TechCrunch50 conference

Have you ever wanted to be at the top of the next wave in technology? What if you could go to a conference where the top 150 "next-big-things" in Internet were all in one place? This place exists, and it is called TechCrunch50.

This past week, three Hampshire students went to the third-annual TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. Jose Fuentes (2005), Madeleine Hahn (2008), and Fred Concklin (2008) received funding from the school to help subsidize their trip and defray admission cost.

"It was a giant internet pitch-off," claims Madeleine. She found the experience to be both rewarding and interesting. These Hampshire students were among the hundreds of attendees not including the representatives from the 150 Internet startups. 50 comanies were featured above the rest, being able to present all the information you would want to know about them in a large auditorium. These presentations went on for one to two hours at a time, with breaks in between. When an attendee got board of the presentations he or she could go to the "Demo Pit."

The Demo Pit was where the other 100 companies were to be found. These companies had boothes set up in an exhibition hall, and a person could wander up and down the rows, stopping to look at interesting or shiny things. Also, with this format, attendees could ask questions of the companies' representatives. Says Madeleine Hahn, "My favorite part of the conference was wandering the Demo Pit. You got to interact with real people, and ask all the questons you had."

Attendees could vote on their favorite Demo Pit companies, and the winner for the day would get to present on stage in the auditorium. The 50 presentations were judged by a panel of experts that included some big names in Internet fields such as: Dick Costolo, the COO of Twitter; Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn; and Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. The winner would receive $50,000.

The chief requirement for these startups to be involved in TechCrunch50 is that they must have already launched. For many companies, this means that their products or services are still in the testing phases, to be available to the end-user "sometime soon."

So who won? A company called Red Beacon now commands $50,000 that they did not have a week ago. Red Beacon is a sort of automated classified service. A local business will list all of their products and services, sort of like a classified ad. However, the big difference is that a consumer can do a local search for a product or service, and Red Beacon alerts all companies who had listed such things as the customer searched for. Theoretically then, there would be hyper-local competition over a customer's purchasing power.

While people who come to such an event to network, learn about the next-big-thing, become early adopters, brag to their friends about an awesome conference, it is not perfect. The generel admission fee is on the order of thousands of dollars, and you do not necessarily get what you paid for. For such a cost, one would expect some excellent food and facilities. Unfortunately, neither was the case. While the students felt that the food was not bad per se, it certinly was not up to par with the associated cost. Madeleine Hahn had some insight here as well, "TechCrunch wants to promote all of these startups, but their own product needs work. They should have a look at their own business plan. I imagine with proper thought, they could cut the price by half."

To read about the company TechCrunch, check out www.techcruch.com. For more informtion about the conference please check out www.techcrunch50.com.