BOALT Blog » techcrunch 50 http://www.boalt.com/blog Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:09:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 BOALT goes to TechCrunch 50! http://www.boalt.com/blog/2008/09/boalt-goes-to-techcrunch-50/ http://www.boalt.com/blog/2008/09/boalt-goes-to-techcrunch-50/#comments Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:00:00 +0000 Adam Boalt http://www.boalt.com/blog/?p=6

2850706739_54e3bc492f.jpgI just returned from San Francisco after heading out there last week for TechCrunch 50.  It was an exciting 3 days to say the least. Although, I have to say that I was more impressed with the judges and the tech celebrities than the actual presenters.  My expectations were built up from the previous years TechCrunch 40 and two amazing startups, Animoto.com and Mint.com.

Everybody including me was pretty excited to see presenter, Ashton Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore.  Michael Arlington put together an A-list of judges which included: Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Cuban, Chris DeWolfe, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose to name a few. 


It was funny to hear Michael Arlington open his keynote with Chris DeWolfe by asking him if he was dating Paris Hilton, although, my favorite keynote was the second night when Jason Calacanis spoke with Mark Cuban. Check out the video below:

A start up called Yammer won TechCrunch 50 this year.  Yammer is a tool created for businesses to help them communicate internally with short questions and answers almost identical to Twitter.  We’ve actually adopted it internally for one of our start ups, RushMyPassport.com.  It’s greatly improved our internal communication and has almost become a necessity moving forward.

presenter_56.jpgI personally think the presenter with the most merit was a company called Open Trace.  In short, Open Trace can calculate the carbon footprint of any particular product. So let’s say you purchase a loaf of bread at the grocery store,  Open Trace will provide you a CO2 emission on all the ingredients, packaging and transportation used to produce the bread. It’s a pretty cool concept and their UI was very intuitive.  I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future, products we purchased had a green rating a long with our nutritional information.

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