TechCrunch 40 Session 4: Crowd Sourcing
Session four as follows, including our live notes.
Cake Financial
Online investing service that offers social recommendations, without disclosing personal details. “There is nothing fake about Cake!”.
Homepage provides all the information usually found at the brokerage firm, but provides aggregated data from multiple firms.
Cake calculates annual returns across multiple brokers.
Interesting: you can chart your success against others, friend, associates etc.
Tools also allow you to look at trades other Cake members have made, the idea being that you can see what users with better results are investing in.
You can also see who is investing in a stock, eg: you can see everyone who holds Cisco, and then see what they are buying and selling as well.
DocStoc
Interesting introduction: fake customer testimonials from the audience.
A professional document service, comes with comments, profiles etc…
Docs can be found by keyword search, filters which include community filters, category search.
Documents can be previewed via popup and shared.
Includes registration for blogs as well.
Teach The People
Starts with intro and rhetorical questions. About bringing learning to the time poor.
The product brings knowledge and people seeking that knowledge together, with the ability to monetize content.
Users get 5gb of storage space for lectures.
There is also an open questions section..Q&A model.
Teach The People is a “community model not a teaching model.”
CrowdSpirit
A Q&A community consultation service for problems and ideas that may be possible. Deeper than say Yahoo Answers, focus is on products and prototypes.
Ponoko
An online toy creating site, make online and “make it real.”
Users are able to add designs, materials, color etc..
Expert panel: Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Rajeev Motwani, and Yossi Vardi
Ron Conway likes Ponoko. Rajeev likes Cake Financial.
2 minutes ago Jason Calacanis said how wonderful the Wifi had become…at it’s been bad ever since, talk about jinxing it.
Yossi Vardi suggests that Cake should also track sexual prowess, to the merriment of the crowd.
Don Dodge likes Cake + Teach the People, asks question to Teach: selling content is a hard ask on the internet, particularly when you don’t know what you’re getting. TtP: they are running background checks on people offering lessons so they can rate the people offering the lessons.
Yossi asked Ron Conway whether he uses Cake (Conway is an investor). Conway says other people handle his money and Yossi asks whether it is his wife. Yossi follows up with “how many of the 162 companies you invest in do you use”…much laughter, Conway says 20%.
Summary: Cake Financial was the strongest idea according to the panel, and correctly so. Ponoko was the most original.