The Social

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 the moment: real-time social media. As if Facebook and Twitter couldn't be dominating enough headlines here, there were six start-ups filling up the "stream" category: Threadsy, Lissn, Radiusly, Stribe, Clixtr, and The Whuffie Bank. And the panel of judges was joined by Twitter-savvy rapper Chamillionaire as a surprise guest.

Guess what? The judges, some of whom have been known to drink Silicon Valley hype Kool-Aid as though it were the world's finest wine, didn't think we needed most of these companies.

Oh, boy.

Threadsy's CEO Rob Goldman demos the site.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Threadsy, whose founders called it "the world's first integrated commnications client," was the best received of the bunch by far. It's a messaging client that aggregates e-mails, Facebook messages, Twitter replies, instant messages, and also "unbound" communications like general tweets and status messages that aren't necessarily geared to you. "We built Threadsy to pull you back together," CEO Rob Goldman told the audience, citing the rapidly growing percentage of Americans who are using more than one messaging client ona regular basis.

It's got a slick interface, can also aggregate automated profiles for your contacts' social-network feeds, and can track Twitter queries in an almost dizzying visual format.

"I think Robert Scoble's head was about to explode," conference organizer Jason Calacanis commented afterward, referring to the Valley mainstay's near-pathological obsession with social feed aggregation.

Scoble's response was remarkably pragmatic.

"I'm just wondering if it has the FriendFeed problem," he said, "which means there's not enough people in the world that care about aggregating all their friends' social networks," but added that he wanted to try it out as soon as possible. A few of the other judges raised questions about how Threadsy will make money, considering inboxes have never been a huge trove for ad dollars. Goldman's answer was a little bit convoluted, which this reporter took to mean that Threadsy hasn't quite figured it out yet.

Up next was Lissn, which appeared to be a combination of a news aggregator, a chat room, and a question-and-answer service. "Lissn starts with a conversation," founder Myke Armstrong said, and then demonstrated the app by posting the question "What would happen if the moon disappeared?" and watched comments and answers roll in. What wasn't really clear was exactly why anyone would use it, what with Twitter, Facebook statuses, and various "conversation" trackers out there already.

"Why would I leave Twitter to join this?" Scoble asked. Harsh words coming from the guy who loves to rave about the next shiny thing that streams words across your laptop screen.

Lissn lets people begin conversations about whatever they want.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Lissn was followed by Radiusly, which aims to solve scaling and communication problems for companies and brands that want to use microblogging and other social-media tools--many of which aren't terribly customizable. A company can build a Radiusly profile to create a directory of official social-network profiles for its employees, manage them internally, and share media like product images and videos for marketing and customer service purposes.

"I think you guys aimed at the right target but your dart hit the wall and not the target," Scoble said. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman chimed in, "In a rare position I agree with much of what Robert (Scoble) was saying." Ouch.

Next in the lineup was Stribe, which is in the same vein as Meebo's chat toolbar and Google Friend Connect--in other words, something that a smattering of established companies are already trying--adding social-networking features to any site by adding a chunk of code. Stribe can provide metrics pertaining to traffic and engagement, too.

Stribe's social network on a page (click to enlarge).

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

This was another well-designed one, but it was met with more skepticism. "I think one of the hardest things about these networks is actually getting the community to sign up," Facebook exec Mike Schroepfer said on the panel of judges. Dick Costolo gently reminded the Stribe team, "You can do too many things and then it becomes difficult for people to understand what they should use your product for...when you try to do a lot of things at once, it confuses people as to how they should use it and then they just don't use it."

The fifth company in the lineup received a somewhat better reaction. Called Clixtr, it's an iPhone app (and eventually expanding to more handsets) that combines photo-sharing with location awareness, turning the phone into what CEO Fergus Hurley called "the ultimate social camera." Clixtr's hook is event photos: The iPhone app lets you browse pictures from geo-tagged events, send photos instantly to other Clixtr users' phones, and find events near you.

"I think that was awesome," Schroepfer said, but expressed some confusion over exactly how geotagging could sync up to an event. Scoble complimented its sign-up process, but said "I'm not sure it causes enough gameplay, or enough something-else that gets me into this." He wasn't the only one to point out that getting people to use the app would be a challenge. "I would up the level of incentive for participation," Reid Hoffman said, and added that Facebook could easily build location-awareness into the photo feature of its mobile apps.

The last company was what Calacanis called "one of our wild-cards," The Whuffie Bank. Named after the deplorable term preferred by marketing-buzzword-loving social media consultants everywhere (basically, it's slang for social capital, a term coined by science fiction author Cory Doctorow), The Whuffie Bank is a non-profit organization for building a virtual currency around online reputation and influence. You can then use that currency to pay others with "whuffie," like tossing a bribe someone's way to ask them to retweet something you've posted on Twitter.

Note to the Whuffie Bankers: At the very least, please choose a different name for your organization. "Whuffie" sounds like something that would happen in porn movies. And the judges seemed to think that however cool of an idea it might be, it might be best if the currency stays in science fiction.

"The problem with these kinds of currencies is you generally need some kind of banking system to regulate them," Reid Hoffman said. "A lot of cool things...I think conceptually it's going to be extraordinary difficult."

"I want to hear in one line, what do I get?" celebrity judge Chamillionaire asked. "It seem like you've got to do a lot of work for them to raise your reputation...It seems like you can fake it."

And with that, it was happy hour. Or so everyone hoped.

Facebook's Aditya Agarwal shows off its new Prototypes feature at TechCrunch50.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

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 is sort of like Facebook's version of Google Labs, had accidentally been unveiled in a company Twitter post earlier on Tuesday afternoon. "It's difficult to predict just what Facebook engineers will come up with next," Agarwal said of Prototypes, which has since been elucidated in a post on the company blog.

Many of Facebook's hottest new features were created in late-night employee "hackathons," Facebook Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer told the audience. Its new iPhone app was created by a single engineer (someone from Facebook told me that this employee was actually a summer intern, which makes it even more impressive), its "Facebook Lite" low-bandwidth-friendly site option was created by three engineers, and the brand new status tagging feature was built in a hackathon.

Some of the new prototypes, Agarwal explained, are photo tag searches, desktop notifications, and a way to filter news feed items to see which ones your friends have recently commented on.

Considering TechCrunch50 is an event devoted to new Web start-ups, Facebook also had a pitch for the entrepreneurs behind them: employee Justin Osofsky then came onstage to talk about Facebook Connect and why start-ups ought to implement . He cited the power of being able to share information on such a massive network, the advantages of not requiring a separate registration process, as well as the proven jumps in page views and traffic that some of the 15,000 sites currently using Facebook Connect have experienced.

At TechCrunch50, Facebook conveniently was able to make the dual announcement that it's cash flow positive and just hit 300 million active users. There are 6 billion minutes spent on the site every day, Schroepfer explained, 1 billion chat messages sent, and 80 billion photos stored on the site (20 billion individual photos, each stored in four different formats).

Within an hour of the site opening up the floodgates to vanity URLs this summer, 1 million had been reserved, Schroepfer explained. He reiterated that the company's engineers were what kept it all afloat.

"The problem with this is, we (were) basically asking 200 million people to show up at the Web site at about exactly the same time," Schroepfer said. "Most people would call this a denial of service attack. We called it a product launch."

Another one from Facebook: The company announced Tuesday, just as it was about to take the stage in a "developer garage" event at the TechCrunch50 conference, that it has reached 300 million active users around the world.

Also: It's cash flow-positive.

"As of today, Facebook now serves 300 million people across the world. It's a large number, but the way we think about this is that we're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone," a blog post from CEO Mark Zuckerberg read. "We're also succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow-positive sometime in 2010, and I'm pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term."

So I guess that's code for "no IPO soon."

Facebook hit 250 million users precisely two months ago, and 200 million users just three months before that.

Zuckerberg's blog post also highlighted a new trend in his rhetoric about the company he founded in 2004 as an undergraduate at Harvard: They run a tight ship. Or at least that's what he says.

"The site we all use every day is built by a relatively small group of the smartest engineers and entrepreneurs who are solving substantial problems and each making a huge impact for the 300 million people using Facebook," he wrote. "In fact, the ratio of Facebook users to Facebook engineers makes it so that every engineer here is responsible for more than one million users. It's hard to have an impact like that anywhere else."

Zuckerberg said in an interview with Bloomberg last month that Facebook hoped to increase its work force by 50 percent by the end of the year, but stressed that "the thing I want to remind people of is we're way closer to the beginning than the end."

This post was expanded at 1:19 p.m. PT.

Oops! Facebook posted this screenshot of a new feature to Twitter and then pulled it.

(Credit: Facebook)

It looks as if Facebook was a little premature in using its Twitter account to announce "Prototypes," a Google Labs-like operation that lets members beta-test new features for the social network and offer feedback.

The tweet offering a screenshot of Prototypes was swiftly deleted--but props to The Next Web for snagging it before it was pulled.

So what are the "prototypes" in question? Facebook seems to be experimenting with desktop notifications, content discovery, and upgrades to its Events invitation service. Next to each test feature is a star-based rating system through which, presumably, users can offer their feedback.

Facebook plans to take the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco early on Tuesday afternoon to make a developer-related announcement. It's pretty likely that this has something to do with it.

Hey, here's an idea! When pitching your women-oriented company to a panel of investors and experts, why don't you make fun of fat chicks in the process?

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

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 conference's audience: women, and not necessarily tech-savvy ones.

The pitches from the two companies, high-end invitation service Cocodot and personal-finance resource Learnvest, couldn't have been more different.

First up was Cocodot, which was founded by former MySpace exec Shawn Gold. At MySpace, which he left about two years ago, Gold served as senior vice president of marketing and content. Which means, basically, the guy knows how to pitch. Cocodot, he said, has a very fine-tuned demographic. "The target is women, who really create 90-plus percent of events," Gold said, showing off the service's slick interface. It's an event planning service that aims to make online invitations an acceptable route for high-end events. There's another start-up, Pingg, offering a similar angle, but Cocodot hopes to court brands, PR firms, and corporations as well as individuals throwing parties. And it hopes to particularly target weddings--for which online invitations are still pretty verboten.

Gold, well-dressed and energetic, was clearly aware that his target demographic wasn't going to be found in the room. He demonstrated the site by sending a Cocodot greeting card to his wife that depicted two overweight women with the caption of "Does this card make my ass look big?" (Um, classy) and added at the end as an appeal to those present, "If you give Cocodot to your wife or girlfriend, you will definitely get lucky."

I'm all for a little levity, especially when we've all been sitting in the same overheated room for a half-day listening to one presentation after another. But Gold's pitch was frankly insulting to both the women who he hopes will use the service, as well as to the predominantly male audience with its assumption that the only way they could possibly understand the aim of Cocodot would be to put a fratty, "Dude! Get laid!" spin on it. Which is too bad, because Cocodot looked pretty darn cool, and the judges agreed. One of them, Google's Bradley Horowitz, said, "I don't want to like this" but admitted that "I could easily see this taking off" among the Hallmark crowd.

The next presentation, though flawed, was a breath of fresh air in comparison.

The CEO of Learnvest, a petite twentysomething blonde named Alexa von Tobel, was one of only a few female CEOs pitching companies at the entire two-day event. Her company, an online personal-finance compendium, is "designed to fill the enormous, gaping hole" between financial self-help books and expensive financial planners for hire, she explained.

"Our core audience is women, an audience historically ignored and underserved in this topic," von Tobel said. Learnvest lets members build up profiles for personalized personal-finance advice, set goals, and earn points and badges in a game-style format by accomplishing goals, helping other members, and offering feedback to the company.

Von Tobel was clearly nervous as hell, especially when the reception from the judges was less positive than she may have expected. Several of them were skeptical of the game-like format, wondering if it could really be applied to something as private and serious as personal finance.

"I could easily see guys I know wanting to be a level-19 ninja," judge Bradley Horowitz said. "I don't know anyone who wants to be a seventh-degree debt removal expert."

Another judge, Digg founder Kevin Rose, concurred. "It's going to be really hard to get people to admit that they're in debt and put that on a profile."

They make a very good point. But von Tobel had done her homework, armed with statistics from Harvard Business School studies about the lack of personal-finance resources for young people, especially women, finishing college and entering the workforce under mounting tuition debt.

"It's not taught in schools, it's not taught in colleges, (and) there's really no good resource online," she said. The judges remained skeptical of Learnvest's game setup, but von Tobel's well-informed rebuttal earned a round of unsolicited audience applause.

(Which, in a sense, is really too bad, as though it meant the TechCrunch50 audience was surprised to hear a young, well-dressed blonde offer such a coherent response.)

Conference organizer Jason Calacanis--who is the CEO of Mahalo, a start-up that targets an audience that isn't necessarily tech-savvy either--seemed to be aware of the fact that maybe Learnvest needed some feedback from outside the all-male judge panel.

"We have a number of women in the audience," Calacanis said, standing up and turning around to poll them on whether they'd want to try Learnvest out. Of course, not many hands went up. But that's to be expected when the audience is easily 75 percent male: every woman I could see had her hand raised.

The lesson? If you're pitching a women-focused company to a roomful of Y chromosomes, insulting the target audience--however absent they may be--is still pretty darn tacky. At a start-up pitch conference, the presentations need to be smart, well-informed, and above all, any pitch that's reliant on marketing to a niche demographic has to show that it takes that demographic seriously.

And don't assume that the guys are going to be too dumb to understand the straight sell, either. There doesn't always have to be a get-laid angle. At least I'd like to think so.

A screenshot of the back-end dashboard of Citysourced, as displayed at TechCrunch50.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

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 second day of the conference that the judges, audience, and organizers seemed thoroughly impressed by an app that they could actually use. Meet Citysourced, a new iPhone app that lets the residents of an individual city log complaints and inquiries--graffiti, potholes, neighbors who go streaking--and send them straight to City Hall.

They had two announcements accompanying the launch: first, that Palm had made a research-and-development investment in Citysourced to build an app for the Pre handset; and second, that the city of San Jose, Calif., had signed on board to use Citysourced as its official mobile 311 system.

You might be thinking that this sounds familiar. That's because it's not the only player in the space: Open311 has gotten some buzz for applying the open-standards model to building civic feedback systems. Also, earlier this year the city of Boston commissioned a mobile development company called Connected Bits to build a complaint-filing app called Citizen Connect.

But none of the existing civic-engagement apps have caught on yet, and Citysourced's mix of no-brainer efficiency and easy-to-read maps seemed to impress both the judges and the audience. So did the back-end Web interface for mapping and tracking inquiries and complaints. Digg founder Kevin Rose, one of the judges, called it "an amazing idea" and started offering suggestions: he wanted to be able to subscribe to a feed of updates from his neighborhood, for example, as well as see volunteer opportunities and vote on the priority of issues, Digg-style.

Citysourced "just seems that it's one that's sort of a no-brainer," TechCrunch founder and conference organizer Michael Arrington said after the presentation, asking for a show of hands in the audience to see how many iPhone owners in the audience would want to download the app. Many arms were raised.

The challenge, as panel judge Tim O'Reilly pointed out, is that Citysourced can only beat its competitors if it has the best approach to the market, namely its effectiveness in getting new cities on board. The start-ups' executives said that they're already in talks with some more of the 10 biggest cities in the country and should have more announcements soon.

In either case, the laptop-wielding masses at TechCrunch50 seemed to think that this new mobile start-up is one to watch.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

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."

SeatGeek co-founder Jack Groetzinger explains how his service can save people money on tickets.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

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

Comedian Penn Jillette demos his new iPhone app.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

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 some theatrics: the news was broken (unsurprisingly, by TechCrunch) that a previous TechCrunch50 winner, personal finance start-up Mint, had just sold to Intuit for $170 million in cash. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer took the stage on Monday to formally confirm the announcement.

So it was appropriate that the first pitch of the session, kicking off the TechCrunch50 conference as a whole, was pretty far out in left field: an iPhone app created by comedy-magic duo Penn & Teller. At first, their developers came onstage and apologized that the entertainers couldn't actually make it to the conference, and proceeded to demonstrate a text-messaging magic trick app. But then Penn Jillette stepped out to formally demonstrate the app, which has the aim of (ideally) fooling the iPhone user's friends into thinking that they're actually playing a guess-the-card trick with Penn and Teller via text messaging.

"It's not so much a moneymaker for us as a public service to get guys laid," Jillette said when asked if there was a revenue model to the app, which sells for $1.99 and is now in the iTunes Store. "If there's a Nobel prize for getting guys laid we'd definitely be in the running for it."

Jillette also announced that the app's alpha tester is a stripper from Philadelphia who has raked in extra tips by demonstrating the app alongside lap dances. Unfortunately, the array of judges didn't seem terribly impressed at its long-term business prospects.

Child's play for start-ups
The next presentation couldn't have been more different: Story Something, "which makes the personalization of children's stories simple and easy," founder Jim Rose said. The Web company uses Mad Libs-like text fields for a parent to personalize a story with their children's names and other attributes, and new stories can be sent on a schedule--for example, every evening before bedtime--as part of a paid-subscription model. There's also an iPhone app for easy reading to kids.

Most of the questions from the judges pertained to business model and the intellectual-property rights associated with the stories published through StorySomething. Judge Don Dodge called it "a lottery-ticket investment" for an angel investor, given the relatively low overhead costs and likelihood that such a company could scale without much additional investment.

Other judges' questions were a bit sillier.

"How profound is the assumption that parents will continue to make kids?" judge Yossi Vardi asked facetiously.

ClaseMovil lets you wander around a virtual world and spend microcurrency. It's also got an education tools, but is currently for Spanish-speaking users only.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

The third start-up in the round was the Mexico-based Clasemovil, a start-up that offers game- and video-based online educational exercises for kids in areas like math, science, and history. Clasemovil uses a format much like trendy kid-focused virtual-world services--its virtual currency, for example, is used to teach personal-finance lessons. The executives were accompanied by an on-staff teacher who vouched for the company's platform as a classroom tool, demonstrating progress-report tracking features.

It's launching first in Latin America (in the U.S. next year, apparently) but its founders hope that it ultimately will allow elementary-school students from around the world to learn by interacting with one another. ClaseMovil, which hopes to make money from subscription fees from both individual users and educational-institution subscriptions, has already raised seed funding and is looking not just to investors but also grant money from governments and organizations.

When asked by conference host Jason Calacanis whether they'd invest in it, judges said they'd consider it. Veteran investor Ron Conway said that it could benefit from some partnerships with other companies. "I would consider, but I wouldn't write a check until it's in English," Don Dodge said of the currently Spanish-only site. "English is where the money is."

Two judges, investor George Zachary and MySpace exec Jason Hirschhorn, said that they'd turn the investment opportunity down outright, with Zachary citing "so much competition" and "huge brand and marketing challenges" when it comes to making a splash in the education market.

The fourth start-up was another kid-focused one, ToonsTunes, a virtual world focused on teaching kids about making music. Players can record music through a mixer interface, network with other users, and sign up for "concert" spots at virtual "clubs." They can share their creations on social networks like Twitter and MySpace, or download them as ringtones. There is, of course, also a virtual currency involved for micropayments like purchasing samples of pop songs.

Obviously, virtual worlds for kids are hot in the wake of the success of companies like Club Penguin, which sold to Disney for $350 million two years ago. And the graphics-heavy ToonsTunes received a pretty warm reception.

"I like it very much," George Zachary said, calling it "GarageBand meets Club Penguin." Don Dodge said that "the quality is absolutely amazing." Hirschhorn questioned the company's ability to compete with the likes of "Guitar Hero." Vardi called it "very, very impressive," considering especially the fact that the company was privately funded and employs only five people.

Ron Conway said that the makers of Guitar Hero would love a product like this, but Hirschhorn remained the skeptic and said that it would be easy for the likes of a huge player like Electronic Arts to create a similar product with far better resources and connections.

Sealtale lets you claim products or services you use, then stick a logo of them on your blog.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

The Sealtale of approval
The last company of the "Youth & Games" round was a little different: Sealtale, a Korean company that lets users create personalized badges (or "seals") to embed on their blogs to identify themselves and express their affinities--as an iPhone user, a supporter of a certain cause, a fan of a band, for example. Clicking on a "seal" can bring up related blog posts from other bloggers with the same seal. It's one part self-branding service, one part blogroll, and one part Google Friend Connect-like networking service.

Calacanis asked the judges what they thought of Sealtale, which he called "Webring 2.0" in an allusion to the '90s-era blog network start-up. "We'd have to see how the product took off and how the acceptance was in other countries (besides Korea)," Conway said. Hirschhorn said he liked the user interface but wasn't totally sold how it was needed in a world of MySpace pages and Facebook fan pages.

So what did the judges think overall of the "Youth & Games" category at TechCrunch50? Calacanis asked them which of the five companies they'd take an investor meeting with, and it looks like there was a clear winner: Dodge and Vardi both preferred ToonsTunes, and Conway said he'd take a meeting with either ToonsTunes or Story Something but ranked them about even. Zachary, meanwhile, said "I'd put ToonsTunes at the top, Story Something a distant second, and the others are off the map."

Hirschhorn--the lone entertainment-industry member on the panel, it should be noted-- was the dissenter, ranking Story Something at the top and ToonsTunes behind it, sticking to his instinct that it'd be tough to get a music games start-up off the ground when there are already so many big players in the industry.

(Credit: Valleywag)

Following rumors that MySpace co-founder and "everybody's friend" Tom Anderson was lying about his age on his profile, Newsweek did a little digging. According to "professional license information, voter registration and utility and telephone service applications," Anderson is actually 36, not 32.

Which means that he was 31, not 27, when he co-founded MySpace, and apparently he was either self-conscious or sketched out (or both) about being in his 30s when he founded a youth-oriented social network.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington expressed concern, saying that "the fact that MySpace and News Corp. had knowledge of the lie, and did nothing to fix it, makes it worse." But Valleywag comments, "(it) would hardly make Anderson the first person to lie about his age on MySpace." (Yeah, a lot of those "99-year-olds" aren't telling the truth.)

In other news, "Tom" is known to be so insecure about his popularity that he adds every single MySpace user as a friend the moment that they sign up for the News Corp.-owned social-networking site, and he also seems to be too lazy to change his dorky profile photo.

Can we get some real news now, please?