MacRant

I recently attended Techcrunch 40.  A new conference hosted by TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis with the support of many sponsors.  The format was dead simple — give 40 of the hottest startups from around the world an opportunity to announce and demo their products at a conference. The companies didn’t pay anything to do this.  A group of 100 additional companies demoed their products in a DemoPit.  The conference was originally called “TechCrunch20” but too many startups applied making it difficult to select down to only 20. 

Summary:

• Sun Microsystems was the (looked exclusive?) hardware sponsor.

• Looks like a Web OS, smells like a Web OS…but, wait it’s now called a “media sharing platform”

• Facebook launched FB Fund with a $10 million (coming from Accel and Founders Fund) fund to be used as grants for college students who submit company/application proposals.

• AOL – launched a new collaborative multimedia story telling service BlueString

• Google – launched “Presently” – A power point presentation tool

There were many interesting and cool companies – “Top 10” from my vantage were:  

1. Mint – a Quicken/MS Money for the web2.     

2.  MusicShake – mixing music tracks and sound effects (Korean Co.)

3. PowerSet – natural language search 

4. Viewdle – video search and facial recognition

5. Tripit – unique share, search, and trip planning aggregator

6. Xobni (inbox spelled backward) – this is a hot product and likely MSoft will acquire. Improves the way users organize, search and navigate their email.

7.  Xtr3D – an awesome demo!  A tool for game developers enabling computer based hands and body movements with one web cam.

8. Yap – say into your phone what you want in your twitter message board or other IM apps.

9. Kerpoof – a “Web 2.0 Broaderbun” site for children.  Kids can create art, stories, and animated movies using a simple 3D interface.

10. GotStatus – community driven systems management and monitoring tools.  They are “google analytics” for the server side.   

Conference Details:   Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington made intros.  Stated there were more than 750 applications/companies submitted.  It was difficult to pair down 150 and even more difficult getting to 60.  They decided to change the format to 40 of the hottest companies and included a DemoPit for the companies that didn’t’ get selected to demo. 

More than a third were unfunded or had less than $250K angel funding and about a third were outside of the US (2 from Korea).  Originally had space for 400 people, then expanded to handle 800 attendees, but with last minute registration went over a 1000 attendees.  Sessions were space limited and had standing room only over the two day sessions. 

Conference attendees were given two chips – one to give to their favorite company in the DemoPit on Monday, and your favorite company on Tuesday.  The company with the most “chips” at the end of day 2 would get an opportunity to demo in front of the audience.  Kaltura was the winner. 

This conference was an excellent format for rapid fire demo’s and company intro’s. 

There were a large number of VC’s (like sharks circling the raft!) and industry luminaries, along with Web 2.0 “rock stars”.  The conference intermixed time to make company introductions and exchange business cards. 

Mint was chosen as the best presenting company and won the $50K grand prize. 

Session#1 (Search and Discovery)

• PowerSet – natural language search, supposed Google killer.

• CastTV – video and facial search, (Marc Andreessen is angel investor)

• Cognitive Code – Cross platform product that can understand human conversations. The website provides a cryptic explanation about what they do. AI (Silvia)

• Faroo – P2P search engine, each searcher also gets a crawler, indexer, ranking engine on their machine to contribute back to the search engine. Good idea? Their reasoning is that search engines require 10,000+ servers and billions of dollars. Will consumers cares?!

• Viewdle – video search and facial recognition 

Session#2 (Mobile and Communications)

• Cubic Telecom – looks like a voip company to solve high cost of cell phone roaming.

• Yap – (or at yapinc.com) say into your phone what you want in your twitter acct or other IM type apps.  A lots of GSM phone issues during the demo, and hotel was a blackhole for cell coverage.  It’s a J2ME lightweight app.

• TruTap – social life for your universal mobile service (any phone any network any place.  Download app for staying connected.  Will have a developer API.

• Ceedo – software that allows you to bring your software with you on a thumbdrive or any mass storage device for virtualizing windows.

• LoudTalks – combines voice and IM; push to talk – a button and talk to friends. 

Humble Beginnings Panel:  Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz interviews Netscape founder and Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen, Yahoo co-founder David Filo and YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley.  They discussed “humble beginnings” that each could recall about the early days of their start-ups, before all the hype and money. 

Chad – Art school background and told a story about selling picts in his yard during elementary school. Dumb and painful to watch!  Talked about how he got started in building web pages and trying to solve problems.

David – Started in HS with basic programming, studied CS ungrad; chip synthesis in the computer aided design at Stanford.Marc – from WI, didn’t know about VC back then.  Went to the Univ IL.   Need to have sufficient or crazy lunatic ideas as 99 out of 100 are no good.  If it isn’t a crazy idea then the established companies will do it.  Looks at what might people like, what products do I like to use, etc., does it solve a problem that you’d like to solve..don’t look at it as a biz. 

Session #3 (Community and Collaboration)

• StoryBlender – online collaborative video production platform where people can work together to “blend” their content into a new multimedia show. StoryBlend’s online editing tool lets users create videos by “blending” images, sound, text, and video clips.  CEO founded CyWorld.

• Tripit – share, search, and find trip planning info from plane tickets, hotel, itinerary, etc. One of those useful ideas that made you wonder why someone didn’t think of before.

• Story Blender – took video mashups to the masses.

• Flock – Social browser that integrates blogging, flickr, some other fluff.

• MusicShake – mixing music tracks and sound effects. Tracks are recommended by “Nuba,” the intelligence behind Musicshake.  Stated there are 170K royalty free music tracks looking to get 1 million. Also a biz model for creators to make music and sell it on the 50/ 50 rev share.

• 8020 Publishing – takes about anything off online content and puts in print magazine format. 

AOL – launched a new collaborative multimedia story telling service called BlueString.  A flex application that allows you pull in all your images, videos, and audio content from across the web and mix them together into a multimedia slide show presentation. There are many user generated content sites out there for pictures, videos, and music. 

Session #4 (Crowd Sourcing)

• Cake Financial – lets you check out the actual portfolios, watchlists and real-time trades of everyone from proven top investors to your trusted family and friends. Plus you can see how you’re doing across all of your brokerage accounts and how you stack up against others.

• DocStoc – a free online document exchange database and social networking site that allows users to store, search, and share virtually any type of document (word, excel, powerpoint, pdf, illustrator, etc…).

• Teach the People – Social Network for learning… members can make a public space to share knowledge and then put up a separate private one and start charging.

• CrowdSpirit – using the wisdom of crowds, they create a consumer product based on ideas the community selects. Members can invest in the product, submit ideas for specs/features, and share in the revenue.

• Ponoko – Have an idea? Ponoko will turn it into a product. Unclear what kind of products (websites? electronics?) UPDATE:Just a quickie response as you were confused as to what ‘type’ of products you could produce with Ponoko – it’s physical products, at present limited to laser cut, but we perceive in time to be pretty much any physical product you desire, with small fabbers in every home (much like how we all have printers today) and then your local fabber shop for the bigger jobs. Is a pretty exciting future! We’ve just opened up to open beta within NZ, and will be open globally soon. So do encourage anyone who thinks this is a ‘bit of them’ to register on http://www.ponoko.com and we’ll email you when we’re open beta in your part of the world! Cheers!! Nic, Ponoko Online PR Chick. 

Fireside Chat With Facebook Founder

Michael Arrington chats with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg announced a new entity called FBFund with Accel and Founders Fund. The size of the fund will be $10 million (coming from Accel and Founders Fund) with anywhere between $25 to $250 thousand in grants available for each selected startup dedicated to developing Facebook applications. Zuckerberg wanted a way to help fund the most innovative, coolest, and disruptive software applications being developed on its own platform. 

Founders Fund and Accel will get the right of first refusal for the first round of financing of any company in the fund. Peter Thiel of Founders Fund and Jim Breyer of Accel will be involved in the fund. Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, Rajeev Motwani of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg will be on fbFund’s board of advisors. Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Product Marketing and Operations of Facebook, will be handling FBFund internally for Facebook   

Session #5 (Productivity and Web Applications)

• Xobni (inbox spelled backward) – this is a hot product. Improves the way users organize, search and navigate their email. Xobni creates an information profile for each person a user communicates with, and provides historical information that is relevant to what users are working on. Xobni displays contact information, threaded conversations, attachments, related people, email usage statistics, and information from the web.

• Orgoo – a web based “personal communications cockpit” that is a one stop site for email accounts, IM accounts, video chat, video mail, SMS and voice. Orgoo is free, requires no downloads, and can be accessed from any web browser or mobile phone.

• App2You – a custom web application creator that lets users create web apps without doing database coding or designing.

• Mint – a Quicken/MS Money for the web. Mint tracks bank, credit union and credit card transactions and alerts users to upcoming bills, low balances or unusual spending.  Seems centric to US for broadband always connected usage model.  Acount aggregation done Yodolee – pulls bank date thru XML feeds, but then leverages a number IP elements.

• Kerpoof – Krista Marks, CEO – intent to become a leading destination site for children through a suite of activities that are enriching as well as entertaining. On Kerpoof, kids can create art, stories, and animated movies using a simple 3D interface, and when done, can save it to their gallery, share it with others, and vote on their favorites.  50% decline in people persuing CS caused the team to get involved in developing a browser based application.  Trying to be as rich as a client base application of days gone past.  Not designed “down” for kids, but simplistic UI.  Doesn’t have the Club Penguin social network aspect.  

Session #6 (Revenue Models and Analytics)

• Spottt – free link exchanging.  Similar to the days of when every website had a link exchange page.  Phil Caplan founder of Adbright.  In ’96 had 30K sites for using link exchange – ’98 had a 1M sites. Tony Hsieh was co-founder linkexchange.  Now is founder of Zappas.com. Simple model, 1:1 exchange model. Same as original link exchange program bought by Microsoft.

• Clickable – provides a control panel to manager ad networks, Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MS AdCenter.  Founded July 2006.  Have 30 employees. for creating and managing online advertising. Their technology provides campaign management tools.

• GotStatus – in alpha, Andrew Taylor, CTO and co-founder.  Community driven systems management and monitoring tools.  Monitor – “google analytics” for the server side.  Has an API. $8B systems management market.  Open system, api driven.

• PubMatic – advertising space that helps publisher make more $$ for online advertising.  400 publishers using tool.  Launch beta today. Its a meta ad server that between online publishers and online ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Value Click. Their service helps SMB publishers manage and maximize their advertising inventory by seamlessly communicating with multiple ad networks to help them find the optimal ad layout and the highest paying ad network

• ZocDoc – tagline is Dentist and Doctor Appointments instantly.  It’s an online channel for scheduling doctor appointments. 

Panel: Getting Funding

Jason Calacanis moderated a panel discussion with Jay Adelson (Digg), David Sacks (Geni), Roelof Botha (Sequoia), Sumant Mandel (Clearstone), George Zachery (CRV), Hank Barry (Howard Rice), and Jeff Clavier (SoftTechVC).  Much of the discussion was about how companies raise funding and the panel provided recommendations and examples base on historical involvement. 

Session #7 (Rich Media and Mash Ups)

• Xtr3D – a tool for game developers enabling computer based hands and body movements.  It integrates with existing virtual applications. Their real-time software analyzes 3D human motions using only one simple web cam. It will allow users to play games and interact in virtual worlds using natural human motions instead of keyboards, mouses and joysticks. Demo included moving around Google Earth by hand movements and “air” boxing, works well. One of the best product/ presentations of the conference.

• Broadclip – media catcher for Facebook offers a legal way to find DRM free music.  A music discovery service.  A Conference First:  an application developed in F8 was shown as a standalone application…even though it relied upon Facebook to function.  More of this will be coming.  The DRM music issue is going to be trouble for this company.

• mEgo – users create personalized avatars that carry their online network aggregation profiles and can be integrated into users’ blogs, social networks, websites, and IM clients.

• Wixi – stores all your media in one place, and play it back where ever. Unclear if you need to download software to upload the data. To play your files they have a universal flash player.  They claim to be a media focused social network where users interact with each other by privately watching, posting, and sharing content of all media types, including photos, audio, and video.

• BeFunky – provides users online tools for creating digital online representations of themselves for use in blogs, websites, and social networks like MySpace. The online tools Uvatar and Cartoonizer enable users to turn themselves into an avatar, cartoon, digital painting or comic.  

Session #8 (Entertainment for all ages)

• FlowPlay – social casual gamer site aimed at teens.  Looks like Hobbo Hotel, Club Penguin, but with casual games emphasis

• Areae’s – the Metaplace platform is a platform that will provide an open, easy-to-use interface which will allow users to create virtual worlds that can run anywhere. The Metaplace-created virtual worlds will allow users to play games, socialize, create content and conduct commerce.

• WooMe – speed dating online and extends to let users meet new people live in speed sessions that are “fast, fun and free.”

• Zivity – an “adult” social networking platform about “sexy models and nice photography.” A $10 subscription, members receive five votes that they can cast for models and photography they find appealing, with 80c out of every $1 vote cast being distributed to the model and photographer.

• Demopit Wild Card – (demo oppty by number of votes).  kaltura.com earned the honor to present as the 40th company.  Kaltura is into collaborative media” and claims they enable users to do with video, audio, and animation what wikis have enabled them to do with text.

Panel: Exit Strategies

Heather Harde moderated the panel with  Michael Montgomery (Montgomery & Co.), Craig Walker (GrandCentral/Google), Raj Kapoor (Mayfield), Ted Wang (Fenwick), Michael Marquez (CBS) and Evan Williams (Obvious and Twitter).  They discuss exist strategies and the best way to sell your company for a lot of cash. 

TechCrunch 40 $50,000 Prize – Mint was chosen as the best presenting company at TechCrunch40. They are a provider of a personal finance application.