I was wrong.

First morning of Techcrunch50 and after a quick walk of the Demopit (those that didn’t make it on stage) I’m not yet startled by amazing new business models. Most of the same with a bit of spice here and there. Here is a summary after a quick lap.

The Usual Prospects

• Advertising – and everyone adds “It’s super targeted”, “It’s specific, locally targeted” or “We’ve got tags”. In this group but not particularly mind-blowing was Meaningz, 7ages,Lifemee and Pip.io. iAte was interesting in that it searches through Twitter and finds reviews of restaurants, then collates them and builds a reputation of them. No great business model yet, but looked like they were creating value.
• Freemium – you give it away and hope to charge a percentage of people a subscription for more features. (I’m not a fan) – Such as Problemator – where users pose questions and answers bubble to the top.
• Fee for service – you actually charge money (I like this more). A good example of this was Ask Your Target Market, which matches your survey to an audience and gives you a simple tool to analyse the results. The more focused the target, the more you pay. Love it. Trademarkia was also interesting, letting companies to IP searches for current as well as lapsed marks (e.g. Trademarks). They say that Google is actually the second Google.
• Licensing – charge money to use the technology. A good example of the this is Tucoola, which has methodologies in the area of Early Childhood Development and lets companies plug it easily into games. This helps them actually be good for the kids, as well as being fun. It also includes analysing the impact such as music exposure, literacy, hand-eye coordination.
• Micro-Payments – charging small amounts of money for tiny transactions. Two examples here, firstly Tapjoy, which touts itself as an alternative to the iPhone App Store, but allows smaller fees for applications, e.g. 5 or 10 cents. They say that Apple is OK with it. Hmmm. Second was Cloudmach which has a browser-based virtual world, which I believe can be embedded anywhere which will be selling virtual goods, e.g. 1 cent for a hug, 5c for a kiss.

So that’s just a first look at the business models being touted here. I hope to see a few more interesting ideas. Don Dodge is on stage asking the ‘What’s your business model?” question to Penn and Teller’s iPhone app, so it’s still firmly in the investors mind – of course.

Techcrunch50 has now officially started. Jason and Mike on stage, talking proudly of Mint which one the first Techcrunch40 back in 2007 that just got acquired by Intuit for $170m. Onto the second pitch – Story Something, which is personalised books for the digital space. Looks like they are looking to the iPhone for monetization too, which might become a new usual suspect.