National anthem in the morning:
Tuesday-morning of TechCrunch50 also started with the star-spangled-banner. I captured the second half of the performance with my camera:
This time the anthem was sung by blogger Meghan.
My appreciation of day 2
Judges are excited by the start-ups from the two morning sessions
Showcasing the $99 fitbit device
Demo of Swype (touch-screen text input)
I found the two start-up morning sessions quite disappointing – and I believe that was not just because everybody was paying a lot of attention to the live-blogging of the Apple event today at the time. The two afternoon sessions on Mobile and Tools were much better.
At least the internet was mostly working fine, because they put ethernet cables on most tables and this also took away load from WiFi.
My favorite start-ups of today:
- Session 5 – Collaboration: None
I think there was no company in the first session that was great.
The worst performance was from IMINDI, but their idea is interesting: Social mind-mapping. Unfortunately their assumptions are weird: Everybody would type everything what’s on their mind into mind maps on the web and then they would merge them with other (also public!) mind maps.
I see a market for this idea, but executed very differently: As an intranet-based mind-mapping software for big corporations. It would match maps and bring employees together that work on similar projects, who don’t know of each other so far. - Session 6 – Finance & Statistics: iCharts
iCharts provides charts on the web – like Excel-chart (bars, pie charts etc.), but interactive.
Their idea is to create a Flickr/Youtube-like community where people upload their charts and I think they are very wrong (as was the jury). Instead they should license their solution - Session 7 – Mobile: fitbit
A couple of interesting companies appeared in Mobile, e.g. mytopia that promises to allow you to write applications for Facebook, MySpace, iPhone, Symbian etc. from one code case.
Also in this category: The hillarious presentation and Q&A reg. tonchidot “Sekai camera”
Overall fitbit made the most promising impression: Fitbit is a small $99 attachment to your cloth. It will then estimate your daily calorie consumption, your sleeping hours and make suggestions how to improve. - Session 8 – Language & Plattform Tools: Swype
Swype shows a virtual keyboard on a touch screen: Users swipe with their finger/stylus in one constant move over the letters of the word. The algorithm then decides which word to put on the screen.
The jury was amazed by the solution, tested it and a judge even wrote down “This will win TechCrunch50” (see photo of demo).
I also like it, but I am not that amazed. To make it useful it has to work extremely well. This is because if it correctly detects 90% of the words – correcting the remaining 10% will take a lot of time.
Btw: There also is a competing company: ShapeWriter. They were also part of the Android Developer Challenge: The jury, including me, did not vote it into the Top 20. But Swype looks better executed that ShapeWriter.
Live-demo of Swype (the judges test Swype for the first time ever):
Statement of the day:
Mark Cuban said that he often makes investments into companies without ever meeting the founders – or maybe only meeting them once. He said he could see a CEO of a company he is invested in on the street and not recognize him – even though he exchanges a couple of E-Mails every day.
Will update you tomorrow – especially with my opinion on the winner of TechCrunch50,
Jens Begemann