Techcrunch40

Earlier this week, Jason Calacanis pimped Loic's LeWeb conference. Loic was then required to "re-pimp" within 48 hours -- he chose Techcrunch50 by asking Jason about why he wants to kill Demo and why Techcrunch50 is a better model.

Robert Scoble has decided that not only will he jump on the "kill Demo" bandwagon but now he is going to kill Techcrunch50 as well. This move came out of left field!

Scoble says that startups should come to him on FastCompany.tv for no cost and that you can watch for no cost. Both conferences charge several thousand dollars to attend. He believes FastCompany.tv beats them both by providing more viewers and also a longer interview and discussion time (both Demo and TC50 offer ~6 minutes on stage).

What Scoble misses is that it's not about the two/three-day infomercials, it's about the networking, the hallway discussions and the business card swaps. I am not sure his TV station can provide this. But he does make one point well - startups should try to get as much coverage as they can.

Come inside to view Scoble's death pitch »

Jiglu was one of the demopit companies at Techcrunch40 last month. They made an immediate impression on everyone as they had $1,000 in a clear briefcase which a man from NYC won at the end of the conference. Today Jiglu will announce that they have moved from a private beta to an open beta. In fact you can go signup now if you wish. To learn more about what Jiglu offers, I spoke with co-founder and CEO Nigel Cannings.

Jiglu's goal is to help a blog recirculate the content that might be deep within the blog and to find hidden relationships between the blog's content. This is similar to JS-Kit and Outbrain in their mission to help draw visitors deeper into a blog. While JS-Kit and Outbrain focus on ratings as their collection mechanism, Jiglu uses tagging for collection.

To use the Jiglu widget, you place a simple script code within your blog template. That activates the Jiglu engine and it begins to crawl your blog. Jiglu then determines the tags that match the content and provide similar content in the widget which allows your readers to discover new content. I asked the difference between the tags I set and the tags Jiglu creates - Nigel said that Jiglu uses an advanced algorithm to find the right tags - it's pretty intense.

Revenue generation will come from the search results they serve on the Jiglu Web site. The team originally worked on email applications and then moved into user-generated content with Jiglu.

One thing they can improve on (as frankly with many startups) is their company information - there is nothing on the site about who they are, what they do, location, bios, logos, etc. Make this information accessible for jounalists, bloggers, investors, etc. Users want to build trust with a company and this information is critical for creating relationships.

Jiglu was founded four years ago and they spent the majority of that time on research. The team is made up of four people with HQ in the U.K. and a "tiny, yellow" office in San Francisco.

Update: Chris at VentureBeat and Oliver at Blognation have some good insights on Jiglu as well.

Last Sunday a bunch of CenterNetworks readers came together for a brunch at the W hotel in San Francisco. I had a great time, learned a lot about each of their startups or blogs and got some great tips for improving CN. Michael Arrington stopped by for a bit as well! I will look to organize more of these unofficial meetups as I travel to more conferences in the future.

A huge thanks goes out to Stephanie Quilao for helping to organize the brunch. She was one of the first CN regulars and has become a great friend over the last year. It was awesome to meet her in person!

The attendees included (in no particular order):

• Ben Metcalfe
• Frank Gruber
• Deborah Kaplan - ZeroFootprint
• Ismael Ghalimi - Intalio
• Petr Kral - Skillr
• Nikhil Roy/Nikunj Somaiya - SpendView
• Francis Pisani
• Lionel David - CrowdSpirit
• Dawn Douglass - MyfRIDJ
• Tomas Zeman - Wirenode
• Jemma and Nik - Faraday Media

Editor's note: Due to the ultra-restrictive embargos placed on journalists attending TC40, I held this post as some of the brunch attendees were presenters at TC40.

Now that the first TechCrunch40 conference is complete, this post will serve as my final conference review and recap. Some of the startups asked me about full, in-depth reviews. I am going to do my best to review each one over the coming weeks, please be patient.

Many thanks!

Before I get into the conference recap, I would like to offer some thanks. First, thanks to everyone for coming over and saying Hi. I was shocked at how many people read CN! :) It was great to meet so many people and some of the people I have met for the first time (after chatting for a long time) include: Roi, Orli, Frank, Clint, Duncan and Joyce. And thanks to Mike, Heather and Jason for allowing me to attend. I do have a surprise coming next week for everyone who gave me their business card so you better watch this space!

Conference Posts:

• Day 2 Full Transcription
• Exit Strategies Panel
• Kaltura Wins People's Choice
• Entertainment
• Rich Media and Mash Ups
• Getting Funded Panel
• Revenue Model and Analytics
• Google Product Launch - Presentations
• Productivity and Web Applications
• Should There Be a Disclosures List?
• Day 1 Recap
• Keynote: Zuckerberg
• Crowd Sourcing
• AOL Product Launch - Bluestring
• Commmunity and Collaboration
• Keynote Panel - Hurley, Filo, Andreesen
• Mobile and Communications
• Search and Discovery

Conference Recap:

Mike asked me last night what I thought about the conference and I told him I rate conferences in three areas: facility, networking and content. So here goes:

Facility - they score top marks. Hardwired Internet for press? Damn. Internet that actually works? Damn. There weren't enough seats and I heard from a birdie that this was somewhat planned. Nice setup overall and they score about an A- for the facility.

Networking - Mike noted that this was the real reason people paid for a ticket. I am sure several deals were made during the conference. I think the networking was top notch. It was definitely a business crowd (not a developer/designer crowd) and I enjoyed the discussions around business and marketing.

Content - This was the area that probably needs the most work if they plan to do this again. The demos were too tightly spaced, some of the demos were canned, the audience had almost zero participation (even after Jason continuously twittered that the attendees would be involved), the demo pit had very little time so you had to either go demo pit or go main ballroom if you wanted a real look at any of the demopit presenters. The experts were basically boring as hell. Very little constructive criticism, a few of them barely spoke, hammer threw in some buzz words to appear relevant. Some of the presenters have no vc, and this was an important time for them to get some real-world advice.

There were also some questions around some of the chosen firms and it seemed to me like many of the companies were sleeping with someone else - either associated with one of the experts, a sponsor or one of the panelists. One person noted that it was like a Mafia-family board meeting. I am sure that Mike/Jason will counter this by saying that it would be hard to find someone not associated with one of the groups I listed. I disagree.

There also needs to be more women both presenting and on the panels. And I am not talking about "apparently drunk" women as those who presented one of the startups, nor am I talking about those fake-ass d-level models Zivity had.

Final thoughts

While I know Jason thinks I am scum, I think he did a very good job as the public-facing host. He kept things moving as best he could and seemed spot on overall. Heather led a good panel and I think it would have been even better earlier in the day. Nothing like a former accountant hearing EBITDA to get my blood flowing :) Mike interjected himself appropriately into the panels and the discussions. While I am sure they all wanted to score a home run, I would give them a sliding-double.

Mint wins the $50k

This was an absolute shock and quite disappointing to me and many of the CN readers and other conference attendees. Mint's demo wasn't great and they couldn't answer my questions about security. Mike didn't even see a demo of Mint, yet they got into the 40? Mint is this year's silicon valley darling and has received more hype (even though the beta testers couldn't talk about it) than the iPhone and I am willing to bet that's why they won. Why give it to a Korean or Russian startup who leaves the country never to be seen again when they can give it to the guy who is at all the parties, certainly helps for local buzz. Check out Rafe's review from over at Webware. In fact, SpendView in the demo pit understands more about security by offering an upload option. Here are some of the other comments I heard after the win:

• Boy, must be nice to win knowing you have an old TC writer working for you
• Two of the votes for the winner come from Mint investors! That's 10% of the total vote!
• At least 10 people talked about their security

They are also heavily funded and I guess that's why Jason noted about giving it to charity. Personally I have absolute concerns (which many of the TC commenters seem to agree with) about giving "some startup" my financial details when they are live 1 day. Trust is earned my friend.

Thanks again to everyone and look forward to meeting you all again real soon!

Tantek Çelik was kind enough to send over his full transcription of Day 2 of TC40. You have my notes and opinions, now you can read the full transcription. And no Mr. Messina, there are no microformats on this page.

Google Docs update
- Jennifer
- now with Presentations

Q&A

Mike: What do you think of Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra?

Jennifer: competition helps everyone, especially the users.

Jason: What keeps me in Excel is the speed, online is too laggy, are you going to fix that?

Jennifer: We are always working on improving the performance.

Shannon Clark: I have had problems with large files in Google docs.

Jennifer: limitation is 10MB per presentation.

Oliver Ryan, Fortune Magazine: What about backuping for webapps like this? If you lose all my documents, what am I going to do?

Jennifer: No one yet has lost their documents, not even one AFAIK. We take very good care, make copies, redundant systems etc.

Oliver: Do you envision in the future some contractual obligations, there is a .00001 probability? etc.?

Jennifer: I don't know about contractual obligations, not my area of expertise. We do have a user agreement that people sign. People's assetts that they put into google docs are precious and theirs and we need to enable people to get to them.

Jeremy(?): What about version control? if someone editing a document with me, I have no idea what they did. Is there a plan?

Jennifer: We've had a feature for 2 years, called revisions. That's good feedback for me. You can click on the revisions tab, we are literally saving your document every 10-30 seconds. You can literally see the entire history of your document, you can revert back to an earlier version. We need to make it more discoverable.

Continues inside »

The last panel at techcrunch40 is called exit strategies and is moderated by heather harde, techcrunch ceo and includes ted wang, michael montgomery, craig walker, raj kapoor, michael marquez.

Here are my live notes:

Heather - sell when you can and get as much cash as you can. What's the real best way to sell your business for the most amount of cash?

Montgomery - it's about preparation in making sure that you know that you have something special that someone is going to want and then delivering on that something special.

Heather - when was grand central ready to sell?

Craig - we were raising a round b when google gave us a call - the more you want them, the less they want you - thats when the phone rang - the best way to be acquired is to not be acquired

Evan - we werent giving any thought to acquisition with blogger when google came knocking - we were looking at a term sheet - we didnt run an auction - we liked the idea so we went with it

Heather - when do the startups need counsel and or bankers?

Marquez - most of the companies we acquired its about alignment of strategy - do these companies help us with our strategy?

Raj - I made some mistakes with my sales - I had a banker and we had one buyer - and it wasn't that useful to have the banker as they took a lot of the sales price - second time he could have used an auction process.

Montgomery - it's very important that we should be educating our clients so when it does happen they are prepared.

Heather - how does deal making work in CBS?

Maquez - its about alignment of strategy - its also about biz development relationship - startups need to be open to how they play in that ecosystem

Heather - all kinds of valuations - ebitda, etc. How did you decide what the valuation is?

Craig - it's hard to get it everyone's mind that there is a massive opportunity - you can go off your userbase and user growth

This just in... Kaltura has won the people's choice at Techcrunch40 and will be able to demo on stage. Congrats to them! Kaltura is a way to create video together. I will have more notes during their presentation. This is a live post, refresh for the latest news.

I saw a demo of this product back in April in NYC - here are my notes while I work on the notes from today's demo.

Live notes:

• Kaltura enables users of social networks to engage in group collaboration of rich media
• Similar to what wiki did for text
• like youtube meets wiki
• you can share videos and then everyone adds their own clips, pretty neat
• they can offer a sponsored version - showed hallmark cards as an example
• facebook greeting cards coming
• two of the first employees were from icq

Post concludes

Last session of the afternoon is around entertainment at Techcrunch40. Here are my notes:

Flowplay

• It's a virtual avatar that you can then create a social network after you create an avatar
• Kinda like a prettier second life
• PLay a stupid game where you hold the mouse down - you can win tokens - nothing like holding down the space bar for an hour
• don't like the prizes - sell them to your friends
• its like avatar meets dance dance revolution
• another pre-recorded demo!

Metaplace

• it's a virtual world widget
• comparisons to the old aol mid-90s
• you can put an amazon storefront inside your world
• you can use xml, feeds, web services, a layer on top of everything
• the main page for your world gets you all kind of web tools - blogs, wikis, etc.
• virtual worlds have loads of potential they say
• the power of metaplace is that everyone can create their own

Woome

• bridging the offline and online world
• its the first company to develop an online speed dating platform using voice and video
• woo someone or be wooed
• do they do gay and lesbian? yes, they do
• they go thru a demo - basically each one has a minute to woo each other
• $1 to contact the person you woo'ed
• you can create your own sessions around any topic

Zivity

• social network with self-organizing content
• hot photos and interactions with amazing women
• amazon-style recommendations
• vote-based royalties for models and photographers
• they pay out 40%
• what does this product actually do??!?!!
• you can upload files in a zip - woo - 2007 baby!
• a photographer uploads photos - and then the models get some of the money or something - heck if i know

Expert Panel

Caterina - she likes Woome a lot - she doesn't think its a good standalone app - better as part of another social networking site
Brad - also liked Woome
Sarah - didn't like Woome at all
Loic - I really believe in Woome, he can see a nice virtual world on a site like techcrunch - he twittered it
Brad - I feel like the train left the platform with metaplace - with second life
Hammer - He liked Kaltura and thinks video is on the upspring and video catches on in the near future
Sarah - likes Zivity the best
Zivity - we do photo verification and age verification - but each model takes a picture with a new newspaper

These demos are the Rich Media and Mashups selected for TechCrunch40. These notes are live.

xtr3D

• real-time software that analyzes 3d motions of a tracker-less person using a simple web cam
• pretty sweet app
• shows it using google earth and using hand and body movements, the world map moves
• hard to describe but it could be powerful

BroadClip - Bringing MediaCatcher for Facebook

• talks about music 2.0 - itunes, limewire, internet radio, pandora, etc.
• broadclip is music 3.0 - social musical interation, free and legal, searchable and portable
  and a business model is sure to love
• its a cool and interesting way to record music from internet webcasts
• there was no one presenting - just a recorded demo - wtf
• jason cut them off - thank you

mego

• can't spell - "challanges" on one of the slides
• From Tantek - mEgos are personal, portable profiles. An avatar that takes and organizes all your personal feeds and information. An avatar with utility.
• They have a twitter feed from your mego
• I guess you make a mego and then you can put that anywhere
• People roll over your body and see things you want (lOl)

wixi

• he fell in love with an argentinian girl - and he was far away - so he couldnt send her large files - specifically french songs
• it's a virtual desktop - looks very nice
• ny-based
• has a full screen view
• when you watch a video - you can see other related videos and pics
• use code tc40access to get in

I am sorry but the computer died and I lost the last bit of notes and expert panel notes. I am trying to get them from tantek and will post shortly. Please remain with this post :)

Update: Jeff Clavier launches $12 million VC Fund. TechCrunch has the exclusive.

Notes from the Getting funded panel moderated by Jason Calacanis and Sumant Mandel, Jay Adelson, David Sacks, Roelof Both, Jeff Clavier, George Zachary. This is a live post.

Jason: When someone best get into your office?

Sumant: You should know Jason, any company we get is referred by someone we know and trust

George: Just a very compelling message in an email about the company

Jeff: networking works and trusted referrals will get our attention

Jason: David, you raised a round of capital that was well noted on Techcrunch, can you talk about it?

David: We raised 1.5 from founders fund and then 10 million from crv. when we did the series a, it was about the team and idea, when we did the series b, we had a product. One thing for ent. is to figure out your scope.

Jason: what attracted you to the geni investment?

George: I was lucky to get in at 100 and david and I are personal friends. Everyone said we gotta get in because this is a multi-billion dollar company

Jason: How is this robust market and valuations impacting the lower end?

Hank: You can develop a really good product on a small amount of money. You can make really efficient use of capital.

Jeff: We send deals to other investors and they to us. I am forming my own fund, a seed fund which will focus on consumer internet and hopefully find good companies.