TechCrunch Launching “Elevator Pitches” Today

At the NYU media event today, Techcrunch editor Erick Schonfeld announced that later today, they will publicly launch "Elevator Pitches" which is a place where startups can post video pitches (up to 60 seconds in length). The pitches can then be voted up or down by the Techcrunch audience and comments can be left as well.

I assume that they will have tons of submissions since the service is free and could help the startup get placement on Techcrunch. They are using BeFunky to "animate" the videos – not sure why – maybe to attempt to put all of them on the same playing field. It looks like they are using YouTube for the video hosting.

Elevator pitches seems similar to what Vator.tv offers but with the Techcrunch audience behind it. What this new service does is let more startups come to Techcrunch instead of Techcrunch seeking them out or receiving the pitch via email. Each elevator pitch has a Crunchbase record which instantly gets ranked 1st page on Google for that startup. The only link to the company is inside the Crunchbase widget which gets the company no search value while the Crunchbase links are outside the script providing the full search engine transfer.

Here’s Erick explaining Elevator Pitches… if you click on the video and go to YouTube, I added an annotation…

Here’s one of the pitches on the site, a company named GoodReads: