TechCrunch 40 Results
Last night, I was shooting the breeze with Kaiser Kuo about the tech scene in China, and TechCrunch40 came up as something that would be interesting to do this side of the Pacific. For those not familiar with the concept:
The format is simple: Forty of the hottest new startups from around the world will announce and demo their products over a two day period at TechCrunch40. And they don’t pay a cent to do this. They will be selected to participate based on merit alone. In fact, we’re even offering a $50,000 cash award and lining up other in-kind services and awards from a generous group of corporate sponsors. [ref]
As co-sponsor of the conference, Jason Calacanis announced the site mint.com won top honors. Their slogan is “refreshing money management,” while TechCrunch describes them as, “a personal finance application that lets users track and monitor their financials in one place without the need of routine maintenance or accounting knowledge. Their application tracks bank, credit union and credit card transactions and alerts users to upcoming bills, low balances or unusual spending.”
That’s pretty slick, but not entirely new. Back in the dot-com era (I recall 1999 or so, but I’m not entirely sure) I used the site Yodlee.com as an account aggregator that tracked investments and balances for you. It’s pretty scary giving one site all your bank and credit card passwords to manage. For Yodlee, I started by entering one every few weeks until I was sure they weren’t going to fleece me and run off to the Caymans. Yodlee is still around, and I login in occasionally to check my “net worth” in their display.
In this industry it often takes a few generations for something to stick. YouTube wasn’t the first to share video, and Flickr was not the first to share photos. But they’re certainly the big ones getting attention now. It’s quite curious what makes these services stick when others fail.
Also of note, Kaltura.com took the People’s Choice award at the conference. I had the pleasure of meeting Shay David, co-founder of Kaltura at Wikimania 2007, where he demoed for me their new video editing in a Web page feature using Adobe Flash. It was really slick, and supported a wiki-like video application. This is perhaps the holy grail of the video production world — supporting meaningful video editing collaboration, and Kaltura really impressed me with what they could do within a Web browser.
Can’t wait to play with both of these when I get more time, and when their sites are not completely swamped with traffic (like mint.com right now).
