Posts from TechCrunch Disrupt

Open Garden

I was on the panel of judges yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt to select the top startup of the conference. The finalists were a very impressive group:

gTarOpenGardenUberConferenceArk, Babelverse and Sunglass.

The winner was UberConference. gTar came in a close second. Both of those companies are impressive and I support the wisdom of the judges:

Fred Wilson, Roelof Botha, Marissa Mayer, Mike Arrington, Chris Dixon, Eric Eldon and Chi-Hua Chien

The choice of the winner and the runner up was almost unanimous except for a lone nutjob who liked a different one.

My favorite was Open Garden. By a long shot. Because what they are doing is the most worthy of the conference name, Disrupt.

Open Garden is a free app for windows, mac, android, and soon iOS. What is does is connect all of your data services on your various devices (and your friends and family's devices) into a single network that all of the devices can access at the same time.

It allows you to create your own mesh network and provision it to the people you want on it.

This is a big idea. And I don't know if they have nailed it. I have just downloaded Open Garden onto my macbook air and my android phone. I will let you know how it goes.

If you want to watch their initial pitch (not the pitch we got yesterday afternoon, I have embedded it below).

 

 

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Setting The Record Straight

The new media world has its pros and cons. The pros are that I've got a blog to set the record straight and that everybody is recording everything. The negatives are that bloggers don't feel compelled to write accurate headlines and twitter can amplify the inaccuracies when those headlines get tweeted and retweeted.

Let's take the interview I did with Mike Arrington yesterday to kick off Disrupt NYC (starts at 51.09 in the stream). We had a great chat. Mike asked a bunch of interesting questions and I tried to answer them honestly and openly.

As I was heading back to the office, I saw this tweet in my timeline:

 

 

I thought "Hmm, did I really say that?" Fortunately they recorded the entire interview and through a cool feature called snapid, you can go watch the exact one minute sequence where Mike and I discussed this.

As you can see, I never suggested that Google missed the boat on buying Twitter. Google is focused on G+ and Twitter is focused on building its business and staying independent. That's what is going on and that's what I said on stage.

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Disrupt Hackathon

Two years ago Steve and Jared spent a couple days hacking at the Disrupt Hackathon and ended up with GroupMe which went on to great success and an eventual sale to Skype.

For the past 24 hours, developers have been busy hacking away at Pier 94 trying to do the same. The demos will take place at Pier 94 from 11am until roughly 2pm, when the awards will be given out.

If you have a few hours free today and can resist the Party In Prospect Park or some other outdoor event on a beautiful spring day in NYC, you should head over to Pier 94 and check it out. Attendance is free but you do need to register on eventbrite.

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