We had a blast yesterday at our Mobile First Crunchup and 6th Annual Summer Party at August Capital. At our CrunchUp, we had some amazing speakers and special guests. Even Chamillionaire managed to make a certain speaker sweat and started a debate on why Android doesn’t have a decent phone.
Later in the day, the drinks were flowing at August Capital and even Ron Conway was spotted enjoying a margarita or two. Our summer party was a huge success and we want to thank everyone who came. We hope you had as much fun as we did. → Read More
Today at Aol West Headquarters, a number of entrepreneurs, VCs, and executives gathered to discuss the state of the mobile industry and mobile technology. After a series of individual panels, the day concluded with the crowd of panelists gathering together for a lively discussion about the future of mobile, current mobile trends gaining legs, as well as what’s missing. Chi-Hua Chien of Kleiner Perkins stepped in to give an example of what’s missing in the industry by sharing three particular business models that he’d like to see make their way into the space. → Read More
The next phase of the web will be ruled by mobile. It’s already happening. Just think about how many killer apps and products are mobile-first or mobile-only. This Friday right before our 6th annual summer party at August Capital, we’ll be holding a half-day Mobile First CrunchUp to talk about where are we in terms of creating mobile products and why so many startups are going after mobile before they even create a desktop Web product. How do the current platforms help or hinder this progress? What new mobile experiences are being created? And how are startups going to make money from all of this?
Our speakers will include mobile founders, engineers, and VCs from Instagram, Foursquare, Kleiner Perkins, Android, Tango, and more (see full agenda below). If you want to buy tickets, we sold out immediately. But you will be able to watch it streamed live right here on TechCrunch starting at 1PM PT on Friday. Please join us. However, we still do have some tickets for the August Capital summer party afterwards. Our last set of 100 tickets are on sale now. → Read More
“Mobile first.” It’s a mantra we’ve been hearing increasingly. For many developers and startup founders, they start with a mobile product first, and web second, if at all. We are seeing this across games, social, photo, payment, group messaging, media consumption, local deal apps and more. It’s just the way things are done.
On July 29, we’ll explore all of these issues and what it takes to go mobile first during a half-day CrunchUp in Palo Alto, preceding our 6th annual summer party at August Capital. We are selling tickets right now for $150. It will be an intimate affair with 250 people. A ticket gets you into the summer party at August Capital afterwards as well. We are also opening up 150 of those summer party tickets for $40 each. → Read More
Grammy award winning artist Chamillionaire (a.k.a Hakeem Seriki) has become a regular at tech conferences, perhaps because the hustle and flow culture of the rap business and the hustle and flow culture of the tech business are surprisingly similar. His stories of struggles between artists and music labels are resonant to anyone who’s experienced the relationship intricacies of startups and VCs. → Read More
We’re just two days away from our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco. The CrunchUp agenda is chock full of goodness. Since our first event back in July, the momentum around realtime has accelerated. We find ourselves awash in realtime streams of data, and these realtime streams are becoming the new center of attention on the Web. During the conference we’ll be drilling down into what’s next for realtime in terms of making this stream manageable, adding new tributaries to the stream such as geolocation data, and building businesses on top of it.
As if the amazing lineup of speakers (from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Seesmic, Brizzly, Hot Potato, Tweetmeme, DailyBooth) and startup product launch demos were not enough to drop everything right now and buy a ticket, I am going to give you one more reason. We’ll be giving away a half-day sailing excursion to one lucky ticket holder at the event.
And remember, you can justify taking a half-day off to go sailing as a “team-building” activity. → Read More
Ever since our first Realtime Crunchup last July, the momentum behind realtime streams just keeps getting stronger. Which is why TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I are putting together another Realtime Crunchup on November 20 in San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now (the price is $395 until the final week when they will go up to $495—there are only 500 available).
The one-day event will take place in San Francisco’s fabulous new Intercontinental Hotel. The agenda is still coming together (hey, they don’t call it realtime for nothing). But I am pleased to announce some phenomenal speakers who will be joining us. Many of the members of our Realtime Board will appear on stage, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, FriendFeed founder (now Facebook exec) Paul Buchheit, Microsoft’s FUSE Labs chief Lili Cheng, and angel investor Ron Conway. Twitter COO Dick Costolo will also sit down with me for a conversation about the transition from RSS to Realtime, among other subjects. → Read More
A lot has happened since our first Realtime Stream CrunchUp in July: Facebook bought FriendFeed, Twitter raised $100 million, Google Wave launched in private beta. So TechCrunchIt editor Steve Gillmor and I thought it would be a good time for another Realtime CrunchUp. The next one will be an all-day event on November 20 in San Francisco. I don’t want to give away too many details just yet, but mark your calendars, and we’ll start to release tickets next week.
For our first event we simply wanted to establish that the realtime phenomenon is in fact real and spreading widely beyond just Twitter. There is no question about that now. The next Realtime CrunchUp will take a deeper dive into where these streams are taking us. But here is what I’m really excited about. To help us think through these issues and guide us as we put together the themes,panels and people for our November Realtime CrunchUp, we have assembled a Realtime Board. These are all heavy-hitters making big bets on realtime. The inaugural members of the board are: → Read More
Thanks again to all of you who came out to our Real Time Stream CrunchUp and August Capital Summer Party. We broke 600 attendees to the Real Time Stream CrunchUp, double our initial expectations, and we hosted lots more of you at the August Capital outing. We had an amazing group of CrunchUp speakers to talk about new trends, boundaries and your passions. And we fit in 22 new product highlights from start-ups and big internet companies alike. It was a blast, and we’ve got the photos to prove it. → Read More
For the past few weeks, TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I have been pulling together speakers and demos for our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp this Friday. What started as a roundtable and a few demos, quickly grew into a full-fledged mini-conference with 45 speakers, including nearly 20 startup and product demos. Other than TechCrunch50, I’ve never seen so many CEOs and companies begging to be present at a conference before.
It barely fits into one day, but we’re gonna pack it in. The CrunchUp is nearly sold out, with nearly 400 attendees signed up so far. There are about 20 tickets left. (You can buy one here for $295, and is also the only way left to get into our annual August Capital Summer party). Some people in Silicon Valley are already complaining about the name Real-Time Stream, so we’ll give away a ticket to whoever can come up with the best alternative name in comments.
There will be panels on investing in real-time startups, the emerging stream platforms, real-time search, and how businesses are adapting from a marketing and customer relationship perspective. I’m equally excited about the demos, which I’ve been previewing. They will include never-before-seen stream readers (from Seesmic and others), new real-time search engines (Wowd), real-time media demos (Magma), mobile video (Qik), real-time CRM (Salesforce, Bantam), and ways to speed up RSS (Wordpress, Netvibes, and more).comments. (Full updated agenda after the jump). → Read More
Our Real Time Stream Crunchup is only a week and half away (get tickets here). We’ve been working hard to pull together the best startups, investors, engineers, and marketers developing products and platforms which take advantage of real-time data and communications in new ways. The real time stream is fast becoming a dominant metaphor for consuming information, increasingly displacing or at least transforming the traditional Web page. It has implications for startups, venture investors, media, search, and business, in general. We’ll explore all of these facets in panels, on-stage interviews, demos, and a roundtable.
Twitter to Facebook have already embraced the stream, but they are only the beginning. An whole new ecosystem of real time stream platforms and apps is emerging before our eyes. In fact, so many companies wanted to demo their product launches at the CrunchUp that we had to turn some away. But we still managed to fit in about a dozen demos, many of them will be seen for the first time.
The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more. Individual panels will do deep dives into the market opportunity, the real time platforms, real time search (something I am very excited about), and real time business. By real time business, I mean how businesses are adapting to the stream as a tool for marketing, brand management, customer engagement tool, internal communications, and even resource allocation. Putting together this conference has opened my eyes as to how far-reaching the real time stream is already, and these are early days.
I hope you can join us to see for yourself. Below is the (almost final) agenda: → Read More
The second batch of 150 tickets to attend our 4th annual summer outing on July 10 at August Capital are available now, courtesy of Eventbrite. They’ll go fast so grab them now. Update: This batch is sold out.
We are also selling tickets for our Real Time Stream CrunchUp earlier that day (a CrunchUp ticket includes entry to the party as well). The CrunchUp is a mini-conference exploring all aspects of the real time stream and its impact on everything from information consumption and search to media and business.
The lineup of speakers includes founders, CEOs, and top engineers from Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Google, Salesforce, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Collecta, Qik, and more. It is amazing how much activity is going on in this area. The number of stealth companies and products that want to launch at the event alone is overwhelming, and we are working hard to fit as many of them as we can into the schedule. (More details soon).
Friday, July 10
5:30 – 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA
Tickets are $20 to help manage the guest list and minimize no shows. Due to extremely limited availability, we regret that tickets are non-transferrable and non-refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. Additional tickets will be released over the next two weeks.
As usual, there will be lots of start-up demos, giveaways, drinks and fun. CrunchUp tickets include expedited entry to the August Capital outing.
Demo tables, photowalls, games and other sponsorships are available to make a memorable impression with MeetUp attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. → Read More
Save the date and let the frenzy begin. Our 4th annual summer meet-up at August Capital will be Friday, July 10 this year.
We can’t thank David Hornik and his partners at August Capital enough for having us back, yet again. Each year the party gets a little more lively, the deck gets a little more crowded, and yet David welcomes us back with unflinching enthusiasm. Thank you. We promise not to trash the place too much.
As our meet-ups have grown in popularity, we’ve expanded the format from simple mixers to timely editorial roundtables. Last year, the topic was the Mobile Web Wars just then brewing. This year, we’re taking on the real-time stream and dedicating a full day to exploring all the rivulets coming together to make it the trending topic on the Web. → Read More
