Last week, the tech and startup community around the world gathered in San Francisco for what has become a tradition over the past three years. During this two-day period, startups took center stage. No panel discussion. No preaching. No learning about how Twitter was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. In fact, the focus was entirely on how these startups were going to pitch their product to the world and potentially wind up a winner of a check for $50,000 by two highly influential individuals.
So what exactly was this event? It’s TechCrunch50, of course and it was hosted and organized by serial entrepreneur and founder of Mahalo.com, Jason Calacanis and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Held at the San Francisco Design Center, the premise behind this event was that 50 companies were selected from a pool of applicants and these were the ones given the distinct honor of pitching their wares on the main stage. One twist to this whole thing was that 100 additional companies were also selected to demonstrate their products off the stage in the “demo pit” which would be perused by at least 500 people in attendance. But that’s not all, Calacanis and Arrington also threw in an additional twist when they created a “people’s choice” award of sorts where the company in the demo pit that received the most votes each day, wound up on the main stage getting the opportunity to pitch the community.
Broken down into several categories, TechCrunch50 made it pretty easy to understand what the startups were all about and there were even some additional surprises throughout the event. The categories were
- youth & games,
- new frontiers,
- advertising & monetization platforms,
- local & classified marketplaces,
- business applications,
- subscriptions & commerce marketplaces,
- news & media discovery, and
- social media streams.
As for the surprises, it was at TechCrunch50 that sites like Google and Microsoft both announced cool new features relating to their search functionality that just came on line – with Microsoft deploying a visual search engine and Google using a flip feature. AOL also promoted its more “social” instant messaging program and proclaimed that it was bringing the AIM Running Man back.
To each his own, the companies that were represented offered a distinct perspective on various business cases, but also seemed to be solving a problem already addressed by another product, or hardly even one at all. I was extremely thankful for getting the thoughts of the expert judges that were on stage to grill each startup after their presentation because it was great getting to know what their thoughts were, folks including renowned angel investor Ron Conway, Yossi Vardi, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Google’s Marissa Mayer, Marc Andreessen, Digg’s Kevin Rose, Tim O’Reilly, Napster’s Sean Parker and technology evangelist Robert Scoble. But what was even more surprising was having rapper and businessman Chamillionaire grace the stage and offer his thoughts which many found to be really insightful and very informative.
Oh, and remember when I said that the winner of TechCrunch50 would win $50,000? This year, the winner was a startup called RedBeacon which provided a pretty useful service of connecting you with vendors and service providers.
Look, if you’re wondering if this is going to be just like another stale tech conference, then you might not want to attend TechCrunch50. This was the first time that I attended and I found it very different than when I’ve been at other conferences – probably because this was focused on showcasing the new products and companies launching. It gave me a first-hand look at some cool products that I could sign up for and test out and many of which I very well may not want to use later on. The ticket price for a TechCrunch event is pretty exorbitant but there are ways of getting to witness the event – usually from the comfort of your own computer.
So for this post, I’m going to say that TechCrunch50 was well done and I really enjoyed it. It was a great experience and for what I personally observed, I think I got some value out of it.
Photo Credits: courtesy of Kenneth Yeung – more photos can be seen here.
Brought to you by Network Solutions®
