It is the first day of 3 for TechCrunch50 in which startups officially launch their companies in a category-based presentation. Of the 51 companies, one will be selected to receive a $50,000 prize. Eight minutes each, 4 per category, some of the hottest companies present their pitch to an audience of 1700 (plus 2500 via live-cast) and a judge panel you'd love to have for dinner at your home: Marisa Mayer, VP of Product Search and Customer Experience at Google, Dan Farber, Editor in Chief of CNET news, Ron Conway--one of Silicon Valley's largest angel investors, and Chad Hurley, CEO of YouTube.
Day 1 morning competition/sessions included two categories: Youth and Entertainment and Memes and News. Afternoon session focused on Enterprise and Advertising & Commerce.
Of the 16 companies, OpenTrace.org got my full attention. OpenTrace lets users track their environmental impact using an innovative bardoce scanning and data matching technology across the supply chain of the product. Users can purchase a product, scan it just as they would at checkout using their computer's webcam, and get instant information about the role they play in their carbon footprint such as the power required during production, transportation, packaging, etc. Users can also see how others in their network are doing on their end. While this technology may not be immediately transferable into meaningful behavioral impact, it is an important Awareness Technology--helping people become more conscious of cause and effect brought about by their actions. Just look at new behavioral initiatives like micro-lending, hybrid cars, and the slow food movement--all went through a significant Awareness period before crossing the chasm; all evolved in the process in both features and the communication of benefits and the true value of the behavioral change.
My take: A creative and well focused approach to generating awareness in users' minds about the impact that their personal shopping behaviors have on carbon footprint. While revenue model may not be immediately clear, it rarely is in the case of Awareness Technology. Given the massive Green push in the US and Europe, I doubt OpenTrace would have any problem finding good partners or a home for its personalized Green awareness offering.
On the flip side, while it may be innovative in its customized media and streaming capabilities, blahgirls was the startup that rubbed me the wrong way from the start. As Ashton Kutcher came to the stage, Blah started with a video of big headed, small bodied caricatures who engage in part-animated part-real gossip via pictures, movies, and interaction with the user.
The technology and interaction are buzz worthy: relevant user-generated content, news feeds, and interactive media stream as episodes, and personalized interaction between the user and the characters of Blahgirls based on a range of voice and text bytes are exchanged with the user ("Blahgirls suck?! ?YOU suck!" Said one of the characters in response to a demoed user comment).
Because the model of celebrity news, caricature based animation, and streaming media on the web are already established, monetization should be very easy and from e-commerce to downloads (voice, songs, episodes, customized products, etc.) to show products and to partner product alliances not to mention ad revenue.
But the implementation is problematic from a target audience perspective. Designed for teenage girls, Blahgirls boasts a blatant age-inappropriate language and it endorses poor role models ("celebrities are like so smart!"). It is Saturday Night Live meets South Park while watching Sex and the City to the sound of Clueless. It could be funny for adults as a spoof but I doubt parents who still have a say in their kids' life would endorse the content or the interaction.
My take? Interesting approach to streaming news while providing a flexible, interactive experience for users with great monetization potential. Parents on the other hand might have a different preference for the language, focus, and horizon expanding activities to which their kids are exposed.
Best presentation nod goes to OtherInbox not only because of their clean and visual presentation quality but also because of the simplicity with which they solve real time painpoints--such as multiple emails from multiple data providers--specifically, shopping and information destinations. OtherInbox aggregates all those email logins we use for Amazon, WSJ, United Airlines and brings them into a single login interface. There, it provides an automatic folder view of all the email destinations we use. OtherInbox also allows users to create new email addresses on the fly, each one automatically receiving its own folder. To make users' lives even simpler, OtherInbox can recognize which email is an invoice and which is a promotion and track it to its original source (such as in partner promotions).
Using the familiar Microsoft Outlook-like interface, there 's little to no ramp up time--users continue to use their primary mental model for information processing, only here, it is all in one place, automatically populated--reducing time and confusion. Pretty cool, hah?
My take: A gem of a small solution that neatly and elegantly solves email overload and mess while offering additional value as baseline issues of clutter and tracking management are solved--all while respecting users' current mental and behavioral models. It goes beyond Yahoo's flat attempts at creating an email management and filtering system in that it provides the whole product solution in one place, in one familiar interface.
About the other companies:
You can check out TechCrunch50 for more information. In general, while each featured one cool technology or another, many of the other companies just didn't seem to know how to translate the technology into a product that customers would choose. From Ithryv—Shryk's Banking for Kids platform that sits on top of a bank and provides banks access to kids early on for relationship seeding, to Hangout Industries which states it is turning Myspace into Myplace for kids while in fact it seems to be creating a near-hedonistic experience in which kids have super powers to flip a pool table, play drums, play games, manipulate the shapes in their rooms--all while being bombarded by commerce (shirts, posters, etc.).
It was clear that all of the selected companies have put great effort and thought into their presentations and demos. Each wanted to do well and did well on the technology front. And while they may have had their use-models just right, it was only a couple of companies that passed the customer focus test today and who knew exactly how their offerings apply to their target market, how it is differentiated, and why they made the choice they made when selecting the application they presented.
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