launchweek08

Why not use a web app to create your web app startup? And what's more, why deal with all the physical realities of incorporating a company and setting up its accounting system when you can visualize the whole thing? That's the proposition of Fairsoftware.net, which debuted an alpha version of its online startup creation application today at TechCrunch50.

While other web apps help you find people for your startup, FairSoftware goes several steps further by letting you, as the founder, parcel out pieces of the online revenue collected via PayPal by FairSoftware your startup (hopefully) generates.

The … Read more

Everyone wants to go green when they shop, but calculating the CO2 impact of everything that went into the manufacture, transportation and packaging of one box of cereal versus another in your head is not in the realm of possible.

Enter Rinen, Inc., a Tokyo-based, garage-based, startup premiering at TechChrunch50 today with OpenTrace.org, a web app which calculates the environmental cost of a product and can boil that down to a single comprehensible number. Want to get a rough approximation of that box of cereal's environmental load all the way back to the processing of the oats in … Read more

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and who rarely gives public interviews, spoke with Michael Arrington at the TechCrunch50 conference today.

Topics ranged from politics to finance and technology. On the item of the stock market, Thiel is concerned that our economy keeps producing bubbles--technology, housing, foreign investing, etc.--yet he does not feel the current technology market is a bubble. Referring to the valuation of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and other tech stocks, he said, "on a relative basis, they're among the cheapest companies in terms of stock."

But the 2000 bubble, he says, "set technology … Read more

SAN DIEGO--A variety of new enterprise security-related products were presented at DemoFall on Monday, including software for blocking malware and preventing data leaks and insider threats, and a desktop management service.

CoreTrace showed its new Bouncer software, which automatically creates a whitelist of applications that are deemed to be legitimate and blocks applications that aren't on the list and which could contain malware.

New applications are checked against the whitelist and are not allowed to be installed or run when they are not on the list. But it allows approved applications to be added to the whitelist.

Fortressware offers … Read more

OtherInbox is a service that helps with one of the growing problems of using Web services: e-mail overload. More specifically, services that take your information and sell it to third parties--thus filling up your in-box with decentralized junk.

OtherInbox works by giving you a special address you can use when you sign up for things and it helps you filter them in a central location with tags and layout akin to Apple's Mail application. Each "subscription" reads like its own in-box.

The service may be most useful for figuring out what services are selling out your e-mail … Read more

The last block of companies at TechCrunch50 on Monday included three advertising startups. All were focused on making ads more interactive or targeted.

First up was ByBurt's Copybox. It's a scripting language for advertising text. Based on where a user is, the weather where they are, and other variables, it adjusts the text in the ad and pushes it into ActionScript (Flash). Could lead to some scary ads that appear almost clairvoyant. I also predict some great ad text bloopers.

Adgregate Markets makes online ads into fully-functioning stores. Basically it's a widget platform. The pitch is that, … Read more

MySpace plans to integrate Google Gears with its platform, according to the social network's co-founder Chris DeWolfe. Users will be able to access their profiles offline using the Google Gears APIs, but the feature won't be available for a few months.

DeWolfe was fielding a few questions in an interview at the TechCrunch50 event in San Francisco with co-host Mike Arrington, who started off the interrogation by asking DeWolfe if he was dating Paris Hilton. The gentlemanly DeWolfe declined to answer the question.

He did talk about the new music service launching this month that will partner with … Read more

Several of the companies from the TechCrunch50 demo pit are brand-new and have some really neat products to show off. For one reason or another they were not chosen to be among those pitching to the crowd--either out of editorial selection or not being able to meet the day-of-the-conference launch requirement.

Two products I wanted to highlight are of interest because they do some handy things that many other start-ups have attempted with the use of software or browser-specific extensions. In both cases the below products (Snipd and 2pad) manage to do just about the same thing without software. Let'… Read more

SAN DIEGO--Who needs a computer to access the many social networks people are members of these days?

While thousands, or even millions, of people regularly switch between services like Facebook, imeem, MySpace, and others, it can be cumbersome to do all that switching.

That's what Xumii, which presented at DemoFall Monday afternoon, has set out to obviate.

The idea is that users will be able to access their various social networks through their mobile phones on a single application, rather than having to rely on computers and full browsers.

In the demonstration, the company showed how users can access … Read more