TechCrunch40: In the Beginning…
Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski is live-blogging TechCrunch40, a two-day conference in San Francisco highlighting what its organizers consider “40 of the hottest new start-ups” from around the globe. Additionally, another hundred or so companies are demoing their products, some of which he’ll feature here.
OK. After a registration foul-up (don’t you know who I am?!!!!!!!), and innumerable technical difficulties (I am, indeed, writing this on my iPhone, and I’m beginning to realize that Steve Jobs may not have been exaggerating when he said that after a few weeks of typing on this virtual keyboard, “you’ll be flying.”) I am finally up and running.
(Eric Savitz of Tech Trader Daily got in a good post on the five search-and-discovery demos that started the conference in earnest this morning, along with comments from the panel of judges.)
Given these early difficulties, I have no detailed posts on the first round of presentations, just some general observations:
- Big focus on video from first presenter.
- All presenters seem to suffer from the same Web 2.0 Tourette’s Syndrome, uncontrollably spouting Web 2.0 jargon: Ajax, long tail, etc.
- Note: if a drinking game existed that required participants to take a drink every time a presenter used a boom 2.0 cliche, I’d have alcohol poisoning by now.
- Conference co-sponsor Jason Calacanis just told everyone with iPhones to turn their Wi-Fi feature off because the devices are “crashing our Wi-Fi network.” How frigging Web 2.0 is that?
- Judges panel: Seated next to Marc Andreessen, Engadget’s Ryan Block
looks like a Mini-me version of the Netscape founder. - Yahoo presents a new service, not yet available. Long-winded intro. Conference organizers should have forced “big presenters” to adhere to the same eight-minute pitch rule.
- It’s called Yahoo for Teachers. Online lesson plans. Social networking for social good. (Wonder how long it took Yahoo PR to come up with that one?) Bit of a yawner, this one.
