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Twelve companies pitched to the crowd at the Where 2.0 conference Monday night. Each had only five minutes each to make their case. A full rundown of the companies is on the official Launchpad page, but here's the Webware takeaway on the most interesting of the dozen apps (not counting Whrrl, which we covered last week):

Orbster makes location-based games for mobile phones. The company was showing off GPS Mission. The cool thing is a Web-based mission designer lets individuals or communities create games based on their own knowledge of their locales. Game players have to collect virtual "gold" by going to the locations in the game and, I think, answering questions based on them. It's like geo-caching, but without that bothersome digging up of plastic bins. GPS-capable phone required.

Rhiza Labs is launching Community Insights, which is a Web-based platform for mapping data sets. It lets users compare data sets on a map, annotate existing maps, and also lets the users who upload data see what other maps use their data. Not quite as straightforward as a "Flickr for data," as the presenter said, but it looks like a very useful tool for any organization trying to make sense of its map-based data.

More coming soon from Where 2.0...