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.

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.

Check out my proposal in the video below. Here’s the basic idea. We all work together. Instead of 50 reviews of the same startup, we create 1 or 2 reviews of each startup. The reviews would be licensed to all of the participating sites with attribution back to the sources. Writer combinations would be picked at random and could create some great matches. A main conference portal site would be created to house all of the reviews plus all of the overall conference coverage. This would allow for a great amount of discovery between the content sources. We’d work to get sponsorship as a whole from larger companies who would absolutely love to be involved with this all-star lineup.

The benefits of this idea are:

• writers can focus on interviews, industry information, overall conference coverage, etc. and not on scrambling to get reviews done. writers also get the chance to work with one or two other writers and pick up tips and techniques
• startups would be able to focus on their presentations and not worry about coordinating 100 reviews
• readers would be able to engage with more content from more sources over the duration of the conferences 

This is just an initial proposal and if the idea is well-received, we would need to get started right away on the details. As a side benefit, these new blogger and journalists relationships will provide education, and you never know what the new relationships might hold for the future. Of course it could just be a crazy idea that won’t go anywhere.

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.

Update #1 – Scoble says via a Techcrunch post that he doesn’t want to kill TC50 (never mentions demo), only to say, “I know the truth: that we’re both laughing all the way to the bank.”.

Update #2 – per the FriendFeed contract, there’s now a thread regarding the below video on FF

Here’s Scoble’s pitch:

Jiglu

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.

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.

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/received 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
• Oh, you do realize Mint sponsored a fatty-ass party for Mint – basically a semi-conference sponsor

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.  I hope Mike and Jason will provide some insight as to why they were selected.

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

Tantek Çelik

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.

— break —

Philip Kaplan
- founder of Adbrite
introduces Spottt
similar to LinkExchange
- started in 1996
- eBay used LinkExchange, was credited with
- 1998 MSFT acquired LinkExchange for $250million
- Linkexchange.com today is dead (showed some error page)
- Tony Hsieh, co-founder Linkexchange, advisor to Spottt
- 1-for-1 swap
- one spottt per web page, above fold
- all sites reviewed for quality
- blog and MySpace compatible
- private beta, signup at Spottt.com
- demo
- enter URL
- upload your Spottt – 125×125
- put in email address, password
- title name of site
- choose category, you swap with other people in your category

Clickable
- founded in July 2006
- series A by Union Square Ventures and Pequot Ventures
- 30 FTEs headquarterd in New York
- TechCrunch40 announcements
- Jonahtan Miller joins BoD
- Partnership with Adbrite
- Public Beta launches today

GotStatus
- think of it as Google analytics but for the server side of web sites and web analytics
- demo, say i’m a small business with SugarCRM deployed
- i want to know what is going on on the back end
- when was my database backed up
- how many user accounts are being created
- how many emails are being sent out
- email traffic going in and out of SugarCRM
- status widget embedded in a WordPress blog demo

(just had first water pitcher spill just behind me to my right. )

PubMatic
- PubMatic’s Auction System Maximizes Revenue for publishers
- PubMatic eCPM auction google adsense/yahoo publisher network/value click media / komli / bluelithium
- asks for password for each one to "verify account" (YIKES!), link account

ZocDoc
- Dentist and Doctor Appointments
- personal anecdote of sinus infection on plane, followed by ear drum bursting
- skit with a person tripping on stage, needing an emergency dental appointment
- US healthcare system is fundamentally broken.  ZocDoc is trying to make it simpler.

expert panel

Jason: Guy – your favorite?

Guy: Spottt was my favorite – only one I could truly understand.  It was like deja vu for me as I remember Link Exchange.  Life is all about traffic.

Jason: Esther?

Esther: Clickable.  You give them the answers that Google doesn’t want them to see.  The one my heart is with though is ZocDoc.  Solves a huge problem. Big challenge is getting out there.  Have to deal with ratings fraud that all the review sites do.  I want to know the background.  If you can deal with all these problems, you’ve got something.  People are fleeing the United Healthcare site that you showed.

Jason: Can you talk a bit about the ratings fraud.

ZocDoc: We’ve looked at some of the leaders in the online ratings space, hired some of the same legal counsel.  We are committed to make sure the feedback is fair.  We are going to do that two ways:  1) if practitioner thinks feedback is unfair, we will give them an opportunity to respond.  2) if feedback is factually incorrect, we’ll pull that from the site.

Jason: Who will judge facts?  You?

ZocDoc: Yes.

Guy: It would not occur to me to go to any site to pick a doctor.  I would ask the concierge at the hotel.

Esther: You’re one of these rich people that stays at hotels.

Guy: If you’re not a rich person or at a hotel, wouldn’t you call a friend instead?

(funny moment of exchange between Jason and Guy, involving rashes, and insinuation of personal experiences with)

Esther: meta comment about Pubmatic, Spott.  The ad market is going more and more towards behavioral targetting where you’re selling the audience, not just random clicks.  I would focus more on behavioral targetting.  Track people as individuals.

PKaplan: biggest growing part of our business is behavioral, but biggest part is clicks.

audience questions.

Q from panel: to ZocDoc – why can’t you be a general solution for service providers?  E.g. OpenTable only solved it for restaurant reservations.

ZocDoc: Lots of complexity to the healthcare process.  We have a inhouse doctor.  I don’t think a generic system would cut it.

Esther: I would not invest in something general.

Guy: I would take the opposite stance of Esther.  You have a very interesting technology.  Become a platform.  License to others.

Shannon Clark tries to interject and interrupt panelists.  Jason Calacanis asks him to please let panelists finish speaking.

Jason to Shannon: ok question, or *brief* comment please.

Shannon: OpenTable works because there is a backend piece that talks with restaurants.  Similarly ZocDoc is probably building a backend for doctors etc.  General solution is very difficult.

(singing of happy birthday for Roelof)

audience question: ZocDoc are you doing anything for mobile?

ZocDoc: thinking about for the future. many people have asked use for that.

— break —

expert panel on funding
- funding often comes by way of referrals
- Jeff Clavier is wearing a "mint" shirt

Jeff Clavier announcement:  after 3 yrs of investing my own money, I’m now starting a fund.  I’m announcing a $12 million seed fund.

Jay Adelson is the only expert on the panel wearing blue jeans Jason is also wearing blue jeans

Financing is not the biggest bottleneck right now in Silicon Valley, it’s hiring engineers.  Money will flow, internationally, than people will.

bad stories:
Jeff: clipping nails during a meeting
….: an entrepreuner looking at their butt on a video conference (they didn’t know the other side was on)
….: too many people from your team talking over each other.
….: both entrepreuners and VC need to be on time.

Jason announcement: if you are offended by nudity, you may want to skip the afternoon sessions.

— lunch —

(discussion of tokens)

Mike: This has been like the Jason show so far.

Mike: introduces experts, the guy at Yahoo that bought Zimbra, MC Hammer, Sarah Lacy, Loïc Lemeur, Caterina Fake

company presentations again

Extreme Reality
- pseudo-minority-report, UI.

BroadClip
- cheesy voiceover with SW theme music in background
- MediaCatcher for FaceBook
- played "Suspicious Minds" (an apropos clip)

Jason: Ok, times up.  You’re done.  It wasn’t a press play on the VHS thing when I saw it.

mEgo – created to save the pain of filling out the same profile information over and over on all your social network profile information and then having to update it all when it changes mEgos are personal, portable profiles.  An avatar that takes and organizes
all your personal feeds and information.  An avatar with utility.
- because it is vector based, you can make it any size you want
- mobile mEgo
- as of 4:00 PST mEgo is live and open for anyone to use.

wixi
- stumbles while trying to create a new folder in the user interface
- a universal wixi player
- every file you upload will be converted to be played from anywhere
- plays a clip from "Can’t Touch This"

befunky
- shot of Michael Arrington in Istanbul
- cartoonizer: turns any video into a cartoon.

expert panel

Hammer: I enjoyed mEgo, and befunky.  Started off slow, but showing changing a photo of a kid to a cartoon, it looked cool.

Brad: I tend to agree with Hammer.  Didn’t get BroadClip.

Jason: I apologize for the BroadClip video presentation.

Brad: I would use mEgo.

Sarah: I liked Extreme3d.  I’m not a fan of the name.  Extreme was overused10 years ago.  I really like the idea though.  Software only is good.  Demo looked a bit clumsy.  I didn’t really get BroadClip.  I kind of find music easily.

Caterina:  I liked Extreme3d – having a Wii thru your webcam is powerful.

Loïc: It was a bad idea to give a pitch with video.  I liked befunky, I can see my kids playing with it.  I also like the idea of wixi to collect everything in one place.  But there is a challenge because Google is doing it with Google Docs.

(…)

Brad: wixi might be good for private porn sharing.

audience questions:

Shannon Clark: wixi, broadclip, raising copyright questions issues.

BroadClip: we actually do increase the revenues of the record companies.

Hammer is mocking the BroadClips guy (who claimed to be an IP lawyer)

Don Dodge, VP of Napster: I’ve lived that life, you’re wrong.

Sarah: About befunky, one thing I like about it, is that so many of the web apps I see online is targeted at someone like me, early adoper.  What I like about befunky is that it is targeted at parents, grandparents etc.

Jason: I think people would pay for it.  Send DVDs to people like here is my cartoon.

Jason: Ok 10 minute break.

— break —

flowplay
- a social entertainment platform
- virtual demo from "moonbeam" – http://stealth.flowplay.com
- oh cool I got a friend request (accept, reject, cancel) [argh]
- "Ooops. I forgot.  I’m supposed to meet T-Man.  We’re going dancing.  At the Starlight lounge."

metaplace
- shows slide about proprietary virtual worlds
- shows slide of HTML hyperlink, web is open etc.
- you can use stylesheets
- http://fattire.metaplace.coim/alphatest
- all the cool web2 buzzwords, blogs, wikis, tags, reviews, ratings
- Tools are currently alpha, not on the web yet, but will be in a couple of wweeks.
- open standards

woome
- enjoy the minute!
- speed dating
- http://george.woome.com:8000/session/
- shows demo between george with Michelle
- running out of time, jumps to next person
- shows someone "Nicole" who is not a girl, is actually nick zenstrom
- real time social networking

Zivity
- founder is a woman
- these are our content creators
- Pearl, Samantha, Heather, ??
- pays over 40% of revenue to content providers
- founder hands dollar bills to content creators
- PG 13 part of presentation is now over
- zip file upload
- scrolls thru a photo-upload UI
- licenses are model/photographer friendly – non-exclusive.
- all licensing/transactions done digitally.
- digital proof of age verification – one of the things that sets them apart.
- dashboard with which sets are making how much money.
- demos user view (URL bar has been hidden)

Mike Arrington – I was actually a little uncomfortable with that.

Onto the 40th company.

DanceJam – was 3rd.
Tangler – was 2nd.

The winner is an Israeli and New York startup called Kaltura.

Kaltura enables of users of social networks to engage in group collaborative creation of rich media, similar to what wiki platforms have done in text, we do in rich media.  Youtube meets wiki.

expert panel

Jason: Caterina which one did you like the most?

Caterina: woome – A+.  Loved it.

Brad: Is it a company or just a feature.

Sarah: My least favorite.  Though I’ve been with same man for 8 years, so never used online dating.  Social networking has changed the market. Launching a new dating app, I don’t know.

Caterina: It’s not dating it’s scoping.

Sarah: You can scope on social networks.

Loïc: I won’t try it [woome] because my wife will hit me.

Mike: You’re supposed to not try it because you’re married, not because your wife will hit you.

Loïc: Metaplace is trying to Facebook SecondLife.

Brad: I thought Kaltura was pretty compelling.  I don’t understand exactly how you are going to create a business around it.  But user participation, good.  Woome, good.  Contrarian on metaplace.  There’s a platform and it’s called SecondLife.  I wasn’t buying that there’s going to be a migration. Hard for me to think about how metaplace is going to disrupt that.

Hammer: I liked Kaltura.  Big believer in video.  I see a lot of people creating films, collaborating on films.  Passing them around.  The business model, injecting ads at certain points, putting it into peer-to-peer space. Zivity, good.  I don’t know if that was PG13, if that was PG13, what’s R?

Mike: Too much nudity in presentation.

Sarah: It [Zivity] was actually my favorite of the 5.  It’s very apparent that the old model is broken. What has Playboy done online? I think it makes sense.

Hammer: How do you vett the process of who uploads photos?

Zivity: We do photo, age verification, each model takes photo of headlines with ID.

Hammer: And we all had fake ids in highschool.

Loïc: I’d like to merge Zivity and Woome

(anonymous audience member: it’s called Doome )

Jason: What was that split again?

Zivity: 60/40 split on subscription model.  Each additional vote is $1. 20¢ of that goes to Zivity, rest is split between model/photographer.

Jason: Caterina how does that compare with Flickr.  Revenue sharing with Flickr?

Caterina: Brad can address.

Brad: There is demand from heavy Flickr users.  Flickr wants to meet that demand.

metaplace: comparison to SecondLife is not correct.  They still own all the servers.

Caterina: About flowplay – I’m a big believer in the socially networked game.  You play along with other people.  I’m not sure flowplay execution hits it, but I’m a big believer in the idea.

Sarah: My problem with Flowplay, I wonder about the authenticity there.  If I were a young girl I would feel very talked down to.

Flowplay: The voiceover talent was more for this audience than for an actual teen audience.  It was probably over the top.

Jason: lesson to presenters, when you hit the play key you lose the audience.

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

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. Rafe has more information on Webware as well.

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

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

Post Concludes

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 :)

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.

Audience question: Coming from Finland, do you do series a funding for companies – do they have to move their hq to the usa?

Sumant – I did a company in India and they are doing fantastically well. Don’t do anything you wouldnt normally do just because an investor tells you to.

Roelof – even companies based here have traffic internationally

Spottt

• It’s linkexchange.com for 2007
• they have a cute fake dog as their mascot
• 1-1 for swap, they will incur all costs for the first year
• this is owned by adbrite
• Blog and Myspace compatible

Clickable

• announces a relationship with adbrite – hrm
• and launches public beta
• johnathan miller joins board of directors
• 30 employees in nyc
• jason wanted this company in the list
• lots of ajax – its a reporting tool for using google adwords, yahoo advertising and now adbrite
• they talk about threats to spending on ads

GotStatus

• as good as google analytics is – it only runs on the browser
• I have to tell you – I am completely lost in this demo – I am sorry. No further notes on this demo will be provided. :(

PubMatic

• make more money from your blog or web site
• i saw a demo of this last week and was very impressed overall – needs some touchups on the corners, but it has potential
• What pubmatic does is simple – you can merge in your various online ad networks (google, yahoo, valueclick, blue lithium) and it decides which ads to show in which locations based on the best paying ad network
• they can also change color combos on the fly to maximize
• 106% increase for one site and a 90% increase for sportsvite

ZocDoc

• it’s like 1800dentists for the web
• they have 2% of dentists in the system
• they show a search of upper west side of manhattan but the results are all upper east side!
• has dentist ratings but charges dentists to list – conflict of interest?

Expert Panel Discussion

• Reolef – i like clickable and pubmatic, the challenge for clickable is there is a lot of competition
• Guy – I like Spott, it was the only one I could truly understand, I like it as a blogger because I understand the pain you are solving
• Esther – I don’t get Spott’s business model – I would go with clickable –

• simultaneous editing
• goal is to keep it simple and easy
• you can share docs as collaborators and as viewers
• when viewing a presentation you can chat with others watching the presentation

It was a quick demo – looks nice.

Mike asks – what’s your reaction to Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra? Jennifer: I think its great and the internet is a big place and competition makes everyone better.

Mike asks – do you feel like an offline version is important? Jennifer: our users have been telling us that they want offline access.

Mike asks – we organized this conference using the google docs tools – how is google going to address security for the enterprise? Jennifer: we are all really concerned about security and we are in our google apps system is secure – talks about how the user is responsible

Jason asks – im addicted to it for using it documents – excel is the thing that keeps me in office – is there a solution coming for lag for power users? Jennifer: we care about performance – if its slow you wont use it.