Of twelve competing startups selected to present at Twiistup 6 in Los Angeles, only one would go home with the prestigious trophy, which was, to adhere to strictest journalistic standards of truth-telling and integrity, constructed entirely of Legos.

The victor in this contest was not the charming underdog, BakeSpace, nor was it the geek-chic rockstar, JamLegend. It was the sensible, freemium enterprise software, ExpenseBay. While talk of expense reports and business travel might strike technophiles as Office Space-esque unsexiness, the Twiistup judges saw a monetizable solution to a very real problem and rewarded its team accordingly. Watch the interview below to learn more about EnterpriseBay's experience and story.

LaunchBox startup JamLegend began in 2008 as an idea to take Rock Band and Guitar Hero online and make them infinitely more fun for more people with more songs.

While presenting at Twiistup in Los Angeles today, Andrew Lee took a few moments to chat with us about how the product was developed and how they've worked out great incentives for users while providing great value for brands, from major record labels to independent artists. Watch the interview below.

BakeSpace might not be the sexiest concept on the startup block. A recipe swap community, said founder Babette Pepaj, strikes many in the tech community as "touchy feely" or "a chick site."

Nevertheless, the site was named a 2009 Webby Award Nominee for Best Social Network and continues to drive traffic and ad revenue with strong content and a great roadmap for mobile and offline integration. Pepaj, a former reality TV producer, said that both her experience in creating fresh, compelling content on a consistent basis as well as being able to partner with Los Angeles' entertainment community to build great marketing partnerships has helped BakeSpace grow into a successful enterprise. Watch the rest of the interview below.

Tonido has reviled the whole concept of cloud computing, calling it an "anomaly... in the natural order of things."

In an age when virtual computing, cloud server technology, netbooks, and web-based apps control a huge share of the startup economy, this team has decided to pitch consumers on owning, storing, and running all their applications and data from their own desktops. The Tonido product is a suite of P2P apps ranging from music- and file-sharing programs to thorough workspace software, none of which require users to be online. Tonido is also selling consumers their own miniature home servers at around $100 a pop. Is this the new price to pay for open-source, cross-platform application use and data security? For privacy freaks, it sounds like a good deal. What about the rest of us?

A project that's been available to the public for just two months, TweetMart allows users to see items for sale and jobs in a Twitter-friendly format. Its co-founders "felt there needed to be a drop dead simple way to integrate a classifieds site with Twitter," according to the site.

Listings can be created on the site, although many are culled from Twitter posts, as well. Quick, simple, and free, TweetMart is still in the early stages of development but presents a great deal of potential for organizing the user-to-user - or even B2C - commercial use of Twitter.

From the minds behind programming Q&A site StackOverflow comes Super User, the smart, simple way to get answers to geeky questions about computer hardware and software.

Last fall, we were impressed by StackOverflow's usability, interface, and credibility system. We're very glad to see the same principles - which are derived from models such as typical Q&A sites, wikis, and Digg - applied to a broader knowledge base that can be used by power users, too. Read on for more info and beta access.

The following is one in a series of guest posts by venture capitalists that we're running on ReadWriteStart. This one is by Paul Jozefak, a VC based in Hamburg, Germany, who used to run SAP AG's European venture activities and is now a managing partner at Neuhaus Partners. The original post can be found on his blog.

One way or another, I've addressed the question of "Where is the Silicon Valley of Europe" a hundred times, be it in interviews, in blog posts, on Twitter, or on panels. Ultimately, there isn't really a "Valley" in Europe, only some places kind of like it. If you want my ideas on that, I have other posts on the topic.

Many users have long sought the ultimate app for mashing up Twitter and online video. Several services have emerged in this space, but many that we tested have been found wanting.

Today, we've been playing with TwitVid.com and the new, free TwitVid iPhone app. Both have greatly impressed us with a simple, well-integrated interface and just the right balance of great function without feature bloat. Does TwitVid have what it takes to win the Twitter-come-video game?

In a recent post, we highlighted a few awesome resources for building websites, both personal and professional, without needing a lot of geekcore coding knowledge.

We omitted many sites in this roundup of personal favorites, and one such startup contacted us directly to make a case for their site. We followed up, and what we found was one of the easiest tools we've seen for creating truly multimedia sites with photo galleries, audio players, slide shows, RSS feeds, and more. Read on to learn more about Jimdo.

Whether the venue is a local bar or a professional conference, we all meet people whose identities and contact information slip away before we can establish a more meaningful connection.

Although missed connections sections in personals and classifieds make for great reading on a boring Tuesday night, some kind of more powerful tool - with a greater share of the market - is needed to act as a beacon between social and professional ships passing in the night. One site among several devoted to this cause is the shiny, new Blinka.me, a very 2.0 version of your local alternative weekly's back pages.