Jens Begemann

This year’s TechCrunch50 is over and the winners have been announced:

The overall winner of this year’s TechCrunch50 is Yammer. The announcement was done American-Idol style and GoodGuide (the site tells you which products contain unhealthy substances; it was my favorite) placed second.

Yammer is twitter for companies. I like Yammer, but it was not my favorite.
Don’t get me wrong: I am sure they will get a lot of registrations from employees of many organizations and it will spread viral. I am sure many employees will find it cool and use it.

Their distribution model is also very smart: Anybody can register (no pre-approval by their company necessary) and people are grouped according to their work E-Mail addresses (like Facebook did with colleges in the early days). If companies want to claim their network to manage and administrate it, they have to pay.

Therefore I think it’s likely that Yammer will be a commercial success - esp. given the traction they now get from being a TechCrunch50 winner. - However I am not sure if this will actually increase productivity or distract employees even more (in addition to E-Mail, work phone, cellphone, instant messaging, intranet, surfing the web and of course meetings). In the end we all still need time where we actually do work - instead of only communicating about it.

In addition to overall winner Yammer, there are five more companies that won a “jury selection” (one of them is runner-up GoodGuide). The full list or jury selection winners is:

• Atmosphir (jump’n'run game, but with user-generated levels)
• fitbit ($99 gadget you attach to your cloth; calculates calorie consumption based on that and makes health sugestions)
• GrockIt (Massively Multi-Player Online Learning Game)
• GoodGuide (web site with information on bad ingredients in products and most healthy alternatives)
• Swype (new input method for touch screens: “draw” the word on the virtual keyboard in one continuous motion from letter to letter; the application will then recognize the word)

Here is my overall conclusion of the three days:

Quality of the organization

I’ve said something similar already on day 1: The overall organization was good, but not excellent (measured by the expectations one may have for such a high profile conference). Most attendees I spoke to expressed a similar opinion.

But I should also praise the TechCrunch team for two reasons:
First of all the video recording of all speeches and the possibility to watch the recordings in the archive is excellent.
Secondly the organizers were very flexible to adopt a new jury format that was proposed by judge Yossi Vardi. TechCrunch reacted by letting the audience decide and changed immediately: The jury from then on did not do a joint Q&A with all of the start-ups of one session as one big group, but instead do the Q&A immediately after the presentation just with this company. The judges were also on-stage all the time and not just for the Q&A. I liked the new format better.

Therefore my criticism to the organization is only valid, if you apply very high standards as the benchmark (which I did). But the key thing of such a conference is the content – and that was very good.

Quality of the start-ups

I’ve been amazed by some of the 52 start-ups, but I have also been critical with some of them in my reports.

I spoke to a couple of attendees reg. the quality of the start-ups we saw since Monday. Some of them were disappointed as they expected to be blown away even more by the 50 best start-ups out of more than 1,000. I share that to some degree, but I even more agree to what Don Dodge said on stage after the last start-up presented:

“If you saw Google when they were 6 months old, you would have said they are lame”. He said in his opinion the start-ups this year were very good and far more polished than last year.

He asked for our imagination reg. what these start-ups could achieve. I think he is right. After all that’s why it’s called venture capital. If success and failure were obvious at early stage, banks would fund them.

Worth the trip?

If you just want to know what new trends there are in the start-up scene, you can also lock yourself in a room and watch the TechCrunch50 live stream.

For me it was definitely worth the flight, because almost everybody from the world-wide start-up scene was here and I met great people.

This trip will help me to finally decide on my start-up idea in the next couple of weeks.

It’s 6:00pm PST here in San Francisco. All 52 start-ups have finished their demos and the winner will be announced in about one hour.

Winner prediction:
My favorite start-up was GoodGuide. I think the jury thinks alike and I assume it will win this years TechCrunch50. - We will know more in a couple of minutes…

 

My favorite start-ups of Day 3:

• Session 9 – Rich Media: VideoSurf
  VideoSurf has a cool technology to search video visually. I doubt they would become big as a stand alone company, but their software should be a good candidate to be acquired by an existing video company.
• Session 10 – Games : Atmosphir
  Atmosphir is a classic jump’n’run game, but enhanced by the possibility for the users to create and share their own levels. It is similar to Little Big Planet for Playstation 3 and it does not look as polished as the Sony product, but it is at least a very interesting concept.
• Session 11 – Vertical Social Networking: CauseCast
  CauseCast is a social network to inspire people & companies to do good – e.g. help to cure cancer.
  There is also real business behind it: Sean Parker made a true statement by saying that social concious projects are a big part of the American economy and “it seems this sector is just late to the party”. I agree that fund raising etc. are not yet big on the web – it seems there is a clear need to improve.
• Session 12 – Research & Recommendation: GoodGuide
  GoodGuide is a web site that shows you if certain products you use contain bad ingredients (e.g. lead) and which are the most healthy products for a certain need. They apply the same to environmental friendly etc.First of all, their presentation on stage was almost perfect: Superb speech, great charisma of their CEO Dara O’Rourke and everything else was excellent – almost at Steve Jobs level. Btw: Their slides were almost an identical copy of Apple-style: Big white words (only 2-5 per slide) on dark background, switching fast, perfectly synched to the speech of the CEO. But better copy the best than invent something new that is inferior. Watch the video of their presentation to get the idea.

  The judges asked a couple of questions reg. the risk that companies would manipulate ratings to appear better. They claim that most of it is based on scientific data.

  As Sean Parker put it: “Classic data aggregation” and “I like that you are different” (e.g. not classic Web 2.0 crowd sourcing).

  The jury was amazed and I was, too: They solve a big need for many consumers in the western world, they have amazing SEO potential and the capability to generate revenue from directing consumers to e-commerce sites that offer the products for sale.

  If they manage to make their database big enough (60,000 products so far) and keep the cost to aggregate that information low enough, they will do very well.

  In my opinion they will and should win TechCrunch50.
  Note: Dara O’Rourke said that it is a “for benefit company that has a social mission” - therefore it might not be a great investment opportunity for a VC, but I still think they owe to win TechCrunch50