Causecast.com is a philanthropic site that brings a number of major figures in politics and entertainment together to pitch and bring attention to 10 non-profit companies a month. → Read More
Video search is an unsolved problem. VideoSurf applies hardcore computer vision technology to this problem and finds relevant results beyond what may already be available to text-based search methods. In the demo at TechCrunch50, the startup showed how you might want to search for a scene in the show Entourage. You can drill down to the show, and then are presented with thumbnails of all of the… → Read More
Grockit, the mysterious online learning site that has been operating in stealth for the past year and has raised a total of over $10 million, has finally revealed itself to the public, and it doesn’t disappoint. The site calls itself a “Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game”, taking gaming concepts that have made World of Warcraft a massive hit and applying it to what amounts to an online… → Read More
Jean-Marie Huillot wants to create “a Wikipedia of pictures,” a Photopedia, if you will. The former CTO of NeXT and Apple’s Applications Division launched Fotonauts today at TechCrunch50. Fotonauts helps photographers organize, upload, synchronize, and share their photos. But it does more than that. It adds data from Wikipedia, Google Maps, and other places to photo albums and then publishes… → Read More
Image search engine Gazopa is the third TechCrunch50 company from Japan (following Opentrace and Sekai Camera).
Michael Arrington introduced the Hitachi-backed service with a warning to judge Bradley Horowitz from Google, saying: “Brad, you’re gonna hate the next company, seriously” (a tongue-in-cheek statement since Horowitz got his PhD in graphics and image processing).
Gazopa uses proprietary… → Read More
Playce is a social gaming platform that actually lets you play games in real geographical locations with graphics quality that blows away most web-based games. Because the game is completely online, whenever you want to start playing you simply select a game and connect. There are no downloads and the geography and graphics are phenomenal. → Read More
Games for the Oprah crowd is how Akoha co-founder Austin Hill describes his online gaming system. The system uses “mission cards” that friends pass to each other along with a mission i.e. give someone a book or buy someone a meal. You then register that card and perform the mission. Using clever social networking tools you can see how your missions effect others, compete against friends, and… → Read More
Day two at TechCrunch50: Awesome.
None of the day one problems with the Internet access, thank God. The celebrities had left the stage. It was all about the startups on stage and in the demopit.
Day two sessions included Collaboration, Finance & Statistics, Mobile and Language/Platform Tools. At least two startups had standing ovations: Swype (virtual keyboard input) and Tonchidot (real… → Read More
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/280032
We’ll be streaming TechCrunch50 here Monday through Wednesday so everyone can see the conference’s demos for themselves as they happen.
You can also find our written coverage of the conference here and coverage from other news outlets below.
Update: All the companies have presented. The winner will be announced later tonight. → Read More
Devunity is a collaborative coding platform that allows developers to simultaneous view and modify code on their browser without having to download a client. The service has built-in support for a number of popular APIs, allowing users to simply click on one of the options to generate the relevant framework in their code.
After developing a program on Devunity, the platform will suggest a… → Read More
AlfaBetic is a translation service that offers publishers a free way to have their content translated to ten of the web’s most popular languages, which it says will expose them 842 million potential new readers.
The service first runs text through a computer, which is similar to the web-based translation systems offered by Google Translate and a number of other sites. After generating this… → Read More
To round out the day’s schedule at TechCrunch50, Jason Calacanis interviewed Mark Cuban, the founder Broadcast.com, HDNet, and several other companies. He has also been an angel investor for several startups including SlideShare, Goowy, RedSwoosh, Box.net, Calacanis’ own Weblogs, Inc and Mahalo.
Below are our notes, which try to capture a fast-paced exchange that included Cuban’s entrepreneurial… → Read More
Postbox is desktop email application that includes a host of features that led judge Tim O’Reilly to call it a “personal information management client.” The company presented as part of today’s session on Language & Communication Tools, and comes from an experienced team that includes Scott MacGregor, one of the original developers of Mozilla’s Thunderbird Email client. And as soon as I… → Read More
Sekai Camera (World Camera in Japanese) is an iPhone-exclusive social tagging service, developed by Tokyo-based mobile application provider Tonchidot. The presentation (and following Q&A) was pretty hard to understand because of the language barrier but Sekai Camera turned out to be a crowd-pleaser nonetheless. → Read More
Swype is an amazing gesture-based data entry system that truly blew our collective minds at TC, CG, and MC. To type, you simply connect letters together using a stylus or finger and predictive text to pick letters and words out of seemingly unintelligible squiggles.
Above is a video of two of the judges trying out the technology for… → Read More
TechCrunch50 company FitBit (which demoed its health activity monitoring device live as well) put up this slide to underscore its point that obesity is a growing problem, particularly in the geek world. The slide shows how the distribution of T-shirt sizes at the Linux Symposium has shifted towards the XL and XXL side of the scale.
I’m convinced. Linux programmers need FitBit. → Read More
Today at TechCrunch 50, Mytopia debuted their cross-platform development framework RUGS.
The idea is simple: code once, and an application is automatically translated for compatibility on a range of mobile and Web platforms. RUGS applications are running natively on each platform, with porting solutions for Flash and every major mobile operating system. They demonstrated support for Windows… → Read More
The first “gadget” we’ve seen at TC50 is the FitBit, a wireless 3D pedometer and diet monitoring system that will cost $99 and connect online to upload activity levels and food intake. The device clips to almost any piece of clothing and is almost invisible. When you pass by the wireless base station the FitBit transmits all of its collected data and transmits it to the website where it is… → Read More
Loren Feldman v. Loic Le Meur. FIGHT!
Introducing Robert Scoble as Don King. → Read More
ExchangeP wants to change the way you trade companies. Sure, you can do it with real money for public companies, but ExchangeP wants to let you do that with private companies.
By default, each company will get 1 million outstanding shares and once users sign up, they will have $100,000 to spend on their investments.
Once the company is added to the listing, it can be traded in the market until… → Read More
Me-trics wants to be “Google analytics for your life.” By doing that, it collects data from countless places on the Web based on your activity and will let you input data like blood pressure or stress level to find correlations between something you have observed and the data you input.
The startup presented today during the Collaboration session of TechCrunch50. You can watch the video of its… → Read More
Today, you will find 900 billion charts offline but only 40 million charts online. Because of that, iCharts believes it currently must be too difficult to bring charts online. So it has developed an easy way to create, share, and embed interactive charts.
The self-proclaimed “YouTube for interactive charts,” iChart provides a way for users to take data they created with other services like Excel… → Read More
Tingz has developed shareable widgets that work across multiple platforms such as the phone, computer, and TV. They can be used to manage and synchronize your data across these devices.
Tingz works on Mac OS X, the iPhone, and in Windows Media Center. In each, the interface is basically the same, which Tingz believes is the most useful feature it offers. And what it offers is quite substantial… → Read More
PersonalRIA is a service that helps you monitor your portfolio and connect you with reliable investment advisors who can better manage your investments.
After signing up for PersonalRIA, users can start looking for investment advisors. The site gives the users information about why they buy or sold each stock, full disclosure about the advisor, and specific information about their trading… → Read More
Erick Schonfeld and Mark Pincus just took the stage at TechCrunch50 to ask twenty (or so) questions to top venture capitalists, most of which were submitted by readers. Sumant Mandal (Clearstone Venture Partners), George Zachary (Charles River Ventures), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Raj Kapoor (Mayfield Fund) and Ross Levinsohn (Velocity Interactive Group) participated.
My real time notes… → Read More
What if you could expand your own thoughts by collecting everyone else’s and connecting them to your mind? IMINDI wants to help you do just that by creating a “mind map” that connects thoughts and ideas.
IMINDI’s mind map is chart showing thoughts and those that branch off from them. Users can click on thoughts to see which thoughts on connected to them. IMINDI calls it the “journey of thought”… → Read More
Mixtt believes that social networks don’t do everything they should. Instead of focusing on just one person, Mixtt thinks that the best way for people to use social networks is to socialize outside the online world and do so in groups.
Mixtt lets you sign up with your friends and give your group a name. Once complete, you can start adding events to your group calendar and find other groups in… → Read More
Popego helps people find more meaning in their social graphs online. The Argentinean startup presented today during the Collaboration session of TechCrunch50 and has just launched its service into public beta. You can watch the video of Popego’s presentation here.
Once signed up for Popego, you can add usernames from all of your social networks (passwords are not required). The service then… → Read More
What a day. 1,700 people streamed into the San Francisco Design Center at 9 am on Monday morning to help launch the first group of 52 startups at TechCrunch50. Dozens more startups were camped out in the demopit.
First, the bad news. The internet was down completely for half the day, and never really worked that well even when it was up. We had dedicated access for the launching companies, so the… → Read More
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/280032Powered by Ustream
We’ll be streaming TechCrunch50 here all day so everyone can see the conference’s demos for themselves as they happen.
You can also find our written coverage of the conference here and coverage from other news outlets below.
Update:Done for the day. Come back tomorrow. → Read More
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