Techcrunch50 which ended yesterday showcased 50 companies (a few more in the demopit). This is good enough sample size to give us a glimpse at the current state of web and tech startups.
My overall impression is that the current economic and funding climate is encouraging companies to think small (startups should do the opposite) and focus on incremental innovation as opposed to disruptive innovation. I am sure there are some companies out there that are shooting for the stars and are working on extremely disruptive ideas. But I do not see many of them at TC50.
A syndrome I see at TC50 companies is trying to be X for Y (for example a startup called metricly was described as mint for metrics). This is a symptom of group think that exists in Silicon Valley. You can see throngs of companies wanting to be twitter, facebook, craigslist of something. These are trying to be derivatives or clones of some ofiginals. Where will the next googles, ebays and amazons come from? You don’t get them from this approach. Google didn’t try to Y for any X. If you are trying to follow/clone someone, pick disrupting someone who is gigantic. None of twitter, facebook and craigslist I would put in that category. Their revenues are peanuts and none of them I see as industry makers yet.
Every company at TC50 claims to be a platform just because they have an API. Everyone has an iphone/facebook app whether it makes sense or not. Every company claims to be SAAS/Cloud based, will go viral using social graphs on facebook and twitter, incorporate gaming as a marketing strategy, organize realtime social streams using AJAX, can make money in lots of ways (ads, freemium, subscriptions, virtual gifts).
The TC50 winner redbeacon is a rehash of servicemagic one of the successful web 1.0 companies with $100M revenue.
Having said that I see a few startups that are doing something new and different. Among these are healthywage, sprowtt, thewhuffiebank, trollim, and my favorite citysourced. Probably none of these will be a home run (I don’t see any potential home runs at TC50) but they are pushing the envelope.