I’ve run in-text ads from Kontera competitor Intellitxt for about a year on our sister site HTMLCenter. The results were strong in the beginning but have since slowed to a point where I will most likely remove the ads at some point in the near future. Earlier this week I noticed that Bing appears to be running a massive campaign with Intellitxt.

When the Kontera funding news hit the wire, Techcrunch writer Robin Wauters posted about the news and called the in-text ads “annoying”. He noted, “I find this type of contextual advertising annoying from a reader perspective…”

Last night a friend of mine messaged me after a “conversation” with Robin on Twitter about his Kontera post and comments. Here’s the conversation (my emphasis):

• Till – Do you realize the double standard when you call Kontera annoying while TechCrunch runs snap.com?
• Robin – why? you can turn Snap off as a reader.
• Till – That’s beyond hilarious. Next time, for full disclosure, I suggest you add, “TechCrunch runs the also annoying snap.com”.
• Robin – did you fail to grasp what I just wrote? you can turn snap off. clue. find it.
• Till – You can disable Kontera with an ad blocker. Snap isn’t less annoying. Just like spam, “please unsubscribe here”.
• Robin – you’re either retarded or trying hard to pose as one. disabling snap is a snap setting.
• Till – You don’t see my point. You call out a service, while you run something very, very similar. That’s a double standard.
• Robin – why do I get into insane arguments with hopeless idiots so late at night? night all!
• Till – Aside from personal attacks (Congrats!) – if you had your homework, you would know that you can turn off Kontera as well.

It’s very disappointing to see a writer for the so-called tech blog leader calling people names when asked about their posts. Insults aside, Till has an excellent point – one that Robin appears to have missed. I am unsure if Techcrunch is paid by Snap but the magic 8ball says “all signs point to yes”. Earlier this year I had several chats with the Snap team about adding the paid publisher service to CN and they confirmed that TC was part of the same program.

I guess I don’t understand how Kontera could be considered annoying while Snap is ok? Both services provide the same user experience. I am not suggesting any of the services are annoying or not – just pointing out that calling one annoying means calling all of them annoying – including the one your company is currently utilizing.

Snap, Kontera, Intellitxt and most other in-text services allow you to remove the service from your browser by installing a cookie via their websites. For Robin’s edifcation, here are links to remove all three services:

• Kontera - click the removal link at the bottom of the page
• Snap - click the FAQ for removal
• Intellitxt

You can also get to the removal pages directly from the windows each service provides. It’s important to remember that all of the removal options use cookies so if you clear your cookies, you will need to remove the links again.

Wanna know what’s really annoying? Going to a blog and seeing tons of links to a company directory instead of direct links to the source. Or even worse — rarely to never linking out to other blogs. That’s the annoying of annoying.

TC50 founder Michael Arrington has doubled the amount of advertising. He says whatever DEMO offers, he will double it.

Arrington notes, “Our ads will be on our various TechCrunch networks sites and via our terrific sponsors, who are going to be adding their own inventory as well. We’ll give half to the top two winners, and half to everyone else who launches.”

It seems the silly wars appear to be on yet again this year. 

I think it’s great that both DEMO and Techcrunch50 are offering bigger prizes – anything to help the startups that present past the initial buzz is a good thing. Let’s just hope Jason, Heather, Mike and Matt remember the end goal and don’t get back to last years “TC50: 1 – Demo: 1 – Startup: 0“.

Now it appears DEMO has stepped up the prize pool bigtime by offering two $1 million dollar prizes. The prizes will be awarded to the best enterprise startup and the best consumer startup. The prizes are basically ad buys over the six month period following the conference.

Update 5:30PM: It appears that the total prize is $1 million, not two million as I previously noted. I am not sure if I got it wrong or if they changed it. I thought it read that two winners (one consumer, one enterprise) would each receive $1m.

Conference organizer Matt Marshall notes regarding the prize, “The campaign will include print advertisements, web banner placements, text link promotions, email newsletter promotions, and video ads. The package includes the development of creative content that is to be featured on IDG media properties – another huge value proposition to the winning companies.”

I assume the ads will be priced at the rack rate so the $1m is probably worth less had you bought the ads yourself and negotiated a better rate (probably 30% at best). No matter what, it’s good to see the winners get some publicity past the few posts they will get from the conference buzz.

How many of the companies that presented at either conference last year can you name? Can you name 10 of the 50 that presented at TC50? This huge ad buy should help two companies stay top of mind for at least six months and could give them a lift to build from.

MG then went all Columbo on us by explaining the stats on the Microsoft official twitter account.  He notes that only 1,000 people were following the account but as of this morning it’s up to nearly 5,000! MG also found out who is behind the account. He notes, “The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people.”

The big news here is that since the post, Microsoft’s 4-person twitter communications team has added a third tweet. That’s right…a company with two tweets makes big headlines (the story got a lead from Techmeme ) so I figured I’d watch the account as best I could and I setup a SMS alert when content is added. So I present now, the third tweet message from Microsoft Corporation:

USA Today on Bing v Google “For a search that sings you may want to Bing it” ^JR

CenterNetworks will continue to monitor the account and will report back of any further important developments.

Update: Microsoft has since added tweets 4 and 5 to their account. We can confirm they are now closing in on Oprah’s count.

Let’s get the logistics out of the way – DEMO will be held on September 21-23, 2009 and Techcrunch50 will be held on September 14-15, 2009. Depending on the date of registration, attendees pay $2,000-3,000 for DEMO and $1,500-3,000 for Techcrunch50. (as a side note, I’ve seen tc50 producer Jason Calacanis giving away bunches of free tickets on his podcast, so you might try that road to avoid the high costs).

Last year I was one of the few people who attended both pitch events. You can read all of my coverage and an in-person comparison between both events. Overall DEMO was a better run show logistics-wise.

My thoughts are based on web/Internet businesses. If you have a physical product or other IT-related service, DEMO is basically the only choice.

DEMO

DEMO requires companies that present on stage to pay $18,500. Presenting companies are also provided with space in the expo hall over the three days of the conference. They have launched a new “alpha pitch” program this year which offers companies 90-seconds on stage, two conference passes and expo hall space for $5,000. To present at DEMO, the product must make it’s public debut on stage at the conference.

The decision here is whether the $20k will provide a better return than if the $20k was spent elsewhere. If you bought ads, hired a temp dev/design/biz person to build out the product further, attended more conferences with the cash, would you receive more media impressions than dropping the $20k on DEMO? I’ve only heard from a few DEMO presenting companies but overall the feedback on the logistics were good.

Techcrunch50

Techcrunch does not charge a fee for companies who present and (at least last year) the companies were offered one day of space in the expo hall (referred to as demo pit). Other companies can pay to be part of the expo hall. Like DEMO, Techcrunch50 requires that your product not be accessible before the conference.

Since there is no “cost” to present at Techcrunch50, it makes it a bit more difficult to compare directly to DEMO. If your product is still a few months from going live, I’d say go ahead and apply, it can’t hurt to get onto the radar of some of the players that the conference has recruited. If your product is ready today, I am inclined to say launch now.

I put cost in quotes above because a number of stories I’ve heard from presenting companies is that if you do get to present, you will be required/pressured into providing all of your future news to Techcrunch. As for the demo pit/expo hall space, most of the stories I heard as I walked around were very negative. The majority of the negativity was logistics-based but there were also complaints of not enough time with the conference attendees. Of course many of those same companies said much more positive things in the press which I guess is required. I am sure there will be more drama this year so if you can’t deal with drama, then don’t apply.

Some additional final thoughts

Another consideration is where your product is in terms of development. If it’s ready to go now, ask yourself if you want to put it on the shelf for nearly 90 days waiting and wondering if another player will step into the arena before you hit the stage.

There are good opportunities at both conferences to meet with venture capital folks. If you are seeking vc funds, attending one of the conferences might be a good way to meet with multiple vc firms at once. On the flip side, the vc firm attendees will be overwhelmed with pitches so it might make sense to pitch as you normally would.

My top suggestion for anyone considering applying to either/both conferences is to pick 2-3 companies from last year’s events that are closely related to your company. Do the research to see what type of media impressions and reviews they received. And watch the media impressions after the conference-sizzle dies down (about 2 weeks out) – are the companies still seeing good media traction?

You might even try contacting the companies and offering lunch in return for some off-the-record discussion. The most important thing I’ve learned by attending these pitch conferences is that what’s said when the camera is on is typically very different when the camera is off.

If you do apply to present at one of the conferences, please make sure your presentation is memorable.

Whatever you decide, best of luck and success for your startup. Remember that no conference, no blog, no newspaper, no one anything can make your company be a success. You need to keep working to build the audience over time and continue to move the needle up and to the right.

The Early Days

While most of Twitter’s users today weren’t around in the early days, many of you were. These were the days of the whale of fail, the rat in your pc and the general fun. Back then, there was no search function. If you wanted to know what your friend had for lunch or if your friend’s cat made a #2 on your friend’s carpet, you had to go to the account for your friend or his/her cat and just page back and forth. It was a tough time.

Summize

Then, like cream cheese on a fresh bagel, here comes NY-based Summize. Now we are talking! (well searching). Summize allowed us to search in near real-time for our friend’s messages. Want to know if that really was an earthquake? Pop “earthquake” into Summize. It was a real pleasure. Soon after the search engine was acquired by Twitter and renamed to Twitter Search and it still lives today. Twit messages are ranked by last posted in the results and there is no weighting to the results. The search functionality is also available within the Twitter site itself on the right side of a profile page.

Authority Search

Late last year during the “made up fights” between several valley bloggers and entrepreneurs, a discussion arose about creating an awesome Twitter search engine that would rank search results based on who has more followers. This was awesome…users who have lots of followers would appear higher in search. Bloody brilliant concept! Surely there would be no way to game the system to get more followers, right? Well, six months later and the rank by followers chatter has died out.

Note: somewhere in here Twitter introduced the Default List – this is the list that pumps certain celebs, FOT, fluffers, people who deliver cupcakes to twitter hq, etc.

Retweet Search

I thought I was excited to learn that they are remaking The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. But now I know what real excitement is when I saw the launch of Topsy. Topsy is the engine that has got Twitter Default User Mike Arrington really excited. Here’s how Topsy works…rather than displaying results by authority or post date/time, Topsy ranks the results by how many times a link or query has been retweeted. If you need a moment, take one please, I know I did. So now let’s get serious for a moment. It’s interesting that in Mike’s gushingly positive post about Topsy, he failed to mention that those on the Default List will have an overwhelmingly higher chance of getting better rankings than us mere-non-cupcake-mortals.

Louis Gray did a Columbo-style investigation and found that, indeed, the default list members do control many of the Topsy topics. Louis looks at search queries including the iPhone, Tesla Motors and more. Duncan Riley took a look at Topsy from the “short url” standpoint.

Could a retweet search engine work? Perhaps but certainly not the way Twitter is setup today.

What’s Next?

Robert Scoble and others have said that Friendfeed does a better job at searching Twitter. Will Friendfeed become the search of choice for Twitter users? Maybe…if Friendfeed can win over the mainstream crowd.

Will Google begin to index twit messages? My magic 8 ball says “all signs point to yes”. Google wants to get some of the “realtime” loving that’s going around now and once they can index Twitter messages in some fashion, users will have even more reason to remain on Google. Google has already added a time panel on search results pages. Although I am not even sure that realtime matters for Google. I could see the search engine starting with just relevancy first – I do hope they separate Twitter or any of the other services from traditional online content.

My only hope is that all of the search engines will allow me to filter “-user: -cat -dog -sheep”.

There’s good news as NY-based doctor appointment service ZocDoc has announced that their service now works with psychiatrists. Perhaps a few visits to a shrink will help return those we have lost back to full sanity. Couple of those happy pills will help just about anyone! The ZocDoc service is free to use as they get paid by the listed doctors after an appointment has been scheduled.

ZocDoc lets you review your doctors after the appointments have concluded – it will be interesting to read the reviews of the listed psychiatrists.

Check out my real world review of ZocDoc when I attempted to go to the dentist.

From the release, “The partnership announced today will make it easy for any organization using the Brightcove platform to program and syndicate advertising-supported video content across the sevenload network. This integration will also enhance the online video experiences for sevenload users by making top-rated programming from Brightcove customers available for viewing and sharing with the wider sevenload community.”

German sports site SPOX is the first to distribute their content to Sevenload via this new partnership and Brightcove says more sites will be announced soon.

If we look back to December, it seems that this latest batch of issues started with the made up fights between Editor Michael Arrington and Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur. From there we move forward to DLD where allegedly Arrington was spat on by an attendee.

Shortly thereafter Arrington noted that he was leaving for a month. You can keep up with his vacation via daily photos on his Posterous account. Wherever he is, the weather and scenery in the photos are certainly beautiful!

Let’s fast-forward to February which seems to be plagued with various reader issues. First we have Robin Wauters’ posting an image which readers called "homophobic". It took some time for the image to be removed and only when readers demanded an apology did a very generic apology come.

Editor Erick Schonfeld posted a hit-job on DEMO this month as well. I wondered if Techcrunch was perhaps getting desperate by attacking a person who decided to shift focus after running the conference for 13 years.

Sarah Lacy was brought in as a temporary writer and so far her posts overall haven’t been well received. Readers have noted that most seem to be self-promotional. For example, her title on the Facebook privacy story was only part of the story – it’s not about whether they own your data but what they do with their license along with how your sharing my data applies to their license but readers noted she made sure to pump her tv appearance. More on the Facebook topic in a later post. To me it seems like, unfortunately, she hasn’t learned much from last year’s "interview". My post from last year could easily apply this year as well.

Last (no pun intended) we have the current storm about Last.fm and sharing data with the RIAA. In case you haven’t seen the post, Schonfeld posted a rumor suggesting that Last.fm sent data about a U2 album to the RIAA. Schonfeld said he contacted Last.fm and RIAA but rather wait for comment, he went ahead and posted. What followed was an unbelievably stern and strong reaction from CBS (last.fm parent) and the RIAA. Robert Andrews at PaidContent has a good recap of the events.

As of the time of this posting there’s been no official reply from Techcrunch. I also think that Last.fm’s reply was not as professional as I would have thought a major media company like CBS would issue. No reason for cursing – I am not a fan of cursing to make a point – it’s just cheap pops and takes away from the strength of the message which in this case is very strong by itself.

The real reason I wrote this post has very little to do with Techcrunch at all. It’s about the importance today of thinking before submitting. It’s about always remembering that what you say online will be in your "personnel file" forever. I’ve written about this before with regards to CEO behavior. Don’t watch a few current "celebrities" and think that because they can say or do whatever they want, that you can too. In fact, most of the current celebs won’t be celebs in a few years and will wish that they didn’t say many of the things they did.

I touched on the topic of what readers take away with regards to the blogosphere’s love for Twitter and what it does to the psychology of new developers.

Everyone has to get away from emotional postings – they never work and you can’t take them back.

When you screw up on your blog or the customers of your startup believe you have screwed up, apologize. And if you do apologize, mean it. For example, when the founder of Magnolia apologized, you could feel how genuine it was. It’s acceptable to admit when you make errors or miscalculations. What’s great about the Web is that we are all willing to help you back up.

I leave you with this phrase from the Honeymooners, "You better be nice to people on the way up…. because you will see the same people on the way down".

Erick uses the post to explain that his conference, Techcrunch50, is the much better model and that now he will have to "crush" VentureBeat. He notes that techcrunch50 companies get in on merit (oh is that how they do it!). Erick also displays a chart displaying the very little traffic that demo.com receives but leaves the techcrunch50.com site out of the chart – the comparison chart is available below for reference.

I wrote an in-person review of both Demo and TC50 from last year as I was one of three people to attend both events. It was great to meet so many CN readers at both events. After the unprofessional treatment I received at TC50, I won’t be attending this year. I am not going to go into the behavior here but suffice to say that even the event staffers thought the behavior was unprofessional.

The truth is that the numerous stories I heard from the entrepreneurs of the demo pit startups, the ones that pay $3k/day, were not good. But, as one might guess, no one wants to speak on-the-record because they are afraid.

It’s totally understandable that the Techcrunch team is probably a little upset because Time magazine ranked their top competitor Mashable as a top blog for 2009 while Techcrunch was listed as "overrated". Might these be some additional reasons why Techcrunch might be the desperate one in this conversation?

• They’ve added a "javascript page refresh" – this means that if you leave the site open in a tab, it will refresh every once in a while – extra pageviews for the site
• They continue to increase the page views required to read the comments – first it was 100 on a page and a link to "view all comments" – now that link is gone and less comments are viewable on each page
• They have decided to break embargoes when it suits them to make sure they appear first
• Even with their reportedly strong-arm tactics, startups are starting to provide news to everyone but Techcrunch and as I’ve said since the early days the best route is to provide the news to all of the sites you trust to honor the posting time and get the most coverage and feedback you can.

Patricio Robles from eConsultancy has a good post reviewing the same post. He talks about why positivity sells; I guess he doesn’t read the aformentioned blog often. Let’s hope that Erick thinks about all the negative feedback on his post and offers up an apology to Matt and Chris, even if it’s handled privately.

Ouriel notes he will continue to send leads to Techcrunch and will continue to blog on his own blog. He will remain a shareholder in the blog network.

Here’s Ouriel’s overview, "Since May 06 i am now General Manager LightSpeed Gemini Internet Lab a joint venture between Gemini Israel funds and LightSpeed Venture dedicated to seed investments in internet Israeli start ups. I seat on the advisory of a few stealth mode startups and on the board of Wikio.com". We wish Ouriel luck and success in his future endeavors.

In other Techcrunch news, announced via a twitter message, bestselling book author and video blogger Sarah Lacy will be replacing editor Arrington this month during his rest time. For those of you wondering, Lacy has noted she will not be at SXSW next month.

He goes on to explain why Yahoo is evil for asking users who have violated their terms of service if they want to pay for an option where their account won’t be deactivated for non-use. I like this move by Yahoo for two reasons: first it’s a smart business move; and second, it makes sense to tell users who are outside of the terms of use how they can avoid the situation in the future.

What’s so wrong with a business acting like a business? Guess what… this year we will see many more companies (and startups) acting like real businesses. "Free" doesn’t mean there are no rules or regulations.

When you signup for an email (or any other Web) service, you are accepting the terms as presented. If you don’t like the terms, don’t sign up.

Jason closes with, "For these cloud-based services to thrive users will have to believe they’re good for life, not just until the company involved holds their data ransom for a revenue boost". Nope, users need to believe that they are good for as long as they say they are.

I will cut Kincaid some slack since his LinkedIn profile shows he’s new to the business world. But understand, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with running a business like a business should be run.

I kept notes on each of the winners from my office in NYC on a scratchpad. I’d like to share some of my general thoughts about the event.

The first award went to Google Reader for best web application. Accepting the award was Marissa Mayer from Google. In a company that has many thousands of employees and a Google Reader team that probably has more than a dozen employees, did Marissa really need to accept the award? It’s clear from past experiences that Google is a very controlling company when it comes to their public face, but why not let someone actually on the Google Reader team have the spotlight. One of my Twitter followers wondered if she was asked by the Crunchies to accept to make sure a woman accepted at least one award. I don’t buy that – I think it’s just Google’s controlling behavior at work.

During the Crunchies event, there were 3 "quick Q&A" and VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall spoke with Mayer. It immediately became apparent to me and the Twitter audience that the questions were staged (for all of the Q&A bits) because Matt started to joke around (seemingly off the script) about cupcakes and when he switched back, Marissa started to answer before Matt even finished his question. Why does Marissa get such fluff interviews? Back at LeWeb, Marc Canter called the interview fluff and last night’s discussion was fluff as well. I don’t know if Marissa demands easy questions but there are plenty of topics that the people in the audience care about. Techcrunch writer Steve Gillmore has been very vocal lately about FeedBurner – why not ask her about that? There are plenty of other topics as well that the audience and the Ustream viewers care about.

Let’s now move to location… that is, where does your company need to be located to win a Crunchy? Loic LeMeur noted on stage that there was only one award given to an international company and all of the companies in that category were from Europe. LeMeur has a longer post today about the valley vs. non-valley topic with regards to the awards show.

As each winner was announced, I took a look at where the company is located and noted it on my scratch pad. Every single startup company, outside of the international award which went to eBuddy, went to a company in California. In fact, all of the award winners are located in Silicon Valley except GitHub which is located near San Diego. Take a minute and think about that…not one company won from NYC, Chicago, Denver, Boulder, St. Louis, Portland or anywhere in between. Internationally, Techcrunch runs blogs in France, UK and Japan and there was no winners from any of those locations or any other city around the world except one winner from Amsterdam.

Does all of the "great" Web technology only come out of California? Absolutely not. I am going to have a lot more on this topic early next week.

Dennis Howlett made a comment that’s worth repeating. "If they were being honest then the Crunchies would be renamed as the Consumer Crunchies". In fact you should read his Twitter stream for some good, honest commentary on the overall event. He’s right and when I looked at the nominees last month I was disappointed that the only startups in the running were those who basically get pushed around in the early adopter crowd. Where are all of the (()#@*&^%% companies that are creating real value for their users and have business models? Where are the web utility companies? I could name 100 companies that deserved to win an award last night. We see this behavior on a daily basis from the valley and I will have more on this topic as well next week.

In closing, it’s great that Techcrunch puts on this award show and gives the community a chance to celebrate their combined success. My hope is that for their 2010 show they will consider some of the points above and make some positive changes which will benefit the Web community worldwide.

Today Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington has a rant about embargoes and how they are always broken. I agree they are always broken. I see them broken everyday. When I saw the Chegg embargo broken, I emailed the PR firm contact and asked what’s up. She said that when she awoke, she had a variety of calls and had to put out various fires due to the broken embargo. Here was my response to her:

I think of all of this as a relationship – you, me, the company, my readers, my advertisers/sponsors – its all about the relationship between all of us – and most of all its about trust.

The only way it will change is when the PR firms stop sending the news to the sites that don’t value the relationship. The problem is that you (general) won’t do it and the blogs know that. So they do whatever they want because they know that you won’t do anything against them.

Arrington seems to imply that because more blogs are receiving the embargoed news, it’s the smaller blogs that are breaking the embargoes. From the nearly one-hundred emails I have from PR firms and startups talking about their broken embargoes, it’s rarely the smaller blogs that are the culprit.

In his rant, Arrington notes:

“We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once.”

Yet in the comments, when called out by Ben Metcalfe about the fact that Techcrunch has broken embargoes, Mike responds:

“You’re right, we did break the justin.tv embargo in 2007. It was an accident…”

I believe that today’s rant comes partially from the fact that embargoes are being broken but also partially because more news is spread around and everyone isn’t running to Mike like they did a year (or two) ago.

I have several emails (plus many calls and discussions) about embargoes that were broken by Techcrunch. So it’s not only the one “mistake” that Mike mentions above. I am not going to post them because there is no reason to drag the startups through the mud. If you trust me, you know I have the emails. And let’s not single out Techcrunch, the other “bigs” also have broken their share of embargoes. I have those emails as well.

There are two types of broken embargoes – mistakes and malicious. Frankly I don’t understand why any embargoes are broken under the “mistake” argument but it happens I guess. A year ago I wrote my thoughts on embargoes and we’ve written several times on the embargo topic since then. And my policy isn’t changing after today’s conversation.

Is it that hard to post a story without using a timed-posting? Is it really that hard to double-check the time of the post? Having been responsible for financial releases where the SEC would issue fines if a post went a minute early, I guess this “don’t put it into wordpress until the right time” just comes second nature to me.

At the end of the day, it’s all about trust and relationships. It seems to keep boiling down to that, no matter if it’s about paid reviews, advertisers, how winners are selected at startup conferences or embargoes.

Update: Arrington has posted a comment to this post and in the comment he notes,”What you don’t understand is that very often PR firms give us an hour or two head start on stories.” Let’s assume this is the case for argument’s sake. So then how does Arrington know that ALL of the other broken embargoes also didn’t have this special “privilege”. How does he know that the apparent line I am being fed is not the same one he is?

The Exclusive

I get offered exclusives every week and I turn down every single one of them. I turn them down because my belief is that it’s best that the startup (or big company) gets the most coverage they can. Some blogs like the embargo as it allows them to look like a news-breaking organization. The truth is, any exclusive that goes up on any blog, I can have a better post written about the story in 5 minutes. Exclusives are the real worthless item out of today’s conversation. But clearly for some blogs, they need to force the exclusive because it’s critical for their success.

There’s a belief that if you don’t offer an exclusive, you won’t be covered. Let me clue you in on a secret, that’s not true. If your story is newsworthy, it will be covered without an exclusive. And if your story isn’t newsworthy, an exclusive probably won’t help anyway. Many outlets won’t cover a story if they know an exclusive was issued. My advice to startups is that exclusives aren’t a good vehicle to use – you want as much coverage as you can, not one outlet.

The Arrington

Arrington is just upset because he no longer gets all the news exclusives first anymore. News is shared with more bloggers, more news outlets, via company blogs, via video interviews with people including Scoble and via tools like FriendFeed and Twitter.

Should be interesting to see if startups and PR firms are willing to stand up to Mike and not send him any news going forward or if ALL YOUR NEWS ARE BELONG TO US.

Update: VentureBeat has a breakdown of all of the presenting companies at DEMO broken down by category.

DEMO

DEMO allows the presenting startups to contact the press before the event begins. Approximately two weeks ago the emails started hitting my mailbox from PR firms pitching their clients for coverage on CN. I am sure all press outlets received the same emails. Of the 72 listed startups, I received pitches from about 24. Not sure why the others didn’t come forward with their pitches. By contacting me ahead of time, this allows for a story to be created before the event begins and then I only need to publish when the embargo opens. The downside here is that some press outlets may break the embargoes.

What I’d prefer to see is a portal which DEMO creates that houses all of the startups, their press releases, etc. I would receive a login to the portal and this would allow me to select the startups my audience is interested in. I could click to setup an interview with the startup and/or get more information. This would make things much easier than receiving so many emails from the PR firms and I could go directly to the startup.

Techcrunch50

Techcrunch50 handles the pre-press coverage nearly opposite to DEMO. They have decided not to share any information about the selected startups until the night before the event (thats’ what they did last year). Presenting startups have been informed not to speak with the press either although from watching a chat between FastCompany employee Robert Scoble and Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur, at least a few of the startups have started to talk. By not sharing any information until the night before, this makes it difficult for the press to get any coverage ready pre-event. Last year I worked through the night to get several reviews and other posts prepped.

This week a few of the demo pit companies have contacted me. The conference organizers note that their policy is designed to prevent any leaks and to "increase audience engagement". Their method of handling pre-press coverage certainly accomplishes that.  

Final Thoughts

I am excited to see the 124 startups that present next week. As for which method is better overall, that’s up for debate. In my opinion a hybrid of both would probably be the best overall solution. Perhaps no public announcement until the day of the conference and utilize the portal idea I mentioned above for press.