In PIE's second demo day, six new startups took the stage and made their pitches for future profitability.

Yesterday, Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) held its second annual demo day event, introducing six new startups to the market. The new projects range from little known to enjoying early launch success, and run the gamut technologically: Some entirely user-focused, others preoccupied with big data. Check out the six new startups courtesy of PIE’s second incubator class.

Little Bird

Former TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb writer Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Little Bird (formerly known as Plexus Engine) kicked things off. While there aren’t many questions about Little Bird’s odds at success — the startup did just complete a $1 million round of fundraising led by Mark Cuban and already has more than 20 paying customers — it still deserves mention.

As a quick summary, Little Bird is a social graph search application that leverages Twitter and top blogs to find the people you need to connect with. That “you” is the important piece: This isn’t a user-facing tool (although it could be); it’s mainly targeting marketers and advertisers — outlets that need to find influencers and engage them.

Sound like Klout? Well there are definitely some overlapping ideas between the two, but Klout remains a rather surface application that focuses on describing how influential you are. Also, it’s a black box: Despite recent admissions about how it finds your Klout rank, there’s plenty that’s unaccounted for. Little Bird is about connecting the dots between subject matter experts and all of its signals are extremely up front. Kirkpatrick compares it to Page Rank, saying Little Bird believes the best way to find valued sources is by analyzing the connections between people, not just the content they’re putting out.

Code Scouts

Call it a reaction to the economy or the tech startup scene — or maybe just call it the Codeacademy effect — but there’s been a flood of alternative computer science education systems hitting the market recently. Despite the “everyone should learn to code!” trend, there is still a huge demand for developers and at the same time this industry needs some serious diversity — to put it plainly, there’s a very real lack of women in the field.

Code Scouts (a non-profit, a unique idea to demo days) is focusing on teaching women to code for mobile and Web, which founder Michelle Rowley reasons is just smart given the influence women have on the consumer market. The organization is more relaxed than your typical intense, quick-and-dirty hacker school. Members work in small groups, take advantage of mentorships, and meet for larger Code Scout-wide events and workshops.

Code Scouts is looking to raise $250k to build its team and then scale out nationally next year. Rowley also says the startup is looking for developers interested in being mentors or volunteers, as well as companies who are interested in partnering with Code Scouts to offer internships.

KS12

Social video remains a much-explored, arguably untapped market, and KS12 is giving it a go with a product it calls “video sprints.” Basically, these are KS12-produced videos that follow the pre and post pieces of an event — as well as, obviously, the during part of the event itself. “We see this as a space for collaboration,” says co-founder Gabriel Shalom. “Most event organizers see events as an end result, but we video sprints we see them as a peak of a cycle of attention that starts beforehand and goes until afterward.”

In a demo, KS12 showed off incredibly high quality video content and a variety of big names in tech and startups — you can check out its video spring focused on PIE here.

AppThwack

The F-word is a very dangerous one to developers: Fragmentation. AppThwack wants to help solve the resulting frustration with its automated app testing platform. Co-founders Trent Peterson and Pawel Wojnarowicz previously worked at Intel and have taken their time and knowledge of system automation over to AppThwack.

“We development a platform that will address the increasingly connected world we live in,” says Peterson. “We will be the solution for testing on devices and all platforms.”

Right now, AppThwack has originally only been available for Android (certainly a good place to start) and HTML 5 apps. You simply drag and drop you app to its site and AppThwack starts running and testing it on actual devices. Then you get your results and find out how well — or poorly — your app is running.

The startup launched last July, and since then it has performed nearly 573,000 tests. AppThwack is now moving into mobile Web development and will begin running testing for iOS apps in a couple months.

Lytics

Lytics is adding its name to the big data startup pool. The analytics service collects an app or services data from wherever you want — Web, mobile, third party APIs, Facebook, you name it — and from there helps you make sense of it all. Lytics can provide data visualization tools as well as enhanced background on a client’s users.

With cloud dependency and more and more outside integrations, applications’ data is fragmented across platforms, and Lytics (currently finalizing fundraising) wants to bring all of that together into one place and make it easily digestible and useful for its clients.

Stublisher

Stublisher shares some of the same focus as KS12’s video sprints by targeting social events. “We want to build a community around experiences and build a life around events,” co-founder Zachary Collins says. Stublisher wants to do more than be a platform that shows what you Like, it’s about showing what you did, and what you do.

Collins convincingly also showed off how Stublisher’s platform looks compared to Facebook Events — and the short story is, it looks much better. Facebook Events are static, feature-less pages, and the moment an event is over, they disappear. Right now, Stublisher is working with the Instagram API, but Collins says they also want to pull in Twitter and that an iOS app is in the works.

In addition to lots of philosophical waxing about the beauty of cherishing events and valuing this part of our social data by turning it into something more interactive, something more engaging, Collins also talked about the value proposition for marketers. Collecting this data and turning it into something we want to build and look at is obviously works to a brand’s advantage. Right now Stublisher is targeting concerts and events, but the team wants to get into sports and fashion. “What Wikipedia did for knowledge, we’re doing for experiences,” he says.

By turning the traditional mouse-and-keyboard paradigm on its head, Windows 8 will open the door for a diverse array of new devices, and retooled old ones. But which will work best?

Windows 8 is a new approach to personal computing. It reverses Microsoft’s earlier decision to push the old Windows user experience down to phones. The new Windows 8 operating system takes a user interface that began on the Zune and matured on Windows Phone 7 products and pushes it up to PCs. I anticipate that Apple will do the same thing with its iOS. Windows 8 capabilities suggest that the best products for this operating system will be in a different configuration than products designed for previous versions of Windows.

Initially new Windows 8 products likely will emulate either Apple products (particularly the iPad) or look like existing Windows products. I’ve been in production with Windows 8 for some months now, and I’m betting that over the next 24 months, another class of product emerges that better showcases Windows 8’s unique flexibility.

All-in-Ones

You’d think all-in-ones would be perfect for Windows 8. That would be true except for one important thing: Screen size for this class has moved to 27 inches, and users typically place anything in that size range beyond an easy arm’s reach for comfortable viewing. You’ll likely find, as I did, that a good touchpad is more useful than a touch screen because you aren’t constantly leaning forward, stretching for the screen. And you won’t be smearing fingerprints all over the display. This last trait is annoying enough on a tablet, but wait until you see fingerprints all over a larger piece of glass. So for 20-inch and smaller screens, touch is fine, but for 25 inches and above, you’ll likely prefer a touchpad. A touchpad also saves you money because it is a cheaper option. But neither a touch screen nor a touchpad is ideal.

We are waiting for a Kinect all-in-one product to provide the balance between touch experience and the ability to sit back and work from your chair without mucking up the screen. In theory, a Kinect interface could work across multiple-screen desktop installations regardless of whether you use a desktop or all-in-one as your core system.

Laptops

A touch-screen laptop can work just fine; however, you’ll want it to be light and, from time to time, you’ll still want a good touchpad. In fact, you may find that the touchpad will be more important than the touchscreen for operations such as cut and paste, which are much easier with a touchpad. The other issue is balance; some notebooks are weighted incorrectly for a touch screen. Because this kind of screen is typically heaver, the laptop tilts back when you press on the screen.

Bigger is often better. If you really want to use the touchscreen, you’ll likely prefer 15 inches to 17 inches in full touch mode over 13.3 inches and smaller. Several folks are talking about Kinect on notebooks, but I’m not yet sold on the idea because the screens are small, and gesturing from a distance is less intuitive.

So I’d recommend screens 13.3 inches or larger with a great multi-touchpad as a requirement. A touchscreen is my strongly recommended option for the cool factor.

Tablets

I’ve been using an 11.6-inch Samsung Windows 8 tablet for months. The size is painfully small when working with Office, which is as close as we’ll likely get to a “killer app” before launch (Microsoft is being secretive about the other apps). After using the product, several original equipment managers (OEMs) are talking about creating 15-inch to 20-inch tablets.

These tablets will be more fun for surface table-like gaming (with the tablet flat on the table) and will create a portable all-in-one that is in the sweet spot for this class of product. These larger-sized tablets won’t be shipping at launch, but I suggest the bigger the tablet, the happier you will be when doing actual work. That means you should shoot for an 11.6-inch screen, or bigger, and avoid the 10-inch class.

Hybrids and convertibles

A hybrid is a tablet that has a keyboard you can disconnect, and a convertible morphs from tablet to laptop while the keyboard stays connected, but hidden under the screen when not in use. We already know that people dislike sizes below 13.3 inches in volume for laptops, or more than 10 inches in tablets. Your choice will depend on how you want to use the product.

But here, too, the ideal size likely will be 11.6 inches and larger. Hybrids are best for those who want to lock down on the tablet side and occasionally use a keyboard (because you are likely to leave it behind). Convertibles are best for those who more often use a laptop but occasionally want a tablet. Hybrids can drift down to 10 inches and below, but convertibles likely will be best at 11.6 inches and above (ideally in the 12-inch to 14-inch range).

Windows to Go

The most undersold part of the Windows 8 platform is Windows To Go, and it is initially only available to Windows buyers. It places the entire Windows image on a USB key that you insert to run your personal Windows desktop on any piece of compliant hardware. As long as hardware is available for your use, this is the perfect portability, because your key files move with you regardless of whether you are connected to the network of a supported PC device. Windows To Go should give you the ultimate in flexibility. The ideal devices will have special slots, so you can leave the USB connected without it dangling and getting broken or lost during travel.

Windows 8 will herald a new class of PCs using unique new interfaces such as Kinect, and they’ll come in ever more flexible form factors. In short, if you thought the change in Windows 8 was extreme, wait until you see the hardware that will eventually, over the next several years, evolve as a result of this new platform.

I remain in search of the quintessential Windows 8 hardware. Let me know if you think you’ve seen it.