TechCrunch50: Day 1
When Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis team up on a project, the webs are bound to be shaken up.
Last year, their conference TechCrunch40 was an enormous showcase for startups to present their idea to venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and the press. This year, it's even bigger.
I will be liveblogging this event for the next three days. I will try to writeup all 50 startups, plus some from the demo pit.
Email me if you want me to cover something specifically.
6:30 a.m. Here is today's lineup:
- Adgregate Markets (Presented by Henry Wong and Du Nguyen)
- AdRocket (Presented by Scott Milener and Andreas Svensson)
- Angstro (Presented by Rohit Khare and Salim Ismail)
- BlahGirls (Presented by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg)
- Burt (Presented by Gustav von Sydow and Gustav Martner)
- Connective Logic (Presented by Stuart Smith and Jeremy Orme)
- Devunity (Presented by Alon Carmel and Leeron Shalev)
- DotSpots (Presented by Farhad Mohit and Matthew Mastracci)
- FairSoftware (Presented by Alain Raynaud and Eileen Long)
- Hangout Industries (Presented by Pano Anthos and Lucas Smolic)
- LiveHit (Presented by Jeanine LeFlore)
- OtherInBox (Presented by Joshua Baer and Mike Subelsky)
- Quant the News (Presented by Brett Markinson and Ben Goertzel)
- Rinen (Presented by Hirofumi Manganji and Go Hagiwara)
- Shryk (Presented by Shane Kempton and Kim Stroh)
- Tweegee (Presented by Shay Bloch and Adi Brandwine)
- Yammer (Presented by David Sacks and Adam Pisoni)
6:38 a.m. Heading to the San Francisco Design Center Concourse. Hopefully I can plugin there.
Calacanis announced that Ashton Kutcher will be one of the first presentations at 9 a.m. PST.
Google's Marissa Mayer will give a presentation today at 11:30 a.m. PST.
7:30 a.m. Just got here. The name badges are two sided:
The demo pit is warming up. Qik's booth:
Video search engine CastTV:
7:40 a.m. Seesmic is here. Think of it as a video Twitter:
Social search startup SearchMe is taking a group photo:
7:50 a.m. Lots of goodie bags:
Breakfast is served:
Webware's Rafe Needleman is working hard:
Microsoft brought a huge table computer:
There were fish swimming in this computer:
Lots of fun Microsoft schwag:
Tired of listening to startup pitches? Rock out with Rock Band:
8:05 a.m. Jason Calacanis arrives. They are playing Kanye West on the stereo.
The presenter's stand is fully equiped with the best gear:
Calacanis chats with Google's Marissa Mayer:
Blogger Calley Nye came up from LA to do some interviews and help out with the conference.
8:45 a.m. The Internet is down, but people are calm.
I am sitting with Meghan Asha from Non-Society. She is a life streamer too:
9:30 a.m. Presentations begin. I can catching up on my photos from earlier, so this early coverage may be spotty.
Meghan is livestreaming the event on Qik. Click here to watch the feed.
Arrington consults with TechCruncher Erick Shonfeld:
iThryv
iThryv is online banking for kids. It teaches them to manage their money at a young age.We have created a "make money" section that will not only help kids manage money, but it will help them make money.
Hangout Industries
“Where MySpace becomes my place” It's a digital playground. Imagine a virtual house with you and your friends. You can customize your avatar with shirts from Threadless.com, streaming from the Internet. If you like the shirt, you can click "Buy".
Over 30 brands and tastemakers have signed up in the last two weeks to work with Hangout.net.
Blah Girls
What is it?
Blah blah blah is a dynamic interactive celebrity pop culture environment. It's designed for teenage girls. It's a blah blah blog. It's gonna bring you the most up to date celebrity trends and gossip.
It's a true collaboration between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. It's an interactive hub for all things celebrity.
We understand that the web is not a passive playground. Every piece of content we put out will be interactive.
Vitamin Water is one of our first partners, and we've built them into the show. But it's not a roadblock to the entertainment.
TweeGee
The future of social activities for kids 8-12. Content, gaming, social networking... you name it.
Kids get 1 GB of space to share stuff with their friends.
Here are the first two unique users of TweeGee:
10:10 a.m. A "panel of experts" gets up on stage. Marissa Mayer, Chris DeWolfe, Ron Conway, Chad Hurley, Dan Farber. Namely, They are talking about the new companies that have just been presented.
Marissa: I really liked Hangout, I thought they had a lot of cool merchandise coming in.
Kutcher: It's a video so it can go anywhere. YouTube will be launching the first episode of Blah today.
Farber: One of the challenges of Blah girls may be interactivity. iThryv sounds like a good idea, but maybe the name isn't memorable.
Angel investor Ron Conway gives his two cents:
A financial investor like myself is gonna have a kinda 'show me' attitude. You need to get the banks to invest in you. -Conway
10:20 a.m. The seats have cleared for a break:
10:23 a.m. They are livestreaming the event on TechCrunch too:
During the break, I spoke with the guys from The Web Service. They host your data and help you control it.
10:53 a.m. CNET's Kara Tsuboi interviews Calacanis:
Revision3's David Prager is in attendance today. He's got his video camera with him :)
Dotspots
It is a symantic annotation layer. Imagine the wisdom of crowds... everywhere. Our first release is focused on the news. This is a browser plugin that follows you on the web, and remembers your preferences.
Angstro
News about your network. Business news about the people in your companies.It's great to have an online professional network, but it's not always as interesting.
To me, this seems like another Facebook or LinkedIn, but with way less qualities.
11:00 a.m. Robert Scoble just sat next to me:
LiveHit
A speech was given about LiveHit, but I didn't understand it at all. It seemed way too thought out and almost like MySpace.
StockMood
StockMood - turning the news into numbers. Easily analyze stocks and see where their "mood" is.
This is a guidance system, not a trading system.
From the judges
Mayer: DotSpots could change the way the web works. My concern for StockMood is the audience.
Farber: Angstro is an interesting feature.
Conway: With StockMood, for commercial acceptance, there will need to be an explaination of how these results are generated.
11:37 a.m. LaughingSquid's Scott Beale is here today. All of the photos in this blog post have been taken with one of his old cameras that I bought from him. (Photo taken earlier this morning):
Marissa Mayer, Google Inc.
Google News is launching millions of articles from old newspapers today. The technology behind it is the same that is used for Google Books.
Search for americans walking on the moon. Not only the stories are returned, but the context. You can see what else was going on in the news that day.
11:50 a.m. We all sang happy birthday to Google:
12:00 p.m. Another panel of experts. This time it's Conway, Yossi Vardi, David Kidder, Chris Sacca, and Matt Coffin. Calcanis is grilling them.
A noteable quote from Ron Conway:
Meeting entrepreneurs that are making something are interesting. When you meet with them, you are talking with the future of technology.
Isreali tech entrepreneur Yossi Vardi gave some of the most valuable commentary.
If we lose the money at an early stage, it's as if we gave a scholarship to these people. And who wants to give scholarships to jerks? -Vardi
12:30 p.m. Blah Girls launches. Here is the YouTube video.
12:40 p.m. Taking a short break for lunch. I might need to charge my camera battery.
12:45 p.m. Calacanis has some anchovies:
Farber is busy blogging about the conference. He was smart and brought an EVDO hookup:
USA Today has some people here:
Sandwiches and wraps for Day 1:
Some girls from Gazaro pose with Larry Chaing of Asse9.com:
1:00 The best giveaways really define a company (if you ask me). Cake Financial has the right idea. Bribe investors with cupcakes:
ZONG is giving away energy drinks:
Yahoo! sent some people to show off BOSS, but they look pre-occupied:
1:20 p.m. Norton is showing off it's new Internet Security 2009 product. They are also hosting an afterparty tomorrow night:
If you gadgets aren't charged, there are plenty of stations to juice up:
Arrington Sr. brought their chocolate lab Laguna to the event!
Gordon Peters from SocialCash came all the way from DC to be here. Pictured with Shira Lazar:
He funds startups and literally gives them a debit card with cash on it. They will it up as needed.
1:45 p.m. The second half of the day is about to begin. This is called a "working lunch". The main conference room is about half full:
1:53 p.m. Building Scalable Web Busineses: The Right Entrepreneurs Focused on the Right Markets (David Stern, Clearstone Venture Partners; Frank Addante, Rubicon Project; Rahul Sonnad, Geodelic; Ariel Poller, Serial entrepreneur; Bill Trenchard, LiveOps).
2:02 p.m The guys from UStream.tv are busy playing Halo 3:
This is the man who makes the event run smoothly. Mahalo's Tyler Crowley:
Yahoo! Tech Tracker's Sarah Lacy was sitting in my chair:
2:30 p.m. Calcanis tries to auction off Scoble's laptop:
Fair Software
Start and manage a business online. Avoid lawyers!
Basically just fill out a bunch of forms and your business is off the ground. The service includes a software bill of rights and a step-by-step process to begin setting up your company.
Yammer
What's happening at your company? You can login with your company email and get into your company's private network.
It's an office Twitter. It gets kinda noisy, but people can create conversations like FriendFeed.
A great way to discover other people in your company. You can create tags by putting a # before a word. You can follow tags too. SMS and IM supported.
3:00 p.m. Yammer just went live.
OpenTrace
Building a database like Wikipedia, with all products shipping information. With a simple webcam, you can scan a barcode and then see information about the product.
Search by location too. With a simple loaf of bread, we can trace every ingredient from each stage of production, transportation and packaging.
From the experts
Andreeson: Fair Software is a good idea. Micro markets are only growing. Yammer sounds good too. Blueprint multicore is the biggest programming challenge of our time. OpenTrace is brilliant idea.
Marc Benioff: Yammer is my favorite. The name doesn't seem very corporate. I would invest in this. With OpenTrace, you need a simple consumer interface.
Ash Patel: OpenTrace is a great idea. You have great data, but need an API.
Vardi: Being Jewish, having a product that would elminate all the lawyers in the world would be very very threatening.
Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace
Arrington: Are you at a $1 billion? How is revenue is growing?
DeWolfe It's amazing. It's growing year on year. If you put it in into context, look how long it took Yahoo! or Google to hit the billion dollar mark. We really focused on revenue from day 1.
We've done a whole redesign of MySpace. Our "hero" unit (the themed ad that spans the whole page) is helping us a lot. 50 million on a daily basis in the USA. If you compare that to a TV show, it's about double the traffic.
How is the site changing? How are you advancing?
We are working on our platform, and integrating with other services like Google Gears. We are taking all of the MySpace messaging and bringing them to your hard drive.
The next project we are working on is making the profile offline.
Let's talk about MySpace Music for a minute.
MTV used to bubble pop culture to the top, and we want to do the same thing.
It's launching this month. It's really exciting. The music industry has lost 10-20% a year in music sales. Instead of fighting these companies, we are working with them.
Streaming music, downloadable content, and ringtones.
It's a complete iterative approach. We have over 70 people dedicated to this. We've built the biggest music site in the world without a CEO; we are just looking for the right guy.
You actually don't say the word Facebook do you, you say "our largest competitor"
Facebook!
Thanks Chris
4:00 p.m. Eric Litman from Medialets made the trip from New York:
He is featured on the front page of Fast today.
Adgregate Markets
We are increasing conversation rates through product sell-through. Advertisers can now calculate hard ROI on clicks.
It really makes customizing an ad campaign easy. You can even morph a transactional ad unit from one type of ad to another.
4:25 p.m. MusicShake was in the demo pit.
It's a website that allows you to take music bits and create your own tracks. As long as it's streaming (Facebook, iMeem, etc), it's free. Their business model kicks in when you want to download the song as an MP3. They have over 500,000 musical tidbits that you can splice into your mix.
4:32 p.m. Local SF interactive design company Design about Town is here. Their huge pencil caught my attention:
Other Inbox
You probably have a separate email account that you use to sign up for things, and send "junk" to.People have email overload. We are getting more reciepts, newsletters, promos, and "bacn" coming to the inbox.
Other Inbox changes all that. You can have an unlimited number of emails for each site. When you make an email address like "amazon@josh.otherinbox.com", it makes a folder inside Other Inboxthat automatically creates a folder for it. You can also identify where other emails are coming from.
You don't have to actively check Other Inbox either. You can choose to get an update email from Other Inbox to your regular email address.
5:20 p.m. Arrington announces the next speaker:
Peter Thiel, Founder's Fund
Arrington: Are we in a tech bubble now?Thiel: No. You can't have a tech bubble if there are no IPOs.
The public markets could be overvaluing the already public companies?
On a relative basis, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay are some of the cheapest companies on the market.
How should ventures make a profit?
Throughout the past 30 years, there was a big shortage of capital. The money was in the hands of the VCs instead of the entrepreneurs. It's starting to balance out now.
What's your favorite startup? You can say Facebook.
I think Facebook is going to do extremely well. I think others are undervalued. We have awesome teams, but some are tracking better than others.
5:40 p.m. TechCrunch writers have been hammering on the keyboard all day:
6:05 p.m. I am taking a break. I may or may not post here again. The next post will come tomorrow morning early.