MobileBeat Startup Competition: More consumer apps vying for your downloads and dollars

The MobileBeat 2010 Startup Competition, sponsored by Palm, continued this morning with the introduction of five more consumer applications hoping to change the way you use your phone. Two winners at the end of the day — selected from a field of 20 consumer apps and infrastructure services — will receive prestigious Tesla Awards.

The panel of judges for today’s contest includes Rob Coneybeer, co-founder and managing director of Shasta Ventures; Eric Duprat, general manager of mobile for PayPal; Anand Iyer, senior project manager on the Windows Phone 7 team at Microsoft; and Alan Warms, CEO of Appolicious.

The judges are evaluating the startups based on three factors: presentation, innovation, and market opportunity. The second group of startups to present today included:

MyTalk: The startup provides a social network that lets users search for other members based on their proximity or interests. MyTalk can also be used to find businesses and locations that match users’ locations and interests.

Judge response: “The question I have,” said Warms, is that with local search like Yahoo, Google and even Yelp, “How are you going to break through the noise, drive adoption and compete? That’s what makes Foursquare so good, it just broke 2 million users.”

Vaayoo: The company showed off its new application called SocialBox, which ties together all of your major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Picasa and others into a central dashboard. Users can view updates from their contacts across this networks in the same location.

Judge response: “We’ve seen apps like Seesmic that combine a lot of networks, as well as a few others in the space,” noted Iyer. “I’d love to have seen how you plan on making money, but thanks for the actual live demo.”

SkyEye: The startup offers a phone application and personal camera device that continually takes pictures and streams them to a secure cloud-based database. Users can use it for personal security or surveillance, to monitor their household or workplace, or even to retrace their steps to locate lost items. The company recommends that you turn on the app and leave it running in the background 24-7 despite battery-life challenges.

Judge response: “I don’t see the business model here, really, but the security market could be very big,” Duprat said. “There’s some concern with the technology because if the phone is in my pocket then it just takes pictures of the inside of my pocket … But it’s interesting, we just need to work on the business plan.”

Presenter and founder Phillip Walker (pictured above) responded to the tech concerns, explaining that SkyEye also comes built into clip-on devices and Bluetooth headsets so they are not always trapped in dark pockets.

BlogRadio: BlogRadio essentially turns your RSS feeds into an online radio station. Based on text-to-speech technology, the service actually reads the text of blog posts and articles brought to you via your RSS reader.

Judge response: “It’s unclear how big the actual market is for this kind of thing,” said Warms. “But it sounds like you have good partners, and that you’re in with some of the car companies, which is always a challenge, so very good job.”

Snaptu: The startup’s goal is to bring a rich applications experience that you see on so many smartphones to every cell phone, particularly low-end phones popularized in the developing world. Working with small equipment manufacturers in China and India, Snaptu runs on any phone that supports Java.

Judge response: “I think the opportunity for what they are doing has proven itself with impressive growth, with 10 million users,” said Coneybeer. “We have a bias, as a VC firm, from an opportunity point of view, toward companies that focus on the smartphone, because that’s where the growth and money is … But I’m guessing this is where the ultimate monetization will come from.”

As emcee and VentureBeat Executive Editor Owen Thomas noted, the stakes are pretty high in this contest. The exposure of winning has successfully propelled previous recipients to the top of their fields.

In 2008, the winner of best overall infrastructure was AdMob, which went on to sell to search giant Google for $750 million less that two years later. And both of last year’s winners, Aloqa and IQ Engines are raising funding and gaining significant traction.