TechCrunch50 Submission Deadline Is Tomorrow; Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff and Don Dodge Join Expert Panel

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!