By Julie Blaustein

Kosmix‘s doubles Ping Pong Tournament held at its head quarters in Mountain View last week was quite the event. Seven of their closest neighbors and potential partners were invited along with a team of bloggers that included myself, Julie “Julie B” Blaustein of Bub.blicio.us and Jennifer “Mediaphyter” Leggio of ZDNet. Kosmix takes not only their work seriously but their Ping Pong even more so. Scattered throughout their office are ping pong balls, rackets and previous trophies – a true testament to their ping pong culture. For this special tournament a two foot high, gold topped trophy with ping pongs was awarded to the winners. Each player’s game name such as “The Octopus” and “The Smasher” made it clear how intent they were in their quest to win. In the end, it was the Kosmix team made up of Nikesh “The Wall” Garera and Ankur “Neo” Jain that were the winners! Check out the hilarious Video of the Kosmix Startup Smackdown shot by Carl Brown of Corduroy Media.

The Contenders included the following companies:

Talenthouse: A platform that provides opportunities to the world’s creative community.

Skyfire: Provides a downloadable, free mobile browser that gives you Web browsing like your PC.

TheFind: Finds every product from every store, every coupon, and every review.

Rythm NewMedia: Mobilizes and Monetizes TV Shows.

Polyvore: Mixes & matches products from your favorite stores. You can then shop looks created by the web’s largest fashion community.

Evernote: Saves your ideas, things you see, and things you like. Then it allows you to find them all on any computer or device for free!

Meebo: Instant messages everywhere.

And Kosmix: It is a universal guide to the Web that organizes the Internet through a categorization engine into fun magazine-style topic pages to navigate the web using a countless number of sources including YouTube and Wikipedia. Unlike Mahalo that depends on Human Editors, Kosmix relies on Search Algorithms. Recently launched MeeHive creates customized news pages through very fine tuned aggregation. You can customize your own or a specialized version such as found with FailCon’s version.

Photo Credit: Karl Mueller

The Kosmix Ping Pong Tournament and its Team Players Photo Credit: Karl Mueller

Kosmix Founder Anand Rajaraman Guards the Ping Pong Trophy