In the upcoming funding and pitching event, sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials, Pitch-preneurs will take centre stage as they speed pitch their businesses to a panel of investors and industry executives.  It seems that the recession is definitely not holding back start-ups, and after an inundation of applications we will showcase each company over the coming weeks:

Pitch-preneur 1: Affect Labs

Affect Labs helps businesses understand what people are saying online by automatically measuring crowd opinions on social media platforms.

Co-founders: Jennie Lees and Steven Renwick
Affect Labs is an Edinburgh-based company which aims to bring meaning to the chaos that is online chatter. Their unique technology automatically extracts and quantifies the sentiment that people express in their Twitter updates, blog posts, etc. This allows Affect Labs to offer an unparalleled level of information about the current emotional temperature of the web, bringing disconnected conversations into one place and letting individuals gain new insight into brand perception, product fans, influential users and more.

They recently completed a successful product trial in association with Channel 4's Innovation for the Public fund (4iP). FestBuzz allowed audiences and performers at the Edinburgh Festivals to instantly see how popular shows were on Twitter, automatically working out star ratings for each show based on how positive the Twitter buzz was. An alumnus of the Astia program, they have been listed as one of the Guardian's top 100 tech media companies.

Pitch-preneur 2: Swacle

Swacle is an online consumer barter exchange for the trading of goods.

Co-founders: Daniella Alpher, Isabelle Régent-Ngwata and Yehoram Ben-Yaacov

Swacle will be an online barter exchange for teenagers and college students. It will offer a multi-category, multi-party platform through the use of credits. Swacle will be a fun, green and modest environment that enables people to maximise the value of their current possessions. They will be launching their Beta in the US towards the end of October.

Swapping and bartering have worked on pretty much every corner of the globe, in every culture, and for every product imaginable. Swacle therefore builds on something that has centuries of “usability testing” behind it and puts it on the Web, allowing people from all over the world to rely on advanced, digital shipping methods. The US Postal Service, UK's Royal Mail, France’s La Poste and Canada Post all offer online digital postage that Swacle can utilise. Their main revenue stream will therefore come from shipping services by offering digital postage and charging $0.5 on top of the basic cost of mail.