Demo: Let the AlphaPitches begin! Students with real companies present their ideas

At DEMO Fall 2011, student innovators get a chance to show off their companies with AlphaPitch. They each get 90 seconds to “sell” their ideas to the general session crowd. Here are the first three of the ten AlphaPitches that will be presented today.

5Degrees is a mobile content management system that lets people manage their professional and personal relationships. Competitors in this space are numerous, including Hashable, ConnectedHQ, FellowUp, Connect.Me and Gist. There’s also competition from email address books and offline little black books. (The company also lists “memory” as a competitor. Cute!) 5Degrees is jumping in to the game because it believes the CRM market has lots of room.

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“The global CRM market is predicted to reach more than $16 billion by 2010,” said Jeb Ory, CEO, founder and director of marketing for 5Degrees (top right in glasses). “We are addressing a subset of this larger market — the $3 billion segment of cloud-based and social CRM. We are targeting real estate and professional services first.”

Chicago-based 5Degrees has raised less than $150,000 in friends and family seed funding.

Intelligent Comparison Platform (ICP) is the product created by Austin-based Compare Metrics. ICP is based on an algorithm that breaks products down to their most important attributes (i.e. the ones customers look for the most) and delivers them through a mobile shopping experience. The algorithm can compare anything with defined attributes, including home appliances, cars and real estate.

“We’re beginning with consumer electronics,” said ICP CEO and founder Garrett Eastman. “We’re able to uncover what is influencing purchasing decisions in real time.”

ICP has raised $15,000 to date.

Cloud.CM comes from Xtreme Innovations, based in Los Angeles. The Cloud website helps groups of people, like coworkers and students, collaborate on documents. They can share, edit, assign tasks, create events and communicate with a message board. They also use cloud video technology to help groups video chat, share screens and edit on a real-time whiteboard.

“As students graduate and move on to enterprise, they will continue to use the product” says Sean McCoy, CEO and founder of Xtreme Innovations. “If the product is not perfect, we will work hard to innovate and make it perfect.”

They have raised $500,000 from McCoy’s brother, Matt McCoy. That’s a pretty cool brother.

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These are three of the 10 companies chosen by VentureBeat to present in the Student Alpha Pitch program at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. They are given a scholarship to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photos courtesy Demo Conference/Flickr.