Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done.
Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small early adopter community and into critical, mainstream usage. While the initial launch and traction proved extremely exciting, it misled us into believing there was a larger market ready to adopt our product. This post-mortem is an attempt to describe the fundamental flaws in our product model and, in particular, the difficulties presented by events as a content type. → Read More
The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
We’re creatures of habit. We go where we’ve already gone. That’s why Facebook’s new Suggested Events feature I just discovered is so powerful — it knows where we’ve been thanks to our checkins. Replacing the old Friends’ Events sub-tab of the home page’s Events bookmark, Suggested Events helps you discover things to do that take place at venues you’ve checked in to, that friends are RSVP’d to, that are hosted by Pages you Like, or a combination. The feature could reduce the need third-party event discovery apps, and get more people out of their houses to attend concerts, club nights, and conferences. → Read More
We are gearing up for 2012 and getting ready to bring you some major events you will want to put on your calendars. Our dates are already locked in for the Crunchies, Disrupt NYC and SF, and our annual summer bash at August Capital. International events are also in the works.
The Crunchies—January 31
TechCrunch will kick off 2012 with The Crunchies along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat on Tuesday, January 31, 2012. The tech party to start the year will move to Davies Symphony Hall this year for both the awards ceremony and the famous after party. Nominations for the entrepreneurial spirited categories are in and being tabulated. Voting begins in early January.
Disrupt NYC—May 19-23
TechCrunch Disrupt will return to New York in 2012 with the pizza-and-caffeine-fueled Hackathon on May 19 – 20, 2012. The TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference will follow on May 21 – 23, 2012 where our fun loving friends at Shaker will pass the Disrupt Cup to the newest Startup Battlefield winner. → Read More
This summer, Tandem Entrepreneurs raised a $40 million fund to continue investing in its incubator and capital fund, both focused exclusively on startups building solutions for the mobile space. One of the four companies (which includes JungleApps, GimmieWorld, and Flit) funded in Tandem’s most recent batch is coming out of private beta today to get young people off the couch and into the fray.
UpOut, as its name implies, is an online event discovery service that wants to get you involved in fun activities that are happening right now, in realtime. Founded by two young Babson College entrepreneurs, Martin Shen and William King, UpOut is intending to do for local events what Yelp has done for the local restaurant market, showing what’s nearby, what’s inexpensive, and what people like you are recommending. → Read More
Sometimes you want to go out, but aren’t sure what’s going on in your city that would interest you. SeatGeek, the ticket search engine for live events, is launching an event discovery engine today called Columbus that helps you find concerts, sporting events, and live shows in your area. It is a “Pandora for live events” says SeatGeek co-founder Jack Groetzinger.
You train Columbus by telling it 4 or 5 bands and sports teams you like then it produces a calendar of events filled with its recommendations. It is all tied to upcoming events in SeatGeek’s database, so the calendar keeps updating all the time. You can buy tickets as well. The recommendations get better over time as the algorithm learns more about your preferences. → Read More
Good startups often emerge from situations where the founder is attempting to solve a problem they themselves have. That was certainly the case with collegiate events site Fampus, created by 22-year old Brittany Brody, now a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As a new arrival to the university in 2008, Brody wanted to get involved on campus, but was frustrated by the lack of a dedicated site that listed both on-campus and nearby community events. So she created Fampus. → Read More
Our 6th annual summer August Capital Party is almost here! Today we are releasing our next set of 100 tickets. The August Capital Party will be held on the beautiful and sunny Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park on July 29th from 5:30 – 10:00pm, following our Mobile First CrunchUp. You will see an amazing mix of startup demos, giveaways, drinks and much more. Tickets are $40 and sell out very quickly. If you would like to come, please act fast. If you aren’t able to purchase tickets today, stay tuned as we will release more tickets next week. → Read More
We only have a couple more weeks left until our 6th annual summer party at August Capital. Our first two batches of 100 tickets sold out in under an hour. Today we are releasing 100 more. The party will follow our Mobile First CrunchUp on July 29th and will be held in Menlo Park from 5:30 – 10:00pm. There will be a mix of startup demos, drinks, giveaways, networking and fun on one of the prettiest roads in Silicon Valley. The tickets tend to sell out very fast, so be sure to act quickly if you would like to come. If you’re not able to get a ticket today, stay tuned for a ticket giveaway this weekend. We will also release our next set of tickets next week.
Tickets are now on sale here. → Read More
Summer is here and our 6th annual August Capital Party is just around the corner. Last week we released 100 tickets, all of which sold out in under an hour. Today we are releasing our next set of 100 tickets. The August Capital Party will be held on the gorgeous Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park on July 29th from 5:30 – 10:00pm, preceding our Mobile First CrunchUp. This party is a great way to see an amazing mix of startup demos, network, enter into giveaways, have some drinks and some fun in the sun. Tickets are $40 and tend to sell out very quickly. If you would like to come, please act fast. If you aren’t able to purchase tickets today, stay tuned – we will have a ticket giveaway this Friday and will release more tickets next week.
Tickets are on sale here. → Read More
Now that we’ve finally caught our breath from Disrupt in New York City, it’s time to to bring Disrupt back home to San Francisco. (We like to keep things moving around here). To get things rolling, we are accepting applications for startups to launch at the Disrupt Startup Battlefield in San Francisco, September 12-14, 2011. So what are you waiting for? Applications for the Startup Battlefield can be submitted starting today.
Do you think your startup can be the next Getaround, Qwiki, or Soluto—and make it through the judges gauntlet to claim the top prize of $50,000, the “Disrupt Cup” and accolades of the crowd? Sure it can. But you’ll never know unless you apply. → Read More
We have just announced our Mobile First CrunchUp and 6th Annual Summer Party at August Capital! Tickets for both events are on sale now and are currently going very fast. For today, we are giving away 2 free tickets to our summer party at August Capital. We will have a great mix of startup demos, fun giveaways, drinks and more. The party will be in Menlo Park on the best deck in all of Sand Hill Road on July 29th. You can read more about the details and directions here. → 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
On Thursday night, 60,000 people will fill up Central Park to watch the Black Eyed Peas in concert. Tickets are sold out, but you can watch it here streamed live in glorious 360-degree vision at 7PM ET. The Black Eyed Peas first used the 360-degree cameras in their iPhone app that puts you inside a music video, but this will be the first time they will try it live. The concert will be filmed and streamed using 360-degree cameras from Immersive Media. This will be the first time a major music concert is streamed live in 360-degrees.
The cameras used are an advanced version of what Google uses to capture its Street View, except this shoots video instead of still photos. They use 11 cameras built into a sphere, shooting simultaneously, and stitching together all the different shots, encoding it, and streaming it with a 2-second latency. Viewers will be able to pan around and control the angle. → Read More
After 30 startups launching on stage at Disrupt NYC, it all culminated in the final battle between six finalists: Getaround, BillGuard, Sonar, Do@, ccLoop, and InvoiceASAP. What made this final battle so fascinating to watch was not only the quality of the startups, but the quality of the judges: Fred Wilson, Ron Conway, Marisa Mayer, Roelof Botha, and Josh Kopelman.
We put together the entire final battle in the embedded video player above. Each demo is a separate video, and you can skip around by hovering over the video and hitting the channel button once it starts to play. Individual videos for all of Disrupt can also be found here. And below are links to our original writeups for each company with videos showing their first demos that got them to the final round. → Read More
I am still recovering from Disrupt NYC. It was our biggest event ever, and we’ll be posting more videos and highlights throughout the next few days. But here are a couple of charts that give a snapshot of the activity around the event as measured by Tweets with the event hashtag #TCDisrupt (thanks for the charts, Simply Measured).
In the chart above you can see the distribution of Tweets across the three days. That spike on Day three was related to an iPad giveaway linked to people Tweeting out the hashtag, which was Tweeted out 18,177 times (and that doesn’t include tweets that used other hashtags such as #disrupt or simply mentioned Disrupt without a hashtag).
But I particularly like the chart below, which shows the distribution of Tweets with the #TCDisrupt hashtag which also mentioned the names of the six Battlefield finalists. → Read More
In case you missed it, hackers were busy building new ideas and products at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Hackathon in New York last night. Fueled by RedBull, coffee, and massive quantities of junk food, hackers burned the midnight oil last night, preparing to show off their designs to the judges, who included VC Jeff Clavier and Canv.as founder Christopher Poole, and Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz.
We had a chance to sit down with the event’s youngest hacker; fourteen-year-old Jake Essman. Essman, a New York native, teamed up with fellow engineers Jesse Leone, William Li, and Feliks Beygel to create buyby, a shopping search engine. BuyBy is fairly simple—you use the site to find where a product is located at a store. So you could search for a ‘white t-shirt’ and the search engine will not only show you a list of online stores that have that product, but it will also show you stores that sell the product nearby your location. → Read More
It’s been a whirlwind twenty-four hours: yesterday, hundreds of talented coders poured into New York City’s Pier 94 for a marathon session of coding that ran through the night. At 9:30 AM this morning, they pushed their last lines of code. And beginning at 10:30 AM, each of them took the stage for a rapid-fire series of quick pitches showcasing what they’d built. Now it’s time to announce the winners.
The top four teams will each get a chance to show off their app during the third day of TechCrunch Disrupt (there are also two honorable mentions). Congratulations to the winners, and to all of the extremely talented hackers who made it through the night and built some very cool apps.
The Winners
We’re midway through the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon (which, by the way, you should be watching live here), and the range of stuff that the hackers have managed to throw together in a mere 24 hours is astounding. Some are trying to find their big payday — others are going for the cool factor or a quick laugh. Some, however, spent their weekend trying to change the world for the better.
It’s the job hunter’s biggest conundrum: the more you need a job, the harder it is to get a job. Lose your job, and you’ll run low on cash. Run low on cash, and you can’t pay for your cell phone — but once you’ve ditched your cell phone, it’s a whole lot harder for potential employers to get in touch. Hackathon group Joinable is trying to solve this problem by providing non-profit organizations with manageable voicemail boxes which they can give out to their patrons/beneficiaries for free. → Read More
