The 14 startups demoing at DreamIt today [Startup Roundup]

Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup parses out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with a weekly email newsletter by clicking here and selecting the Startup Roundup button or follow Startup Roundup’s RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

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The Philadelphia Business Journal covers DreamIt Ventures’ Fall 2011 graduating class, which will show off their work this afternoon at the incubator’s demo day. TechCrunch has the full list of startups, including 5 minority led companies launching today. Included in the demos today will be Cloudmine, CirTouch, ElectNext, Flirq, Grassroots Unwired, Kwelia, Metalayer, OneAway, Qwite, SnipSnap, Spling, SupplyHog, ThaTrunk, and UXFlip.

New DreamIt Ventures startup Spling announced a $400,000 Series A investment yesterday led by Deep Fork Capital, TechCrunch reports. It’s a social sharing site, that appears to be a cross between a bookmarking service and social network. In related news, Lancaster-based appMobi, which is striving to create tools and resources for HTML5 development, was named ReadWriteWeb’s Most Promising Company for 2012.

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Startup Roundup: It’s the end of the bubble as we know it

Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup parses out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with a weekly email newsletter by clicking here and selecting the Startup Roundup button or follow Startup Roundup’s RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

MUST READS

That startup bubble we’ve all been experiencing is expected to dwindle in 2012, according to a new report from TechCrunch that comes from conversations with early-stage investors like First Round Capital‘s Josh Kopelman. He told the publication that “I think 2012 will look more like 2008 than 2011.” Investors, Kopelman included, suggest that they’re being more cautious in Series A rounds.

Duck Duck Go has been integrated as the default search engine in Linux Mint, which claims to be the 4th most widely-used home operating system beyond the usual suspects.

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The hand-painted production cycle of mobile game Catball Eats It All

The concept of Catball Eats It All, a developing new mobile game with ties to Philly, is simple.

Your goal is to eat everything in sight. The more you eat, the bigger you get. And the bigger you are, the more you’re able to eat.

There’s not a lot innovative about that.

The members of the development team Broken Compass Studios, coordinated by Project Manager Jeff Hsu, were inspired by games like Katamari Damacy, where players collect objects on a sticky ball that gets bigger and bigger, and Super Mario Galaxy, where the player inhabits small orbiting worlds instead of recognizable two-dimensional Mario levels.

But where Catball is unique is in its art direction.

The concept art and mockups created for this in-progress development are all hand-painted, which gives the game a feeling of unpolished yet sophisticated perfectionism.

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