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Official TechCrunch50 Program (PDF)
Erick Schonfeld Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:10:35 -0000
Below is the program guide that is being given out to attendees this morning at TechCrunch50. It includes the full schedule, along with all the panels and keynotes, as well as fuller descriptions of the companies presenting.
Announcing The TechCrunch50 Finalists
Erick Schonfeld Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:30:30 -0000
We've gone through more than 1,000 companies to get down to the final 50 (okay, 52) that will present on stage at TechCrunch50 starting later this morning. We will be covering all of the companies as they present onstage or shortly after. But for now, here's a list of all the companies that made it (except the last one, which will be picked from the DemoPit by the audience at the event). Learn more about these companies on CrunchBase by clicking "CB". You can also visit the official TechCrunch50 website to watch their presentations live, or stay tuned right here for coverage throughout the week.
Three DEMO Companies To Keep An Eye On
Jason Kincaid Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:00:11 -0000
This week we're going to see dozens of companies launch new products. Here are a few of the companies presenting this week at DEMO that are showing some strong potential: In most cases, choice is a good thing. But when it comes to online video, the abundance of content available on the web can be overwhelming. ffwd (pronounced fast-foward) deals with this by picking your videos for you. The site uses video meta data as well as user behaviors to create virtual "channels" of video, which are essentially dynamically updated playlists. Rudder shares a lot in common with Mint, a personal finance site that debuted last year at TechCrunch40 (and won the conference's top prize). Both sites present financial data in attractive, intuitive graphs. But Rudder is taking a slightly different approach: while Mint analyzes your past spending habits to help you adjust in the future, Rudder is concerned with telling you how much you have available to spend on a given day. Photrade With image piracy rampant on the web these days, a number of startups have sprung up to help users easily obtain legal pictures. Photrade has a similar goal, but it also manages to help casual photographers make some cash in the process.
All The TC50 Diggs, Feeds, Tweets, and Blog Posts You Can Handle
Erick Schonfeld Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:57:00 -0000
I know where I am going to be checking to see what people are saying about TechCrunch50 this week. The TechCrunch50 Aggregator. It is a site developed by Sean Percival to collect all the Twitters, FreindFeed comments, blog posts, news stories, photos, videos, Diggs,and Techmeme headlines that are tagged "techcrunch50"or "tc50." Even right now, in the middle of the night before the show starts, you can see a picture of the team still unloading boxes, read Robert Scoble lamenting via Twitter that nobody has yet leaked the list of TC50 finalists (ha!), and other various opinions.
RealNetworks Lets You Copy DVDs to Your Hard Drive — And Keep the DRM
Don Reisinger Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:00:37 -0000
As anyone with a lick of tech knowledge knows, ripping a DVD onto your hard drive is, well, frowned upon by the "Powers that be" in the motion picture industry. Realizing that, RealNetworks has launched a new solution called RealDVD, which lets users copy DVDs onto their hard drives without facing legal troubles. Even better, it only takes about 20 minutes to do so. Sounds great, right? There's only one catch: it keeps the DRM. After copying the DVD onto your hard drive, you can't transfer the movie to a friend's computer, so you'll be stuck using your own. Much like iTunes, though, RealDVD lets you authorize five computers to play the movies on the hard drive.
Parascale Promises Data Center Heaven: Private Cloud Storage At About $1 A Gig
Erick Schonfeld Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:55:52 -0000
Web applications require a lot of data storage. All the videos uploaded to YouTube, for example, are estimated to take up more than 500 terabytes of storage. Google’s servers overall process one petabyte of data every hour or so. Google had to create its own Web-scale file system to handle all the data that it processes and stores. As Web-scale computing and the needs of plain-old enterprise storage grow, many more companies are wishing they had a file system like Google’s. Monday, a startup called ParaScale is launching a private beta of a commercial-grade storage software that uses a similar approach to Google’s own in-house system. (ParaScale nearly made it into TechCrunch50 this year, but was just shy of making the cut, largely because it was no longer in stealth mode). It offers a file system that can run on a cluster of any off-the-shelf Linux servers. Companies can keep adding as many servers as they need, with each one acting as a redundant node. The software runs on the cluster as whole, treating it as one giant file system. This creates private cloud storage that companies can host themselves inside their own firewalls. ParaScale CEO Sajai Krishnan says customers can expect to pay about $1 per gigabyte, depending on their server costs.
ENN Investing and Corporate Social Responsibility
Study Suggests Carbon Market Encourages Chopping Forests
The current carbon market actually encourages cutting down some of the world's biggest forests, which would unleash tons of climate-warming carbon into the atmosphere, a new study reported Monday.
Technology Companies Tout Greener Credentials, but Significant Improvements Are Distant
With energy costs high and environmental friendliness making for good public relations, more tech companies are touting ways they are "greening" data centers, which serve up Web pages, swap Internet traffic, and process and store business information.
Westinghouse Seals Mega China Nuclear Deal
U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric signed on Tuesday a multi-billion-dollar deal with Chinese partners to build four nuclear reactors in eastern China, finalising a pact agreed between Beijing and Washington seven months ago.
The Financial Page
James Surowiecki: What drives market volatility?
James Surowiecki Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
American investors are frazzled. True, oil prices have fallen from their most vertiginous highs, the dollar is a bit stronger, and the stock market has actually risen over the past month. But none of those things have happened in a smooth and steady fashion. The stock market’s “ascent,” in particular . . .
James Surowiecki: Too many stakeholders can be a deal-breaker.
James Surowiecki Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:00:00 -0000
In the second decade of the twentieth century, it was almost impossible to build an airplane in the United States. That was the result of a chaotic legal battle among the dozens of companies--including one owned by Orville Wright--that held patents on the various components that made a . . .
James Surowiecki: Sponsoring Recklessness
James Surowiecki Mon, 21 Jul 2008 04:00:00 -0000
When do the words “not guaranteed” actually mean “guaranteed”? Whenever the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are involved. The two companies have long been required to tell investors that their securities are not guaranteed by the federal government. But in the financial markets everyone has always assumed that . . .
NYT > Your Money
Your Money: Fannie, Freddie and You: What It Means to the Public
Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:50:37 -0000
Mortgage rates may fall a bit initially but probably not enough to quickly halt the decline in home prices.
Fundamentally: Why the Bear Is Alive and Well
Sun, 07 Sep 2008 04:25:55 -0000
If there’s a silver lining to bear markets, it is that they make stocks cheap for the next wave of investors. But so far in this downturn, it isn’t working out that way.
Your Money: Counseling on Student Loans Now May Ease Pain Later
Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:18:09 -0000
What students about to take out their first loan should know.
The Economist: The World Bank and the IMF
Poverty: The bottom 1.4 billion
Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:35:37 -0000
The world is poorer than we thought, the World Bank discoversCorrection to this articleIN APRIL 2007 the World Bank announced that 986m people worldwide suffered from extreme poverty—the first time its count had dropped below 1 billion. On August 26th it had grim news to report. According to two of its leading researchers, Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, the “developing world is poorer than we thought”. The number of poor was almost 1.4 billion in 2005. ...
Who runs the world?: Wrestling for influence
Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:02:45 -0000
The post-war global institutions have largely worked well. But rising countries and growing threats are challenging their pre-eminence THE powerful, like the victorious, do not just write history. They grab the seats at the top tables, from the United Nations Security Council to the boards of the big international economic and financial institutions. They collude behind closed doors. They decide who can join their cosy clubs and expect the rest of the world to obey the instructions they hand down. That is how many outsiders, not just in the poor world, will see the summit that takes place from July 7th to 9th of the G8, the closest the world has to an informal (ie, self-appointed) steering group. Leaders of seven of the world’s richest democracies, plus oil-and gas-fired Russia, gather this year in Toyako, on Hokkaido in northern Japan, to ruminate on climate change, rising food and energy prices, and the best way to combat global scourges from disease to nuclear proliferation. ...
International government: What a way to run the world
Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:02:45 -0000
Global institutions are an outdated muddle; the rise of Asia makes their reform a priority for the WestCLUBS are all too often full of people prattling on about things they no longer know about. On July 7th the leaders of the group that allegedly runs the world—the G7 democracies plus Russia—gather in Japan to review the world economy. But what is the point of their discussing the oil price without Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest producer? Or waffling about the dollar without China, which holds so many American Treasury bills? Or slapping sanctions on Robert Mugabe, with no African present? Or talking about global warming, AIDS or inflation without anybody from the emerging world? Cigar smoke and ignorance are in the air.The G8 is not the only global club that looks old and impotent (see article). The UN Security Council has told Iran to stop enriching uranium, without much effect. The nuclear non-proliferation regime is in tatters. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the fireman in previous financial crises, has been a bystander during the credit crunch. The World Trade Organisation’s Doha round is stuck. Of course, some bodies, such as the venerable Bank for International Settlements (see article), still do a fine job. But as global problems proliferate and information whips round the world ever faster, the organisational response looks ever shabbier, slower and feebler. The world’s governing bodies need to change. ...
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