Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

TechCrunch50 startups, VCs, press, all in one place

TechCrunch50 is in it’s third year. Bigger and better than ever. It's being held September 14th and 15th in San Francisco and just like last year, you can expect two days filled with amazing demos, incredible ideas and unmatched networking opportunities. With 50 companies launching on stage, another 100+ in the Demo Pit, lots of VCs and Angel investors, and dozens of the industry's top though leaders, there's no better place to learn everything you need to know about startups.

Here is what you can expect from TechCrunch50:

• Exposure to some of the hottest new startups from around the globe
• Insight and analysis from thought-leaders across the industry
• Network with Marissa Mayer, Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Yossi Vardi, Kevin Rose, and many more
• The best conference after-parties

Make sure you get your tickets soon. You can currently get them for only $1995 (a 33% discount), but they go up to the normal price ($2995) after August 31st, so act soon!

I will be on the Panel of Experts again this year. The judging is done “American Idol” style where the judges give immediate feedback to each presenter. Several winners are announced at the end of the conference.

Microsoft BizSpark is a sponsor again this year. BizSpark will present the “BizSpark Web Audience Choice” award this year to the best startup voted by the audience watching on Ustream. Last year thousands of people from around the world watched the conference live on Ustream. This year you will have the chance to be a judge too by voting online for your choice as best startup.

Check out BizSpark if you are a software startup (less than 3 years old) to get the software, support, and exposure you need to make your startup successful.

Please stop by and say hello if you are at the conference. I will be there from start to finish, and at all the parties. Come join the fun!

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the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die – Ted Kennedy

U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy has passed away at 77.  “The Last Lion” of the Senate, he served for 47 years. He ran for president in 1980 against incumbent president Jimmy Carter. He lost the primary, and Jimmy Carter lost the election to Ronald Reagan. I met Ted Kennedy several times in 1978 when he was campaigning for the re-election of Maine Senator Bill Hathaway. He was always attentive and kind…even to a young college kid like me.

Many people aren’t old enough to remember Ted Kennedy’s concession speech at the 1980 Democratic Convention. It was one of the great speeches of all time. Here is a short YouTube clip of the closing line “"the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die." http://bit.ly/4rdY5 It still gives me chills.

He had his faults for sure…he was after all just a man. But his heart was always with those less fortunate. His lifetime passion was health care for all. He didn’t live to see it in America…but “the dream shall never die”

Y Combinator launches 26 startups in Silicon Valley

Y Combinator provides seed stage capital and a 10 week startup boot camp for budding entrepreneurs. At the end of the 10 week session Y Combinator invites VCs and Angels to an investor day / demo day. Today YC unveiled 26 new startups to about 80 Silicon Valley elite VCs and investors.

Each startup has 4 minutes to pitch their company, including a short demo. This is the “elevator pitch” at its best, and these guys are really good. After 4 minutes investors could get an understanding of the problem they were solving, their unique approach, and a quick demo of the service in action. There was plenty of time after the event to follow up with questions.

My favorites – FlightCaster – a service that predicts if your flight will be late or delayed. DailyBooth – described as “Twitter for pictures”, already has 3.5 million unique visitors after just 6 months, and growing 30% per month. HighlightCam – finds the interesting events in long form video. For example, it detects motion, sounds, or events in a 24 hour security video feed, or finds the highlights in a long form film. Bump Technologies – Lets you share files of any kind between two mobile phones be literally “bumping” them together. No need to type information, just click on what you want to share. They already have 2 million users. FanChatter – share photos from your mobile phone while at sporting events. The best photos get displayed on the Jumbo-Tron at the event and all photos are displayed on a special event web site.

About half the companies that presented were not yet ready for a public launch or they just wanted to stay in “stealth mode” for a while longer. Several of them are focused on very profitable niche markets and want to fly under the radar until they have captured significant market share. Several of them would have made my “favorites” list, but they asked that we not write about them.

Just a few months old – Most of these startups are just a few months old. If you had seen Google, Facebook, or Twitter, at 3 months old you wouldn’t have been impressed either. But, to the trained eye, it is possible to envision where they will be and how the marketplace will react. That is what VC investing is all about. VCs can’t always predict the winners, but they are very good at predicting what will lose…and avoiding investment. That said, VCs fully expect that on average, 50% of their investments will fail, they just don’t know which 50%.

TechCrunch wrote a more detailed review of the 13 companies that presented and were ready for public launch.

TechCrunch50 Conference will launch 50 more startups on September 14th and 15th in San Francisco. Get more information and registration details here.

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Why Twitter works

Kevin Marks (bio) wrote a brilliant article “How Twitter Works in Theory” that explains in theory why Twitter works so well in practice. The reasons are only obvious after you read them, and they have implications for other forms of communication like email, blogs, IM, and even newspapers. You should read @KevinMarks post to get the full flavor of his thinking, but here is my riff on the subject.

My Stream – Unlike email where anyone can send a message or request, Twitter is only from people I select. I can adjust the flow (more or less) and content (add or delete a person) to suit my needs. It is a satisfying and liberating stream of collective consciousness from people I know and respect.

Faces – Twitter is like Facebook in that each message has a friendly face attached to it. The picture makes it more personal and friendly. Wouldn’t it be nice if all your emails had a face attached to them…and a “LinkedIn style” social graph that showed how you are connected to them?

Following vs. Friending vs. Requesting – On Twitter you decide who to “follow” with no implicit requirement that they “friend” you in return. Facebook requires “friends” to be reciprocal, which implies a relationship that shouldn’t be ignored. Twitter is like a casual encounter while Facebook is a continuing relationship. Email demands attention, action, and following through on requests. Twitter is so liberating.

Communicate without Filters - Ashton Kutcher @aplusk is a master of social media, especially Twitter. He was the first person to amass 1 million followers, and now has over 3 million. Why? Because he communicates openly and honestly about his daily life, in real time. Quickly, effortlessly, no PR filter, and no response required. His Twitter feed provides a glimpse into his personal life and that of his wife Demi Moore who goes by @MrsKutcher on Twitter, and has over 1 million followers of her own.

No Guilt – Do you ever feel guilty about not reading/responding to email? I do. Every time I see 35 Unread Messages in bold, I feel obligated to tackle it. Maybe it is the “Type A” personality in all of us that compels us to conquer the task. Twitter is a guiltless pleasure. No “unread” messages count staring at you. Read as much or as little as you like…whenever you like.

No Response Necessary – Email is serious work with real action and responses required. Twitter is fun, enlightening, and entertaining. Twitter doesn’t demand a response or acknowledgement.

Information will find me – I think @RobertScoble said “If I need to know something, it will find me”. Actually, Robert does a great job of filtering information for all of us and sending just what we need to know. He is famous for saying “I read it so you don’t have to”. That is essentially what Twitter does; filters information from people we trust, and delivers it in bite size chunks.

Bite Size Chunks – Twitter forces brevity and clarity. You can decide in 5 seconds if something is worth reading, digesting, remembering or not. Blogs and email allow unlimited length and pontification. There is something about 140 characters that forces the writer to be clear and concise…or ignored and forgotten.

What can we learn from Twitter? There are elements of Twitter that could be applied to other forms of communication. Twitter, Facebook, IM, texting, blogs, email, and cell phones all work uniquely well for certain forms of communication. They are different, but effective. We use them all effortlessly and choose which tool is best in each situation. Until I read Kevin Marks’ article I didn’t fully understand why Twitter works so well.

Does Twitter work for you?

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StartUp Day 2009 Seattle – How to get started

StartupDay 2009 is a conference exclusively for the technology industry pre-entrepreneurs, those who have yet to join or found a startup. The event will be Saturday, September 26 in Bellevue, WA, and it will feature some of the most respected and successful technology entrepreneurs in Seattle. This is your opportunity to talk to people who have started companies, and meet other people like you who want to start a company.

“Seattle has a large pool of smart people working on the tech industry like those at Microsoft, Amazon, Real Networks, Adobe, Google, Expedia and more, who might have an idea and is wondering what does it mean to have a startup and StartupDay is the conference for them”, says Marcelo Calbucci, founder of Seattle 2.0. “In addition, there are also those who have been recently laid off and been doing work as consultants and are ready to build their startup but are unsure where to start”.

The conference has an all-star lineup of successful entrepreneurs participating, including Alex Algard, Founder of Whitepages.com and CarDomain; Jonathan Sposato, Co-Founder and CEO of Picnik; Josh Petersen, Founder and CEO of Robot Co-Op; Matt Hulett, Chief Revenue Officer of RealGames; Shelly Farnham, Founder of Waggle Labs and Pathable and others. Rich Barton, Founder and CEO of Zillow, the Founder of Expedia and an investor on many startups, will deliver the closing Keynote.

StartupDay 2009 will also include the Advisory Room – a room with experienced professionals, entrepreneurs and investors for the attendees to book one-one-one meetings. Each meeting is 15-minute long and attendees will be able to talk with lawyers, accountants, branding and marketing experts, entrepreneurs, angel investors, VCs and more.

The content of the conference focuses on giving an overview of several important topics to build a successful startup, from picking the right co-founder and idea, to build and market the product, to monetizing it. The conference even includes a talk on what happens when your startup fails, usually a taboo conversation for those who have experienced it.

Registration for the event opens today and the early-bird price is only $95.00 until August 21st. Attendees can register and learn more at the website www.startupday.com.

TechStars incubator hatches 10 new companies

 TechStars is a startup incubator that selects 10 teams from over 600 applicants, provides funding of $18,000 per team, as well as free office space, operational support, and mentoring from investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders. .

TechStars has now been operating for three years. Three of the original ten companies from 2007 have already been acquired (SocialThing by AOL, Intense Debate by Automattic, and Brightkite by Limbo). Today, TechStars debuted ten new startups from their 2009 class in Boulder, Colorado. The teams presented today to about 150 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and typically have two or three founder employees.

Next Big Sound – Measures the growth and popularity of music groups across major web properties like MySpace,Twitter, Last.fm, and others. Next Big Sound measures things like number of fans, number of plays, comments, etc. It's best understood as a sort of Compete.com for bands. The company hopes to be the de facto standard for understanding band related metrics on the web. They currently track track about 500,000 bands. They use the “Freemium model” with free basic services, and charge for premium services like more advanced reports, social media impact analyses, and other services. Current customers include Jason Mraz and about 30 other bands. 

Everlater - This company enters the crowded but very lucrative online travel space with a site that allows users to richly document their travel experiences. Users can upload stories, experiences, photos, etc directly to Everlater or the site can pull items in from external services such as Flickr. There is also an iPhone app that enables offline recording of travel experiences which can be synchronized and shared later. Each user and trip has a unique URL like this one that can easily be shared with friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Everlater also allows users to share their travel experiences offline by generating and sending postcards, printing scrapbooks, photo albums, etc.  The company is planning to self-fund but is also open to speaking with potential investors.

Vanilla Forums - Vanilla is a popular open-source application that already powers over 300,000 discussion forums on the web. It's been around for many years. Today, the company announced that it has released a greatly enhanced Version 2.0 of Vanilla both as open source and for the first time as a hosted solution . Vanilla has a business model similar to Wordpress. They have vanillaforums.org for open source, free download/use, and vanillaforums.com as a hosted service, but with up-sells for things like, domain name mapping, removal of ads, single sign on integrations, etc. They should get a good bump in initial sales from the 300,000 installed base of free users who will be happy to pay for the additional services.

SendGrid - SendGrid is an email service that solves the problems faced by companies sending transactional outbound email (emails delivered by software applications such as sign up confirmations, shipping alerts, friend requests, notifications, etc). By using SendGrid instead of their current outbound email servers, companies can improve deliverability rates and solve scalability problems. SendGrid also solves many of the common problems faced by companies sending transactional email, such as CAN-SPAM compliance, link tracking, open rate reporting, and more. The company already has nearly 100 paying customers and has delivered over 100 million emails on their behalf.

Take Comics - Provides online digital versions of Comic books. The company has relationships with Comic book publishers and has technology which converts the print format into pixel-perfect digital formats optimized for desktop and mobile experiences. The comics themselves are visually stunning both on the desktop and on devices such as the iPhone. Comics can be purchased directly through the iTunes style application which also includes a variety of social features and content discovery mechanisms.

Rezora - An email marketing service specifically designed for the real estate market. It's similar to Constant Contact, Vertical Response and many other similar services but it adds many real estate specific capabilities such as MLS integration and local real estate news feeds. The software is sold to agencies for use by their realtors and can track clicks to help realtors understand what properties, areas, and price ranges their clients are interested in. The company has already signed a major client with 1,100 agents.

Retel Technologies - Provides video surveillance analysis for stores and restaurants. It uses security camera feeds to deliver interesting metrics and analyses such as table cleanliness, service times, employee activities, etc. Many companies have tried to use sophisticated techniques to process daily video streams from security cameras with varying success. What's interesting here is that Retel has re-thought the process and delivers human tested results using paid micro-tasks on services like Mechanical Turk. This enables the company to deliver sophisticated reports that include data points such as male vs female ratios, instances of theft by employees, and other actions, that only humans can get right. The company charges a flat monthly fee per camera for these services. Retel already has some national chains as early customers and is reporting that $550K of a planned $750K raise is already committed.

TimZon - Pronounced "Team Zone", this service is billed as "the easiest way to share visual feedback" and is targeted at virtual teams and customer service organizations. The service allows you to record a visual message that can include screen images, audio, video, white-boarding /annotation, etc., then easily share it as a URL.  Because it requires no software to be installed in advance, this is an easy way for organizations to exchange complex visual feedback. The basic service is free to use, but TimZon provides paid packages for companies that want to systematically collect and organize visual feedback.

Mailana - Helps you share what really matters with the people who really matter. It analyzes your communication patterns from email, Twitter, and social networks to determine your inner circle. It then allows you to share your inner circle with the inner circles of your close connections. The idea here is that existing social graphs are too inclusive to be used to efficiently discover connections and expertise. Mailana aims to simplify this by implicitly generating only your "inner circle" based on actual communication patterns, then exposing that only to your most frequent and trusted connections. In theory this dynamic, current, and accurate social graph will allow the most efficient path to needed, trusted connections. The business model is likely to be something like LinkedIn, meaning advertising, and up-sells for premium services.

Spry - Spry provides insight into software development projects by monitoring all the tools and services used by the team. Spry analyzes the data in real-time, generates progress reports, and enables clear and consistent communication throughout the team. This helps managers and developers make better decisions throughout the process thereby reducing the likelihood of failure and delay. What Spry is doing is analogous to the activity stream on Facebook, but based on the activity of the development tools and services used on a project. Spry is similar to 6th Sense Analytics which was acquired by Rally Software earlier this year. Spry will use the classic 3 tier (free, pro, enterprise) revenue model, with more features as you move up the scale.

TechStars will also unveil nine more new companies in Boston (this is the first year for the Boston version of TechStars) coming up on September 10th.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column. You can also follow me on Twitter @dondodge