hangout.net
Day one began with a bad omen. The wireless began failing with only about 100 members of the press in the concourse. Throughout the day, the network team was clearly just under a massive amount of pressure, with about 1,000 laptops constantly trying to get a wireless link they just didn’t stand a chance. Understandably this is a very young conference, and the execution has been fantastic. My recap is brief, very brief because I had to leave not too long after the opening sessions. To begin with, the conference started about 35 minutes late as they struggled to get the concourse wireless working. Then they opened the event with an unexpected rendition of the National Anthem. I’m not quite sure why, but I’m writing it off to dimensional stability failure. TechCrunch50’s format is somewhat unique. It’s arranged in groups of presentations where 4 companies in a specific market segment present for 8 minutes. After the 4 have finished, a representative from each startup are brought up against a panel of industry experts. Shane Kempton from ithryv was the first presenter. iThryv is a web application with it’s heart in the right place. iThryv attempts to encourage learning financial responsibility (cashflow management, entrepreneurialship, etc) fun for children. Unfortunately, I think they’re trying to bite off more than they can chew with the first version. A vastly slimmed down version could have a lot of potential. Right now they’re working with a somewhat yet to be flshed out advertising based revenue model. Next up was hangout.net. This is one of those moments where I’m happy to be a blogger, not a journalist. As a father, I found hangout to be ill-conceived at best, and malign at worst. The concept is a second-life like set of embeddable widgets that encourage rampant consumerism at every step of the customer experience. After seeing hangout.net, I’m not sure if I’m ever buying a computer for my daughter. Blahgirls is founded by Ashton Kutcher and is apparently “The convergence between hollywood and the silicon valley that we’ve been waiting for”. Standing on the shoulders of the previous two presenters, Mr. Kutcher failed to disappoint my skepticism on the validity of child-target marketing. The only nice thing I can say about blahgirls is that their demo video was humorous and self-deprecatingly made fun of it’s founder, as well as the conference promoters Michael Arrington and Jason Calcanis. Blahgirls is a vapid celebrity video blog aimed at ‘tween girls. It’s incarnation is through three funny, but superficially void cartoon characters reminiscent of the southpark style. It will also have an interactive component where users can create their own airy 3d avatars. The aim is clearly not role-model building, but low-brow media creation. The last presenter of this session was tweegee.com. Tweegee is an immersive, second-life like experience aimed at 8-12 year olds. It’s actually a rather interesting application providing a gigabyte of media storage and quite a few options for sharing between customers. Security and privacy were the aspects strongly stressed by all of the presenters. The question not asked was how strongly they were planning on conforming to COPPA, but I felt that the intent was there. The panel session wasn’t much to write about, except that Ron Conway has an amazing mind, and I wish it had just been 30 minutes of him talking. Also amusing during the panel was Marissa Mayer of Google stating that hangout.net was her favorite start-up of the four. I wonder if Marissa finds it hard to reconcile Google’s “Do No Evil” mantra with hangout.net’s direct assault on children. Please excuse the divergence, and I’ll be getting back to datacenters very soon, I promise. Up on the slate for the next couple of days is talking with 3Tera and GoGrids, two exhibitors at the conference.
