At today's SVASE Launch event at the Mountain View Microsoft campus, some of the most interesting startups featured a freelance professionals marketplace.

Thirty early stage companies (bootstrapped through Series A) presented their companies in a 10-minute presentation/demo format. There were two tracks and 6 sessions total where 5 companies in each session competed for a "most likely to succeed" award (as voted by the audience).

The winners were:

Session 1 (Next Generation Internet): Dayak (Online Recruiting Marketplace);

Session 2 (Semiconductor & Industrial): Loadstar Sensors (Load Sensors for automotive, aerospace, medical devices and industrial applications);

Session 3 (Next Generation Internet): Triggit (Monetizing Websites);

Session 4 (Life Sciences & Acoustics): Sensear (Speach Enhancing Noise Supression);

Session 5 (Computing): uTest; and

Session 6 (Media & Mobility): Dial2Do (Voice recognition phone service).

Two of the winners Dayak and uTest are using the web to create global marketplaces for niche vertical professional services.

Dayak is addressing the lucrative and highly inefficient recruiting market. Companies list job postings with finders fees for the various positions they are looking to fill. Professional, free-lance recruiters work these job orders in search of matching the job and redeeming the bounty for a successful match. Dayak takes a 20% transaction fee for their service.

uTest has developed a marketplace for QA professionals. Companies can review and engage a QA professional from uTest's registered QA testers. The company then pays the uTest a fee per bug. uTest takes a transaction fee and pays out their QA freelancers.

This professional talent marketplaces have the potential to dramatically disrupt service-oriented industries. By tapping into a global talent pool, the cost and method which services are requested and delivered are sure to dramatically change. Just as eBay created a new avenue for thousands to generate incremental income running home retail-based businesses, sites like uTest, Dayak, eLance, Guru, and LiveOps will provide an opportunity for professionals to develop home-based service businesses. The key for these virtual professional services sites is to institute an intelligent matching-engine and detailed performance review metrics.

As those in the staffing industry understand, the most successful recruiters will concentrate on jobs where they have domain expertise. Recruiters for technical positions may not be well suited to fill accounting positions for example. Therefore, a site like Dayak needs to be able to profile their recruiters in order that job postings are sent and managed by the proper professionals. As in the real estate business, the top recruiters have built a network of qualified candidates and referrals who have had previous positive experiences with the recruiter. A recruiter who scores high for submitting qualified candidates (not just any resume) to a job posting, and also scores highly with the candidates they are representing should have a higher "power-seller"-like rating. As a site develops their professional networks, and the scoring metrics of these professionals develop, the site will have a network effect and a huge first-mover advantage that will not only protect them from competition, but will also allow these sites to compete with traditional recruiting firms.

Besides these professional service marketplaces plays, Triggit, Capzies, and Grouply had impressive presentations.

Capzies offers a clever user interface for creating stories and messages by utilizing their time-line digitial presentation solution. Think Apple's preview menu bar with digital photos/videos sorted in chronilogical order. Capzies provides an easy user interface to create these digital storybooks, and has nice features such as privacy settings for the storybooks, or for the photos and videos embedded in a storybook. It is much harder to put into words what you can see pretty quickly with their demos at http://www.capzies.com/.

Triggit has a smart long-tail monetization strategy for bloggers and other small to mid-size content sites. Rather than being relagated to what Google's Adsense gives you, Trigget empowers the content provider to drag-and-drop and embed ads in a self-service fashion. Triggit does this by storing a huge inventory of ads, pictures, and affiliate links. For example, you may be writing a review of Salman Rushdie's new book "Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity". You could quickly seach Triggit's database using a keyword search, and embed the Amazon affiliate link for the book. Better yet, Triggit collects the affiliate fee, takes a cut, and sends you checks for cumulative ad money you have earned.

Grouply has taken an intelligent approach to consolidating the various groups that an individual participates in. Many people participate loosely or actively in various online community groups (often Yahoo! Groups). Softball leagues, PTA groups, neighborhood groups, parenting groups, alumni organizations, etc. Grouply provides a central web-site for aggregating all these groups into a Facebook-like user interface. As with Ning and Facebook, Grouply takes advantage of social networking features to provide a stronger connection for an individual to engage with a group. Grouply has grown exponentially by using a smart group invite feature. With a click of a button, a group member can invite their entire group to join Grouply. One amazing fact is that Grouply has recently eclipsed Ning in terms of number of social groups participating in Grouply. By leveraging existing online groups, Grouply avoids challenging switching costs of changing from one online group site to another.

There were two tracks, and I missed the semiconductor & industrial, lifesciences, and computing presenters. Svase Launch was a well run seminar with approximately 350 attendees. Mostly entrepreuners in the audience, though there were a few VC's checking out the companies.

Seth from meebo opened the event with a keynote speech providing some suggestions for the perils and methods for fund-raising and working with VC's. Tim Draper closed the session with his always entertaining, optimistic, and future-looking view of technology, life, business and politics. Tim wrapped up his speech with his enthusiatic singing of his Dylan-esque power-ballad "The Risk Master". You can download the song at http://www.theriskmaster.com/.