Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
A pure TechCrunch goodness
has descended on New York on this rainy evening. Ignoring the rain, hundreds of web 2.0
fans, venture capitalists and sponsors rushed to the sought after New York venue called
B.E.D.
The venue is famous for serving out-of-this-world food to lavish and spoiled New
Yorkers, but this is not why the crowds piled in this evening. The crowds sought to be in
B.E.D. with TechCrunch, and this is exactly what they got as the 8th TechCrunch party
took place.
The party occupied the entire 6th floor – which featured bar, music and slide shows on the
walls. 15 presenting companies got a chance to showcase their products to a lively crowd
that made a point to show up despite the rain. I got lucky and had a chance to attend,
because AdaptiveBlue was one of the sponsors. The party turned out to be pretty good, I
made a round through the presenters and here is what stood out for me.
Compete.com
The alleged Alexa killer Compete.com,
one of the sponsors of the party, was showing off their latest traffic tracking tool.
Although at present there is little data for some smaller sites, the tool looks
promising. First of, the interface is cleaner, simpler and faster than the one offered by
Alexa. But what gets me excited is the ability to create and track competitive
portfolios, which is going to be opened to the public in about a month.
Multiply.com
Multiply.com, the social networking site
that we have covered here before, has
re-launched a brand new site. With this re-launch Multiply is focusing on the unique
value that they deliver – a user centric site oriented towards aggregating and
prioritizing information for the end user. The new site is definitely simpler and easier
to use. Multiply’s focus on the individual seems right on. We are not aware of any
other site that would aggregate and prioritize an individual’s information in quite the
same way.
Snap.com
The makers of the Snap search engine
showcased a new product called SnapPreview anywhere. This is a simple idea of previewing
the page via a link that has been done many times before, but there is a nice
implementation here that is noteworthy. Snap’s claim to fame is the preview. If you
search for a term on Snap.com you get results in two frames – one lists
the matches, the other one shows a preview of a selected match.
The
makers of Snap have taken the idea of a preview one step further. They create the
infrastructure for bloggers and companies to embed a small snippet of code into their
pages, in exchange for some preview magic. Once the code is installed, all the users of
the blog can hover over any link to get a preview of the page. This service is completely
free, but here is where it gets clever. The preview also shows the Snap.com search box,
which allows the user to perform an instant search. This is a nice touch and should get Snap
a lot of traffic, if they manage to sign people up to use their preview technology.
Me.dium
Last, but certainly not least, we want to profile a new
social browsing startup called Medium. This company has
created a browser add-on that allows users to collaborate and chat about the sites they
are browsing. There are a few companies that do this already, but this one seems to
implement it in a very nice way that might become viral.
The service is implemented as
a browser sidebar. As you browse, you see a visualization (a graph to be precise) of
people who are also visiting this site. The people are presented based on their proximity
score relative to you. For example, someone who is in your network will get a high score,
but also someone who has been visiting similar sites as you have, will get a high promity
score as well. So basically, you see the relevant people who are also browsing this page.
You can also chat with these people, which is quite handy. The use case that I
was given was shopping. As you are looking at a product, you can shout to the crowd for
tips. If someone has found a better deal, they have the chance to send you the link.
Overall, I felt that if the UI is simplified a bit (like having an option to show relevant
people as a list), this has potential – because having the opportunity to exchange ideas and
tips with people while browsing specific sites, is valuable.
Wrap up
Whew, so there you have it – four Blue Moon beers later. It was nice to meet some people I knew virtually in person. And I got to
shake the hand of the man himself. I guess I can now say, I was in B.E.D. with Mike
Arrington. Not that there is anything wrong with that… [Editor’s note: did I mention
that Alex wrote this ;-)]
