The next Yahoo! or Amazon.com may be lurking somewhere in the confines of the Hyatt Regency hotel in South San Francisco today. And all one thousand attendees at the wrap up of the two-day Garage.com Bootcamp for technology startups at the Hyatt hope it's them.

The rags to riches Internet dream is alive and well for these entrepreneurs many of whom came from out of state and from other countries to hear venture capitalists, lawyers and successful entrepreneurs share some of their techniques and tips for building a tech business.

Not all the attendees are rookies however; many come for the intense, high level shmoozing and deal-making that happens outside the main conference hall. Take Mikhail Lari, Chairman and CEO of Electrifier Inc. His company launched its electrifier.com Web site last Fall from headquarters in Research Triangle Park, NC. But Lari moved the firm to San Francisco this February.

"The Bay Area is just the epicenter of what's happening in the Internet," says Lari, who adds that his company maintains a presence in Research Triangle Park because "it's important to be bi-coastal."

Part of Lari's mission at the Bootcamp is to get help raising his next round of funding (Series B) of $5 million. Electrifier has repositioned its Web service since its launch from a generic presentation system to a marketing system for sellers on exchanges like eBay. Electrifier provides streaming media technology sellers can employ using existing photos and text. Electrifier tracks the sale and collects a small percentage if the sale is successful. A final version of the currently available beta is set for release later next month.

HOPING FOR A RESCUE ANGEL

There are also more than the expected starry-eyed startups and established Web veterans at Bootcamp. Renee Esquiva is attending the conference in hopes of saving her company, thePerk.com, which launched last November to sell premium coffees, teas, and gourmet gift items via the Internet. The company was started in Austin, TX with operations in San Francisco; now the Austin HQ is closed and the only two people left are Esquiva and her co-founder, both in San Francisco.

After listening to a morning of presentations and panel discussions, Esquiva says she realizes she and her partners made many mistakes in launching the Web company, particularly in the area of capitalization. thePerk.com was started with funding from friends and families with the hope that interested Angel investors would kick in.

"Angel (investors) kept hanging around and showing interest but they wanted a lead investor to be someone in Austin and that didn't happen," says Esquiva. "Starbucks got hammered for its Web efforts, but we think we have a better idea and if we get the funding we'll do it. Time is on our side because we have enough money to pay our bills until we find the equity we need."

WWW.PIGALOO.COM

At least Esquiva has a relatively good name for her site; would you invest in Pigaloo.com? Debdoot Das hopes so, and given the focus of his Web site - it's aimed at kids -- he might just be okay. After six years of trying Das says he was finally able to convince the founder of Golden Books Records, which published many classic kid's songs and stories on the old vinyl albums, to give him Internet rights to the songs.

"Golden Books were before Disney and included many classics, like Cab Calloway, Burl Ives, and Captain Kangaroo," says Das. His pigaloo.com site is down for the next week while Das makes some changes to it, but he says he has 5,000 tracks ready for downloading. The tracks will be free initially though he eventually intends to charge as the list of offerings expands.

Pigaloo also wants to be a place for new music artists to post their work and Das says he'll let them share in the revenue once a portion of his site goes paid. Das wants to shake up the music business with his pricing scheme which he says will cost consumers as little as a five to ten cents per track. "Why should an album cost $16 to download, it makes no sense," says Das. "If you make it easy, simple and cheap to get music you don't have to worry about piracy. And we're going to offer a $10 credit to get new buyers started."

So will Pigaloo fly? Das says he chose the unusual name for its high recall factor, which could be helpful in getting the attention of potential investors. In one of the Bootcamp sessions, a panel of venture capitalists said their firms see upwards of 10,000 business plans a year, but fund less than a hundred of them.