MeetUp Details:

• Date: Thursday, April 10, 2008
• Time: 6:30 pm – midnight
• Venue: Vanguard, 6021 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood (maps: Google / Microsoft / Yahoo)
• Photo/Flickr Tag: TechcrunchMeetup12

MeetUp Highlights:

Over 2,000 TechCrunch and PopSugar fans turned out for our biggest MeetUp yet at the Vanguard in LA.

Check out the official MeetUp photos, courtesy of PicApp.

In total, our TechCrunch-PopSugar meet-up hosted twenty start-ups and Internet company demos. Upstairs, dating site Engage took over the white room with iMacs, DJ and celebrity Bachelor to showcase their new social-media product. Global Grind tricked out the red room with hip-hop talent and fans.

In the main ring downstairs, PopSugar editors circulated through the floor and helped guests style their cell phones. MySpace brought in celebrity DJ Perry Farrell for the evening. The Rubicon Project provided demos of their new ad-optimization services. DimDim had a tatoo artist, coComment brought their own videoblogger, eFactor connected entrepreneurs together, etc.

Big thank you to Brian Solis and the Bub.blicio.us team for all the great photos and video coverage of the event.

Thank You Sponsors
Co-Host:

PopSugar is a network of blogs targeting trendsetting women. The Sugar Network comprises 15 distinct lifestyle and entertainment sites covering topics that include celebrity, fashion, shopping, beauty, entertainment, food, health and more. The network’s conversational and witty editorial voices creates an active community of over 5 million monthly unique visitors who generate over 50 million monthly page views. The Sugar Network also includes ShopStyle, a comprehensive shopping engine for fashion and beauty.

Partner Level:

MySpace: The largest social network on the internet and favorite community to music and other artists, big and small. MySpace will showcase new apps on the MySpace Developer Platform.

Engage: The Internet’s first social dating community, combines contemporary social networking principles with established online dating tools to enable people to make meaningful connections in a way that is more like the real world. Community members can be single or involved in a relationship, and everyone works together to help like-minded individuals find one another in a fun, intuitive and low-pressure environment. Registration is fast and free, and it’s easy to invite your friends along for the good times. And we’re always updating the Engage Blog — check out all the photos, videos and commentary from the Geek Goes Chic Meet-up after the event, all from an Engage perspective. We look forward to meeting you!

Global Grind: The place for you to explore multimedia that matters to you. Discover new content, collect your favorites, share them with the world, and discuss them with the community. Global Grind makes it easy to access what your friends and those who share your tastes are surfing, watching, reading, and talking about. Get all the top news, gossip, humor, entertainment and more from around the web in one place, as voted on by our users.

Velocity Interactive Group: A venture fund organized by Ross Levinsohn, Jon Miller, and comVentures with offices in LA, Palo Alto and New York. Velocity Interactive Group is focused on digital media and communications. As of February 2008, it had $1.5B in assets under management.

Product Level:

Rubicon Project: The Rubicon Project is a group of industry-experienced, aggressive and passionate renegades dedicated to bringing a new level of efficiency to the fragmented Internet advertising space. The Rubicon Project’s ad network optimization service is the new online advertising standard that makes it effortless for websites to generate the mad cash they’ve always dreamed of. And, it’s free to join. Websites looking to make more money while doing less work should visit: rubiconproject.com.

Geni: Geni is a social-networking website for families to explore their geneology. Geni aspires to create a family tree of the whole world.

E.Factor: an E2E networking community. The only global social connector made by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

CoComment.com: is the leading provider of comment and blog access, aggregation and tracking technology. The company enables better conversations on the web by providing users the ability to centralize, track and share comments anywhere online. Through integration with major media companies and publishing platforms, coComment increases the visibility and exposure of comments to a greater user base of active commenters, bloggers and the public – creating more interesting user experiences, driving users to the commenting sites and linking conversations with a community.

Dimdim: The world’s free, open source web meeting company. Dimdim provides a free, hosted Web conferencing service where anyone can share their desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees. With Dimdim, now the world can meet freely at http://www.dimdim.com

DocStoc: DocStoc wants to do for documents what YouTube did for videos: put them online.

Mahalo: Mahalo is a human powered search engine founded by Silicon Valley veteran entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Results are generated non-algorithmically by a team of profile builders who create pages for search terms.

Media Temple: TechCrunch’s own hosting provider, headquartered in LA. They keep the lights on at TechCrunch and we really appreciate their support.

Meebo: The Web’s live interaction platform. Founded in September 2005, over 30 million people use Meebo monthly, either at Meebo.com, or through Meebo Rooms on partner sites. Meebo’s investors include Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Visit Meebo.com to connect with friends live on the Web.

PicApp: Enables bloggers to choose from extensive collections of millions of copyrighted images being updated by the thousands each day that have been licensed from Getty Images, Corbis and other prestigious image agencies to visualize the content on their web sites. Each image is accompanied by a non-intrusive ad to drive royalties to the related content partners, instead of the traditional license fees.

ThisNext: ThisNext is a social commerce site where people recommend their favorite products so others can discover what’s best to buy online. It blends two powerful elements of real-world shopping otherwise lost for online consumers: word-of-mouth.

ArtistForce: ArtistForce is a new service and suite of management tools targeted at the live entertainment community to help connect artists with agents and talent buyers, promoters and venues.

Media Sponsor

Bub.blicio.us: Brian Solis and the Bub.blicio.us team captured the highlights of MeetUp12 with great photos and video coverage of the event. They ran non-stop with us from morning until after midnight. Thank you for your energy.

Event Level

EventBrite: Thanks to Eventbrite for managing paperless ticketing and reservations for the TechCrunch MeetUp. Many thanks for keeping us organized.

Lotus Vodka: Our firends at Lotus Vodka served specialty cocktails for us all evening. Many thanks for the tasty concoctions.

MailChimp: Mailchimp powers email marketing for over 15,000 companies worldwide, from small startups and web-dev agencies to large organizations like American Airlines and Mozilla.

Mo’jiva: Mobile information at your fingertips for the MeetUp, meetup.mojiva.com.

PerkettPR: Virtually-organized agency, PerkettPR works to help its clients get buzz and be heard.

Co-Host

Partner and Product Launch Sponsors

Product Sponsors

Event Sponsors:

Media Sponsors: