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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