TechCrunch50: Day 2
Yesterday's presentations were a lot of fun to cover. I'm getting right back into the grind today.
6:30 a.m. Here is a list of today's presentations:
- Alfabetic (Presented by Oded Broshi and Arik Kopelman)
- DropBox (Presented by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi)
- Emerginvest (Presented by Andrew Waterman and Eugene Kim)
- ExchangeP (Presented by Saul Kato and Charles Katz)
- FitBit (Presented by James Park and Eric Friedman)
- icharts (Presented by Seymour Duncker and Tyron Montgomery)
- Imindi (Presented by Adam Lindemann and Galen Kaufman)
- me-trics (Presented by Christian Dodd and Jame Vreelan)
- MIXTT (Presented by Eve Peters and Diana Agraz)
- Mobclix (Presented by Sunil Verma and Krishna Subramanian)
- Mytopia (Presented by Guy Ben-Artzi and Galia Ben-Artzi)
- Popego (Presented by Santiago Siri and Emiliano Kargieman)
- PostBox (Presented by Sherman Dickman and Scott MacGregor)
- Swype (Presented by Mike McSherry and Cliff Kushler)
- Tingz (Presented by Patrick Hunt and Richard Benson)
- TonchiDot (Presented by Takahito Iguchi and Peter Anshin)
- PERSONALRIA (Presented by Guy Hirsch)
6:36 a.m. Walking over to the venue. I am gonna try to get the same seats I had yesterday.
8:11 a.m. Gathering pictures from yesterday, and writing up two quick reviews if I can.
8:20 a.m. ComScore is doing a breakfast session. There's about 50 people in the main conference center. I bet more people will be at Apple's announcement.
8:29 a.m. Internet is much better today. There is about 60% more wired Ethernet cables setup on the tables:
Breakfast is bigger today:
When you get to your seat, there are flyers waiting for you:
8:32 a.m. Michael Arrington taking a pic:
9:01 a.m. I got a great demo from John Holland, Chief Experience Officer at Search Me.
9:12 a.m. Jason Calacanis announces that we are changing the format of the conference to American Idol style. Judges give their remarks right after each presentation.
Mike Arrington, Kevin Rose, and Mark Cuban hanging out:
Calacanis and other join in:
9:20 a.m. Meghan Asha and TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher are doing a Seesmic video:
9:30 a.m. Stage is set. We are ready for day 2:
Asha sings the national anthem:
Mark Cuban is in the house:
Today's judges are Kevin Rose, Cuban, Roelof Botha, and Don Dodget from Microsoft.
Tingz
Cross-platform sharable widget focused on the things you want, use, and need every day. They deliver the same user experience no matter which device you are using (TV, phone, Internet).
They claim to help you gather content, but Digg and Delicious already have these services in place, and they already have most of the user base.
Mixtt
Redefining social networking as a tool that helps you connect with strangers at events. You aren't all alone though. You can make groups of friends and meetup with other groups of friends.
Facebook and MySpace are great for keeping you in touch with people you already know. Match.com turns out to be awkward and unbearable. Mixtt is more direct, more functional, and more fun.
The calendar feature makes it easy to plan your adventures. It's a site that takes your flirtations, and procrastinations offline.
The girls giving the demo are actually using the site to show the demo. It's not a collection of Powerpoint slides like the rest of the presentations.
iMindi
World's first thought engine. A computer mind mapping system.
There is a way to connect everyone's thoughts into one database. It's called the Mind Index. iMindi is building a collective mind on the web.
Popego
Cut out the noise of social news aggregators and make the web more meaningful. Login and plug in all your feeds, and Popego makes a tag cloud of your interests.
There is an equalizer so you can fine tune your interest profile. You can choose more articles from Flickr and less items from Digg if you want. The possibilities are endless.
Popego knows what you like. You can also build and "autoblog" for yourself and your friends to see.
Kevin Rose: I don't know if this is something that's gonna break out and recieve mass adoption, or will it stay in the small web 2.0 circle. You are now competing with Facebook too because they just launched the full live feed on the profile.
PersonalRIA
Using a smart trigger-trading algorithm to help with investment advising.
When you create an account, you are assigned a personal advisor who will look over your assets.
10:53 a.m. Arrington and Calcanis watch from the couches:
Emerginvest
The Yahoo! Finance for the rest of the world.10:59 a.m. It's a shame that a conference a few blocks is luring the attention of everyone here. But hey, Steve Jobs is speaking!
exchangeP
How much is Facebook worth to you? 1 billion? 5? 15?
exchangeP is a virtual fantasy stock exchange, especially for trading opinions about companies.
Our site is a mix between Yahoo! Finance and Schwab. There are 75 companies on the site now.
11:15 a.m. exchangeP launches:
me-trics
Google Analytics for your life. Track different parts of your life and see how they correlate.
icharts
There are about 40 million charts online, but in the print world, there are 900 billion charts printed every year. It's not simple to bring charts online.
Using the icharts "studio", it's quicker to create a chart here than on Microsoft Excel.
11:48 a.m. Taking a little break. I am meeting with Ashton Kutcher at 12:30 p.m.
What should I ask him? @me on Twitter.
2:09 p.m. Asha and I interviewed Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg.
Our next round of panelists: Rafe Needleman, Tim O'Reilly, Evan Williams, and Josh Kopelman.
Mytopia
Our mission is to help the world play together. We've had the web for a while, but now we have smartphones. Rich media and applications that work on one world, don't always work on other worlds.
There is a lot of platform fragmentation. What is we could create emersive applications that could work on all platforms?
Mytopia is the multi-platform mobile gaming application. You can play the same game with users on 12 different platforms, including Blackberry, iPhone, Android, Nokia, and Windows Mobile.
They used a programming language called RUGS that spans many platforms. You can even write in ActionScript 3 and have it work on 99% of phones.
Tonchidot
Real space is the new interface for the Internet.
This is the Sekai Camera:
They are walking through Tokyo with an iPhone holding it up to stores and it's translating them into English. They are looking for a phone store. They get into the phone store, and hold the camera over the phones.
Little popups come up with friend's recommendations. You can send voice messages to them too.
When you are at a restaurant, you can hold the camera over the food and Yelp it.
3:19 p.m. We are streaming live on Qik:
Fitbit
A little device that you carry around with you. It lets you know how active you are. How many calories have I burned? How well did I sleep? How many steps did I take today?
If you are trying to lose weight, you can set a plan with Fitbit's online portal.
When you are sleeping, it can tell you how long you slept over a period of time, how many times you woke up during the night, and how long it took you to fall asleep.
O'Reilly: Fitbit by a mile. They understand what kind of buisiness they are in. They know how their gonna make money.
Rafe: I'd love to disagree, but I can't
3:40 p.m Om Malik is sitting in as a moderator:
Arrington texting:
Tyler Crowley taking a much needed break:
Each company gets eight minutes to present their idea to the crowd of investors, entrepreneurs, and press:
AlfaBetic
A turnkey solution to publishers to translate and monetize at no cost.
PostBox
Search through your inbox and do more with attachments and emails.Swype
The text input for the 21st century. You just swipe around the keyboard and it knows the word you are trying to type.
Imagine 50 words per minute in every screen in your house.
Swype is very forgiving and flexible. Don't just think touch, think gesture. You can use this on many devices too.
O'Reilly gives it a shot:
You know this company is going to be a winner because people have stopped looking at the clock. Now everybody is up there:
DropBox
In the future, you won't be carrying a USB drive around with you. Your stuff will be backed up online.The company that makes it a reality will be the one that makes it so easy to use.
It's as simple as dragging stuff into folders on your desktop. Painless.
Devunity
An open source coding community. I wrote a post on Webware about them a few months ago »
5:48 p.m. Mark Cuban and Jason Calacanis are keynoting. Here are some pictures I just grabbed:
Cuban doubled the value of the Mavericks.
Absorb the journey and the destination -Mark Cuban
6:01 p.m. Asha is all blogged out. There are no more energy drinks in the building:
UStream is making this a live event for the world:
These guys are working hard:
Expensify helps us manage expense reports. They were bribing us with drinks!
