Techcrunch UK’s Christmas Party 2008 – The Pitches

Techcrunch UK held a good party tonight with some interesting panels and debates. Well worth attending in my humble view. I met some interesting people which is definitely a plus as well

The pitches were a mixed bunch tonight but below is a 1 or 2 sentence review of each of them. Before I start – I cannot believe how difficult it was to get logos for some of these guys – talk about making life more difficult for bloggers!

booking bug – interesting software as a service play looking to provide booking services to service providers. Great unsexy idea but with difficulty getting to their customerbase, approaching listings/directories would be low hanging fruit (difficult to obtain logo!)

cardcode.net – make business cards more useful – creates a code that allows you to retrieve the information quickly and easily. I am sure I have seen business card scanners that grab information direct from a business card – that strikes me as one less step and therefore a better option.  (difficult to obtain logo!)

jupidi – these guys made everyone smile – a service to allow you understand the opposite sex (SMS a question asking for advice and receive a human response). They did not seem to know what they would do if someone sued them for bad advice.. a little worrying considering their target audience. I also was not sure if they were using psycologists or not?

rendezview – the icelandic guy – makes meetings more productive – though the presentation was good, I just was not convinced by the pitch – its a good idea but I could not see why people would use it, and those who did would suffer the same issue with those using pen and paper – not enough time to prepare and follow up effectively. They also really need a better URL. Am I wrong?

socialibrium is a great concept I think – it is a relationship tool for your contacts, basically telling you who you are not talking to. They are talking to the consumers unlike socialminder which is for the business space. I love the idea of the tool, I really want to get a closer look . The interface seemed more advanced than socialminder – I’ll give a more in depth review after I take a look. In today’s environment, I think the business market is probably a better one mind.

soundcloud is the flickr for audio – it sounds such a weak pitch until I realised I know few others like it, everyone else seems to be doing video. It sounds like a great idea and if its as easy to use as they make out then they could be onto a winner. They have MC Hammer on board (who’s knowledge  is impressively adept online) and they came second tonight. Worth checking out. (but their logo was not easy to get hold off)

Quick.tv – before they stood up my expectations were low – another tv startup <mutters> here we go. And then the pitch started. This was a well presented pitch – they make video interactive in a way that looked very easy, allowing advertisers and content providers to interact with their audience. The interface looked good and very easy to use so it was of no surprise to me that they won tonight. I am waiting for Google to buy them and use it to monetise YouTube.

Worldeka was the only startup I had heard of before, they are a social network for change – allowing charities to connect with activists and crowdsource to achieve their aims. It is an interesting concept though I struggle to see how they will be profitable without charging the charities – they said advertising was enough, I am not so sure.

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Bubblegeneration wrote a post criticizing techcrunch which may or may not be true – I’ll leave that for others to figure out for themselves. At the end of the day we will all know when techcrunch is going downhill – we’ll all stop visiting

Anyhow, the interesting comment bubblegeneration made was that he thought Etsy could be the next Google. I just dont understand why he thinks this- yes it’s a great site – it allows individuals to buy and sell items they have made. So I see yes it possibly could be the next ebay (though I think they might be more likely to buy etsy). But the next Google? Why?

Back from last minute trip to dubai.. lots going on both here and elsewhere.

It all looks like its kicked off over at Techcrunch with Techcrunch UK being “put on hold”. Hopefully it will return as there is definitely a need for it. I know a few people that would like to see it come back as Techcrunch Europe..

Anyhow looks like everyone is over reacting a bit right now – hopefully the dust will settle and everyone can be friends again

This morning, I received an invite to take a sneak preview of the edgeio system. It allows people to post items for sale on their websites. These in turn are picked up by edgeio and then reposted on the edgeio website. It has been launched by Michael Arrington (of Techcrunch fame) and Keith Teare (formerly of RealNames and Easynet).

So what’s so great about that? Well, eBay’s success is its huge community – take that away and why would you sell an item on there? – it would never sell, or achieve a good price! In the same way posting an item on your own website is just as pointless – using edgeio, all items are centralised on the edgeio website as well as your own site, where if successful, there is a large community. Right now, it costs nothing to have it appear on the edgeio website – unlike on eBay of course. Will this change in the future? How will they make their money over the longer term if they don’t? Will advertising be enough? It will need to be easier to use than eBay that’s for sure..

So first thoughts..

well the interface looks clean and crisp and items are easy enough to find. Posting seems to be a different matter though – claiming my rss feed has proven impossible, whether by adding a line to a post or adding it to my header. Nor has my item shown up automatically inside edgeio yet. What’s wrong?

[update] so I was misreading the link I am supposed to enter to claim the blog (it wanted the base url, not the RSS feed). So I am in Now to see if it can see my posts..

[update2] and sure enough as soon as my site was authorised, it picked up the listing. It found the picture and created a thumbnail Having not specifically tagged anything however, this is not altogether surprising. I shall have to do another test with everything properly tagged – I only found the “special” tags afterwords in the FAQs on the site – I think these need to be more prominent on the site – maybe in a publishers section?

[update 3] I thought I should finish off this post as it really lacked any sort of conclusion. Looking at the service more and more, I agree with the guys over at corporate blogging that edgeio is more of a competitor to craig’s list and the classified services than ebay. The major worry for edgeio must be what happens if other providers add the ability to scan for the listings tag. How difficult is this? and if they do what is going to make a user pick one service over another? Right now, ignoring all this, the one thing that bugs me about edgeio is that its not easy enough to get all the information from your post into the right sections on edgeio – its too geeky! Mind you it is mostly geeks who post to blogs anyhow today so maybe that isn’t so much of a problem…