DailyFinance's unofficial TechCrunch50 awards

After spending most of Monday amid all the start-ups and hoopla at the technology pitch-fest known as TechCrunch50, it can take a bit to digest all that Web 2.0 wonderfulness. Everyone is waiting for the award ceremony to be held late West Coast time on Tuesday. A panel of tech celebrity judges, including Netscape founder and CEO Mark Andreesen and Digg CEO and founder Kevin Rose, pick the winner. Winners get $50,000, roughly $4 billion (yes, you read that right) worth of free online advertising, and probably a mountain of term sheets from amorous venture capitalists. (Update: The winner was RedBeacon, a company I mention below. Nice work, guys). But here's DailyFinance's own award ceremony, based on what I saw on Day 1.



Company Most Likely to Get Steamrollered/Bought by Google:Yext.com showed off a very nifty tool that uses voice recognition technology to transcribe and automatically categorize phone calls from potential customers to local merchants (gyms, mechanics, etc). This has been something of a Holy Grail for local advertising companies, as local merchants like calls and not clicks. Yext CEO, in response to a question from Google's Vice President of User Experience Marissa Mayer, compared his company's technology to Google Voice with its own automatic transcription technology. Oops. You got that right.