• 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.

I don't know Omar, but I've known employee number 2 at Admob Russell Buckley (one half of the MobHappy gang) - for a number of years. Wonderful result for him and the team, and a lesson for me. I've spent a lot of time thinking up fancy-schmancy new mobile advertising paradigms, most of which are gathering dust in powerpoint archives, whereas these guys "just" went out and built something that is simple to describe (banner and text ads on mobile websites) and they crucially, executed well, with smart advisors. Seven hundred and fifty million proof points that execution matters sooo much more than ideas.

So if I ever find myself going down the startup route, and i) what I do can't be described in 7 words or less and ii) executing to those 7 words is not what every employee spends all their time doing, someone please shoot me.