Yesterday was Shotput’s inaugural demo day.

Shotput is one of many Y Combinator style startup accelerator programs.  David Cummings and the entire Shotput team worked very hard to select the best capital light Internet startups they could find and coach them over the course of the summer.

Eight companies presented at the Technology Square Research Building auditorium.  It was a packed house.  Standing room only.  The effort of the Shotput team and volunteers showed.  All the companies did a great job.  And I am not just being nice.  The presentations and the demos were all first-rate.

Inevitably the question that was asked over and over again at the reception following the presentations was “which were your favorites”.  I hesitated to answer the question.  But when pressed I did.  My top three.

EventHive is an application to make conferences more engaging.  They popped out of the gate at shotput.eventhive.com.  Nice app for presenters to get real time questions, feedback and polling. Users have the option to comment within a specific event or broadcast more widely via Twitter.  It worked like a champ and many of the 100 or so attendees used the app to make the Shotput event more interactive.  While currently raw, EventHive has the potential to handle event commentary in a much more elegant way than Twitter hashtags.  Like it.  A lot.

Looxii is developing web apps that make it as simple as possible for companies to get the most out of the social web.  They demonstrated a social analytics dashboard, that really did not impress the back channel.  I met the founding team during Georgia Tech’s digitial media demo day.  Smart guys.  My bet is they figure out a play before it is all said and done.

Khush‘s LaDiDa was the best demo of the day.  Literally applause in the middle of the demo.  LaDiDa, is a reservse karaoke iPhone application that analyzes sung vocals and composes matching accompaniment.  Khush was founded by a group of technologists from Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology.

Again, a great day for all of the companies, not just these three.

And a great day for Atlanta.  Over two years ago I was calling for a VentureLab for non Georgia university system startups and supporting Wayt King in bringing the YC model to Atlanta.  Now we have them both.

Well done.