This was the final session on Day 2 - and the title said it all. Some of these 5 entertainment startups target kids, some target adults!
FlowPlay is a gaming social networking site that targets the teen demographic. It consists of Flash-based animatable avatars, enabling you to interact with your virtual friends without revealing who you are. The main part of the site though is Flash-based online games. They currently have 100 games, not all of them in-house developed - some licensed from others. While you play, you can earn virtual money - with which you can buy virtual things for yourself (e.g. clothing). After dressing up your character, you can go to places, bars and hang out with your friends, dance, chat and have fun. The fact that there is a virtual economy inside the platform makes it quite attractive.
The third session of the day dealt with rich media and mashups. These companies all had something to do with images, music, or movies in some way. Below are summaries and thoughts from the five presentations in this group.
xtr3D is trying to change the way we interact with computers. Their software replaces the traditional mouse and keyboard with real-time 3D motion analysis. Their "3D Human Machine Interface" can translate your physical movements into mouse moves and keyboard clicks.
In the second session of the second day, it is the turn of advertising companies.
AdBrite has announced a new product: SPOTTT.com. It's a link exchange program that is very similar to LinkExchange (from the web 1.0 era). Just to remind you; LinkExchange was sold to Microsoft for $265M in 1998.
Started by FuckedCompany's founder Philip Kaplan, AdBrite says they are bringing back LinkExchange with new innovations. Instead of LinkExchange's 2:1 ad publishing program, they have a 1:1 display program - this means for every one ad you publish, your ad is published on other sites as well. Tony Hsieh, co-founder of LinkExchange, is also assisting with the product.
The second and final day of the TechCrunch40 conference is underway with the first of the final four start up sessions. Session 5 focuses on productivity and web applications. Below are my thoughts about each of the startups that presented.
Xobni ("inbox" spelled backwards), makes the Insight plugin for Microsoft Outlook that adds social networking features to your email. The plugin extracts a social graph from your email conversations. Xobni says that email is already used as a file manager, contact manager, todo list and social network and their software just ties those functions together. For example, the plugin can reveal connections between people who have emailed you and create a historical view of your contact with an individual.
The last session of the 1st day at TechCrunch40 was about crowdsourcing.
Note: for a full round-up of the day's action at TC40, check out Allen Stern's sterling effort at Center Networks.
Cake Financial is a financial sharing platform backed by Ron Conway. It allows people to share portfolios and real time transactions with others. The site can be integrated with services such as E*Trade and Charles Schwab. This sharing feature allows you to chart yourself against other people and the market normals. You see what your friends are doing, you get notified in real time, and so on. So it's financials, enriched with social networking features.
Session 3 was of community and collaboration startups. Two of the
participants were from Korea, showing the internationalization
of web 2.0.
StoryBlender is a promising video mashup startup from Korea. Video editing is not new, but this one's approach is like a 'video wiki' - it lets you mash up videos collaboratively, with your friends and peers. The interface they demonstrated was very easy and straightforward. You can easily add music, video, text and animate things. No need to be a pro, no special skills needed.
The second session of the first day of the TechCrunch40 conference was on the topic "Mobile and Communications." There were very interesting companies but unfortunately, they all suffered bad connection & coverage problems, so they couldn't pitch their products so well. Here they are:
With additional writing by Josh Catone.
This morning saw the first five startups at the TechCrunch40 event hit the floor and presented to journalists, investors, and early adopters. The first session focused on search startups. It's interesting to note that one third of the presenters at the TC40 are from outside USA. Below are quick reviews of the first five companies to present.
Powerset is a natural language processing-based search engine that raised $12.5 million a year ago to create what many have touted as a "Google killer." Company founder Barney Pell said this morning that interacting with today's search engines is like talking to a 2 year old. What Powerset does to change that is index the web semantically and extract meaningful relations.
