With facial recognition being adopted by the police and the Xbox 360 sensor, expect more attention paid to start-ups developing the underlying technologies. Affective Interfaces, a business application developer that presented at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2009, builds technology that senses emotions through a webcam. The San Rafael, CA-based company "researches behavioral truthfulness indicators, emotion, and meta states of cognitive process, for a reflective empowered social web."

While the small group that makes up Affective Interfaces focuses on their innovative service but does not neglect their own monetization. The team combines clinical trauma expert Jai Haissman and software developer and philosopher Dr. Philip Kuryloski with business and finance advisors. As Tim O’Reilly commented on the TC50 panel, "[Affective Interfaces] is the first one I’ve seen that actually seems like a business."

Appropriately-acronymed AI, the tech analyzes facial expressions to help businesses uncover "the nonrational influences affecting decisions from purchase to engagement." Using input from the customer’s webcam run through AI’s metrics, the data returned is useful for gauging emotions in response to ads, media, and user experience. In an example report on a Mercedes commercial, positive responses, engagement and emotions indicated a successful commercial, except for demographic discrepancies. Time-based metrics pinpointed the two main branding moments, which generally were met with high engagement states. By comparison, the females did not show positive response or even showed negative response at the peak branding moment.

The mission statement of this company waxes enigmatic: "Affective Interfaces helps you understand and fulfill the preconscious heart and mind of your customers." Implemented effectively, the service ostensibly aims to give businesses the ability to predict what their customers will want on an informed, analysis-dependent level. The process is likely effective, as GigaOm summarizes the software’s capabilities as showcased at the TechCrunch conference - Kevin Rose of Digg was deemed happy in prerecorded video of him smiling and frowning backstage.

(Update: December 10, 2009: Stribe won top honors at this week’s Le Web in Paris)

It all started with sports.

After running a semi-marathon a few years ago, Kamel Zeroual wanted to keep in touch with the community that had been created at the event. But there was nothing online, not even a Facebook page.

“We said ‘OK, it’s a pity. We shared interests, spirit,’” Zeroual says of the lack of tools to reconnect the community that had participated in the race.

So Zeroual created those tools. The result, Stribe, is the first French startup to be named finalist at TechCrunch50.

“Getting selected for TechCrunch50 is like graduating from school,” CEO Zeroual says.

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I was happy to see Sarah Lacy’s semi-scathing article about TechCrunch50, because I was beginning to wonder if I had reacted to the event too negatively.

For me, only a tiny handful of startups were even remotely exciting, and listening to the demos in the hot, stuffy conference room was more fatiguing than inspiring, or even educational.

Lacey writes: “I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world. There were too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better, and too many people wanting to be the next Mint.com, not the next Google.”

To be fair, this year’s TC50 companies seemed a more diverse group than last year’s. (At first take, at least. Now looking back on last year’s list, I’m not so sure.)

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Sprowtt.com

Meaningz.com

7ages.com

LearnVest is a personal finance site designed primarily for women. Users can customize what aspects of their personal finances are most important to them, from mortgages to grad school payments to credit scores.

LearnVest offers a step-by-step financial walkthrough, giving expert advice for financial concerns like dealing with debt and it promises to cover every financial event that one can come across. Nice design. Game dynamics were criticized by VCs.

lissn, which was introduced with the promise to “make Robert Scoble’s head explode,” connects users with real-time conversations. IM-ing with rich metadata? Conversation-based advertising. Very hashtaggy.

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One in four Americans has a diagnosed mental disorder, but only 25 percent get treatment. BreakThrough fights the stigma of mental illness by keeping treatment anonymous, connecting patients with medical professionals.

Some members of the review panel showed awkward hesitation when addressing the site’s potential, mirroring society’s general reticence to understand mental illness and any non-Freudian structures required to treat it.

I suspect that BreatkThrough’s main funding problems will come through misunderstandings like this, met with jokes about the mentally ill instead of any real attempt to understand the issues BreakThrough is trying to address.

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AnyClip won early points by structuring the beginning of their presentation around The Big Lebowski.

The site allows you to easily find any clip from any movie.

This is awesome in theory, especially for people like me who can’t for the life of them drop a movie quote correctly. Their ClipIt dashboard allows users to add metadata so you don’t have to search just dialogue to find the scene.

Many of film’s iconic scenes are already to find with Google. Yesterday when I learned about Patrick Swayze I searched “Pain don’t hurt” in Google and found the scene immediately. Right now,

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Thoora is a news discovery service that helps find communities of interest, aggregating news sites, blogs and tweets and indexing them in real time. Scoble likes it but wonders how it is going to remove noise.

Other panelists say Thoora needs to work on its business model, differentiation from other aggregators and a sustainable competitive edge (Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn). Scoble wants a curation tool.

This is a really tough market to enter. As the VCs said, thoora needs to make clear from the get-go how they are different from competitors.

Insttant. Joe Langevin,youngest presenter at TC50 at 19, introduced Insttant, which converts tweets into meaningful data. It aggregates tweets to find out crowd sentiment, like a graded tweetmeme. Sentiment analysis is always cool. I like it: tracking trends without the chaff. Scoble likes it because they’re entering a new space instead of trying to make their way through oversaturated markets.

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Live streaming from the TechCrunch50 2009 conference.

Online TV Shows by Ustream

As I try to adjust to the fact that this year’s TC50’s demo pit apparently got its PR training from Brussels touts, here are some quick thoughts on products we’ve seen demoed so far:

Fluid.html, fixing the problems of Flash. Flash doesn’t work for deep linking, doesn’t work like rest of internet, can’t be pre-rendered like HTML. Fluid borrowed a lot of their ideas from HTML: style sheets, etc. Brands can now make brand content easier and cheaper. Sotheby’s is a customer. Looking for investment.

Toybots Woozees. Toy that can interact with online world. Objects added to physical toy make in-game character more customizable. Physical toy reacts virtual world, uses accelerometer to check phone messages or play in-world games. With GPS, toy becomes ‘virtual tour guide.’ “It’s basically an iPhone or a Kindle inside a toy,” says the developer. Firmware is open-sourced. Announcing partnership with telecom carrier in next week or two. Looking at the Hobbyist market as well as kids. If they had this for Star Wars and GI Joe when I was five, I’d have totally been down.

Yossi Vardi’s investor assessment: “I am amazed that a country that can invent things like this and send a man to the moon can’t develop toilet seats that don’t fall when you lift them.”

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