One of the real high­lights of the Trav­el­ing Geeks trip to the United King­dom last week came when we were treated to “speed dat­ing” ses­sion with the top start-ups of Seed­camp.

This, after all, is one of the chief goals of the Trav­el­ing Geeks: to suss out young or little-known start-ups hear their sto­ries, and throw a spot­light on the ones that res­onate with us.

So we were thrilled when Sherry Coutu and Reshma Sohoni of London-based Seed­camp (Twit­ter: @seedcamp) arranged for us to meet their top start-ups, both col­lec­tively and one on one. Every one had a com­pelling consumer-facing ser­vice. Here are the ones that par­tic­u­larly struck a chord:

Huddle.net

Twit­ter: @huddle
Email: hello@huddle.net
Site: huddle.net

Huddle.net offers a col­lab­o­ra­tion, shar­ing and project tools plat­form for get­ting stuff done. Specif­i­cally, Hud­dle pro­vides secure online work­spaces where users can share files, col­lab­o­rate on ideas, man­age projects and orga­nize vir­tual meet­ings. P&G, Toshiba, Pana­sonic, Nokia and Unicef are among the cus­tomers using Huddle.

In Feb­ru­ary, Hud­dle part­nered with Inter­Call, the world’s largest con­fer­enc­ing provider, to pro­vide ser­vices to their 1 million-plus cus­tomers. And last month Busi­ness­Week named Hud­dle one of their “50 most promis­ing star­tups” around the globe.

Heady stuff for founders Andy McLough­lin and Alis­tair Mitchell, who gave me a five-minute run­down of the site’s ser­vices. While I’ve been impressed by Base­camp’s recent improve­ments, I saw enough in my ses­sion with Andy and Alis­tair that per­suaded me to try out Hud­dle in an upcom­ing project with one of my clients or co-conspirators.

Zemanta

Twit­ter: @zemanta
Email: andraz@zemanta.com
Site: zemanta.com

Andraz Tori (pic­tured at top), CTO of Slovenia-based Zemanta, sat down and gave the company’s six-word pitch: “Zemanta is an author’s best friend.” Turns out that it’s not just a mar­ket­ing pitch.

I just started using Zemanta today and can see why it’s so addic­tive. As a blog­ger on Word­Press who uses the Fire­fox browser, I’m per­fectly suited for Zemanta’s ser­vices. I had pre­vi­ously come across Zemanta only on other blog­gers’ posts and didn’t pay much atten­tion to the link at the bot­tom of blog posts that would sum­mon up related posts.

But Zemanta offers a slick and con­ve­nient way to spruce up your blog posts.It looks over your shoul­der while you’re craft­ing a post (or even an email) and sug­gests images, related arti­cles, links and tags to use. A sim­ple click and the image or link now becomes part of your post. Zemanta draws from a large pool of avail­able images, many of them car­ry­ing Cre­ative Com­mons licenses. That’s one of the coolest fea­tures — mouse over the image and you’ll see its terms of use (gen­er­ally free).

“I just love Zemanta,” said fel­low Geek Meghan Asha. “It’s just cool to be able to have those images right there, all free and legal to use.”

Well put. I’m a believer now .

Spo­tify

Twit­ter: @spotify
Email: shak@spotify.com
Site: spotify.com

In my book “Dark­net” I wrote about the ongo­ing clash between the music com­pa­nies and music fans who just want easy access to dig­i­tal music. Spo­tify is one of the first com­pa­nies to come along with an answer.

Through its simple-to-use inter­face and licens­ing deals with the major music labels, Spo­tify offers music fans instant access to their favorite music. The ser­vice enables on-demand stream­ing of tons of audio con­tent through a free, ad-supported model and a pre­mium paid model. London-based Lastfm and US-based Pan­dora are two sim­i­lar music lis­ten­ing ser­vices, and Sound­Cloud is a great way to share music and audio files (see Robert Scoble’s video inter­view with One of Europe’s bright­est star­tups: Sound­Cloud).

Scoble has been a big fan of Spo­tify, and I can see why.

Moo

Twit­ter: @overheardatmoo
Email: richard@moo.com
Site: moo.com

I’ve been a fan of Moo cards for years — they’re a sta­ple at Sil­i­con Val­ley events — but didn’t real­ize, until founder-CEO Richard Moross laid it out for me, just how many kinds of busi­ness cards and stick­ers Moo offers.

A lot: the com­pany prints of cards a month for cus­tomers in 180 coun­tries. Their cus­tomer base con­sists of 40 per­cent North Amer­i­cans, 30 per­cent from the UK and 30 per­cent from the rest of the world, chiefly Europe. The best part: The cards are com­pletely per­son­al­ized. In the past, I’ve uploaded 50 dif­fer­ent images for a stack of 100 busi­ness cards at a cost of about $20. Crazy-cheap.

How do they work that magic? Richard called the process “print­fin­ity” — a pro­pri­etary sys­tem that lets the com­pany print cards of any kind, with any image, in a scal­able way. They’ve applied for a patent on the process.

In the depths of the cur­rent reces­sion, Moo has seen a 300 per­cent uptick in con­sul­tants buy­ing busi­ness cards. In addi­tion, Richard said, “Lots of peo­ple are turn­ing their hobby or craft into a shed busi­ness.” You can order as few as 50 cards.

Moo has become one of the fastest-growing print busi­nesses in the world, with “extremely high mar­gins,” Richard told me. “We’re try­ing to make bor­ing busi­ness cards a thing of the past.”

I“ll be order­ing my next batch of cards from Moo.

Stu­pe­flix

Twit­ter: @stupeflix
Email: nicolas@stupeflix.com
Site: stupeflix.com

Stu­pe­flix is a web ser­vice aimed at peo­ple and com­pa­nies that want to gen­er­ate videos auto­mat­i­cally from their pic­tures, music and footage. The com­pany uses tech­nolo­gies allow­ing faster than real time video ren­der­ing, as well as the gen­er­a­tion of tens of thou­sands of videos a day using one server only if you’re run­ning a busi­ness. The pub­lic API that Stu­pe­flix offers to devel­op­ers is one of a kind in the flex­i­bil­ity and level of con­trol it allows.

See the Box of Tricks blog for Video pod­cast­ing made easy with Stupeflix.com.

Other com­pa­nies that res­onated: Skim­links (a new way to do affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing — I have a video with CEO Ali­cia Navarro that I’ll post soon), uberVU (a real-time con­ver­sa­tion search engine — I’ve requested an invi­ta­tion to their pri­vate beta), School of Every­thing (a train­ing mar­ket­place) and Qype (sim­i­lar in some ways to Yelp, it’s a crowd­sourced reviews site).

Related

• Susan Brat­ton: My impres­sion of UK and Euro entre­pre­neurs from today’s Seed­camp Speed Dat­ing adventure

• Craig New­mark: Seed­camp at NESTA, part of the Trav­el­ing Geeks tour

• Tom Forem­ski: UK Diary: Tues­day — Guardian News­pa­per Media Panel …

• Tom Forem­ski: UK Diary: Tues­day — Back To Soho and Din­ner With Agency.com

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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