Saturday, September 13, 2008

TechCrunch 50 is over. See you next year :)

I just spent a week in San Francisco for 2 events. TechCrunch 50 and CTIA Wireless Entertainment.

TechCrunch

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.

2 comments:

Open Web Awards - Producteev said...

Thanks Florian, and it's great to have such a shareholder on board :)

Yihong Ding said...

Hi Florian,

It's great to see your cover of the TC50 story. The only thing I do not agree to you is about Imindi.

In fact, Imindi is the indeed most innovative company in this TC50 show. Their vision is beyond most of the people under stage. However, I agree that their presentation was bad.

But believe me. As long as the two Imindi co-founders can learn from this lesson (and I know they have) and do not give up (which I sincerely wish), in no more than two years, the world will tell the two as the next Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Also, you should believe the Mike and Jason had carefully interviewed every company. "One TC50 company is picked without thinking?" This was impossible! Among the two, Jason was especially seeing the future of Imindi. Unfortunately, he was afraid to speak out his really feeling after this bad presentation.

The only thing I could say now. Maybe this innovation is still a little bit ahead of the time (though I must say that the presentation is far less than good enough to really describe the potential of the vision).

Imindi is a breathtaking product. Though she is now an ugly-looking newborn, she will be among the most beautiful when growing up. However, just like the unly duckling, who has the eye to look through the surface into her deep heart?

Yihong