Will the next Mark Zuckerberg please present yourself?

I kept asking myself that question as I walked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, which on Saturday was filled with college students convinced they have the next great business plan, the next billion-dollar company, or the next organization that will make the world a better place. In all, 50 student-founded companies were honored for being the innovative enterprises at the 2011 Kairos Global Summit, and each one had a table set up to introduce itself, talk about its business model, impress the likes of venture capitalists, angel investors, corporate CEOs, and media.

The Kairos Society wasn't around when Zuckerberg and a few of his fellow Harvard students created Facebook. The society was created in 2008 by Ankur Jain, now a 20-year-old senior at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as a way to promote the creation of companies that can help solve the world's problems. The organization is headquartered in the United States, but has a global reach: Students from India, China, the Netherlands, Spain, Great Britain, and more gathered in New York on Friday and Saturday for the chance to meet at the United Nations, tour selected companies, take part in discussions at the Stock Exchange, and network.

In the short time Kairos has been around, it's gathered some influential friends and supporters. NYSE director and chief operations officer Duncan Niederauer toured the trading floor with Jain on Saturday. Stan Anderson, chairman of the Campaign for Free Enterprise, used the gathering to announce a new Center for Entrepreneurship effort at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A dinner on Friday night was held at the estate built by John D. Rockefeller.

But beyond the discussions about what's needed to bolster entrepreneurship or how companies can do social good while making money or why there aren't more women creating startups, there were 50 companies getting a coming-out party at ground zero for American capitalism. These companies covered a wide spectrum of industries—social networking and filtering, clothing design and sales, bicycle design and manufacturing, children's day care at night and on weekends, entertainment production, and investing.

Here are a few that stood out. For more, click here to see a slideshow:

• BPG Werks: An example of the benefits of goofing off, this company got its start when Ben Gulak wanted to create an all-terrain vehicle that had the strength of a snowmobile and the agility of a skateboard. An early prototype of the DTV Shredder he built earned 1.5 million hits on YouTube in a week, got him on Dragon's Den (the Canadian version of the ABC show Shark Tank), and captured the interest of the U.S. Air Force. Still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gulak said his biggest challenge will be to stay in the United States because of current immigration laws.
• Long Effect: Christopher M. Long never intended to go into the family printing business, but his father's death while he was a student was a catalyst for him to take over the Warminster, Pennsylvania, company and reinvent it. "The printing industry is definitely dying, and we saw that creating brand identity was really the key to the future," said Long, a Babson College student.
• Newsle: If this site works as promised, it will go a long way to helping today's digital-information clutter. The brainchild of two Harvard University students, Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon, Newsle bills itself as a way to track news stories about your friends, professional contacts, or select public figures. The site, Newsle.com, is still in beta.
• AlphaSpoke: As if to prove that new companies don't have to be rooted in new industries, Warren Liao and his partners created this company to manufacture custom suits and shirts for men. The Web-based shopping site is based in New York, but does its manufacturing in Shanghai. "We're trying to revolutionize the way you buy clothing," Liao said, noting that the site aims to educate young professionals on how to dress and will create tailored suits for between $400 and $700.
• Lacerta Technologies: Created by two students from Hungary, this Budapest-based company has developed a technology designed to help with the healing of bones as a result of transplants. According to the company, this "provides increased stem cell survival, thus resulting in faster recovery and more reliable bone restructuring."

Maybe—just maybe—one of those companies, or one of the others on display this past weekend, will have the reach and impact of Facebook. And maybe one of these collegiate entrepreneurs will have the same kind of name recognition as Zuckerberg in a few years. I'm keeping their business cards just in case.