I've been at the TechCrunch 50 event for the last couple days (http://www.techcrunch50.com/).

This is an event where selected early stage (pre launch) startups (50 of them rumored to be selected from more than 1000 entries) present (in 10 minutes), answer hard (seriously) questions from a panel of judges, and then launch their companies.

There have been a ton of interesting companies demoing (some brilliant, some terrible, the majority intriguing).

Trends have been:

1 - How to deal with too much information (on many levels).
2 - How to better leverage the volume of information (and create meaning from better data).
3 - Applying principals and methods from social networks to other products and solutions.
4 - Making products easier to use.
5 - Hyper-focused niche products.

The big winners (so far) have been:

Yammer (http://www.yammer.com/) -- Twitter for the Enterprise.
Emerginvest (http://www.emerginvest.com/) -- Information for self-directed investors looking to get involved in Emerging Markets.
FitBit (http://www.fitbit.com/) -- Wireless device to track exercise and health.
Swype (http://www.forwordinput.com/) -- Predictive rapid text entry for touch screens.
Dropbox (http://www.getdropbox.com/) -- Cloud based personal file storage, sharing and synchronization.
Tonchidot (http://sekaicamera.com/) -- Location based meta data annotation for the real world.

Of these... the crowd favorite was Tonchidot by far (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTwSXK_5dg).