Bloggers love to have widgets and badges on their sites that communicate their personal brand in the form of interests, causes, and affiliations. Korean startup SealTale is tapping into the widget craze by making it easy for bloggers to create widgets that express their affinity to particular interest groups and products. The TechCrunch50 finalist lets bloggers pick “seals” which typically… → Read More
As social networks target younger and younger audiences, ToonsTunes is taking a musical approach. Announced today at TechCrunch50, its virtual world for tweens takes place in a space station where their avatars live in personal pods and can record songs in a virtual studio called the Mix-O-Matic.
In the Mix-O-Matic they create tracks by selecting from thousands of different instrumental… → Read More
Kids today with their YouTube and video games, how do they expect to learn anything? Alex Moctezuma has an idea. How about teaching them with games and videos. Moctezuma is the CEO of Mexican startup Clasemovil, which he just showed a demo of at TechCrunch50.
Clasemovil is a fun learning community aimed at K-12th grade across Latin America. It is filled with hundreds of interactive lessons in… → Read More
Every parent knows how important story time is for their kids. It is a ritual, an opportunity to connect, and a learning moment. But too often it gets crammed into the few minutes left at the end of the day before putting them to bed. The average working mom spends two hours a day with her children, but only 4.5 minutes of that time is devoted to reading. Working fathers are even more remiss… → Read More
The magicians Penn & Teller have this card trick. Except it’s not really a card trick, it’s an iPhone app. You tell a friend that you know Penn & Teller and that they can guess cards remotely. To prove it you ask them to name a card, then you pull out your iPhone and tell your friend to send an SMS message to Penn (or sometimes it’s Teller). They always respond, because you are such good… → Read More
And so it begins. The finalists are prepped and double-prepped. The Demopit companies are overflowing in the halls. And we are about to start this year’s TechCrunch50. For all of you following along at home (or the office), we’ll be streaming the conference live via Ustream here on TechCrunch as well as on the TechCrunch50 website. You can also vote for your favorite startups on this page… → Read More
TechCrunch50 has begun and we are thrilled to announce the 46 startups that were chosen from more than 1,000 applications from 39 different countries. Here’s a list of the 46 companies that are launching over the next few days. Remaining companies are to be determined and will be chosen from the DemoPit.
You can follow along from home (or the office), we’ll be streaming the conference live via… → Read More
DotSpots, a TechCrunch50 startup that demo’d its product last year, received a good amount of buzz and even a compliment from judge Marissa Mayer. Today, the startup is launching its annotation platform to the public, after thousands of people signed up to use the service over the past year.
DotSpots’ service is simple—it lets users annotate any part of a web page, from a single quote to the… → Read More
It’s less than a day before the third annual (and third sold out) TechCrunch50 launch event in San Francisco. Fifty startups are preparing to launch their new products on stage in front of thousands of people. Are they nervous? Yep. But its all part of a rite of passage into the wonderfully chaotic world of being a startup entrepreneur.
A bunch of good articles giving advice to launching startups… → Read More
Every startup needs exposure. So as part of TechCrunch50, we’ve signed up some major partners to give $1.3 million worth of advertising to the startups launching at the conference next week. We’ve already announced the first $1 million of this advertising from Facebook, Google (Youtube), Microsoft (Bing) and MySpace.
They are being joined in their generosity by Break Media, Glam Media, AIM… → Read More
TechCrunch50 is less than a week away, and we’re putting the final touches on what will be a jam-packed two days of startup launches, hallway pitches, and new ideas. We’re proud to announce new Twitter COO and FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, RedPoint Ventures partner and Zimbra founder Satish Dharmaraj, Google Apps product VP Bradley Horowitz, Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary and… → Read More
We guard the final 50 new products and startups that launch at TechCrunch50 closely, and don’t let anyone know the final list until the day of the event (not even press gets the list). But we also generally pre-announce one of the presenting companies to give the audience a taste of what’s to come.
And this year, I’m very proud to announce that Penn & Teller will be launching a new consumer… → Read More
The following message is brought to you by TechCrunch50 co-host Jason Calacanis.
In order to build excitement for the TechCrunch50 conference we’ve convinced the bean counters at TechCrunch HQ to let us give away one $2,500 ticket a day for the next 45 days. That’s more than $100,000 worth of TechCrunch50 tickets.
So, if you’re broke, laid off or too cheap to buy a ticket, all you have to do is… → Read More
If you weren’t one of the 1,800 people who attended TechCrunch50 earlier this month to watch 52 startups launch, and didn’t catch the UStream live stream of the event, don’t worry. You can download around 25 hours of live footage – the entire three day conference – if you’ve got the room on your hard drive. The BitTorrent links are below. Each file is about 5 GB. → Read More
Beet.tv, a media company that specializes in providing videos for business-oriented individuals, was busy at TechCrunch50 this past month. The company recorded videos with over 30 companies and has posted them to its site for the world to see.
Want to find out what Me-trics had to say after it got off stage? Interested in a one-on-one discussion with Yammer about how the company works? You can… → Read More
By far, the biggest crowd pleaser at last week’s TechCrunch50 was a demo by the Japanese startup Tonchidot for a mobile social tagging product it is developing called Sekai Camera. The Japanese CEO Takahito Iguchi overcame a very noticeable language barrier and deflected serious questions from the judges through sheer will of character. He had the… → Read More
Want to drill down to see how different iPhone apps are doing? You can click around iTunes and collect your own data, or you can visit the Application Ranking section of Mobclix and see the breakdown of iPhone apps in each category. Paid apps still outnumber free apps. Of the 3,420 apps in the iTunes App Store, a full 2,604 (76 percent) are paid, and only 816 are free. (About the same ratio… → Read More
Last week at TechCrunch50, a slew of great companies were showing off their services in the DemoPit. And although not all of them were able to fully show off how their sites could work on-site, one company, MyJambi, was lucky enough to do just that.
MyJambi is a social marketplace where users can buy and sell services online without the use of anonymous service postings. Anything from childcare… → Read More
Twitter cofounder Evan Williams (pictured right, with Tim O’Reilly) will certainly be invited back as an expert panelist at next year’s TechCrunch50 conference. in addition to taking a half day to judge nine of the launching startups, he wrote a long blog post today with his “day after” notes, saying “I find most of the implications of a product or company, if it’s really interesting, aren’t… → Read More
TrueCar joins GoodGuide in helping consumers obtain more information about the products they buy – information that sellers don’t necessarily want them to have. In TrueCar’s case, that information is simple yet elusive: just how much you should pay for a new car.
TrueCar aggregates data from a variety of (mostly unnamed) sources to determine how much money other people have paid for new cars… → Read More
The last company to present yesterday at TechCrunch50 was picked by the audience from the more than 100 additional companies vying for attention in our DemoPit. Every attendee got three TC50 poker chips that they could give to a DemoPit company each day, and the one with the most chips at the end of the conference became our 52nd finalist. This year’s winner was Iamnews, a crowdsourced newsroom… → Read More
Three jam-packed days, and 52 startup demos later, we finally have a winner for this year’s TechCrunch50. Every day, the presentations just seemed to get stronger and stronger. There were so many strong contenders this year that we are awarding five jury selection prizes, in addition to the top prize. But there must be a winner, and that winner is…Yammer.
Israel seems to be the country with the single biggest foreign contingent at TC50 with no less than 6 of the 50 companies presenting on stage. Some more Israeli startups can be found in the demo pit, the exhibition space and just walking around the venue floor shopping for investors, customers and partners.
Here is a round-up of the 6 Israeli companies that presented on stage: → Read More
There are countless travel sites available on the web that detail the best things to do in every major city on the planet. But with so many options, actually booking a trip is a major hassle: attractions may close on seemingly random days, or may require reservations weeks in advance.
GoPlanit is a travel site that aims to simplify this process by generating your schedule for you. The site… → Read More
Product transparency was a popular theme in the twelfth and last session of TechCrunch50, Research and Recommendations, with two companies in particular helping consumers make better purchasing decisions. The first, GoodGuide, was met with unanimous acclaim from the expert panel for its efforts to inform consumers of the social, environmental and health “goodness” of personal care products and… → Read More
GoodRec is a web-based system for posting and finding recommendations from your friends and the world at large. The recommendations pop up on a map either in the browser or on a phone – specifically, in this case, the iPhone.
You can take photos of the locations or items or simply add a recommendation on the fly. You can recommend and look up multiple types of things including restaurants, books… → Read More
Atmosphir is a gaming platform and engine that allows users to easily create their own levels in a 3D world by painting basic elements into a three dimensional grid. After downloading a client application, users can play in their own levels, or they can visit the Atmosphir community website to play on any of the maps that have been uploaded by other users. The application is currently… → Read More
Desktop music-mixing software like GarageBand has liberated musicians from the sound studio. Now Bojam wants to liberate them from the constraints of geography or the isolation of their rooms. Bojam is a Web-based sound studio that lets musicians practice playing music, find other musicians around the world to jam with, and lay down tracks together on the same song.
Bojam is a fully functional… → Read More
The first two companies to present at this afternoon’s Vertical Social Networking session proved that niche social networks can be exciting, even for people outside of their respective niches.
On paper, a social network for bird watchers sounds like a joke. But the founders of Birdpost wowed the TechCrunch50 audience by presenting not only a very well-designed site but one that thoroughly… → Read More
Shattered Reality has released Kaos War, a multi-player game with absolute transparency and social network design functionality which allows the players – not a bunch of overpaid and overfed game designers – create future expansion packs and levels based on player requests. → Read More
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