Hummadi showed me how to create the polling question with yes/no or multiple choice answers. For TV stations, you can then push this out to the live broadcasting system. In the backend, Snooozy is aggregating response from SMS and voice calls–they handle the IVR as well. There’s no special programing required.

It’s true there’s other solutions out there, but it usually requires mastery of an SDK. That acronym is, thankfully, not to be found in their marketing.

Besides phone interactions, Snooozy lets you also push polls out to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. The software will pull in responses from both social media and voice interactions for a total picture. The Snooozy analytics breakdowns answers across various dimensions: by media source, across a time period, and depending on the information available, also by area code.

I was impressed by the simplicity and power of Snooozy.

Uberconference is a free conferencing built by the folks over at Firespotter Labs.Chatting with Firespotter Josh Chiet, I learned his team was also behind the wildly successfully Grand Central Station. That’s the one number phone service that was sold to Google and is now at the core of Google Voice.

While chatting about all the bad conferencing services out there, Chiet demoed uberconference for me. I really wanted to see their creative web interface up close. Like a lot of other audio conferencing services, you get an email or SMS invite that lets you register. So far, so good. But with Uber, the interface displays picture icons of all the folks in the conference and shows you who is currently speaking.

Let me repeat that. You will know who is currently speaking. Their interface will push conveniently place the speaker’s icon to the top of the page.

As a victim–I’m far from being alone, of course–of very large corporate conference calls, I applaud the Uberconference team. After about the fifth or so sign-in with all the antiquated services, my ability to connect a voice with a name seizes up. If you know the people and their voices, you’re fine. But that kind of defeats the purpose of a free-wheeling collaborative call.

According to Chiet, the Firespotter team has junked all the old ideas in their conferencing architecture, and instead based their system on softswitch technology and Google’s cool App Engine in the cloud.

By the way, Uberconference is a Battlefield Finalist. Well deserved.

Instead of tweeting with a boring bit.ly or other short-link generator, you instead use the embedly service. When someone clicks on the embedly link, their twitter apps pops up over the referenced web page. Now you can view the tweet stream related to the web page or blog post or youtube video, etc. and respond without leaving the content.

There’s more. As you embedle, you earn points, which can be cashed into buy sponsored links on their app. They’ve dedicated a small bit of real-estate at the bottom to promote related content. So they will figure when your content is relevant to someone else embedle and then display it. Clever.

Want to see what the embedle app looks like? Click on the embedle link for this post here.

Oovoo has done video-conferencing right. Really, they have.

In an earlier part of my writing and marketing career, I was working on stories that tried to make the first wave of room and desktop video conferencing, circa 2002, fun and exciting. Fun it was not, and it never caught on in the business world the way the legacy vendors had hoped. To this day, in many corporate meeting rooms ominous looking Cisco-Polycom conferencing contraptions often gathers dust, and hardly anyone uses desktop video in enterprise cubeland except for a few brave renegades.

I stopped by Oovoo’s both on Monday to look at their launch of fun and effortless video conferencing apps for regular humans. I was first shown their impressively slick Facebook app, that supports conferencing with up to 12 friends or contacts. The interface is far beyond anything I’ve recently seen from the long-time vendors.

I watched as my guide, Rajesh Midha, VP Corporate Development, switched between high-quality, mostly jitter-free conversations, and then popped up a full screen conference. There’s some impressive engineering in the back-end with the connection looping through Oovoo’s own private network. Anyway, Rajesh was able to turn on HD video as I chatted with an Oovo coworker in their NYC office.

I was able to actually read the business card that she remotely presented to me. It was a very clear picture. This was all done within Facebook, and did I mention it’s all free?

For the iPad, they have the coolest video mobile experience I’ve come across. The iPad real-estate is divided into quadrants, allowing four simultaneous conversations. This is a fun app. For Android gadgetry, Oovo also supports 12 connections, but you can only see one at a time.

Here’s what I’m leading up to: Oovoo is both an awesome consumer app, and with the bring-your-own-device uprising in the corporate world, it is a killer business app as well.

Moti, by the way, has relocated to New Jersey after selling his previous Israeli-based peer-to-peer car rental service to a company called Hertz.

Anyway, with his latest venture he allows used car buyers the chance to rent the car they intend to buy from the owner. That way they get to try that Porsche or Lamborghini. If the renter eventually buys the car, the owner takes the rental price off the purchase. And from what I understood, rent2buy takes a percentage of the daily rental rate, but leaves out the ultimate sale transaction from their business model.

I thought the idea made sense for high-end cars, which is rent2buy’s initial market. The service is just rolling out, and should be available in NY tri-state area soon.

Within the space of an hour or so after I arrived, I was chatting with the founder of Videolicious, which has a raw video to quality Web-ready news short app, met up with the Israeli-founder of a NJ-based peer-to-peer car rental service called rent2buy, had a silk-screen shirt made for me by a Crown Heights, Brooklyn startup (Go Brooklyn!), heard Dennis Crowley talk about Foursquare’s very bi-coastal work arrangements for its employees, and watched a Battlefield player call KurbKarma explain how parking behaviors can earn karma points.

Like last year, I’ll be doing the very popular “Tales from Startup Alley” profile posts. And I’ll be tweeting away, time permitting, at @agreenjay.

My calendar is filling up with appointments and presentations I’d like to attend. If you want me to hear and see your venture, contact me at: editor at technoverseblog.com.

By the way, there are pics from Disrupt NYC 2011 posted on our Facebook page. Gaze in wonder.

In my brief tour of the booths and desks at Startupalooza, I came upon a medical monitoring watch-like gadget, an inpatient nurse notification tablet, and a GPS-based cellular device for monitoring fleets and teenage driving patterns. All these startups are on the verge of attracting more investment and getting more attention in the marketplace.

Taking it from the top, Vesag focuses on personal medical sensor that can transmit bio-information over a wireless or cellular network. At their desk, I saw their Advanced Medical Watch. Think of it as one of those G-Shock-sized watches but with a built-in GPS, accelerometer, and wireless ZigBee router that links up with other Vesag sensors. The Vesag watch gathers temperature, blood pressure, and EKG, along with location coordinates and then sends this bio data over a cell network to notify doctors, nurses, and caregivers of potential emergencies.

Vesag’s Advanced Medical Watch has obvious applications in hospitals and independent living environments or any other remote monitoring situation. Company founder, Rajendra Sadhu, came up with the idea when he wanted to keep tabs on his elderly parents back in India and view in real-time their vital information. Necessity or distant mothers can be the mother of invention.

NYC-based StarlingHealth has another medical related product, called Starling, that takes on the patient-nurse communications in hospital settings. Anyone who’s ever tried to hail a nurse will readily see the value prop here. Patients are given a touch-sensitive tablet on which common requests for, say, food, medications, and bed adjustments, are represented as icons. Starling aggregates and prioritizes requests from all patients, feeding them to the appropriate nurse or aide, who can the view the medical situation on their own specialized tablet app.

Starling, by the way, will do any necessary language translations–I saw a demo of Spanish to English and back-again at their booth. The Starling back-end system supports workflows with standardized templates so nurses can respond with just a click to take care of the most common requests.

There is lots of competition here, with big players like Hill-Rom and Conexall– don’t ask how I know about them, I just do. But Starling appears to be a less expensive solution and may have a nice market in smaller hospitals or departments within larger institutions.

Global Telematic Solutions was my last stop at Startupalooza. They have a palm-size embedded system that can be used by fleets to monitor driving behaviors of their drivers. The driver, so to speak, behind this product are usage-based insurance polices–they are being offered!–in which insurances rates dynamically reflect driving patterns.

So with GTS’s Data Logger plugged into the truck’s computer system sending telematics through its CDMA chipset, the insurance company can monitor speed limits, mileage, and other behaviors. Good drivers are rewarded with better rates.

Dennis Lottero, VP of Business Development at GTS, mentioned that this same gadget has other applications, especially in the consumer market. Parents can monitor the activity of their teenage drivers, configuring notifications when they use the family car outside of given hours or beyond an electronic fence or over a certain speed. Lottero told me that GTS supports an SDK so that third-party developers can create their own apps.

I had to run out before the formal pitches were made in the evening, so I don’t have the judges final verdicts on this group of startups. Anyway, I’ll go out on a limb by saying that Startupalooza attracts serious, mostly NJ startups that deserve more attention that some of the things I’m seeing on the other side of the river.

Politis told me that with the success of DomainWatch, which has several hundred corporate users, he was getting feedback for new features. Ultimately users comments were transformed into the new FlashPanel product. While DomainWatch manages Google Apps resources, such as documents, calendars, and access rights, FlashPanel has its aim on email and user administration.

“FlashPanel helps with onboarding, it helps with de-provisioning users when you need to suspend someone’s account and backup their mailbox and let new people who are emailing know that person is no longer with the company. All of that is built into the product as predefined workflows,” Politis told me in our phone conversation.

Politis also emphasized the security aspects to FlashPanel, which included the ability to monitor email content. It’s a capability that companies who wanted to move from Microsoft Exchange–yes people, corporate email can be easily audited–to Google Apps had been asking Politis for.

In my own conversations over the last few months with IT directors, I have been more than a little surprised to hear Google Apps being mentioned. It’s especially popular at universities. Politis has seen the same thing, and in fact, has written a post for Mashable about growing up Google– you start out in college with Chat and Gmail, and then continue in the corporate world.

So with my beta login, I was able to play system admin with FlashPanel in my own mini Google Apps environment. In short: it’s got a Googley feel, and far simpler and easier to use than that other company’s software found in most Fortune 1000 servers.

Along with the new product, BetterCloud also pulled in $2 million in seed funding from angel investors with backgrounds in enterprise IT.

According to Politis, the money is being plowed into product development and also “on developing new channel partners as part of a longer term strategy.”