TechCrunch 40 Day 1: Wrap Up

As the party goes on in downtown San Francisco, a quick wrap up of the first day of the TechCrunch 40 Conference. We live blogged the whole event, and added some great pictures as well. I’ll clean up the typos tomorrow…or the day after.

TechCrunch 40 Session 1: Search and Discovery.

The first session in front of a crowd of around 1,000 people, all wielding laptops and camera’s can be daunting, and despite the odd hiccup the first startups did a great job.

CastTV was our pick from the 5, however ultimately it’s up to the expert panel to decide the winners tomorrow.

Yahoo Presents Yahoo Teachers.

The title says it all, a clever product for school teachers. Check out our post for the demo video.

TechCrunch 40 Session 2: Mobile and Communications

A diverse session title for a diverse range of presentations. A much closer field in terms of picking the best presentation. I picked Cubic Telecom at the time and it’s a name that’s come up in conversations a lot since the session, even being mentioned by some as being a possible winner. Not all the experts on the panel were hot on the business model/ idea though…I can’t help but think that they don’t travel a lot.

TechCrunch 40 Keynote Speakers: Humble Beginnings

Marc Andreessen, David Filo and Chad Hurley. Royalty. There is no need to say much more.

TechCrunch 40 Session 3: Community & Collaboration

By far and away the standout startup session of the day. The presentations were smooth, entertaining, informative and most of all engaging. Flock was the big surprise for me: I expected to see more Firefox with plugins and saw something in the soon to be released 1.0 version that was completely different, unique and new. TripIt was just one of those useful ideas that made you wonder why someone hadn’t thought of that before. Story Blender took video mashups to the masses. The stand out performance in the most competitive field of the day was Music Shake. A couple of blokes from South Korea took the stage and delivered a great presentation. The product is unique, easy to use, and looks like a lot of fun. 95% of the people I’ve spoken to since the end of the day nominate Music Shake as their favorite startup. They enter day 2 as the short price favorite to take the $50,000 first place prize.

AOL Launches Blue String

Read the post for more. Nice to see the AOL team coming up with something new and unique. I had dinner with some of the AOL people, engaging folk, decent dev team who probably don’t get enough credit for the various products they are creating.

TechCrunch40 Session 4: Crowd Sourcing

Last session of the day and always a hard sell when talking to a crowd that had been sitting for the better part of 7 hours.

Cake Financial as the best presentation/ product for my liking, but as with Session 2 it was a fairly close field.

TechCrunch 40 Keynote Conversation: Mark Zuckerberg

First impression: Mark Zuckerberg is human, and normal…and engaging, and interesting, even if some of his responses were great corporate waffle in an attempt to avoid answering the question. No matter what you think about Facebook, Zuckerberg surely must be a champion of Generation Y, for very few have achieved so much at such a young age.

Well be back Tuesday with more live blogging here at TechCrunch. Check out the TechCrunch40 site for company info, video highlights, and the Tangler powered chat room.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.