ReadWriteWeb

Machine processing of large quantities of unstructured text, to discover media mentions, relationships between entities and sentiment analysis need not be priced out of the range of the everyday web lover or small business.

Tonight two Texas companies announced a collaboration that brings exactly that to market, at a disruptively low price. Web crawling service 80Legs and Natural Language Processing service Language Computer Corporation have combined their efforts to create Extractiv, a web crawling and semantic analysis service offered at an affordable price. I've already put it to use to perform some awesome bulk text analysis for my own work.

"My background is in Artificial Intelligence and my last business was building predictive data. Most of our customers were oil companies, and you can hold that against me if you like. But my pitch back then was 'just give me enough data, I'll figure out something.' And often enough I did figure out something."

That's how Houston-based 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar describes his background. Tonight his Web-crawling-as-a-service company will put up for sale tens of millions of data points extracted from public social networks and other websites. He says it's only a matter of time until everyone's doing it and he wants to be one of the good guys. "You can figure something out from just about anything," he says. That's the kind of geek Shion Deysarkar is.

The Web 2.0 Expo's startup showcase, Launch Pad, gave five companies five minutes each to present their product to a panel of experts today and the People's Choice winner was awesome. The judges who cut the field from more than 80 applicants down to 5 were Matt Marshall (VentureBeat), Anand Iyer (Microsoft) and ReadWriteWeb's own Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Members of the audience voted for their favorite product via SMS. Of those who voted, 43% decided that mobile development platform PhoneGap was the winner. We have a summary of the pitches below.