Watch a video of the awards ceremony here.
Three jam-packed days, and 52 startup demos later, we finally have a winner for this year’s TechCrunch50. Every day, the presentations just seemed to get stronger and stronger. There were so many strong contenders this year that we are awarding five jury selection prizes, in addition to the top prize. But there must be a winner, and that winner is…Yammer.
Yammer
Yammer is Twitter with a business model. Created by an existing company, Geni, to scratch its own itch, Yammer takes the familiar Twitter messaging system and applies it to internal corporate communications. There is such a huge demand for this type of service that 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the first day it launched on Monday. Anyone with a corporate email can sign up and follow other people in their company. But if a company wants to claim its users, and gain administrative control over them, they will have to pay. It’s a brilliant business model. (Watch a video of the the winning demo).
The runners up are:
Atmosphir
Atmosphir is a gaming platform that anyone can use to create their own immersive, 3D levels. The tool works by dragging and dropping level elements into place - pieces of land, bridges, hazards, etc. To play your level, all you have to do is hit “play” and you can even go back to the editor after entering gameplay. Atmosphir is available for Macs, PCs and Linux machines and was developed by Minor Studios. (Watch the video).
FitBit
FitBit produces a small gadget that can be clipped discreetly to your clothes. It tracks your movement throughout the day and delivers reports on how active you’ve been. These reports can be accessed through a website and used to learn not only how many steps you’ve taken but your sleeping patterns and caloric burn as well.
GoodGuide
GoodGuide helps consumers find better and more comprehensive information about the products they buy and the companies that make those products. The site ranks products on their health, environmental and social “goodness”, empowering consumers to buy conscientiously. The founders say they have enlisted the support of scientists and technologies, as well as hundreds of information sources, to make the service as accurate and informative as possible. (Watch the video).
Grockit
Grockit is an online, interactive learning tool that brings students together to answer quizzes with each other. The startup has raised $10 million for what it’s calling a “Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game”, which takes its cue from World of Warcraft and applies that game’s concepts to SAT-like study groups. Grockit features a chat room where students can talk with one another as they deliberate over questions. They can also award each other points for their insight. (Watch the video).
Swype
Swype introduced a radical new gesture-based way to input text on touch-screens. Created by Cliff Kushler, the same man who co-invented the T9 predictive text entry system found on over 3 billion phones, Swype lets you simply connect letters on a touch-screen keyboard by making squiggles between them using your finger or a stylus. (Watch the video).
first!
At last, Michael Arrington finds his revenge against Twitter.
I can’t grasp why they picked a winner whose business model could be completely destroyed if Twitter basically rolled over on the other side of the bed tomorrow morning…
With absolutely nothing else to differentiate here, there is nearly NO innovation and definitely NO justification for them to have won this year’s TechCrunch50: 10,000 new members and 2,000 organizations is nothing; Twitter can do it better and if anyone bright over there actually has a say, something like this would be simple (relatively) to implement and MUCH more convenient for existing users of Twitter.
But I’ll leave my more detailed rant here:
http://www.htmlist.com/rants/t.....n-is-dead/
Agree with Chris~~ from an innovation point of view it’s well, not.
Hey! Hey! Hey!
Before all hell is raised! What was the criteria for choosing the winner and the runner ups?
Asides that, I will not question the judgment of the panel. Congrats Yammer!
This is the big idea? Twitter for businesses?
Hell I could have done that.
this is what michael meant the “O Shit” moment
@Chris C - Yammer has basically taken the few extra steps that Twitter should have made months ago, but instead was bogged down with their stability issues and actually had to ROLL BACK some features (’track’ is still disabled, as is most/all IM, and the conversation threading for @ replies is all screwed up - at least on the Twitter home page, on search.twitter.com it seems to mostly work for some reason…).
Basically Yammer placed the track feature/tagging formally into the UI, and created domain level security/segmenting. All stuff that Twitter could/should have done already.
Also long overdue: Sub-segmenting lists, more intelligent sorting options of follower/followee lists (last active, most tweets, most followers, etc.), tracking by keyword AND user/user-sub-group, etc. etc.
Agreed that it’s a bit disappointing that this is in fact seen as THE BEST idea out of the whole pack of 50+100…
Been using it since they launched. It is a great product and well executed. Congrats guys.
What are you working on?
is this big brother in a cubicle.
from my experience people dont like to be disturbed or followed while they work.
Imagine the Messages:
get busy, where are you, may i use the restroom, yes you may, sit in your chair, what are you doing, listen to me, i am your boss.
Personally, I feel like this would be more of a hindrance to work rather than any sort of benefit. If everyone is constantly checking to see what their colleagues are doing then no work will ever get done.
Working on http://www.hubdub.com. Basically Yammer lets the team communicate stuff like ‘fixing the rounding error bug’, ‘getting to work on forums’ or ‘pushing the release now’. We would never share this by email or IM. It is the sort of stuff you would naturally pick up if we were all in the same office together.
lets replace pointless meetings with pointless tweets.
A twitter clone that has been vertically positioned wins tc50?
please yammer don’t hurt ‘em
big upset
I agree. I can’t even believe DropBox didn’t even make the runner up. They should have won and I spoke with many many people at the conference of importance who felt the same. I guess their presentation got messed up, but come on with Yammer. I like the guys and the BM is cool, but the only reason they have a chance to succeed is that they presented at the TechCrunch 50 in front of the exact guy who would buy them in the event they had massive growth. Benioff is just mad he was there to be a judge because he can’t actually steal the idea (which would take a couple days to program) in good faith. He will corner these guys into a hole and give them $500,000 to sell and give them an ultimatum if they don’t. DotSpots is another company which should have been in the runner up list. The guy started Shopzilla and BizRate, he clearly knows what he;s doing.
DropBox was aborted by Live Mesh. Sorry.
Yammer is from a company called Geni. Geni’s CEO is David Sacks. Sacks is a close friend of Peter Thiel and the ex-COO of PayPal. Thiel (ex-PayPal CEO) is the major VC behind Facebook, Slide and Geni. Thiel was interviewed by Arrington on TC50. Arrington has also written very positively about Geni.com, although it’s a commercial failure (its main competitor has 10 times as many users).
So, quite possibly Arringtion is a little brown around the nose today.
Anyway, look up “Peter Thiel” and “David Sacks” on Wikipedia or Google, and search for Arrington’s articles here in TC and see for yourself.
huh? I think twitter should get this prize.
No imagination. biting from someone and spitting out as a different chunk. what has the valley become? Innovation Folks!!!!!!
It’s called “business” dawg. Make money…end of story. How many of MS Windows ideas were original in the 90’s (or even worked for that matter) ??? It served the needs of many and boasted revenues to prove it.
But MS’s ideas were not ‘features’ of other products, which this clearly is.
Same with that Xobni thing. Good thing they also got rolled over by PostBox this week.
Really no surprise here. I think I saw Steve Gilmore running behind the curtain
Congratulations! Is Twitter down?
btw: I think Twitter didn´t hear me. I´ve got the best business model for Twitter.
Why the hell don´t they do what I suggest. Okay, here it is!
Dear Twitter,
please ask your users alternative question in a smaller font near by the main-question “What are you doing?”, so it will look like this:
“What are you doing?” or “What do you think about the new Product X ?” (<-just smaller font)
These branded questions will work! Companys can hire Twitter to ask Twitterusers a branded question. They can pay price x per answer or price x for a day/hour/minute the question appears near by the main question “What are you doing?”
Don´t get me wrong. I heart twitter to the fullest, but now it´s time for me to ask Twitter:
“What are you working on?”
A friend from Germany
Do this yourself and maybe you’ll be the twitter clone to win next year’s TC.
Makes entirely no sense. No blasting about being a clone or anything and wins the TC50. Good job.
I vote for FitBit - truly unique. Would have also added Hangout and VideoSurf to the list.
Actually this is another re-do with small improvements. Google “FitBug” to see the product that’s been around for awhile now. Only thing it doesn’t do is sync up with bluetooth, you have to plugin. Adding bluetooth to an existing product is hardly innovation.
I vote for fitbit too. truly innovative and fils a need.
yammer is just a clone for business. already done by ididwork also.
Agreed. FitBit has greater mass market potential. A cheap hardware product with great margins and a potential for a subscription service with lots of possible add-ons. Not to mention tie-in deal potential with other products, such as the iPod, shoe and fitness companies, and even rental business at fitness places and resorts.
Just like “Yammer” is just another marketing euphemism knocking off “Twitter”, Yammer is just a Twitter knock-off with a very limited vertical marketing appeal…that Twitter could crush at any moment if they start a corporate service.
Why not just give the $50k to Zune if innovation doesn’t count? They could probably use it too.
I would have voted for fitbit too …
i don’t think “none of the above” was given enough consideration
Signed up for our org about half an hour after seeing the demo and watching them put it live. A couple days later, it’s already a staple in our org.
org org org