I’m not sure what the best part of the second annual TechCrunch Europe ChristmasCrunch was. Between the numerous cool startup pitches, the collected wisdom of our terrifically qualified panels and individual speakers, the auction of signed copies of the LDN Nude Tech Calendar that raised £2,000 for Take Heart India and of course, the annual air guitar competition, it was a pretty eventful night.
We had two pitching competitions featuring seven 3 minute pitches (plus Q&A) from startups specifically in the ‘realtime’ space; and twelve 60-second ‘free for all’ pitches.
As is the tradition at our annual Festive event the pitches were judged by the audience via votes on Twitter and an innovative new method – hand clapping.
One Minute Pitch Competition
Winner: Catwalk Genius, crowd-funding fashion site
Runners up: nurphy, replacing email with conversations; Fat Student, location-specific part-time job board for UK students; and social media aggregator Friendbinder (who also pitched at Le Web 09)
Three Minute Pitch Competition
Winner: kuwalu.com, realtime RSS feeds curation
Runners up: nsyght, realtime social search engine; and koogaloo, a location-specific social calendaring app that notifies you of events and deals near you.
Our rocking video partners Newspepper recorded the whole lot for posterity. Here’s the archived video for you to stream at your leisure:
James Whittaker, UX & UI Architect at TweetDeck (at 00:01:00).
Jennie Lees, founder of realtime sentiment analysis tool FestBuzz (at 00:05:30).
Marco Kaiser, director of engineering at Seesmic (at 00:04:50)
Realtime Services Panel from 00:11:30
Keynote: “The future of Realtime Content and News” by Nick Halstead, founder of TweetMeme, from 00:44:30
“The realtime effect on entertainment content” by David Maher Roberts, CEO, The Filter from 00:21:02
“How Google Wave affects the future of realtime collaboration” by Daniel Tenner, co-founder of Woobius (from 00:34:00)
Realtime content panel (from 00:54:12)
Featuring Alberto Nardelli from Tweetminster; Ian Hogarth from Songkick; William Fischer from Twitter Jobsearch; and Tim Morgan from Mint Digital.
Pitches! (from 01:30:00)