Stitcher has delivered more audio recordings of our MobileBeat conference today. The first link is for the panel entitled What Will the Gatekeepers Do Now? The AppStore and Beyond (pictured above). And the other is the MobileBeat 2009 Startup Competition — Apps event . (pictured below)

Why it’s Breakthrough: It’s a company that’s not just bringing back electric cars, but building an infrastructure out of existing resources and a model that will keep electric cars here to stay. The Story: Better Place is a revolutionary company that is making the dream of non-polluting electric cars a reality. Better Place has over $200 million in venture capital along with the governments in Israel and Denmark supporting it, and is building the infrastructure that will bring greater convenience and affordability to electric cars than is currently offered to traditional petroleum powered automobiles.

It’s not often that we hear about consumer web startups getting their own TV spots, much less during the Super Bowl — that’s the sort of craziness that was reserved for the heady 90’s, back before the (first) bubble burst. But that’s exactly what Hulu did this year when it ran a spot during Super Bowl XLIII, introducing the masses to the online video site’s plot for world domination (headed by Alec Baldwin, of course).

It’s not often that we hear about consumer web startups getting their own TV spots, much less during the Super Bowl — that’s the sort of craziness that was reserved for the heady 90’s, back before the (first) bubble burst. But that’s exactly what Hulu did this year when it ran a spot during Super Bowl XLIII, introducing the masses to the online video site’s plot for world domination (headed by Alec Baldwin, of course).

Big content is gradually wading into the waters of interactive video. One interactive video service, Clikthrough, has enlisted two more record labels and added dozens of new videos to its library. If San Francisco-based startup Clikthrough has its way, sites like Vevo — the upcoming Web music video site spearheaded by Universal Music — will be filled with clickable streams, allowing viewers to learn about or purchase anything they see.

Spinvox, the voice-to-text startup, has been on a roll: $100 million in funding from an impressive list of backers; then, a key deal with Telefonica covering its Latin America mobile operations, which bump its userbase to 150 milion (with some other contracts it claims it has yet to announce); and just yesterday, 600 registrations for its API set, which is getting the service embedded with other fast-growing mobile applications like Audioboo.

We’re starting the first half of the startup competition at our MobileBeat conference in San Francisco. Hosted by CNET TV’s Natali Del Conte, seven companies (selected from hundreds of applicants) will try to convince the judges that they offer the best mobile service. Here are the companies, what they do, and the news that they’re announcing on-stage: AppStoreHQ is a discovery service for iPhone applications. Comparing itself to news aggregator Techmeme, AppStoreHQ aggregates and scores writing about iPhone apps on leading tech blogs and iPhone-focused sites.

Image via CrunchBase I’ve been on the founding board of two industry associations, the IAB and the ADM. We started the Internet Advertising Bureau in 1997 when venture funding was free flowing like champagne at an @PaulCarr rendezvous and though we felt some financial constraint, there were plenty of dues to be had to fund our site and manage the business. Not so with the Association for Downloadable Media, which started in 2007, with very small coffers in an increasingly tight industry.

Former Googler Sanjeev Agrawal To Lead Just-Funded Mobile Search Startup Aloqa – venture.name 07/16/2009 Today’s a big day for Aloqa , a fledgling mobile search and information services company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The startup will be announcing at Venturebeat’s MobileBeat 2009 conference that they have just raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from Wellington Partners and show off a product release and new hire.

Interactive video and analytics startup Clikthrough has secured $1 million in Series A funding from music execs and investors Max Martin, Savan Kotecha, Nicky Byrne, and Wayne Wilkins. Clikthrough’s technology lets you “clik” on anything you see: products, people, places, and more. Once you click on a “hotspot” you will see information about the product to the right of the main video screen. Clikthrough lets you see how to purchase to an item; user comments, how to save it to a wish list, as well as live chat, rating and sharing features.