I just spent a week in San Francisco for 2 events.
TechCrunch 50 and
CTIA Wireless Entertainment.
TechCrunch is an excellent start for entrepreneurs looking to test-drive their product or services. You must be fully ready to participate to the event. Some came with almost nothing and will certainly end up by folding their project very soon. But some others were really good at it.
Among my winners and interesting companies - no special order of preference:
Producteev - Social Project Management
PeopleBrowsr - Social network aggregator in a web app
Swype - new predictive touch key solution on tiny screen
TrueCar - change the way cars are being sold
Zong- mobile payment system enabling web publishers to bill
Popego - another web social platform.
Lots of people were complaining – including
Robert Scoble – about poor execution of companies presenting at TechCrunch. I don’t think TechCrunch is to blame. The market is just saturated of low-ball ideas with lousy execution. I think TechCrunch took what was out there. I wonder how many ‘bad’ projects were submitted :)
The worst on stage was
IMINDI. How did they make it to the stage? What happened there? I can’t believe Mike and Jason were reviewing this!
Anyway the event was a great opportunity to meet friends, colleagues and entrepreneurs – no preference in order of appearance:
Bhaskar Roy,
Jackie Danicki,
David Marcus,
Jean David Benichou,
Loren Feldman,
Jeff Nolan,
Loic LeMeur,
Mike Arrington,
Jeff Sass,
Jeb Brilliant,
Iain Dodsworth,
Daniel Brusilovsky,
Sol Lipman,
David Speiser,
David Smith,
Christine Lu,
Ouriel Ohayon,
Jason Calacanis,
Robert Scoble,
Ilan Abehassera, Arik, Orli…
And of course my buddies
Pat Phelan, Bernard Murphy,
Marc Rochman and Chris Kennedy –special thanks to you Chris, you did a fantastic job.
TechCrunch thru my eyes on
Flickr. And you must watch this exceptional moment when Mike Arrington found out Pat broke his iPhone:
Disclaimer – I’m a shareholder in Producteev. And I really support their dedication, execution and hard work.