The second batch of TechCrunch40 companies will focus on collaboration and crowd sourcing. I am blogging this live so please forgive the spelling mistakes and incoherent flow of information.
Community and Collaboration
Story Blender - online video collaboration platform where people can work together to create videos. Add music, text, and video from existing clips to create a new video. There is a social networking aspect to the creation inthat you can find other creators to collaborate on a new project.
TripIt - organize your travel - Founders from Hotwire. Travel is the largest e-commerce segment, mostly done directly with airlines and hotels. Tripit makes it easy to add weather, maps, travel tips, Wikipedia, pictures from Flickr, events, to your travel information. They also allow other people traveling with you to see your plans and make similar plans, or add events to the travel plan.
Flock - social web browser - Remembers passwords to sites you visit, and friends in those communities. Flock brings together all the media associated with your friends. Drag and drop media from one site to another, for example from Flickr to Facebook. Share your favorite video with friends. Really focused on social networking.
MusicShake - User created music - Similar to Hyperscore from Harmony Line. A visual way to compose music, add effects, and tracks from a predefined list of instruments. You can also add voice tracks from other sources to create a mashup or what is called "sampling" in the music business. The library of pre-recorded music tracks was created by MusicShake so there are no copyright issues.
8020Everywhere - community created travel magazine - Users contribute pictures, content, maps, and reviews, all focused around a particular destination. Stories are sorted by destination. Real big on pictures and videos. You can also sort stories by social network, meaning finding content created by your friends. The site will launch in a few weeks. The actual printed version of the magazine will follow.
Crowd Sourcing
Cake Financial - Personal investing social network - Collective wisdom of the crowds around stock investing. Cake works with Fidelity, Schwab, eTrade, and all the big online stock brokerages. They import your current holdings and all your trading history. Cake will chart your investment results against the major indexes, and against friends and other people in the Cake system. People obviously can't see your actual holdings. Everything is expressed in terms of percentages and graphed against the indexes. I think they will have some challenges convincing users to load their real data. No one wants to be exposed as a less than stellar investor :-(
DocStoc - File sharing for business, legal, and technical documents. Find professional documents. It works like a stock photo site, say Getty Images, except it is focused on white papers, business plans, legal briefs, college term papers, and other documents. Do category or key word search for documents.
TeachThePeople - Social network for sharing educational documents. Their tagline is "The people powered university". Anyone can contribute content and knowledge to the site. They can make it available for free, supported by advertising, or they can charge money to view your content.
CrowdSpirit - crowdsourcing for electronic products. It is a community where someone with an idea can find manufacturing partners and potential customers. You can post an idea that you have for a consumer electronics product. Manufacturers review the ideas and contact the owners of ideas they would like to build. Users can find interesting first of its kind products and purchase them at the site.
Ponoko - Community to buy, sell, and share product designs. The site lets you design a product with materials, colors, shapes, and sizes. It could be used to design and build childrens toys. There are tools to help you design more sophisticated products, but it is not clear to me how easy it would be to actually use them. The site maintains a listing of products available for sale. Sort of like an eBay for custom made products.
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