Have you submitted your application to launch at TechCrunch50 yet? The deadline is tomorrow, Friday, at midnight, so you have about another day and a half to send it in (the application page is here).
Three more experts join our panel this week - Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff and Don Dodge. They, along with our previously announced experts (and more to come) will judge and discuss the startup launches at the event.
Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff is chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Under Benioff’s direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. For its revolutionary approach, salesforce.com has been lauded as one of BusinessWeek’s Top 100 Most Innovative Companies, named No. 7 on The Wired 40, and selected for the past two years as a Top Ten Disrupter by Forbes. Benioff has been widely recognized for pioneering innovation with honors such as the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, the SDForum Visionary Award, Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year by the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business, and being ranked No. 7 on the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT survey by eWEEK. Crunchbase profile.
Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and chairman of HDNet a HD TV cable network. July 1982 saw Cuban start MicroSolutions. MicroSolutions became a software reseller and system integration company, selling products such as Compuserve, Carbon Copy, and Lotus Notes, with the company’s biggest client being Perot Systems. Cuban sold MicroSolutions to Compuserve for $6 million in 1990. In 1995 Cuban and friend Todd Wagner became interested in the early stages of the Internet along with their interest in basketball resulted in them starting broadcast.com which grew to revenues of almost $100 million and 330 staff. The internet company Yahoo brought Broadcast.com with Cuban earning himself just over 5 billion worth of Yahoo stock. Crunchbase profile.
Don Dodge
Don Dodge is a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks. Don is currently Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. Don has been in the software business for more than 20 years. He started his software career with Digital Equipment, aka DEC, in the database group. He worked with 5 software start-ups over the next 12 years. Forte Software was the first multiplatform object oriented development environment. AltaVista was the first search engine on the web. Napster was the first P2P file sharing network. Bowstreet was the first web services development environment. Groove Networks was the first secure P2P collaboration platform. Now he is at Microsoft… “the biggest start-up in the world”… working with VC’s and start-ups in the greater Boston area. Crunchbase profile.
Also, we want to thank Ustream, who joins us as our latest sponsor.
Get those submissions in!
Thats great news. I like the way that this years TC50 is using alot more expert firepower. Mark Cuban can be a bit of an idiot though but Marc and Don are good.
Venturebeat broke the Powerset Story!! Why not techcrunch? You guys are falling behind!!!
Mark Cuban is a bartender that hoodwinked Yahoo into hopping on his money train.
I think the real value of having him available at this event is for useless services like Twitter to take notes and find out how they can also become acquisition targets with no business plan or revenue sources in place.
After all, who wouldn’t want to know when you are in the bathroom relieving yourself? Now all your fellow tech nerd subscribers can know in real time…
interesting to see these guys from the enterprise domain. Is TC50 expected to be more about enterprise 2.0 that before ?
This is interesting, I’m looking forward to this event! I hope that by the time it rolls around Cuban owns the Cubs!
I wonder who else you are going to pull out of the bag as Judges?
Is Mark Cuban going to show this year?
Or will he be too busy dancing with the stars?
Mark Cuban is no tech prognosticator, he is merely lucky, with impeccable timing.
“The internet company Yahoo brought Broadcast.com with Cuban earning himself just over 5 billion worth of Yahoo stock.”
Mike,
Yahoo bought the company for $5billion; it did not net Cuban $5billion.
He was always worth around $1-2billion.
Just saying, Random Person
Congrats! Looks like a great panel. Sadly the timing isn’t right for us to enter.
Hey Mike, what about features of our site, is that eligible, or is it just entirely new companies?
I am working on, what I believe is some pretty interesting new features of Twitturly.
Joel: New product launches are eligible (you don’t have to be a new company.) For example, last year AdBrite launched Spottt at the conference. New feature sets will be considered but it will have to be really substantial innovation to take one of the 50 slots.
Thanks Heather. I will be submitting an application shortly.
Almost done with the info for submission. Transcoding the video to smaller size guys
Definitely looking forward for TechCrunch50!
Last year was a blast and I am sure this year will be twice the action and twice the fun! Hehe
I was just thinking if the TC50 team has built enough excitement for the event. It seems like it deserves more coverage/mention and here are my suggestions:
- Create a simple JavaScript event countdown (e.g. 23 days, 9 hours left)
- Create a “heat map” for Web 2.0 categories being selected/focused this year (e.g. more red on Social Network if more SN are selected — more blue on Social Bookmarking if there is just a few) .. this will get people more engaged and talking about what’s going to happen
- Create an online contest for TechCrunch readers - give some hope to those who can’t afford to go for the event - they can always join the contest and win a FREE ticket! This could be a “TC gives Back” campaign.
Hope it helps and keep up the brilliant work!
Best regards,
Darren Lee
http://www.adexcel.com
Hi
We have submitted our application. Boy have we been working hard on a bunch of awesome features.
We really do believe our app is going to blow your judges away …
Kevin
And oh, I wonder if we are the only Aussie applicants …
Looking forward to attending!
Any idea on how many entries were submitted last year?