After a great line up of innovative products this morning, the afternoon sessions looked kind of average. Maverick's demo came out of the lot though with a software application that prevents unwanted access to a mobile handset data.
For example, using simply text messaging (SMS), the owner of a stolen mobile device can remotely lock/hang/control its mobile phone and stop a thief using it.
Controlling remotely mobile phones is not knew and I've seen similar solutions at HP and Sybase.
"But the difference is that to do what we do you'll need a PC and their enterprise software solution. With Maverick, all you need is a cell phone with SMS enabled", explains Anil Ganjoo, VP sales and marketing for Maverick.
Is the long-hoped-for merger of Hollywood sparkle and Internet ubiquity finally taking place?
Don’t count on it. Yet, several companies took significant steps toward bringing studio-quality productions to this Web this week at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.
For years, entrepreneurs have seen bringing 3D environments and more polished video to the grainy, jerky Net as a holy grail of sorts.
During the "head to head" session (pictured), AllThingsD.com executive editors, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg responded to VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi question on why both Dow Jones (the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a subsidiary of News Corp) media superstars chose to attend the DEMOfall instead of TechCrunch50. A question that was enough to start Swisher's anti-Michael Arrington rant.
"Getting lectured on journalism ethics by Michael Arrington [TechCrunch blog and conference founder] is like getting parenting tips from Britney Spears", poked Swisher.
If you want a glimpse of what’s coming next, stop by the TechCrunch50 conference (photo courtesy of TechCrunch) this week in San Francisco.
Young (very young) Internet startups of every ilk unveiled an astonishing array of upcoming products and services set to redefine what we do online.
But don’t expect your journey to be easy. The conference’s wireless network was down most of the day and navigating your way about the exhibit floor of budding companies was difficult.
The show is in its second year and this week is hosting an impressive lineup of startups with next-generation Web products. Take Picad, for instance, a 1-year-old New York City company hoping to germinate a business linking pop-up ads to the photos people see as they browse the Web.
Brush your mouse across a photo of Hawaii and up might come a small ad from a travel agency. A photo from a Detroit car show could bring a tiny box with an ad from an auto company.
The goal is to link advertisers and publishers, and to deliver relevant ads, said Raymond Chan, Picad co-founder. As if publishers aren’t frantically looking for new ways to make money!
Another winning idea came from Snipd, founded in February and now headquartered on the couch of one of its co-founders. Snipd wants to let you clip images, passages of text, or snippets of videos that you find on the Web and then display them on your Facebook page or elsewhere.
The aim is to foster sharing, said co-founder Alex Schliker, who hopes to launch his service (at least in an early form) in two weeks.
At Hangout Industries, teenagers will be able to create virtual 3D spaces for their friends to come and, well, hangout. The service is in testing, but should be live by October, said co-founder Pano Anthos.
Visitors create “avatars,” or computer personas, when they arrive, and owners of a space can decorate their surroundings with pictures and furniture.
“Business don’t want to use avatars, but kids do,” said Anthos, who hopes to make money from companies willing to pay to have their products used in the online chambers. Makers of clothing, shoes, furniture and televisions are obvious candidates, he said.
Plastic Logic was for me the most innovative company that presented this morning. That was actually a very difficult pick because the others in the list were also very good.
The Mountain View, CA, start-up showed a thin (3/10 of an inch thick), light ("ounces not pounds!") and compact (the size of a sheet of paper) digital reader. The plastic, a strong and flexible 10.7" display is the key differentiator especially if you compare it with Amazon's Kindle.
The Plastic Logic Reader will be available in the second quarter of next year, with both wired USB and Bluetooth, and eventually Wi-Fi. Pricing has not been announced.
I'll be doing a seperate post for my other faves. And check out Plastic Logic demo after the jump.
The search giant says it already does this for books and maps. “Now we’re going to do this with newspapers,” said Marissa Mayer (pictured), vice president of search products and user experience. “I think this is really good for newspapers.”
Mayer made the announcement on the first day of the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. She said the service includes millions of articles from the newspapers The St. Petersburg Times and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
It will allow people to search for articles from archives and bring new users to the papers, she said. Google will share ad revenue with newspaper companies.
Close to the end of the morning sessions, the name of TechCrunch, the anti-DEMO tradeshow, was finally out! Hopefully for the last time quipped DEMO producer Chris Shipley.
It's a little know secret that the TechCrunch50 conference, which also starts today through Wednesday and DEMO are in a battle to attract start-ups: TechCrunch does not charge companies to present versus over $15,000 for DEMO. Inspite of this significative difference between the two tech shows, this does not seem to have affected DEMO as it is reporting more attendees, more presenting companies, more reporters and a good list of sponsors at the DEMO pavilion.
However, unlike TC50 which is available live on the Web, you 'll have to wait the end of the day Monday to access the first video of presentations at DEMO.
DEMO producer Chris Shipley (pictured) kicked the fall event touting the end of the Web 2.0 era, what she also refers as the third cycle of the Internet. An interesting thought as, back in San Francisco, 52 Web 2.0 startups are waiting in the starting blocks before going on stage at TechCrunch50. A conference that you can watch live on the Web.
For Shipley the first Internet cycle was the "flat" Web, then came the transactional Web (the dot com era), the Social Web aka Web 2.0 and finally the Distributed Web i.e. a network of things, always connected. The Demo producer also predicts that unlike the Web 2.0 era "which did not produce a lot of millionaires" comparing from the previous cycles, this fourth cycle will be based on real business models and create plenty of wealth for entrepreneurs, VCs... and tradeshow hosts too I presume!
"Web 2.0 has laid the foundation. It has been a critically important foundation and cycle in our business growth. But the really big growth comes in this next phase that I call the distributed Web. The distributed Web is all about syndication, integration, distribution. It's about reaching out from one place and being present in every place. The distributed Web assumes connectivity virtually everywhere", says Shipley.
At the main DEMO conference earlier this year, producer Chris Shipley and crew kicked-off the tech show with a hip dance routine.
And that's all it needed to start a brand new tradition: the DEMO dance!
Check out below for the first DEMOfall dance dance revolution!!!
For the past few years, Fall means for me going to DEMO... Yes, again! It used to be a much smaller cousin of the "real" Demo happening earlier in the year and dubbed DEMO Mobile. Renamed DEMOfall 2 years ago, the organisers have tried to widen the focus of the conference - I guess there was not enough innovation in the mobile space... then!- and it now has a life of its own.
This year, DEMOfall attendance is more than 10% from the last event (800 expected attendees, 100 press) with 72 companies presenting, mostly unknown start-ups, except for Alcatel-Lucent, RealNetworks and Best Buy! DEMOfall kicks off this morning and you can find the complete conference agenda here.
Musinaut hopes to remake the world of online music by bringing new interactivity to downloaded songs.
The Paris company is to launch on Monday a new format for online compositions – MXP4 – that it says will give musicians the flexibility to include text and images along with their music. It also will let bands include several versions of a tune when it is downloaded over the Web.
“We will establish this as a worldwide standard,” said Trish Thomson, chief executive of the startup founded in July 2006. “That’s our goal.”
The company’s new format comes inside a software editing tool for musicians and producers, and a player listeners will need to download onto their computers. It will sit alongside the compression algorithm MP3, which is the standard format for Internet music today. The editor will sell for $499 while the player is free
Musinaut says it doesn’t want to replace MP3, but to augment its capabilities. The tool, for instance, could produce a different edition of a song every time a listener plays the tune.
Musianut has already attracted attention in Europe, raising $5 million Euros in March 2007 from Sofinnova Ventures and Ventech.
Among the items the company suggests musicians may want to include with their compositions are lyrics, scores and interviews about upcoming tours.
Fast growing startup EchoSign will unveil a new version of its software by the end of the month, said Eran Aloni, head of product management.
The Silicon Valley startup, which exhibited this week at the Office 2.0 conference, now has 500,000 users of its online contract-signing service and expects more growth.
The new release will add reporting features, so users can keep track of who received and signed a contract, Aloni said.
EchoSign, of Palo Alto, was formed three years ago and expects to grow its paid customers eight to 10 times this year – about the same growth as 2007.
Innovation in back in vogue again in Silicon Valley, entrepreneur Marc Andreessen is quick to say.
“I’m so bullish on the valley. I’m so bullish on the innovation happening right now,” he said Thursday during an appearance at the Churchill Club in Palo Alto
There is a new generation of entrepreneur in the valley that arrived since 2000 and the pop of the dot-com tech bubble, said the co-founder of NetScape and Ning, his current company. They do not carry the baggage of those days and are more focused on technology than were some of the trendy dot-coms that have since disappeared.
Andreessen said the evidence of this revival is in companies such as Google, VMware and Facebook, where he is a board member.
The next five to 10 years will witness a wave of really interesting startups developing online services and software, he said. Andreessen has co-invested as an angel investor in 15 companies in the past 1½ years with financing rounds of $25,000 to $100,000.
The small rounds keep him from getting upset if a company fails, he said.
Andreessen also is excited about Apple’s iPhone and the pressure it will put on other handset makers to come out with better products.
The iPhone will be 100 million units “before you know it” and maybe a great deal more, he said. “Either (it) will have monster market share or other people are really going to get their acts together.”
Google’s introduction of its browser Chrome could prove a milestone in the migration of applications from the desktop to the Web, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreessen (pictured) said Thursday in an interview with Condé Nast Portfolio contributing editor, Kevin Maney.
The core technology in Chrome, released Monday, is fantastic and will put pressure on rival browsers Firefox and Internet Explorer from Microsoft to catch up, said Andreessen, best known for co-founding browser pioneer Netscape in the 1994.
Much of the interactive code on Web sites is written in JavaScript, and Chrome runs JavaScript significantly faster than Firefox and IE, he said during an appearance at the Churchill Club in Palo Alto.
“I think it’s an extraordinary product,” he said. “The barriers to doing things in the browser are falling fast.”
Andreessen, who now runs Ning and is on the board of Facebook, said Google’s ability to capture market share in browsers will depend on how the company “productizes” and distributes Chrome. “That will be very interesting to watch,” he noted.
But any remaining desktop application will move online as the browser’s ability to run JavaScript speeds up. More so, if JavaScript performance is good enough, developers could begin favoring it over Adobe Systems' Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight, a Flash competitor, he said.
