techcrunch50

Most rousing demo award at TechCrunch50 goes to Bojam, simply because they had the music ("Africa," by Toto). The service is a music mixing product and online store.

Artists can lay down new sounds on top of tracks other people have recorded previously, and anyone with access to the tracks can mix music.

New completed songs can then be sold on the site.

The demo was loud and entertaining, and the technology is cool. If you're a musician looking for a jamming product, also check out eJamming, which I covered from the at the January 2007 Demo … Read more

Following the killer demo of video search engine VideoSurf at TechCrunch50, the team from the Hitachi project GazoPa took the stage with a similar product, but for photos.

GazoPa is a pattern matching service. It matches color and shape. Or -- and this is cool -- just color, or just shape. Found a picture of a product you like, but want to see it, and only it, in other colors? Filter by shape. Or for similar products in the same shade, filter by color.

The presenter said the database handles 50 million images. But while it recognizes faces, it can'… Read more

At Wednesday morning's TechCrunch50 demo of video search engine VideoSurf, CEO Lior Delgo showed off how the technology would be useful for finding a single moment from your favorite TV series. Delgo used HBO's Entourage as an example, picking out a few lines of dialogue from a 30-minute episode.

To make all of that happen, entire episodes--in this case illegally hosted ones on YouTube--get crunched through VideoSurf's servers. It's an entirely automated process that scans videos faster than real-time, and does not require people to do the heavy lifting.

What makes the technology special is that it picks out characters from these series and lets you see individual moments where they appear. The same thing happens when you're viewing any episode through the service--it'll pick out who it recognizes and put up a character list next to the clip. … Read more

Let's face it: Video search blows. It's easy to use YouTube's search box to find straightforward Internet video memes like cats playing pianos, skateboard tricks, or Rick Astley remixes; try for anything more intricate and you might be out of luck. There are established companies in the space, like the U.K.-based Blinkx, but none of them has captured the market share that video search potentially could.

Enter VideoSurf, a company launching later on Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference that's been getting a choice spot in the tech-blogger limelight thanks to a Los Angeles Times preview.… Read more

Postbox is a new cross platform e-mail client for Windows and Mac computers. It's an alternative to Microsoft Outlook, and manages to bring some of the benefits of Web e-mail to a desktop application.

Things like a conversation view, tagging, and search that indexes both mail and attachments are all features Gmail users have been enjoying for years. The problem is, those features and several others have not gone over to the desktop side of things without additional software plug-ins from third-party providers.

Postbox answers that by taking many of these single features sought after by other third-party developers and blending them into a standalone client. For example, if it sees an address it will pull up a quick map link complete with business information. When you're offline you still get this information.

As some of the session judges at the TechCrunch50 conference noted, some of the things this product does would be much better suited as an extension to the software e-mail client you're already using. I'd certainly love the photo browsing client and conversation view in my Outlook, but I definitely can't ditch it until this product gets rock solid Microsoft Exchange support with a built-in calendar (a feature the product does not have).

Postbox currently works with IMAP, POP, and SMTP protocols, letting you tie in your Web mail accounts. Unless your business is running off Google apps this probably won't be a good companion for anything besides your personal accounts. That said, compared with something like Apple's Mail application, it looks like a nice step up.

Update: Postbox will be available for download in "a few weeks" time. Only the sign-ups were opened up today. I've also thrown in another screenshot after the jump.… Read more

For years, celebs and CEOs have the luxury of having a personal fitness trainer shadow them, tracking their activity levels, urging them along so they look better and feel better than the rest of us. Fitbit won't provide you with your own personal trainer, but the tiny clip-on wireless motion sensor/recorder may be the next best thing.

Introduced today at TechCrunch50, the small, wearable, $99 device records and then transmits to the Fitbit server an encrypted stream of motion data. Your motion data. The server translates the recorded movement into exercise intensity levels, calories burned, sleep quality, steps … Read more

The inventor of the T9 keyboard technology for numeric keypads, Cliff Kushler, is back in the game with a new alphanumeric entry technology for today's devices: touch-screen laptops and smartphones. His new technology, Swype, is quite simple to use, although beneath the user interface there's a lot going on.

Swype works with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard like you have on the tablet version of Windows and on the iPhone. But instead of tapping letters out, you press your finger or stylus on the first letter, then, without lifting it, move it to the remaining letters in the word. … Read more

One of the coolest things to be shown off at the TechCrunch50 conference might not ever become something any of us can use. It was a mythical technology demo from a company called Tonchidot Corporation, which showed off its "Sekai Camera" application. It uses both the camera on your phone and GPS to offer up a near real-time tag of what you're looking at.

The funny thing is the entire demo could have been a complete hoax. We never saw the service in action--just a video of it placed in the gadget-saturated Akihabara district of Tokyo. It … Read more

Any time I hear a company reference their product as a "YouTube for _____," I cringe a little. Newcomer iCharts said the same thing about its charts product at its presentation at the TechCrunch50 conference this morning. The service takes your data from spreadsheets and turns it into charts that are both hosted on the site and can be embedded elsewhere, including things like PowerPoints, message boards, and PDFs.

What makes iCharts less worthy of the YouTube cringe is that it's a solid business model. As billionaire panelist Mark Cuban pointed out, you can leverage out this … Read more