Jens Begemann

The first day of TechCrunch50 today was great – but not without a couple of hitches

 

Starting late:

The event started half an hour late with ca. 2,000 people sitting there and waiting – because WiFi was not working for the audience.

First of all it is awkward that TechCrunch did not manage to get WiFi working on such a high-profile tech-conference (TechCrunch likely generates several million dollars from sponsorships and expensive attendance tickets). And it was unclear to me why everybody had to wait – is Michael Arrington really that desperate that everybody blogs and twitters live from the audience? Is this the real point TechCrunch50 exists – to get blogged about?

 

Professionalism of the organization

The organizers did not manage to get WiFi working through most of the rest of the day. And the overall picture does not become more professional: Mediocre food at lunch, a part-time outage of the power-plugs for the journalists, running out of water bottles in one break and constant audio-problems with the microphones throughout the day.

 

Mechanics

The concept of TechCrunch50 is simple and I like it :
52 start-ups have been selected out of over 1,000 applications. 4-5 of them are presented as a group (e.g. “Mobile”): Everyone gets 8 minutes on stage to pitch and after that there are a couple of minutes of Q&A with the jury. This is mixed up by a couple of panels, on-stage-interviews and the demo-pit/exhibition.

 

My favorite start-ups from today:

• Session 1 – Youth & Entertainment: None
  The ideas presented were nice, but I didn’t like one idea enough to point somebody out.
  The video from “Blah Blah Girls” was funny, but I don’t really see the potential for this content-creation company to become huge (plan is 2-3 videos of teen celeb gossip a week + interactivity features). If it wasn’t a company from Ashton Kutcher, I doubt it would have been part of the 50 finalists.
• Session 2 – Memes & News: dotspots
  dotspots allows users to comment any content on the web (via a browser plug-in or server-side script) – and other users can then see your comments (even if the content is syndicated on other sites).
  I agree to Marissa Meyer who said that the project was an ambitious approach, but we would be better off with a standard annotation (and potentially rating) system to move the web forward
• Session 3 – Enterprise: FairSoftware
  FairSoftware allows teams to set-up virtual companies and ease the management of such companies/projects. The solution would then manage virtual shares, spread profits etc.
  The panels favorite was Yammer (Twitter for companies). I liked them too, but I am not sure if a company-internal micro-blogging will increase or decrease productivity.
• Session 4 – Advertising & Commerce: OtherInbox
  OtherInbox allows you to give a different E-Mail-address to every company you interact with (amazon@john.otherinbox.com etc.). You don’t have to set-up those addresses, but you just use all of these addresses and it’s then very easy to manage your E-Mail (e.g. read E-Mail in an aggregated form; block unwanted mails; get summaries of E-Mails you get). The goal is to make sure your main inbox only contains personal E-Mails from real people.
  Btw: I also liked AdRocket: They use the E-Mail address as a unique identifier to deliver ads relevant to the individual user (there is huge potential to deliver very relevant ads with targetted, but anonymous user data across multiple sites and channels).

 

Quality of the presentations

Putting the quality of the products aside, the quality of the presentation is very important: All presentations were at least OK (none bad), but few were great. A couple of presenters even read from cards, some had learned the whole presentation word-by-word and some missed to mention key facts in their speech – that then only became clear during Q&A.

This is amazing given the fact that many of these start-ups will never again be able to speak in front of such an audience.

 

Presenter of the day: Joshua Baer from OtherInbox

The best presentation of the day was from OtherInbox: A great presenter, great powerpoint slides (pictures, not bullet points) with perfect timing according to the speech and you could feel the enthusiasm of CEO Joshua Baer for his company.

 

Statement of the day

Ron Conway said something like “Search- and display-advertising are both multi billion dollar markets. And product placement is a new multi billion dollar market emerging in front of our very eyes at the moment”.

 

Interview of the day: Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel does not give a lot of interviews. Today he had a very interesting 45-minute conversation with Michael Arrington on stage:

Peter is a very very impressive person that appears to be very smart. Some of his main statements from today:

• The tech-bubble from 2000 set the IT industry back by 10 years (as did the real estate bubble respsectively). The government needs to be proactive not reactive – e.g. SOX should have come in 1998 instead of 2002.
• If there had not been a bubble the achievement from 1993 to 2008 would have been substantially bigger (e.g. many smart people stayed out of technology after 2000)
• Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon etc. are undervalued compared to other stocks.
• On clean energy:
  There should be separate discussions on climate change and running out of conventional energy sources that lead to high prices for oil etc.
  Depending on which of the two you think is the big problem, you need to take very different actions. If you believe both are the problem, you probably have to be very aggressive on nuclear energy.
• His investment hint:
  Invest where few others are investing now, because the area failed in the past, but apply the learning from the failures. When PayPal was founded in 1998, nobody invested in payment systems.
  Now it is time to invest into companies that use artificial intelligence companies: Not trying to make computers smarter than humans, but carefully looking at how to split work – to look at where computers can help humans to produce better results (example: YouNoodle)
• Most important indicator if a start-up will be successful: Payment of the CEO
  More

 

Part 2 tomorrow will be shorter – promised!
Jens Begemann

 

P.S.: An international event?

TechCrunch50 is a very international event – if you judge by attendants – but not necessarily by the mindset of some others…

For example event kicked off by making the audience stand up, a singer entering the stage and then the US national anthem! I’ve never seen something like that at a conference.

A couple of judges were also talking as if start-ups could only become successful in Silicon Valley and Ron Conway said founders from outside of the valley should move there to be successful. Yossi Vardi from Israel then asked the audience to raise their hands where they came from: Ca. 3/4 came from outside of Silicon Valley.
Btw: A stars-and-stripes flag was on stage the whole day.