Drumroll please. Our panel of all-star judges has picked the finalists for the Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup. The judges sifted through 39 entries and came up with eight finalists. This year’s contest will be held during the GamesBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel on July 12-13,
The finalists will compete on stage in front of a who’s who crowd of game industry executives, CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, and other professionals. They will each have a few minutes to present and will then face questions and comments from the judges.
One of the prizes for the final winner is a round in the August class of YetiZen, which offers a 3-month accelerator program for game startups. This year’s contest is sponsored by TriNet, which will give an iPad 2 to the winner.
Our judges include moderator Sana Choudary, chief executive of the game accelerator YetiZen; Tim Chang, a partner at venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners; Michael Chang, director of corporate development at Electronic Arts; and Terence Fung, head of corporate development at Zynga.
Here’s our list of finalists:
MetalCompass — a maker of social real-world games and peripherals for smartphones
Haptify — creator of games that make use of haptics; started by Immersion
Gamestring — creator of Adrenalin cloud gaming service, which is akin to Slingbox for games
Kaiju Empire — A developer that wants to bring back the Japanese classic monster characters
Zipline Games — maker of Moai mobile game creation tools
Protege Production — creator of DreamHome social network casual games
Gbanga — developer of mixed-reality games
OneUp Games — a live sports game maker.
Guerillapps — maker of social games with green twist.
The competition will give these entrepreneurs a great opportunity to be exposed to some of the most discerning judges who look for great startups for a living. The judges will look at the companies based on their innovation, originality, freshness, momentum, likelihood for business success, and their potential for making fun products.
The contest itself will take place on the afternoon of July 13th, and we’ll announce the winner at the close of the conference that day.
We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us atsponsors@venturebeat.com.