Announcing CN51 – THE Startup Conference – Coming This September!

I’ve been to several startup pitch conferences the last couple of Septembers. I’ve found them to be stuffy, way overpriced, and let’s not even talk about the controversy about who is in and who is out. On the long plane ride home each year I’ve sworn to make a better startup conference and today I am happy to announce the first step in a plan to make things right for startups.

Announcing CN51!

The conference will be held on September 14-15, 2009 in San Francisco. The CN51 conference will be held at 634 Eighth Street – directly across the street from the beautiful San Francisco Design Center.

A press conference is scheduled for 2:30pm Pacific today and will be carried live here on CN.

The CN51 conference will bring together two of the hottest platforms and technologies today: Twitter and Facebook. Based on my top tech blog reading over the past months, it’s clear these are the only two services that matter. And I know that building on top of these two companies can put strength on top of strength. So all startups that present at CN51 must utilize one (or both) of these technologies. There won’t be any boring video chat or storage or classified services here.

As for the physical location of presenting startups, Loic Le Meur explained recently that almost nothing good comes from outside the Valley and Sarah Lacy told us in no uncertain terms that Israel is not creating valuable startups. We took this data into account when we decided what areas were acceptable and we are happy to announce that startups from anywhere except France and Houston are permitted to apply.

There are several other important criteria we have for companies that want to apply to demo at CN51.

1. Cannot be a current advertiser
2. Must not be related to a member of CenterNetworks
3. Cannot have worked at some point at CenterNetworks
4. Must have less than $5 million VC funding
5. Cannot be venture capital reprsented by one of our venture capital sponsors
6. Cannot have an investment from a founder of CenterNetworks
7. Cannot be close friends with a staff member of CenterNetworks

Place your reservations for seats today!

Demo Stands

If you are a company outside the Twitter or Facebook realm, you might want to apply for our "demo stands". Basically a demo stand will get get a 12" round table to setup your wares and market to people as the go into and exit the conference. We will provide one chair for the entire demo stand area and expect all of the companies to share the chair throughout the available times. A separate Internet line will be configured for optimal access – we at CN51 know how important it is to have Internet access to demo your products! One startup will be granted access to the main audience via the usage of bottle tops – whichever startup collects the most bottletops from attendees (we will be checking!) will win. Contact us to book a demo stand today!

What can you expect for your ticket price at CN51?

• Working Internet connections for the duration of the conference
• Good food and lots of it including cupcakes (that’s how you get on the default Twitter list yo!)
• The biggest celebs on Twitter and Facebook
• Media coverage from some of the top blogs and newspapers across the world including TwitterBeat and Facebookable
• Surprises!

Who should attend CN51?

Anyone who is in the Internet industry – from marketing people to startup people to venture capitalists who want to see the hottest apps and startup to invest in. Also, each person on the Twitter default list is welcome to attend – we’ve created VIP seating for these folks and will provide limo service for them because, well they are special.

Sponsors

More large sponsors to be announced this month – contact us for sponsorship information.

Press

Here’s how the press registrations will work. In late May we will be scheduling blood and retina testing. This will assure us that on the week before the conference we can give the information about the presenting startups to the right press people. Let me be very clear here — if you are granted one of our 850 press slots, you must agree to this testing. And if we find out that your outlet broke the embargo, then your retina and/or blood might be accidentally "spilled". Just do the right thing – even though I know some press outlets break embargoes all the time, those approved for CN51 will be held to the strictest liability.

Place your reservations for seats today!

I certainly hope you are as excited about CN51 as I am. It’s been months of planning, slaving over the specifications but I believe we have created one damn awesome startup conference. It’s going to be hot and you need to be in attendance!