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September 20, 2007

Picking TechCrunch40 Winners

Frank Gruber Bookmark and Share

Tc40 - who got my vote? The TechCrunch40 conference has come and gone with Mint ultimately came out the biggest winner (aside from TechCrunch itself, of course) scoring the $50K award for best demo at the event. Below I give some of my thoughts on a number of the TechCrunch40 companies at the conference.

Congratulations to the TechCrunch team for pulling off its first conference. I am sure it learned some lessons from the conference and will improve upon all of its shortcomings with its next attempt. I just wonder if the next conference will be called TechCrunch Infinity?

* = Somewhat Frank favorites

Day 1
Session 1

*Viewdle - a facial recognition video search which recognizes others in video
CastTV - video search, clean design but video search is a crowded market and could be a tough market to break into
Powerset - a natural language search that figures out what people do via powermouse and verb association - could be an interesting offering in Wikipedia
Cognitive Code - artificial intelligence which offered an innovative talking head called Sylvia - could be used in kids toys or for accessibility
Faroo - a p2p attention-based search engine - has potential scaling issues without mass adoption

Yahoo Showcase
Yahoo for Teahers offers a free social network for teachers. It has not yet launched yet but when it does it will offer an easy to use bookmarking tool (Yahoo Gobbler) with tagging and meta-data which will help feed a new education search product

Session 2
Cubic Telecom - I did not get the point of this from the demo
*Yap - offers voice enabled mobile text messaging - voice activated mobile updated (twitter, facebook) which could make text messaging safer while driving
Ceedo - connects to any computer with a USB port and enables users to run apps via mobile phone.
Trutap - goal is to provide your social life on any mobile device on any network - good in 210 countries and AT&T - organizes your friends into groups and enables group messaging and broadcast messaging  - aggregates all top instant messengers
LoudTalks - combines instant messaging with voice messaging - messages are stored and can be replayed

Session 3
*Storyblender - Korean online video editing site with social aspects which enables users to mixes a video with multiple video streams into one place - reminded me of a more open Animoto
*TripIt - itinerary aggregator that enables users to email your travel itineraries to TripIt and it produces an organized document with photos, maps and other related information - definitely sounds like a useful application
Flock - social web browser - makes it easy to interact with social networks
*MusicShake - Korean startup that makes it easy to build music with blocks - all the music is owned by MusicShake and business models includes a rev share for the music creators
*8020 publishing - community magazine publisher (includes JPG and Everywhere) - publishing 2.0

AOL Showcase
BlueString Launches

Session 4
Cake Financial - group finance site that enables you to track and learn from other investors.
*DocStoc (covered previously on Somewhat Frank)
*Teach The People - expert matchmaker community - groups with tools for education. A community model for education - an eBay education
CrowdSpirit - produces products based on the group spirit of the crowds
*Ponoko - a personal manufacturing platform that enables users to create, buy, sell and promote a  manufactured product

Day 2
Session 1
*Xobni - email organization - personal profiles contacts - powerful search
Orgoo - instant messaging via email - aggregator - not sure why email providers wouldn't just enable this feature
App2you - builds apps without needing to know coding
*Mint - online money management
*Kerpoof - aims to improve the way children use and learn on the computer

Session 2 (I missed a few of the companies in this session as I was in the demo pit)
*ZocDoc - find and book doctors and dentist appointments  - this is something I could have used a year ago when I moved and looked for a local doctor and dentist

Session 3
XTR3D - web cam 3d action and motion tracking for navigating the we
Broadclip - record music from Internet webcasts
mEgo - an interesting widget avatar with utility - hover over various parts of the widget to pull in notes - similar to a WeeMee
Wixi - video player like Joost but with no download since video is streamed
*Befunky - web based image and video cartoon creator that was pretty impressive

Session 4
Flowplay - avatar game
Metaplace - widget virtual world
*WooMe - online web cam speed dating application
*Zivity - amateur adult model platform where contributors can make money for popular content

Voted in from the Demo Pit
*Kaltura - collaborative music and film site - voted in via conference attendees

Here are some photos from the event.

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» TechCrunch40: Premio da 50k$ a Mint.com from Schininà.it - LogBook
Qualche giorno fa, nellambito del TechCrunch40, si è completato un contest che ha visto Mint.com premiata come migliore applicazione presentata, e onorata perciò di un premio da 50.000 $. Mint è unapplicazione per la ges... [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 20, 2007 3:56:51 AM

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