users use Google Street View to see how your ad would look in that spot. CBS or WPP - make a bid while they're cheap.

• Vyou could hit big. It's a platform allowing people to publish videos in response to specific questions. It is designed to maximize the value of video participation from its publishers by slicing it into small segments and dosing it in metadata. It could work well with celebrities, sports people and other expensive types (e.g. subject experts) as it requires minimum time commitment, maximum reach (videos are embeddable by anyone elsewhere on the web) and content needs only to be created to answer questions that people are already asking for. Want to know what the Pope says about contraception, or exactly how Jamie Oliver avoids curdling the sauce, this could become the reference source to find it. As audience member David Rose said, think of it as Quora for video.

• Dotgo: This was a little harder to parse, but impressive if nothing else for the virtuouso coding coolness (live) of the CEO (Stefan Gromoll) as he wrote - in a language he'd invented - a program in 2 minutes that allowed people to text in answers to a poll, which are then displayed online. The company does something close to my own heart - connect the mobile world, and in particular, its messaging system with the web.  Having worked 6 years at in the telco space I often despaired at the glacial pace of innovation, so this is manna. However, short codes are a jealously guarded resource and it wasn't clear to me how they'll address this, but this is a company to keep an eye on.

Others: Munchly have an excellent idea that roused cheers: order (and sometimes even receive) fast food at a sports game (or other venue) from your seat. Certainly a consumer pain point, but I'd worry about the execution - specifically the cost burden on participating venues and lack of penetration by the other customers to make it worthwhile.  And while sitesimon has a great name (love a pun) the audience winced at the idea of people automatically sharing every site they'd been on. Unless rumors of the death of privacy really are true, this will face an uphill struggle to show more signal than noise.

Final thought - a plug for an interesting startup competition. Aware of its laggard status as a tech hub compared to the Valley, New York has been playing catch-up. This Summer the NYC Investment Fund, together with Accenture, has created the FinTech Innovation Lab with prizes of 25k and (even better) C-level mentors from Big Banks to successful startups focusing on financial services customers. I like this as it recognizes that it's better to build on strengths rather than blindly copy what happens out west. For example, perhaps the predictive modeling techniques of recommendations engines in consumer web services could be applied in reverse to help fraud detection at banks. A perfect opportunity for those having left the big banks in the bust to get an invite back. But be quick, deadline is Jan 31.

ok, well i didn't really vote but i went in the booth with my wife who is a bona fide american citizen and witnessed the process - quite sobering and perhaps of interest for those observing from across the seas. first impressions of our polling station in upper west side manhattan was good - was clearly marked (a local school) and there were no lines. cnn is reporting 3 hour queues in florida and apparently the whole of pennsylvania is becoming one enormously long line of frustrated mewling wannabe votees.

the process of voting in us elections involves being registered, finding your local voting station, knowing your precinct number (ours was 74, courtesy of a lady in the building), and then registering at a table inside. there were probably double the number of staff to voters in our station, and so we didn't have a hard time finding where to go.

but it did take a full 5mins before the lady found rita's name on the list and filled out a slip which gave her a voting number - hers was 211. there was a bit of back and forth between the staff about whether she'd filled out the form correctly, and whether it was neat enough and whether registering people on the list was more important than dealing with questions. not exactly slick, but i guess they only do this once every 4 years and these are unpaid volunteers.

the slip of paper was then given to us and we got into a queue to give that to another lady a few feet away, where we stood waiting for the chap to leave the booth. there was a set of lights on the booth with little obvious functionality - the lady told us to go in, but the guy was still inside.

so we go in to the booth area, shrouded in heavy black plastic bag material for secrecy, and are presented with a vast machine. i suspect these were designed by an epileptic monkey let loose in a tool shed at some point towards the end of the nineteenth century. there is a Big Grey Box, a Big Red Lever, and instructions. very mechanical, very retro. no chance of those nefarious electronic machines being tampered with in this outpost.

you have to flip the BRL over to the side to allow your vote to count then flip various mechanical switch from UP to SIDE next to your choice for president. there was one for obama and 3 for mccain -- he was also confusingly on the conservatives and independent columns. then there was another set of levers for supreme court justices. and then, randomly positioned on the bottom right hand side was another choice - it was a proposition 1 amendment or something about veterans rights. i could hardly understand the issue or figure out what i wanted, but thankfully the voting was done by the lawyer in the family who knew what to do.

and we were done - after spending about 5mins within the plastic bin liners. not exactly the white heat of technology, all rather manual, amateur and not really clear, but it did seem to work ok. we were in an affluent well educated neighborhood and the process was neither smooth nor transparent for the workers and voters alike. i can see how more people needing to vote would cause huge delays. we then went over to starbucks and claimed our rightful free cup of coffee that they give to all voters. let's hope that's just the start of the good times rollin.

so, in the end i didn't vote in the us elections. but if i had done, i'd have flipped barack's switch with pride.