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Back from Techcrunch 40!
By David | September 23, 2007
What a week! The Techcrunch 40 was a very good conference, filled with entrepreneurial energy and kids that made it big in the Valley. Mark Zuckerberg spent 45 minutes with Michael Arrington discussing his big plans for Facebook without revealing much about how the platform will evolve in the next months or years. His stance is amazing for someone his age (23). After turning down a rumored $1.6bn acquisition offer from Yahoo!, Mark very seriously affirms that he will develop Facebook for the next 30 years and that the company is not for sale. Is this his true ambition or is it merely perception tactics? Youtube founder Chad Hurley, also at the conference, said back in 2006 that he had no intentions of selling the company, we know how that played out.
In any case, one cannot help but make the parallel between Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates in Microsoft early days (see picture). Will Facebook become a true OS on the web with all the applications you need? People already use Facebook to send “emails” to other users although they know the email address of the recipient. This alone shows the prevalence of this amazing platform.
Techcrunch 40 also featured some really promising startups, the winner of the conference, Mint, is really a very useful service. It allows you to consolidate and manage all of your financial information automatically and categorizes your credit and debit card spending to manage your budget more efficiently. If people trust an Internet startup enough to give it access to all of their financial data (that’s their challenge), then they could be off to a great success.
Another true problem solver is Tripit, which allows you to aggregate all your travel plans, flights, car and hotel reservations in one place and share them with friends, family or colleagues. The upload of reservations is as easy as forwarding your email reservation confirmations to plans(at)tripit.com, the service then “digests” the email and adds the details automatically to your account.
Finally one of my favorite companies pitching was South Korean Musicshake. It is an amazing web based tool to create great music without any musical talent. Labels are going to love this… An 8-year old Korean kid has become a star overnight by creating a tune on Musicshake that eventually became nr 1 on the Korean version of MySpace! The beauty with this app is that not only is it cool, it also has an amazing business model. The moment you like the track you created, you have to pay to download it. Finally there’s a marketplace where people can buy music created on Musicshake and revenue is shared with the tune creators.
Other companies, such as CastTV or Viewdle, having one the best video search tool I’ve seen for one and a very good face recognition technology for the other, are definitely well positioned to be bought by Google or any of the big players in the Valley as video is really the core of their focus and they need these technologies to improve user experience and indexing.
After spending those 2 roller coaster days in San Francisco, we spent the next 2 days with meetings in Silicon Valley. The conclusion: if you’re launching a tech or web company and you’re not in the Valley, move there. There’s a lot more competition but also the perfect mix of energy, people, venture capital money and neighbors to make it big. But don’t go to make money, join the Valley’s thinking of solving problems and making things better, if you execute well, money will probably follow…
Sphere: Related ContentTopics: Facebook, Techcrunch, Techcrunch 40, Mark Zuckerberg, Musicshake, Mint, CastTV, Viewdle, Chad Hurley, Michael Arrington, Silicon Valley |
