KEY POINTS:
Imagine this: you're on a stage pitching your start-up company's big product, the room is packed with the Silicon Valley venture capitalists you're hoping will fund you, the press you're hoping will write nice things about you and the competitors you hope to crush.
You've just issued a spoken command to your artificial intelligence system to create a Word document.
Nothing happens, a tense silence spreads across the room, quiet sniggers from the crowd.
Then Silvia, as she's known, springs back to life and announces in a steady voice that the job is done. Phew.
The pitch comes off well and Cognitive Code, which hopes to build Silvia into everything from stuffed toys to mobile phones, impresses a judging panel that includes Wired magazine editor and long tail creator Chris Anderson and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen.
The inaugural TechCrunch conference held in San Francisco this week is the Dragon's Den of the tech sector.
Forty companies, including New Zealand's own Ponoko, made the cut from around 700 applicants vying for a spot in the limelight.
It's a golden opportunity to get in front of the people who can turn good ideas into viable businesses.
The fact that TechCrunch, the influential tech news and commentary website, extended the number of featured start-ups from 20 to 40, shows just how much activity there is on the tech start-up scene as the industry's brightest minds chase the riches that have gone to the founders of Google, YouTube and MySpace.
The money is certainly there to fund the better ideas - Sequoia Capital, which has a legendary record in the Valley having worked with everyone from Steve Jobs of Apple to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, is TechCrunch's main backer.
But is the next Google, or YouTube or MySpace among those who took to the stage at TechCrunch this week to compete for US$50,000 ($69,000) in prize money and the adulation of the industry?
It's hard to tell. Of the 20 or so companies I watched pitch at TechCrunch, most had good, innovative ideas, but most are building on foundations laid by companies that were pioneering the way a couple of years ago - Skype in internet messaging and telephony and Google in search engine technology, for instance.
What's impressive about this disparate collection of companies is how quickly they've learned from the industry leaders and adapted their products to fill niches that the web giants are overlooking.
Cake Financial, for instance, has a great web service that allows you to compare your share market trading record against friends and family and the anonymous data of traders who have been outperforming the market.
Viewdle uses face recognition technology to search and index photos - a great tool for sorting out the mass of video footage on the web.
Ponoko's founder, David ten Have, gave an intriguing presentation, the significance of which may not have been recognised by many in the audience on the first pass.
The company has created a personal manufacturing platform, allowing people to use their computers and bog-standard design packages to mock-up unique products then connect via the internet with manufacturers who can bring their creations to life.
You may have a funky idea for a designer lamp. Create a digital model of it, specify the materials, and Ponoko will find someone who can make it for you and freight it to you.
In the age of one-size-fits-all products, the prospect of being able to participate in the creation of everything from furniture to clothing is revolutionary, at the same time building on the user-generated content trend pervading the internet today.
Fellow TechCrunch candidate Crowd Spirit has a similar idea to Ponoko, creating an online community of designers to work on consumer electronics products, then selling the results. I'm less keen on that idea, given the fierce competition in a market where scale, least-cost manufacturing and R&D budgets are everything. But the concept has merit.
If there's one big new idea I saw emerging at TechCrunch it is that the internet is breaking down the barriers between producers and consumers, sellers and buyers.
In the future you'll no longer have to accept the design leads of the companies you're buying from, but will be able, in some capacity, to have control over the make-up of what you consume. In Ponoko's case, that could allow you to design something from the ground up.
In Cake's case, it's allowing you to do your own financial analysis rather than relying on a financial adviser to feed you information at a price.
If the standard start-up failure rate applies, most of the companies that presented at TechCrunch won't be around in a few years.
But at least a handful have the potential to make it big in their own right - or at least get a slice of that VC cash floating around.
