ZURB, a well-regarded interaction design and strategy firm in the San Francisco Bay Area that has in the past done work for eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, Zazzle and many other familiar names, regularly publishes insightful design deconstruction posts for homepages of some of the most popular websites on the net, using its very own Notable app (also see our review of the website feedback tool).

After taking a critical look at CNN.com, MSN.com and Twitter.com, the ZURB team has recently shined its light on TechCrunch.com. And we took notice.

The best way to check out what ZURB had to say about our homepage design – which has been live since Summer 2008 when we did a major redesign for the second time – is to visit this full-page screenshot, where you can hover over their notes to see what feedback the team had to give.

Apart from the visual aspect, the Notable page also allows you to check out the code, content and SEO elements of a website, and you can download the whole critique as a PDF straight from the app without the need to register.

Just for the record, we agree with nearly everything the ZURB team had to say about our homepage design, both the good and the bad. No design is perfect, but we like to think we’ve struck a good balance between making it as easy as possible for readers to check out our content, while giving advertisers valuable real estate that doesn’t interfere with the editorial.

We’re committed to making the experience even better, so note that we are currently working on an entirely new template and design for TechCrunch.

Stay tuned, and in the meantime, do let us know what you think about the current design.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This message currently graces every page on Engadget. We’re not sure what they’re up to [Update: Yes we are.], but it’s promised to be “awesome awesome stuff,” editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky tweets.

In fact, beyond the in your face teaser promising that, “What’s next is coming now. Stay close.”, Topolsky has been tweeting teasers all night. So Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera decided to respond (below):

Not ones to be left out of a super awesome please-refresh-our-page-every-5-seconds-party, we have a page of our own now (below):

(And before we start an Internet flame war, we’re just having some good clean fun with our friends at Engadget. We too are interested to see what their surprise is.)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

• Conferences & Events Producer
  TechCrunch – Palo Alto, CA

• VP, Marketing
  Eventbrite – San Francisco, CA

• Network Engineer
  Six Apart – San Francisco, CA

• Senior Web Developer
  TV Guide – New York, NY

• Sr. PHP Developer
  GOSO.com – Washington, D.C

Also, don’t forget that we’re looking for an Account Executive and CrunchBase interns here at TechCrunch!

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Go ahead, stop reading this right now and go visit it. You’ll be back in a second anyway. Why? Because yes, wwwtwitter.com is the greatest redirect of all: It redirects to TechCrunch.

No, we don’t own it, nor do we have any idea who does. The registration is set to private, but the redirect is being done through GoDaddy. It was registered in November 2007, and won’t be up for renewal until 2014. So, whoever the wily person is out there who did this, good looking out.

Here are some other incorrect www addresses:

• wwwapple.com is a Mac applications review site
• wwwtechcrunch.com is a squatter
• wwwmyspace.com is a squatter
• wwwfacebook.com appears to be broken
• wwwgmail.com appears to be broken
• wwwcnn.com appears to be broken
• wwwdigg.com is a squatter
• wwwning.com redirects to some site called Streetball.com
• wwwespn.com redirects to magazines.com and smartly features ESPN the Magazine

Update: As my colleague Robin Wauters points out, it’s also humorous that people own variations of twitter.com with more “t’s” up to twitttttter.com. Try them all! And yes, a squatter own twiter.com as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Top technology advertisers are finally catching on to the fact that we are kind of obsessive here at TechCrunch in our technology coverage and so are our readers. In fact, they’re want to understand why TechCrunch is such a big deal to so many different types of people (we do too.) To help them get a better understanding of us, we’ve constructed a quick 20-question survey that will help them get a better sense of how today’s leading start-ups and enterprises use social media, business and personal technology, and how TechCrunch influences your thinking about key strategic trends.

Please take 5 minutes to complete our survey. We’ll publish the results here on TechCrunch.

You’ll remember that back in May, we said thank you and good bye to our third-party sales agent, Federated Media. Heather, our CEO, decided our network metrics were strong enough to stand on their own. Turns out she was right (again).

Since May, the TechCrunch network has added nearly 3 million additional readers and 6 million pages views. Our September audience stats now stand at more than 10.5 million unique readers (7 million from our sites and 3.5 million from RSS) and more than 22 million page views.

To handle our network growth, we’ve hired Vaughn Brown as Sales Director. He comes to us from IDG where he was most recently working on the InfoWorld and Industry Standard brands. You can reach him at vaughn [at] techcrunch dot com to discuss custom programs and sponsorship ideas. And as a reminder, you can also buy impressions direct via our self-serve platform, hosted by isocket.

Thanks for reading and for keeping us growing. Please fill out the survey so that advertisers can understand us better and we can keep paying our writers to serve you better.

(Photo credit: Flickr/Robbert van der Steeg).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

As you can see, NYPost wants to paint Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the kind of guy who wants to date socialite Paris Hilton. We’re not so sure. In the social networking circle, she’s old news. She’s practically Friendster. Does Mark really want to Poke former MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe’s Top Friend?

Regardless, Mark can have Paris, because in the similar picture from our event, his sister Randi gets the real prize: Michael.

Okay, yes, we just wanted another excuse to post the picture of Randi and Michael.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Thanks again to all of you who came out to our Real Time Stream CrunchUp and August Capital Summer Party. We broke 600 attendees to the Real Time Stream CrunchUp, double our initial expectations, and we hosted lots more of you at the August Capital outing. We had an amazing group of CrunchUp speakers to talk about new trends, boundaries and your passions. And we fit in 22 new product highlights from start-ups and big internet companies alike. It was a blast, and we’ve got the photos to prove it.

Photos by Marc Salsberry

Click through on any thumbnail to view a photo at full size

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck
Nick Halstead, Tweetmeme
David Hornik, August Capital
Bret Taylor, Friendfeed
George Zachary, Charles River Ventures
Loic LeMeur, Seesmic
Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft
Craig Walker, Google
Andreas Weigend, people & data, and Stanford University
Kevin Marks, former Google
Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch
Steve Gillmor, TechCrunchIT (Moderator)

Find my live notes below (paraphrased): Or you can follow the live stream.

SG: Where is this going, what is this all about, this real-time?

ID: I started TweetDeck just me, cause I couldn’t deal with the data coming at me on Twitter. This is a massively big deal, I’m not going to webpages anymore. I’m consuming real-time data

DL: Real-time in life. And all of this will wrap around our lives.

GV: This is namespace for people versus namespace for websites. It’s very exciting and fundamental as anything we’ve been doing in 15 years.

DH: I think this is a part of the evolution. It’s the same thing that happened with RSS, we had the data, then we couldn’t sort it. Now it’s with this real-time data.

SG: Has Google fallen behind in speed?

CW: I don’t think so. Google Wave was as impressive as it gets in real time.

ES: So how does this tie into Google Chrome OS?

CW: Chrome OS is about web apps are the future. A lot of info isn’t out there, so I’m not going to say much.

DL: I’m looking forward to learning about it. And I’ll be waiting a long time (laughs).

BT: Real-time is an important feature of every site. But this is all changing user expectations. Email, social network, real-time. Now you seem to need all of them. We’re still struggling with some user interface elements. It’s simplicity of chronological information versus the need for filtering. You need to come up with an interface that mixes those. We’re thinking a lot about that. You want to load up FriendFeed and it’s all good stuff, but you don’t lose anything. I think it will be a mix.

KM: The real-time stuff distracts us a bit. Real-time is only a part of what we’re going to want. What used to real-time television and radio are now stored, but there are new real-time elements.

ES: And do you have an announcement to make?

KM: Yes, I’m joining British Telecom to work in this area.

AW: The amount of data generated by people is so huge now. Data is grow so fast, and real-time incentivizes people for it to grow faster.

NH: Real-time to me is about collecting news in real-time. Google FeedBurner is too slow, so we went with Tweetmeme on Twitter cause it’s instant. And then you press a button and then it goes back to Twitter. FriendFeed impresses me too, you retweet something and seconds later its on FriendFeed. This is real-time. To me it’s all about real-time filtering, getting data in front of the people who want it.

SG: PubSubHub is fixing the FeedBurner speed right?

NH: Yeah.

SG: So where are we going to draw value from this stream?

NH: It’s a lot of thing, the story their talking about, who mentions it, and who else is talking about it. Dynamic filtering doesn’t work for us cause the data is too live.

ES: There seem to be two main platforms: Twitter and Facebook coming on strong. How many stream platforms can there be?

LL: You have a great tie (laughs). We are pushing about 4,000,000 API calls to Facebook a day, but we don’t have it to Twitter.

ID: (laughs) We don’t have that information.

KM: You’ve got the Highlander disease again, where there can be only one. We don’t all see the same web, we see a different subset on the web.

ES: Okay if MySpace or Yahoo tried to recreate Twitter would anyone care.

KM: Yes they will, they have millions of users.

LL: I bet MySpace and Yahoo will come up with something very soon. Twitter and Facebook is just the first.

BT: I think it’s wrong to think that real-time systems will always be like AOL and Compuserve, that you can only talk to others on that network. I think it will be more like Yahoo Mail or Gmail, where you can talk to other networks. There is a lot of work on that. Federation will be big, users will demand it. Users demands for openness will win out, and the system with operate openly. So with that Yahoo could make what they wanted, and it would just work.

ES: That sounds great but Twitter can’t afford to give its firehose to Google. That’s its power.

CW: I have no idea if Twitter is not giving us accees. But IM open operation has never happened. There’s a incentive for the leader not to give away the goods.

KM: We’re talking about different things.

GZ: I think it’s going to be a return of the IM horse. We’ve reinvented IMs with this, I don’t think the name spaces will cooperate with each other.

SG: But it happens in the business world, why not the consumer world?

BT: There is no RSS of every IM you send, so it’s a bit different. We didn’t sign deals with a bunch of companies, we used feeds and APIs. That means a lot.

ES: But developers are building on top of Twitter and Facebook. How do Microsoft and Google get those guys on board?

DL: There’s infrastructure. It’s kind of like the cloud conversation, all this data is somewhere. You have to adhere to the core standards. There’s a lot of cost when you get up to hundred of millions of users. This is a similar movie to the movie has played before, but now it’s based on standards.

SG: How will this play in Twitter exits?

DH: Venture exits? Is that a joke? (Laughs) This is like anything else, the amount of data being spread is meaningful, and platforms will exists. Platforms are the big winners. The most interesting, the most useful for porn, etc. (laughs) Can we really be done 7 months into the excitement on the web? I don’t think so. We will fund the new things that come out.

SG: So what are you interested in?

DH: I honestly think this question of managing this information is what is really interesting. That’s why I invested in Aardvark. Everyone sitting here is trying to build the next interesting things. Maybe FriendFeed wins. Maybe TweetDeck wins. We’ll see.

AW: Sometimes it’s worth thinking about what’s constant. People have to be clear about the tradeoff what they’re willing to give up, things like privacy.

—-Okay, well a WiFi failure ate the final two minutes but here’s a summary: There is huge opportunity here, and it’s only going to get bigger. The number of requests to get into this conference alone says this is far from over.

Interoperability of all this data remains a big question marks. Some are sure it will come, others are sure it won’t. Some think it has to for this idea of real-time to really thrive. Some think if this happens, it will dampen the big platforms. Obviously, there is a lot of debate.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Below find some live notes (paraphrased):

Note before: Conway invested in Google at a $75 million valuation.

Michael Arrington: What is real-time?

Ron Conway: I think it’s much bigger than Twitter. The fact that 10,000 app developers use the Twitter API is huge, but it’s a bigger opportunity for new content on the web. Real-time content hasn’t been available up until now, but it’s valuable. A whole new industry will pop up around it.

John Borthwick: It goes back to broadband, the “always-on” connection. And now that many people have these real-time connection, we’re seeing it grow. Also the openness of the platform is helping this trend. Shift occurred when Twitter bought Summize (which Borthwick invested in)

MA: How much stock did you get from that?

JB: Great question, we’re not disclosing. But there’s a collisions between real-time interactions and the liveness of an experience.

MA: I think Twitter search is still awful. Are we going to see improvements?

JB: I don’t view this as just being Twitter, it’s about the whole landscape. And I can’t speak for Twitter, but there is a whole bunch of innovation in the real-time search space. 4 years ago people would not have looked at this as an investment. But now it’s all open.

Steve Gillmor: So why the investment in things like URL shorteners like Bit.ly?

JB: Because those links are about the density of data, and it makes it easy to filter the stream. There is only going to be more demand to filter it.

MA: What are the big opportunities?

RC: I invest in great entrepreneurs first. We’re talking to every real-time data company out there. Then we invest in the idea second, and how much intellectual property they have. The new opportunity is how you can invest in this content now. It will blossom and monetization gets proven.

JB: We’re still very much learning. That tone is getting packaged now, but we’re not there yet. Web 2.0 had too many definitions, we don’t really have one here yet.

RC: Whatever this is, it’s early, early days. It’s Google in 1998.

MA: Dumbest thing Twitter can do is add friction to the process, right? What about what the Sun Valley guys were saying this week?

RC: “Innovations is not happening in Sun Valley, it’s happening in Silicon Valley.” These guys all have to make sure that users like their service, and then monetization strategies will be obvious.

MA: And Twitter isn’t spending the money that Facebook is right? So they don’t have to worry as much.

RC: Right, but Facebook is doing great though. I have a couple thousand shares in Facebook. Facebook is now monetizing. There will be monetization for Twitter too. “Twitter absolutely can be a business.”

JB: There’s a Silicon Valley centric way of thinking. Some great companies from England. New round in TweetDeck, unannounced round. TweetDeck is kicking all the competitors butts. Round was a couple million in pounds dollars.

MA: Let’s talk about Bit.ly. I didn’t get it at first, but now I think I do, it’s kind of like Digg with data. Is Bit.ly the next company to sell to Twitter.

JB: Bit.ly was something my company Betaworks built. It turns one year old this weekend. We developed it to scratch an itch really. 27 or 28 million Bit.ly links are now being liked as of yesterday. That’s with the partnership with Twitter (it’s the default shortener). Lot of great data with Bit.ly, not sure what to do with all that yet, but we’re thinking about it. And we’ll push a lot of data through the API. We’re spending a lot of time scaling now.

SG: How does what you’re doing with Bit.ly going into what Ron is saying with monetization?

JB: Great question, it’s too early to tell. Maybe lead generation and analytics. I won’t answer the sell to Twitter because I don’t work for Twitter, and because I think the eco-system around Twitter is vibrant and it’s important it stay intact. If they sell, it won’t be an ecosystem.

MA: With API and Track, Twitter has some issues they need to deal with.

Erick Schonfeld: What’s the most valuable data?

JB: I think the social relationships is. Social filters are so valuable too.

RC: It’s early days remember, social relationships, news, opinions, celebrities having direct contact with fans. Any entity to directly contact with their constituants. The Twitter app community is the development department of Twitter. All the apps being developed are outside, users decide what they like.

SG: Are Microsoft and Google going to get in on this? Other candidates for exits?

RC: Lot of exit opportunities. Lots of roll-ups, and lots of M&A. I think Google and all them will do their own things in this area as well.

MA: Panel in Seattle was interesting. Companies were talking about making money, all of them said they buy traffic on Google. But that’s converting at a lower rate than links from Twitter. That’s Earth-shattering. But they can’t chare for that, right?

JB: The most compelling monetization models go with the user experience. You can’t slap on an existing one. It gives the users a poor experience. In the early days of Google they didn’t know how it would work. Some other companies are getting 20% of their traffic from the stream.

RC: This is about iterating and finding a monetization model.

SG: Question from audience. As data keeps coming in, how do you organize and filter it?

RC: A lot of these third-party apps are doing it. It’s a real dilemma, but they’re doing it.

JB: First filter is the social filter, then topical filters, then new filters which are emergies: retweets, @ replies, how many followers you have. A lot of this is related to the de-industrialization of the news. No one knew what Twitter would be good for, but then it was SXSW, then it was the news.

Questions from audience:

Q: Google was clearly not the first search engine, so what’s the opportunity to replace Twitter?

RC: It will be really hard, because Twitter has built a 5-letter word, brand.

MA: But didn’t Friendster?

RC: Nowhere near.

MA: Twitter was weak for so long and we didn’t leave, so maybe they made it.

RC: It’s all about the brand. I bet it’s close to what Google’s brand was that the same point in its life.

JB: On the topic of Google. Twitter has search-like behavior of Google, but it’s about navigation of the data too, which is different.

That’s a wrap.

Update: Here’s some video footage of the talk:

[photos: CC Brian Solis]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The last batch of 150 tickets to attend our 4th annual summer outing on July 10 at August Capital are available now (now sold out), courtesy of Eventbrite. Once these go, the only way in is to attend our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp (which we highly recommend).

Every summer we have a party at August Capital, and it somehow seems to get more popular every year (is that possible?). Last year we preceded the party with a roundtable on the Mobile Web Wars, and this year we are doing the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp. Think all day and party all night: that’s pretty much sums up our philosophy. Hope to see you at both events.

August Capital Tickets

Friday, July 10
5:30 – 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA
Tickets: HERE UPDATE: SOLD OUT.

Tickets are $20 to help manage the guest list and minimize no shows. Due to extremely limited availability, we regret that tickets are non-transferable and non-refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door.

Grey Goose Vodka will be hosting a special martini bar for us (perfect compliment to our mini burgers.)

Demo tables, photowalls, games and other sponsors are working to make our 4th annual outing better than ever. We have a few slots left, so please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde for sponsorship details.

CrunchUp

Friday, July 10
9:00 am – 4:30 pm
Fox Theatre, 2223 Broadway, Redwood City
Get CrunchUp tickets for $295, which include expedited check-in to the August Capital party.

The CrunchUp final agenda is here.

Gaping Void’s Hugh MacLeod designed his 4th commemorative lithograph in honor of our event, “dream big.” It’s certainly inspiring. We’ll live auction one special serigraph during the CrunchUp with proceeds to benefit Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Press, please email Daniel Brusilovsky for press consideration to attend the CrunchUp and August Capital outing.

Big Time Thank Yous to Our CrunchUp Sponsors

Product Sponsors: Glam Media Lab’s Tinker live conversation moderation, Tokbox live video chat, Ustream live video streaming, Bantam Live, Charles River Ventures, Microsoft BizSpark and mailspace cc:Betty.

Demonstration Sponsors: Seesmic, OneRiot, PeopleBrowsr, Mashery, IDrive, Sun Start-Up Essentials, Meraki, SocialFeet, Tapulous, Loopt, Grey Goose Vodka, Future Works, Gaping Void, Stormhoek Wines, Friendster, LifeIO, and Groovy.

Event Sponsors: Eventbrite for ticketing and MediaTemple for hosting, Topix, Orange, AIM/AOL, ReTargeter, Coveroo, Pandora.

Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Additional details here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Our Real Time Stream Crunchup is only a week and half away (get tickets here).  We’ve been working hard to pull together the best startups, investors, engineers, and marketers developing products and platforms which take advantage of real-time data and communications in new ways.  The real time stream is fast becoming a dominant metaphor for consuming information, increasingly displacing or at least transforming the traditional Web page. It has implications for startups, venture investors, media, search, and business, in general.  We’ll explore all of these facets in panels, on-stage interviews, demos, and a roundtable.

Twitter to Facebook have already embraced the stream, but they are only the beginning.  An whole new ecosystem of real time stream platforms and apps is emerging before our eyes.  In fact, so many companies wanted to demo their product launches at the CrunchUp that we had to turn some away.  But we still managed to fit in about a dozen demos, many of them will be seen for the first time.

The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more.  Individual panels will do deep dives into the market opportunity, the real time platforms, real time search (something I am very excited about), and real time business.  By real time business, I mean how businesses are adapting to the stream as a tool for marketing, brand management, customer engagement tool, internal communications, and even resource allocation.  Putting together this conference has opened my eyes as to how far-reaching the real time stream is already, and these are early days.

I hope you can join us to see for yourself.  Below is the (almost final) agenda:

Real Time Stream CrunchUp (Agenda)

Friday, July 10, 9:00 am – 4:45 pm
Fox Theatre, 2223 Broadway, Redwood City
Get CrunchUp tickets HERE for $295, which includes a ticket and expedited check-in to the August Capital party.
Press contact: Daniel Brusilovsky

9:00 – 9:45 am
The Real Time Opportunity
Q&A with leading angel investors John Borthwick and Ron Conway, moderated by Michael Arrington and Steve Gillmor.

9:45 – 10:30 am
The Real Time Moment

• Jack Dorsey, Twitter
• Chris Cox, Facebook
• Bret Taylor, Friendfeed
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch (moderator)

10:30 – 10:55
Real Time Communication Demos

• Wordpress, Andy Skelton
• Netvibes, Freddy Mini
• Meebo, Sandy Jen
• AOL, Frank Gruber
• Adobe Wave, John Shapiro
• Additional STEALTH demos

10:55 – 11:05 am
Break

11:05 – 11:30
Real Time Application Demos

• Seesmic, Loic Le Meur
• PeopleBrowsr, Jodee Rich
• Wowd, Boris Agapiev
• Additional STEALTH demos

11:30 – 12:15 pm
Real Time Search

• Gerry Campbell, Collecta
• Matt Cutts, Google
• Kimbal Musk, OneRiot
• Vipul Ved Prakash, Topsy
• Edo Segal, Investor and founder Relegance
• Sean Stutcher, Microsoft
• Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch (moderator)

12:15 – 12:30 pm
Real Time Mobs
Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble talk about the darker side of the stream

12:30 – 1:45 pm
Lunch

1:45 – 2:15 pm
Real Time Media Demos

• 12Seconds.tv, Sol Lipman
• Qik, Bhaskar Roy
• Magma, Andrew Baron
• Additional STEALTH demos

2:15 – 2:30 pm
Business Demos

• SocialMedia, Somrat Niyogi
• Twitturly, Joel Strellner
• Bantam, John Rourke
• Salesforce, Kraig Swensrud
• Microsoft Silverlight

2:30 – 3:15 pm
Real Time Business

• Porter Gale, Virgin America
• John Ham, Ustream
• Eric Marcoullier, Gnip
• Ross Mayfield, SocialText
• David Sacks, Yammer
• Maynard Webb, LiveOps
• Tim Young, SocialCast
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch (moderator)

3:15 – 3:30 pm
Break

3:30 – 4:45 pm
Real Time Roundtable

• Chris Cox, Facebook
• Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck
• Nick Halstead, Tweetmeme
• David Hornik, August Capital
• Loic LeMeur, Seesmic
• Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft
• Kevin Marks, activity stream junkie
• Bret Taylor, Friendfeed
• Max Ventilla, Aardvark
• Craig Walker, Google
• Andreas Weigend, Stanford and Berkeley
• George Zachary, Charles River Ventures
• Steve Gillmor, TechCrunchIT
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

All details are here.

Press, please email Daniel Brusilovsky for press consideration to attend the CrunchUp and August Capital outing.

August Capital Tickets

Friday, July 10, 5:30 – 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA
Get tickets NOW, courtesy of Eventbrite. They’ll go fast, so grab them now. UPDATE: Round of tickets sold out. Final batch of tickets will be released next week.

Tickets are $20 to help manage the guest list and minimize no shows. Due to extremely limited availability, we regret that tickets are non-transferrable and non-refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door.

Demo tables, photowalls, games and other sponsorships are available to make a memorable impression with MeetUp attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

Big Time Thank Yous to Our CrunchUp Sponsors

Product Sponsors: Glam Media Lab’s Tinker live conversation moderation, Tokbox live video chat, Ustream live video streaming, Bantam Live, Charles River Ventures and mailspace cc:Betty.

Demonstration Sponsors: Seesmic, OneRiot, PeopleBrowsr, Mashery, IDrive, Sun Start-Up Essentials, Meraki, SocialFeet, Tapulous, Loopt, Grey Goose Vodka, Future Works, Gaping Void and Stormhoek Wines.

Event Sponsors: Eventbrite for ticketing and MediaTemple for hosting, Topix, ReTargeter, Coveroo, Pandora.

Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Additional details here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The second batch of 150 tickets to attend our 4th annual summer outing on July 10 at August Capital are available now, courtesy of Eventbrite. They’ll go fast so grab them now. Update: This batch is sold out.

We are also selling tickets for our Real Time Stream CrunchUp earlier that day (a CrunchUp ticket includes entry to the party as well). The CrunchUp is a mini-conference exploring all aspects of the real time stream and its impact on everything from information consumption and search to media and business.

The lineup of speakers includes founders, CEOs, and top engineers from Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Google, Salesforce, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Collecta, Qik, and more. It is amazing how much activity is going on in this area. The number of stealth companies and products that want to launch at the event alone is overwhelming, and we are working hard to fit as many of them as we can into the schedule. (More details soon).

August Capital Tickets

Friday, July 10
5:30 – 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA

Tickets are $20 to help manage the guest list and minimize no shows. Due to extremely limited availability, we regret that tickets are non-transferrable and non-refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. Additional tickets will be released over the next two weeks.

As usual, there will be lots of start-up demos, giveaways, drinks and fun. CrunchUp tickets include expedited entry to the August Capital outing.

Demo tables, photowalls, games and other sponsorships are available to make a memorable impression with MeetUp attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

Double your TechCrunch fun and join us for the Real Time Stream CrunchUp. We are calling it a CrunchUp because it will be highly participatory and real-time in every sense of the word.

CrunchUp

Friday, July 10
9:00 am – 4:00 pm
Fox Theatre, 2223 Broadway, Redwood City
Get CrunchUp tickets for $295, which include expedited check-in to the August Capital party.

Morning Fireside Chat with Real Time Angels:

Our confirmed speakers include:

• Jack Dorsey, Twitter
• Chris Cox, Facebook
• Bret Taylor, Friendfeed
• Robert Scoble, Building43
• Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck
• Nick Halstead, Tweetmeme
• Loic Le Meur, Seesmic
• Joel Strellner, Twitturly
• Vipul Ved Prakash, Topsy
• Gerry Campbell, Collecta
• Kimbal Musk, OneRiot
• Andrew Baron, Magma
• Bhaskar Roy, Qik
• Eric Marcoullier, Gnip

More details are here.

Big Time Thank Yous to Our CrunchUp Sponsors

Product Sponsors: Tokbox live video chat, Ustream live video streaming, Bantam Live, and Charles River Ventures.

Demonstration Sponsors: Seesmic, OneRiot, Loopt, Future Works and Stormhoek Wines.

Event Sponsors: Eventbrite for ticketing and MediaTemple for hosting, ReTargeter, Coveroo, Pandora music.

Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Additional details here.

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TechCrunch TweetDeck users will get all the features of the normal version of TweetDeck (Twitter, Facebook, 12seconds, etc, integration), with the added bonus of the TechCrunch Column, as an option. This column features tweets from TechCrunch’s writing staff. It’s seriously riveting stuff. Why just last night, our own Robin Wauters tweeted out, “Cleaning up disks, creating backups etc. Necessary evil.”

Seriously though, we do occasionally share interesting stuff. And if news is breaking, there’s a good chance you’ll get it from one of us first. And you’ll be getting a version of TweetDeck with the handsome TechCrunch logo all over it. What’s not to love? Get it now.

TweetDeck is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, it just requires Adobe AIR. The company, which secured angel funding in January, has been working on getting more services integrated into its client. Last week, it launched an iPhone app that has been gaining popularity quickly.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

We’ve been flooded with interest in the Real Time Stream CrunchUp to be held Friday, July 10 in conjunction with our 4th annual summer meet-up at August Capital (see ticket info below). Since we first announced the event two weeks ago, some major speakers have confirmed their attendance and the schedule is really starting to come together.

Jack Dorsey, the inventor of Twitter, will be on hand to share his first-hand account of how the real time stream rose to prominence so fast and where it needs to go from here. Chris Cox, the VP of product at Facebook, will have his own thoughts on the subject. And we might even stream Robert Scoble live via video from London just so that he can tell Dorsey all about FriendFeed. If Scoble needs help, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor will be there to set him straight.

We’ll kick things off with a morning discussion between two of the smartest investors focusing on real-time startups today: John Borthwick and Ron Conway. Both hold shares in Twitter, but their commitment to the real time stream goes way beyond that.

Borthwick runs betaworks, a startup accelerator with investments in bit.ly, Summize (which was acquired by Twitter and now powers its real time search), TweetDeck, and most recently Twitterfeed, among others. Conway, an early investor in Google and more than 500 other startups, is now laser-focused on the real time opportunity as well. Come learn why they are scanning the horizon for real time investments and how they think these startups are poised to reshape the fabric of the Web.

Individual panels will take a look at how emerging real time platforms are setting the stage for other companies to build applications on. These include not only other Websites, but also desktop and mobile clients. The stream is not bounded by the browser, as stream readers from TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop are proving. We’ll also do a deep dive into real time search with Collecta (which launched yesterday), OneRiot, Topsy, and others.

The stream will touch every aspect of the Web, from real time media (including social reporting and live video) to real time business (brand monitoring and rapid response when customers complain in the public stream). We’ll be exploring those realms as well.

Interspersed throughout the day will be new product demos from Google, Salesforce, Seesmic, Andrew Baron’s Magma, and several stealth startups. (If you have an eye-opening demo or want to launch a product at the CrunchUp, please contact our conference producer, Asad Akbar. We have just a few spots left.)

It is going to be a whirlwind day. TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be hosting the event. We are calling it a CrunchUp because it will be highly participatory and real-time in every sense of the word. Our confirmed speakers include:

• Jack Dorsey, Twitter
• Chris Cox, Facebook
• Bret Taylor, Friendfeed
• Ron Conway, angel investor
• John Borthwick, betaworks
• Robert Scoble, Building43
• Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck
• Nick Halstead, Tweetmeme
• Loic Le Meur, Seesmic
• Joel Strellner, Twitturly
• Vipul Ved Prakash, Topsy
• Gerry Campbell, Collecta
• Kimbal Musk, OneRiot
• Andrew Baron, Magma
• Bhaskar Roy, Qik
• Eric Marcoullier, Gnip

Additional speakers will be announced over the next three weeks. If you’ve got some real-time hotness you are ready to unleash on the world, contact us.

CrunchUp Details

The CrunchUp will take place on Friday, July 10, between 9:00 am and 4:30 PM at the historic Fox Theatre in Redwood City. CrunchUp tickets are $295 and include expedited check-in to the August Capital party.

Get CrunchUp tickets here, courtesy of Eventbrite.

The complete line-up is here.

Big Time Thank Yous to Our CrunchUp Sponsors

Tokbox is our offical video-chat sponsor of the CrunchUp.

Thank you also to demonstration sponsors OneRiot and Loopt. And to Eventbrite for ticketing and MediaTemple for hosting.

Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Additional details here.

August Capital Tickets

August Capital year 4, can you believe it?
Friday, July 10
5:30 – 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA

We’re also releasing the first batch of 150 August Capital meet-up tickets here, courtesy of Eventbrite. Hurry, they’ll go fast.

Tickets are $20 to help manage the guest list and minimize no shows. Due to extremely limited availability, we regret that tickets are non-transferrable and non-refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. Additional tickets will be released over the next three weeks, so please be patient and stay tuned.

As usual, there will be lots of start-up demos, giveaways, drinks and fun. CrunchUp tickets include expedited entry to the August Capital outing.

Demo tables, photowalls, games and other sponsorships are available to make a memorable impression with MeetUp attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

Hope to see you there.

UPDATE: August Capital Tickets SOLD OUT quickly as predicted. Watch for the next batch next week. Else, get a CrunchUp ticket and attend both events with us.

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I just got word from TechCrunch editor at large Sarah Lacy, who’s currently writing very little for us while working on her new book in Rwanda. Her excuse? A “baboon attack” which is really just a baboon eating her breakfast. The fascinating video is above – I bet she could have written two posts in the time it took her to edit it, though.

Glad you and Geoff are safe, Sarah. Come home soon.

And yes, the main reason for this post was just because I really wanted to write a title like “TechCrunch Editor Attacked By Baboon”

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Some people use Twitter to organize street protests in Tehran. Some people use it to share their daily thoughts and observation. But it is increasingly becoming clear that one of the most common ways people use Twitter is as a social information filter and link distributor.

Over the past few months, TechCrunch has experienced the power of this micro-media firsthand as the percentage of traffic we get from Twitter has grown to the point that it is now our second largest source of outside traffic after Google. In the past 30 days, Twitter accounted for 9.7 percent of all traffic to Techcrunch.com, up from 1.8 percent six months ago. This is out of millions of visits.

Looking at our Google Analytics numbers, here is the breakdown of visits to TechCrunch by source over the past 30 days:

Top Sources of Traffic To TechCrunch
1. Google: 32.7%
2. Direct: 22.7%
3. Twitter: 9.7%
4. Digg: 7.4%
5. Techmeme: 2.4%
6. Other: 25.1%

Twitter has been rising up that chart, just recently surpassing Digg. TechCrunch is certainly not typical of most Websites, but this data certainly shows the potential of Twitter to generate traffic. A large portion of that traffic comes from the TechCrunch account on Twitter, which has nearly 715,000 followers (it is one of the accounts suggested to new users). For many people, Twitter is replacing their RSS readers. One of the ways we use that account is to Tweet out links to our stories, which then spread virally as followers retweet those links. Retweets are becoming a new type of link currency. We are big believers in retweets (in fact, there is now a retweet button at the bottom of every post).

About a month ago we started using Awe.sm, which lets us send out our own custom short links (http://tcrn.ch) and track how much traffic we get from them. About 73 percent of our Twitter traffic comes from people clicking on an http://tcrn.ch short link. Another 23 percent comes directly from Twitter.com via other short links such as bit.ly’s.

We can also approximate how much Twitter traffic comes from desktop and mobile clients. At least 44 percent of Twitter traffic comes from clients, and that counts people clicking directly on http://tcrn.ch links from those clients. So the true number is easily more than half.

For us, and I’d argue increasingly for other large Websites as well, Twitter is not just about micro-media. The most powerful Tweets are those which point elsewhere. Or to put it another way, the shortened link may just be the most powerful type of micro-media there is. Those retweeted links are turning Twitter into a social broadcast media that rivals any other on the Web.

(Photo credit: Flickr/Brett Weinstein)

Top 5 TechCrunch Traffic Sources

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

In December they wrote about Facebook revenue woes just, as it turned out, at the time that Facebook saw a huge spike in advertising dollars that will propel them to as much as $600 million in revenue this year. Then there was the Tesla article that prompted quite a response from CEO Elon Musk. That article was retitled and rewritten to correct errors and change the overall tone.

I can’t help wondering if our occasional criticism of the NYTimes prompted their most recent attack, this time aimed squarely at us. Not only does writer Damon Darlin get a lot wrong, he just absolutely failed to write the real and far more interesting story that was staring him in the face.

When Damon reached out to me by email to talk about the story, I wrote back something along the lines of “The Sunday New York Times scares the shit out of me” because of their reputation for twisting conversations to fit whatever story they’ve decided to write. But Damon persisted, saying “I want to call you about a column I am doing on different ways news organizations approach reporting rumors.” Seemed fair enough, I have lots of thoughts on that subject.

We talked for 20-30 minutes by phone. About 30 seconds of dialog, remixed to change the meaning and context entirely, made it into the article as quotations. None of the rest of our talk seemed to influence his thesis, that blogs can’t be trusted, at all.

Damon was laser focused in the article on a post we ran talking partially about Apple/Twitter acquisition rumors. Here’s that post: Twitter Mania: Google Got Shut Down. Apple Rumors Heat Up. Damon says:

Hours later, TechCrunch, a popular Silicon Valley tech news site, was reporting the very same thing. The posts generated a good deal of traffic for both sites. They were picked up by numerous reputable sites and retweeted endlessly on Twitter. The TechCrunch post yielded 405 comments from readers, an unusually large response. Within 12 hours the Gawker post had been viewed 22,000 times, enough to earn it the orange flame that Gawker editors use to designate a post as hot news.

Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into its story, that, “The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations.”

But they reported it anyway. “I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,” said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post. (Owen Thomas, the writer of the Gawker post, has since taken a job at NBC and did not want to comment on the record.)

Damon is suggesting that I reported the rumor as if it were real, and waited until deep into the post to say anything about it being unlikely. 133 words into it!

The fact is we didn’t talk about the rumor until the third paragraph of that story, and the statement about it being unlikely to be true came immediately after the sentence that stated the rumor:

Today, though, rumors popped up that Apple may be looking to buy Twitter. “Apple is in late stage negotiations to buy Twitter and is hoping to announce it at WWDC in June,” said a normally reliable source this evening, adding that the purchase price would be $700 million in cash. The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations. If these discussions are happening, Twitter is keeping them very quiet indeed. We would have passed on reporting this rumor at all, but other press is now picking it up.

There’s just no way to interpret this paragraph as a cheap way to get traffic by misleading readers. We say exactly what we were hearing, and what we believe to be true. And by the way, it shouldn’t matter, but we’ve subsequently confirmed that Apple and Twitter were in fact in acquisition discussions, and the original source for our story was correct.

The other money quote from Damon is also misleading and was taken out of context:

That drive to compete with the so-called mainstream media is what’s behind his strategy. He doesn’t have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything, so he competes where he has the advantage. “Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”

Note the break between “Getting it right is expensive” and “Getting it first is cheap.” The break is there because there were paragraphs of dialog between them. Damon saw a way to slap them together to make us look bad. He did that because it fit his original thesis, which he had formed prior to talking to us.

The Real Story

The real story is what I said between those two sentence fragments, and it’s that stuff that makes all the difference. I talked to Damon about how stories evolve on our blog. How it can start with a rumor, which we may post if we find it credible and/or it’s being so widely circulated that the fact of the rumor’s existence is newsworthy in itself. But then we evolve a post to get to the truth.

Jeff Jarvis calls this Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture in a post today. His arguments deserve to be fleshed out into an entire book.

We don’t believe that readers need to be presented with a sausage all the time. Sometimes it’s both entertaining and informative to see that sausage being made, too. The key is to be transparent at all times. If we post something we think is rough, we say so. If we think it’s absolutely true, we signal that, too, while protecting our sources.

A good example of this is another Twitter story we wrote, this time about Google. in Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter (Updated) we wrote, based on a solid source, that Google was in late stage talks to acquire Twitter. The post itself brought out other sources who disputed that the talks were in late stage. Within minutes after posting we had updated the text, adding “Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine. But discussions between the companies are confirmed.”

That update is 100% correct. Google was in talks over a data deal, and there were discussions of an acquisition. Our original source got his information from a Google employee. We have subsequently confirmed that a Google employee did in fact tell him that they were in late stage acquisition discussions with Twitter, because he believed it to be true. There was some internal miscommunication about the discussions.

But anyway, media outlets like the NYTimes think that having to update a story is a sign of weakness. I believe the opposite, that it’s a sign of transparency and a promise to our readers to continue to give them the best information we have. Corrections and updates are made constantly to big news posts.

Some people ask why we don’t just wait until we have the whole story before posting. That’s where the cheap/expensive quote above comes in. The fact is that we sometimes can’t get to the end story without going through this process. CEOs don’t always take our calls when we’re asking about speculative rumors. But when a story is up and posted, it’s amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information.

It’s that iterative process, which Jarvis nails completely, that I was trying to guide Damon to. He can like it or hate it, but it works. And readers love it. The only people who don’t like it are competitors who like to point out that a story was partially wrong, and that they got it right later. But the fact is that they didn’t even know there was a story to begin with. Our original post kicked off the process, and they, like us, started digging for the absolute truth.

The other thing Damon conveniently left out of his article are the many, many big stories that we have broken over the years. There’s a reason that we are no. 1 on the TechMeme leaderboard. There’s a reason why we have more than twice the weight of CNET, at no. 2 and the NY Times at no. 3. It’s because we have an exceptional reputation for honesty and hard work, and we spend all our time in the community building friendships with the people who are driving this industry forward. I translated the word “friend” into “source” for Damon so he could understand what I was talking about. I don’t just call these people when I have a question on a story. I also call them to hear about their kid’s elementary school graduation, or to give them advice on which venture capitalist might want to invest in them. They trust me, and they talk to me.

Here are a few of the stories that we’ve broken over the years. These aren’t stories where we followed someone else, they’re things that we broke first and nailed. I don’t think the NY Times or anyone else can point to this kind of track record:

• Google Buys Youtube (we had the parties and the price nailed)
• Yahoo’s Offer To Buy Facebook (we posted internal Yahoo documents showing their valuation modeling of the Facebook deal, and broke the fact of the discussions first)
• Google/Yahoo Search Deal (we broke the news that a deal was happening, down to the time it was being announced, although we were off by two hours because Yahoo changed the time. this was a major stock market mover)
• Kindle 2 and Kindle 3 (you heard it on CrunchGear first, months before anyone else)
• Existence of New Palm Pre (we were the first to report on the existence of the Pre)
• Palm’s second Pre-like phone (we were the first to report on the second Palm phone using the Pre OS)
• Bebo Getting Acquired (we had the price range and speculated on lots of buyers while competitors were yelling that it wasn’t true)
• Facebook In Dubai Raising More Money (story was 100% true, despite the fact that Facebook continuously denied that they were raising more money right up until they announced that they had raised more money)
• Twitter Raises Capital At $250 million valuation (we broke this story, confirmed by company a few weeks later)
• Cisco Buys Flip (we had parties and price, no on else was anywhere near this story)
• MySpace Founder/CEO Chris DeWolfe firing (we owned this story, plus we broke the news on the new COO)
• Thousands Of MySpace Sex Offender Refugees Found On Facebook (just as MySpace was kicking off 90,000 registered sex offenders from its site, thousands of them were showing up on Facebook—our post led to inquiries by the Connecticut Attorney General).

These are just a few of the big stories we’ve broken over the years, and there are countless other smaller stories that we’ve owned completely as well (like this). Readers flock to us because we have the most interesting tech news and because we always maintain 100% transparency. Our love of this community is obvious to our readers. I just wish fear of the unknown didn’t blind the NY Times and others to the future of journalism. Because that fear is driving them exactly away from the truth.

I always shudder when journalists say “don’t say something, get a source to say it and then quote them.” It leads to really awful stuff. Pretending that you’re writing one story when you’re really writing another, and then twisting what your sources tell you to fit whatever it is that your editor told you to write isn’t ethical journalism. It may check all the boxes that were laid out for you in journalism school, but it isn’t anything other than op-ed with nothing real to back it up.

Update: NYTimes editor Tim O’Brien, who has trashed us before, tells Jeff Jarvis via Twitter “@jeffjarvis really, it has nothing to do with a “playground fight”. it’s just a a difference of opinion. you’ve aired yours, which is great.” here. One problem – the NY Times article wasn’t labeled as an opinion piece, it was labeled as factual reporting. This is a really serious issue in my opinion.

And someone else on Twitter points out that the NYTimes loves the rumor, too.

Update 2: Robin Wauters points to this post where he questioned a somewhat sensationalist headline on a NYTimes blog post. The title of the post was subsequently changed and a link was added back to us in explanation. The link was later removed by the editor. That’s called process journalism. There is actually a whole laundry list somewhere of NYTimes articles that had to be updated based on later facts coming to light, but I really didn’t want this to devolve into “i know you are but what am i.” however, we can go that route, too, if we have to.

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Save the date and let the frenzy begin. Our 4th annual summer meet-up at August Capital will be Friday, July 10 this year.

We can’t thank David Hornik and his partners at August Capital enough for having us back, yet again. Each year the party gets a little more lively, the deck gets a little more crowded, and yet David welcomes us back with unflinching enthusiasm. Thank you.  We promise not to trash the place too much.

As our meet-ups have grown in popularity, we’ve expanded the format from simple mixers to timely editorial roundtables. Last year, the topic was the Mobile Web Wars just then brewing. This year, we’re taking on the real-time stream and dedicating a full day to exploring all the rivulets coming together to make it the trending topic on the Web.

What do we mean by the real-time stream?  It’s popping up nearly everywhere you care to look.  Information on the Web is coming to us increasingly in streams. Twitter kicked off the shift, but everyone from Facebook to FriendFeed to Google to AOL is quickly adopting the information stream as a dominant mechanism for distributing data to people exactly when it is produced. As I’ve written before: “The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.” RSS is dead. Long live the stream.

A whole new set of products is cropping up around these information streams to help consumers filter them and manage their flow, such as Tweetmeme and Seesmic Desktop. It seems as though a new one is launching every day. And the real-time stream is beginning to impact other parts of the Web as well, such as search and corporate reputations.

It is time to figure out where all of this is going, to bring together the smartest people we can find and map out the different paths the stream can take. We’ve just begun to organize this mini-conference, but already the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. We are calling it a CrunchUp because it will be highly participatory and real-time in every sense of the word. TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be hosting the event.

Speakers and panelists from Facebook, FriendFeed, Microsoft, Salesforce, Seesmic, and Tweetmeme will be there, and we are just getting started (stay tuned for full lineup). Companies pushing real-time streams to new levels will also be demoing their products, some which haven’t yet launched publicly, such as Andrew Baron’s Magma. (If you have an eye-opening demo or want to launch a product at the CrunchUp, please contact our conference producer, Asad Akbar).

Additional participants will be announced in the coming weeks. If you’ve got some real-time hotness to share, contact us. You will be able to find the speakers, agenda and details as they evolve here.

The CrunchUp will take place on Friday, July 10, between 9:00 am and 4:30 PM at the historic Fox Theatre in Redwood City. Tickets are $295 and are on sale now through Eventbrite. Admission to the August Capital party is automatically included in your CrunchUp ticket (with expedited check-in to August Capital.)

The CrunchUp also gives us a great sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Additional details here.

We’ll plan to release the first batch of August Capital meet-up tickets the week of June 15, but we’d really love to spend the whole day with you real time. Hope you can join us.

Photo credit: Flickr/Justin Lowery)

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We’re all glad Q1 is behind us.

Silicon Valley and the start-up ecosystem certainly was not immune to the general economic malaise. The TechCrunch sweet spot, early-stage start-ups, was particularly hurt.

The number of start-ups getting started was down 65% vs Q1 2008. We saw just 184 new start-ups formed, down from 546 in 1Q 2008.

Start-Ups Founded: January 2008 – March 2009

Source: CrunchBase

Early-stage start-ups are working hard to do more with less. The average number of staff at new start-ups founded 1Q 2009 was 6, down from 8 a year ago. How do we know? It turns out that there’s a wealth of interesting facts that we can glean from CrunchBase, our structured-wiki startup directory and primary data source for TechCrunch Research. What else did we learn from CrunchBase?

The $3.1 billion in venture capital financing was down 50% from Q1 2008, though up nearly 25% from Q4.

Venture Capital Financings: January 2008 – March 2009

Source: CrunchBase

Here’s the thing, transaction volume was weighted heavily to Series B and later stages of investment, suggesting that VCs were focused on providing additional resources for their top portfolio companies as opposed to new deal flow. By example, only four of the startups founded last quarter also reported the closing of outside funding.

Venture Capital Financings by Stage: 1Q 2008 vs. 2009

Source: CrunchBase

(Excluding the New York Times’ $250 million bailout raise by Carlos Slim), the biggest consumer web and mobile financings were: obopay ($70M), Zag ($70M), Twitter ($35 million), Omniture ($25M) and Pocket Communications Northeast ($25M.) Monetization businesses received attention: Tremor Media ($18M), Offerpal Media ($15M) and AdMob ($12.5M.)

Perhaps most telling of all, no acquisitions were announced by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, or Amazon. We can’t remember a fiscal quarter where none of these companies announced even a small transaction. In total, $1.6 billion in M&A was reported for the quarter, down from $11.9 billion in Q1 2008.

M&A Transaction Values: 1Q 2008 vs. 2009

Source: CrunchBase

There were a total of 82 exits announced for the quarter, and the number of exits was actually higher than the 73 reported Q1 a year ago. In 2009, dealflow was tactical and modest in size. The two big deals of the quarter were Autonomy’s acquisition of Interwoven for $775 million and Cisco’s acquisition of Pure Digital Technologies (aka the Flip) for $590 million.

M&A lTransactions: January 2008 – March 2009

Source: CrunchBase

Despite a number of executive departures and hirings, we’re still waiting to hear new news from big internet media. After budget cuts are complete, what will be the sources of future growth? There is a vast sea of start-ups available at newly rationalized prices.

The full 28-page first-quarter report (including 32 interactive exhibits and charts in excel) is available for $149 as a download here. This quarter, we added all our raw data, charts and tables into excel so readers can easily cut-and-paste charts into their own reports and slice-and-dice the data for their own use. It’s a big improvement to our 2008 Year In Review. Of course, you’re also welcome to grab data free of charge through our CrunchBase open API.

See the report table of contents and table of exhibits here.

BUY the 1Q 2009 Report

$149

BUY the Annual Subscription (2008 Year In Review, 1Q 2009 Report, plus the Q2-3 Reports sent to you as soon as they’re issued)

$450

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A few of you have been kind enough to stop by and visit and see us at work. But for those of you who haven’t stopped by, you can now see what we’re up to 24/7, thanks to Ustream. The TechCrunch cam is now up and running (or crunchcam), strategically placed at an angle to show as much of the office as possible. We’ll leave this on as often as we can, and it will double as a security camera at night. Please be patient if it goes down from time to time today, our tech team is busy duct taping the camera to an Ikea lamp that we’re using as a tripod. First class all the way here at TechCrunch.

We may install a second camera with a directional microphone to allow some limited audio. Stay tuned.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The key uses: Internet consumption. The virtual keyboard will make data entry a pain other than for entering credentials, quick searches and maybe light emails. This machine isn’t for data entry. But it is for reading emails and the news, watching videos on Hulu, YouTube, etc., listening to streaming music on MySpace Music and imeem, and doing video chat via tokbox. The hardware would consist of netbook appropriate chipsets (Intel Atom or Via Nano), at least a 12 inch screen, a camera for photos and video, speakers and a microphone. Add a single USB port, power in and sound out, and you’re done. If you want more features, this ain’t for you.

Price? it can be built for less than $250, including packaging. Add in fixed costs and other stuff you have to deal with (like returns), and you can sell it for $300 and probably not go out of business. Physical design is important, and the software is the key to winning.

We stumbled through an initial prototype that barely booted, but we finished it in a month. Prototype B was much more impressive and usable. That effort was led by Louis Monier, with software developed by Singapore-based Fusion Garage and industrial design work by by David Yarnell and Greg Lalier from Dynacept.

Anyway, we’ve continued to tinker with the project, which is referred to as Mike’s Science Project internally (or, “that thing”). But we certainly aren’t ready to talk about anything more at this point. But we did meet with Fusion Garage again today to test out the most recent prototype (B.5?). This is a significant step forward from Prototype B because the software stack is now entirely customized. The last version had a full install of Ubuntu Linux with a custom Webkit browser. This version has a bottom-up linux operating system and a new version of the browser. We also switched from Via to the Intel Atom chip. The total software footprint is around 100 MB total, which is a solid achievement. Also, this time the ID and hardware work was driven by Fusion Garage out of Singapore.

In fact, all the credit should go to Fusion Garage. But frankly we weren’t planning on talking about it at all, it just isn’t the right time yet. But, to make a long story short, someone accidentally published some photos we took to the web, they were seen and shortly were everywhere (see lots lots lots lots lots more). Even our own CrunchGear couldn’t resist.

Ok, so now that what’s done is done, where do things stand? Well, I’m not ready to say yet. But one thing I’ve learned about hardware in the last year is that you need partners to actually make things happen, and the credit for what we saw today goes entirely to the Fusion Garage team. Those guys are rock stars.

Here’s are pictures of the various prototypes in chronological order if you’re interested. The first was our initial conceptual drawing.

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When you are introduced to new Web products and businesses every day, as we are here at TechCrunch, it is difficult not to get the startup itch. Mark Hendrickson, who has been with TechCrunch as a writer and Web developer for nearly two years, has decided to scratch that itch and build his own Web service. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it will combine location with social discovery, will have “lots of maps,” and will work with Facebook Connect. It will be a while before he is ready to launch it, but if you are curious you can sign up for the waiting list to receive an invite. Or you can follow him on Twitter.

Mark has been a key member of TechCrunch, and he will be sorely missed. Most of our readers know him primarily as one of our more analytical writers. His first post was a side-by-side comparison of different DIY social networks, he’s been a key chronicler of changes at Facebook, and helped us realize that Hulu doesn’t suck.

But beyond writing great posts, Mark is one of the people who has kept TechCrunch humming behind the scenes. Michael and I kept trying to get him to write—and we squeezed 569 posts out of him—but really all Mark wanted to do was Web development. From TechCrunch to CrunchBase to Elevator Pitches, Mark’s hand has touched practically every Web property we operate.

Mark recently redesigned not only the TechCrunch site, but all of the other blogs in the network as well. He made our site search one of the first to be powered by Yahoo Boss. Then he added Facebook Connect as a sign-in option for comments. He also just finished up FriendFeed integration in comments (whenever someone says something about a TechCrunch post on FriendFeed, it becomes a comment under the post, which I guess we never announced until now).

As if he didn’t have enough to do, whenever Michael or I needed some fast research, a poignant image, or an instant post when news was breaking, Mark was always ready at his laptop to do whatever was necessary. In fact, Mark’s calm under pressure has already earned him a place in the Web’s pop culture. For some reason, Loren Feldman of 1938Media is obsessed with him. (And I don’t think it is because of Mark’s dancing skills). Many of Feldman’s videos about TechCrunch (see example below) routinely feature a Michael Arrington puppet screaming off-camera: “Hendrickson! You’d better get that post up!” Mark, we are gonna miss you.

Update: Mark lays out his initial thinking about his startup here in a new blog post.

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I stayed in Hanalei Bay on the north shore of Kauai. Hanalei is a very small town with just a single small hotel, lots of locals and a few tourists driving through to reach some good hiking trails at the end of the road. For a blogger looking to get away from it all, Hanalei is a good place to do it.

I didn’t stay in that hotel (you’d know why if you saw it). Instead, I stumbled across a listing on a vacation rental site for the Hanalei Surfboard House. They are generally booked solid months in advance, but there was a random cancellation and I jumped on it.

Little did Simon Potts know that he’d be creating the perfect haven for a down and out blogger when he opened the Surfboard House in 2003. Potts, a 56 year old retired British music executive, is one very colorful person. Surfboard House (named after the surfboards that line the fence of the property) sits one house off the beach. The rooms are immaculate, huge, and very private. It compares favorably to any five star hotel I’ve stayed in (here’s what Frommers said about Surfboard House). I spent weeks there.

Potts is a fascinating character. I quickly determined he basically felt the same way about the music business that I do. In short, he thinks he got out at exactly the right time. His quippy summary of the music business today: “It’s an unholy mess.” So we got along famously. And boy can he tell a story. In his short but profitable career in the music industry he signed artists like The English Beat, The Stray Cats, Haircut 100, Thompson Twins, The Cure, 10,000 Maniacs, MC Hammer, Blind Melon and Radiohead. He retired when he was 40. He’s got a story or two about every artist.

When my time was up to leave, I asked Potts if I could stay another week. He said something about being fully booked, but I offered to pay more than his usual rate and said I’d plug Surfboard House on TechCrunch (consider that a disclosure). He had (and still has) no idea what TechCrunch is, but the dollars did the trick. Schedules were juggled, I stayed. But the days flew by, and soon it was time to go home.

In short, I’m back. I’m tanned, rested, and generally grumpy about not being in Hawaii any more, but back I am. And somehow TechCrunch did just fine without me.

More soon on my plans for the future and my thoughts about the events that led me to take a month off in the first place. Just as soon as I get a couple more days of skiing in.

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Tomorrow’s Cloud Computing Roundtable is sold out. But we have good news. For those of you who can’t join us in person, we will be live-streaming the event. Thank you to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring the roundtable stream (powered by ustream and camera work by FutureWorks.) Tune in on TechCrunchIT or Sun.com/cloud

TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be grilling our panel of cloud-computing heavyweights about where we are with this technology and where we need to go. As Gillmor wrote in a post on TCIT:

Short term, cloud computing will slip in as a cost-saving rationale. Near term, the social clouds will expand across workgroups, across business domains, and finally cross-cloud. Then the Golden Age of the Cloud will occur, where applications and services only possible in that environment will guide the next wave of business architecture.

On Friday, the dialogue will be about when, not if. When did cloud computing begin? How far are we into the cycle? Is cloud computing a baby or an old man in diapers, and are we going backwards or forwards so fast that we can’t tell the difference? Or are we and cloud computing meeting in middle age, each ready for the other?

I am also happy to announce the startups who will be giving the main demos prior to the roundtable and the panel of judges who will be evaluating them. Here are the companies and what they will be showing off:

Veodia—Video recording through the cloud.
BrowserMob—Stress testing Websites via virtual browser instances.
Diomede Storage—Cheap, green storage with power-saving technologies at one tenth the cost of Amazon S3. Or so they claim..
Appirio—Stitching together three different clouds. Can it be done?

They will be judged by:

Dan’l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft
George Zachary, partner, Charles River Ventures
Geoff Ralston, CEO LaLa
David Bernstein, VP/General Manager, Cisco
David Kralik, Silicon Valley office Director of Newt Gingrich

And then we will hold the roundtable. Again, our roundtable participants will be:

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

Roundtable Moderators:
Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch
Steve Gillmor, editor TechCrunchIT

Thank you to Microsoft and the BizSpark team for hosting us at their Mountain View campus. And thanks to Charles River Ventures, Ribbit and FathomDB for sponsorship support of the roundtable and reception.  We looking forward to learning more about a dozen early-stage companies at the roundtable reception.

We have a few tables left for companies who would like to demo product at the event, but otherwise we are over capacity. Contact Jeannie with sponsorship inquiries (jlogo@earthlink.net)

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