Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Survey shows business owners expect a hectic holiday season and 2012.

A sampling of the unusual pitches at this year's showcase of 14 fund-seeking start-ups. DreamIt , a start-up incubator founded in Philadelphia hosted a demo day in Midtown Manhattan Wednesday for about 250 attendees, many of them venture capitalists and angel investors looking for the next Dropbox or Scvngr. Fourteen teams presented the start-up companies they have been developing for the past three months

A sampling of the unusual pitches at this year's showcase of 14 fund-seeking start-ups. DreamIt , a start-up incubator founded in Philadelphia hosted a demo day in Midtown Manhattan Wednesday for about 250 attendees, many of them venture capitalists and angel investors looking for the next Dropbox or Scvngr. Fourteen teams presented the start-up companies they have been developing for the past three months.

Yep, they are 30-day hack-a-thons--and they are helping launch big products, including Facebook Deals. Welcome to what one Facebooker calls "a playground for engineers." Tech giants such as Google to Facebook are famous for hack-a-thons, all-night marathon coding sessions where eager employees build something unrelated to their current projects