Just came back from the Under the Radar event where 31 consumer tech companies presented in front of an audience of VCs, peers and the media. It was a great event, lots of interesting presentations.

PubSub won its track against stiff competition from 5Across, Rojo and Audioblog. I caught up with Richard Treadway, its VP of Marketing after the presentation – although PubSub has established its credibility in blog tracking, its matching technology can be applied to many other commercial aims such as monitoring online purchase criteria, event-specific details such as flight delays (already live), even earthquakes. The reason they’ve started with blogs is to demonstrate the power of its matching engine, which the founder claims took twenty years to develop (and he certainly seems to have many of the bases covered).

Nice to bump into Matthew Podboy, founder of Voce too. We swapped notes about the current market, with the mood being generally good, lots of technical innovation and new companies emerging, with recruitment coming back onto the agenda as a challenge. Good to see the independents thriving.

Well done to the IBDNetwork team for organizing the event, congrats to the other winners Peerflix (way to go Billy), FatLens and GoTV Networks – everyone I met felt this was a unique event, a good chance to network, to meet the media and to learn about new technologies. But then again, I’m probably a bit biased…