TechCrunch50 the biggest startup conference in the world is underway in San Francisco. 50 companies presenting on stage, over 100 companies in the Demo Pit, and another 50 or so alumni companies from previous TechCrunch conferences. Over 1600 attendees, VCs, Angels, Tech Execs, and press. This is the third year of the conference, bigger and better than ever. 11 companies present this morning, and another 11 in the afternoon. The companies this morning are grouped around games, gadgets, and tech gear. Here is my take on the companies this morning. These will be short because I am blogging live on stage while judging the companies American Idol style. Other experts on the judging panel include; Ron Conway,Yossi Vardi, Jason Hirschhorn, and George Zachary.
Session 1: Youth & Games
Penn & Teller This comedy duo has been entertaining audiences on TV, in Las Vegas, and in movies for 35 years. Penn & Teller perform nightly at The Rio in Las Vegas. At TechCrunch50, Penn & Teller unveiled their first ever iPhone app. Penn picked me to do a card trick on stage using an iPhone. Bad choice. I am a Microsoft guy and don’t use an iPhone. The on screen keyboard is tough. The app is a card game like Liars Poker, but the twist is that you say you are a friend of Penn & Teller, and they will guess the card remotely. You ask your friend to pick a card and the iPhone app magically figures out the card by sending a text message over the phone. They will sell the app on the AppStore. Penn picked me to do a demo of the product on stage with an iPhone. I’m from Microsoft and don’t use an iPhone so I found the typing VERY difficult. Funny moment…I couldn’t make it work…but the demo went on anyway. Penn was unflappable, and carried on like a pro. I thought he might make me disappear at any moment. Look for the Penn&Teller iPhone app on the App Store.
Story Something is a mobile and web platform for personalized and customized children's stories that include your family names, places and things they know. Storysomething provides busy parents with a powerful, meaningful and fun way to connect with their children through stories and storytelling. Professional and amateur authors use Storysomething's Author Center to reach and engage with their audience directly. Every child loves stories that are fun yet familiar. The service also allows professional authors to build custom stories. Offered on a time trial basis, then you pay a monthly subscription. Marketing will be the challenge, but they plan to use social networks to get the word out.
clasemovil creates web-based learning activities (games) that empower very young students all over the world to face the challenge of competing in an ever expanding global economy. Clasemovil.com has created a place where young students can "come to play," but always in an environment where mastering recognized skills and subject competencies are the silent goal. Clasemovil makes education fun and cool, kids really have fun while learning, making clasemovil.com a revolutionary educational community! Again, the challenge will be getting noticed in a very noisy market. Parents are willing to pay any amount of money to help their kids…if they know about it and see value.
ToonsTunes.com is a virtual world for kids (age 6 to 14) that combines social community with the ability to create and share music and enjoy music made by others. Playing games and making music earn impressive rewards for your avatar, while utilizing music-sharing features gives players a chance to expand their audience through email and social networks. Making music on Toonstunes is fun. Very high quality application, beautiful graphics and amazing sound library. Easy to upload songs to MySpace, Facebook, and other social sites, and share via email, IM, and phone. Revenue from three sources; Freemium model subscription, sponsorship, and merchandise sales.
Sealtale Bloggers can plug in a widget called “Seal” to their blog. “Seals” can be in forms of pictures, multimedia, or flash-animations that express the users’ personal interests, opinions and ideas. If the desired seals are not available, the users can always request or even create their own “Seal”. Also, by seals, the users can network and share information with the other users of similar interests. Tag-RSS (which filters the RSS feed with the tag words) and other features of Sealbook such as Tale, Chat, and Info enable the users to express themselves and communicate with others in various ways.
Session 2: Gadgets & Gear
iTwin is a novel consumer device which provides Plug & Play Remote File Access. It consists of two identical parts called Twins. All the user needs to do is plug one Twin into a computer and the other Twin into any other computer. Then, she can access files on one computer from the other, and vice versa, over the Internet. iTwin is designed to be convenient and easy to use for non-technical people. It does not require any setup, configuration or login/passwords. iTwin looks like a memory stick with a USB connector on both ends. It will sell for about $100. You can solve the same problem with Microsoft Live Mesh which effortlessly synchronizes files across multiple computers…automatically.
FluidHTML Rich Internet Applications are growing rapidly and globally. FluidHtml is a new markup language that dynamically generates Flash™ content. Structured like HTML, FluidHtml allows any web developer to dynamically generate Rich Media sites and applications and is compatible with all major browsers. FluidHtml solves the Flash™ search problem by exposing the markup text to search engines. Now web publishers can combine the human appeal of rich media with all the business benefits of the web.The real advantage to FluidHTML is the ability for search engines to index the Flash content. It would be interesting to know if there are any performance impacts. The tool is free to developers, but publishers pay a fee on deployment. It will be a challenge to get developers to switch tools even if it is free.
Toybots Woozees is attempting to disrupt the gaming and toy industries. They have a platform for connected physical toys with full 3G, GPS and accelerometer capabilities tied to online and mobile games. Imagine a physical toy you can tickle online and it giggles in the real world. Imagine a grandmother in Iowa recording a family story the toy can tell her grandchild in Florida. Toybots gives device developers a platform to launch new connected items; our open SDK and app store enable application developers to enhance the end-user experience with new games and content. Toybots was incubated at SGN, innovator of the "mobile social game," and operates as a separate division within that company. The challenge here will be crossing from the physical toy world to the online interaction world…with small children. Great technology, very innovative, but I don’t know of any examples where toys and online interaction have achieved market success.
Spawn Labs develops an “anywhere, anytime” platform that provides remote, real-time, interactive access to products, content, and experiences that rely heavily on video. The company’s first application for this platform gives gamers the freedom to play their console video games, alone or with friends, at home or on the road from any network-connected computer. The company also sells a version of this application to the world’s leading game developers for remote game-play access to console development kits. Rocket science technology for gamers to be able to play games remotely. It is a hardware device that will retail for about $200. Latency could be an issue but they feel they have it solved. Selling hardware means they need relationships with retailers. This is hard, and cuts profit margins…unlike a pure software play. I would describe it as Slingbox for console games. Could be a hit…or not.
Clicker is a guide to Internet television, basically a search application for TV. As massive amounts of programming move online, consumers are entering a world of infinite choices, all on-demand. Finding the show you want to watch? Painful. Thousands of episodes from thousands of shows are housed on thousands of different sites, mixed amongst billions of random videos. Clicker culls all broadcast programming, and TV-quality Web originals, from these silos and delivers them in one seamless, organized experience so you can easily find, save, share and even contribute content for any show or episode online. Want to know "What's on online?" Head to Clicker.com. Allows users to add tags, reviews, build playlists, and share content.
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
