» TechCrunch 50 Recap

Redbeacon was this years TechCrunch 50 winner. I wasn’t that impressed with the judges selection. I thought that the presentation was fantastic as they created a mock scenario where they ordered 500 cupcakes which were delivered to the audience in a matter of minutes. Sure, this sounds like a fantastic idea, but let’s face it, it’s a bit far fetched. They’re launching this October in the bay area and then hopefully expanding to other cities in the near future. You can see their presentation here:

My good friend, Cyrus Massoumi, launched ZocDoc at the orginal TechCrunch 50 and his idea which is currently in operations in New York city is a great company because he focused on one specific industry: doctors and dentists. He’s not trying to basically achieve the “get whatever whenever” philosophy which is actually W Hotels motto by the way.

My favorite company that presented this year was Crowd Flower. They created a Software as a Service that allows you to provide quality assurance with Mechanical Turks. You can watch the presentation here:

For those of you have worked with Mechanical Turks, you would know that they fill a gap in areas where machine computing can’t play a role but present some very obvious issues. Your paying people to complete micro-tasks known as “Hits” for pennies and controlling the quality of this tasks can be very challenging. Crowd Flower did a great job at providing a solution for this and I personally would have liked to have seem them win.

You can see all of the companies from TechCrunch 50 here.