Excursions

SAN FRANCISCO--By late afternoon on Tuesday, it was getting awfully hot in the conference venue hosting TechCrunch50. Blame it on the body heat, or maybe the scores of laptops humming away.

But the air was sure to get a little hotter when it came time for the "Social Media Streams" category of start-ups to present.

The organizers of TechCrunch50 decided to save the last slot on the final day of the event (you know, right before everybody starts downing booze at the cocktail reception) to showcase new start-ups that deal with Silicon Valley's most hyped niche of … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook took the stage on Tuesday afternoon at the TechCrunch50 conference for a "Developer Garage" event, to highlight just how important its team of engineers is to the company--and to unveil a new feature to let users play around with what they're up to.

Facebook engineering lead Aditya Agarwal unveiled a new offering called "Prototypes," which makes internal projects on the site accessible as applications on its developer platform. "Some of them are going to be buggy," Agarwal said. "Some of them are going to be super polished."

Prototypes, which … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Let's not kid ourselves. Nobody was expecting the audience at the TechCrunch 50 event to be full of women. That's just the reality of Silicon Valley, notorious for its boys-club culture (and plethora of complaints about how hard it is to find a girlfriend).

So it was undoubtedly a challenge for two of the start-ups pitching to TechCrunch50's all-male panel of industry insiders in Tuesday morning's "Subscription & Commerce Marketplaces" category. They were offering the first look at companies that are geared toward a demographic that's just about the opposite of the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--It's about time people got excited over here.

It's not that the smattering of fresh new companies presenting at the annual TechCrunch50 start-up launch conference was boring, per se. Most of them, in fact, had an extremely practical slant to them, like the array of job- and car-hunting sites that take something Craigslist does and make it way less sketchy. And therein lies the problem: Sometimes, those sorts of productivity and next-gen enterprise start-ups simply aren't that cool and shiny when you stick them into a PowerPoint demo.

But it was on the morning of the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The world of Web 2.0 has been criticized for being too much about the nifty ideas and not enough about raking in the dough. So there were likely more than a few sets of ears in the audience on Monday at TechCrunch50 that perked up at the start of the third batch of start-ups presenting: "New Advertising & Monetization Platforms."

The judges included such Silicon Valley marquee names as Google executive Marissa Mayer, industry veteran Marc Andreessen, Sequoia Capital's Roelof Botha, YCombinator founder and investor Paul Graham, and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who sold his company to Amazon this summer.

The first company to present was 5to1, an advertising technology company that tackles the seemingly unsolvable problem of filling up remnant advertising inventory that can't be filled up by premium or direct sales--and which often ends up getting filled by ads that are cheap and irrelevant. 5to1's model lets site owners and publishers fill up their ad inventory as though it's a music playlist.

"What we're talking about here is total control by the publisher," founder and CEO James Heckman said. "No ad is going to show up that you don't like." (He described typical remnant ads as "the dancing fat bellies and the punch-the-monkey ads.")

But some judges were lukewarm on 5to1.

"I think it's a really slick interface but I would just be worried," Tony Hsieh said. "It just seems like a lot of work to have to go through and decide which ads (to run)...my question is how does it scale as a publisher grows."

The next start-up was another advertising platform, DataXu. The focus of DataXu's product is a data dashboard where publishers can buy ads through ad exchanges like Google's and Yahoo's with a highly refined algorithm that promises to show the right ads to the right people at the right time--for example, that news- and sports-related ads get more reception in the morning--and then tracks the success of an ad campaign with all sorts of analytics.

President and CEO Mike Baker called DataXu's offering "rocket science," adding that the underlying technology was actually used by NASA for a Mars mission plan. "What we're doing is actually using machine-learning techniques to take vast amounts of data with a small positive-action subset, which is very consistent with the Internet advertising problem: there are very few clicks and even fewer actions," Baker said, while declining to provide any real trade secrets. "We're applying on top of that the concept of control systems."

Up next was something much more consumer-focused, and that left the audience pretty impressed: SeatGeek, which forecasts concert and sports ticket prices, much like airline price applications like Microsoft's Bing Travel do. Co-founders Jack Groetzinger and Russ D'Souza explained that sometimes ticket prices can drop unexpectedly at the last minute--and sometimes they don't.

The secondary ticket market is around $15 billion, Groetzinger said.

SeatGeek pulls in ticket prices from secondary sellers such as StubHub or Craigslist and then forecasts where they might go based on an algorithm. "We have a system that every day crawls the Internet and pulls in thousands of actual ticket sales," Groetzinger explained. "We're also pulling in other external factors that we know to drive ticket prices." For a baseball game, for example, it can come down to the weather, the starting pitcher, and whether there are popular concerts in town. "Right now we're testing at about 75 to 80 percent accuracy, and that's going up every day as our system learns."

SeatGeek, which says it's already profitable… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The fall season has officially begun. Starting Monday morning, the annual TechCrunch50 conference took over the San Francisco Design Center for two days of start-up pitches and presentations; the conference's angle, as co-hosts Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis reiterated, is that all 50 companies on the roster are completely new and launching for the first time.

Start-ups presenting at the conference, which were chosen through a behind-the-scenes elimination process, were grouped into categories. The first of the day was "Youth & Games," with an array of kid-focused and entertainment start-ups.

The day had already begun with … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Ben Mezrich's new book "The Accidental Billionaires," a dramatic and contested account of the early days of social network Facebook, is on the fast track to Hollywood.

But Thursday night's inaugural public event for the book, which first hit stores on Tuesday, was a humble affair well suited to this relatively quiet university town. Held in the Brattle Theatre, a basement-level space in a 120-year-old brick building just off Harvard Square, Mezrich was interviewed on a small stage by Scott Stossel, managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, his onetime roommate, and a fellow Harvard … Read more

I ended up spending the Memorial Day holiday weekend in Las Vegas, a city in which I do not set foot particularly often. When I wasn't partaking in my preferred activity of lounging by the hotel pool with a good book and a pina colada (yes, that's right, I don't gamble), I decided to test-drive a new iPhone app. Namely, it's the free app from lifestyle e-newsletter UrbanDaddy, which hit the iTunes App Store earlier this week.

UrbanDaddy--which operates city-specific newsletters for New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, and Los Angeles, as well as … Read more

NEW YORK--"We're here today to talk about how many friends you can have," Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in her keynote address at the AdAge Digital conference on Wednesday, the same day that Facebook announced that it had reached the milestone of 200 million active users around the world. "This is certainly something I thought about a bit before I joined Facebook, but in the last year, this has been a major question in my life."

But the major question she was addressing in her talk was a different one: namely, can … Read more