Liveblogging TechCrunch 40: Day 2

Here are some highlights from Day 2 of TechCrunch 40 (in reverse-order of appearance):

The winner of the $50,000 prize for best demo went to Mint (see below). I caught up with the CEO for a quick chat at the conference, and he explained his business model,which is all lead generation.  Since Mint keeps track of all your spending habits, it can suggest ways to save money by switching services,  Those are leads that it gets paid $20 to $50 apiece for,  In the future, it could suggest products to buy as well. 

Kaltura:  This startup was voted on-stage from the demo pit by the conference attendees.  Slick, collaborative video editing software. It's all Web-based. Lets you collectively create a video with your friends.  A wiki/peer production platform for making videos.

Zivity: User-generated porn. The site shares revenues with the "models"who upload photos.  Just what the world needs: a company that is lowering the bar on porn.  One of the presenters had this weird handlebar mustache.  What's with that?

WooMe: Speed dating site where you spend a minute meeting potential mates via Webcam.  Real-time social networking.  Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom is a backer.

Metaplace: Build your own virtual world that can appear on any site as a 3D virtual-world widget.  The big idea is that every object in the world can be linked to.  "Metaplace is trying to Facebook Second Life," says panelist Loic Le Meur.  Yahoo's Brad Garlinghouse argues Second Life has too much traction to be displaced.

BeFunky:  Turns photos and videos into cartoons.  Sort of makes everything look like A Scanner Darkly.  Also lets you create "uvatars" that look exactly like you.  (They are hand-drawn now, but will soon use the same "Cartoonizer" technology you can already apply to photos and videos).  Startup is from Turkey.  Cool FX.  Panelist MC Hammer thinks its funky.

Wixi: Yet another file sharing site.  As panelist Loic Le Meur says, "Everybody is doing that."

mEgo: Have too many social networks to keep up with?  mEgo lets you cerate a profile once and upload it to 20 social networks and blog sites, including MySpace, Facebook, and even your mobile phone.  The founders are women, which might explain why the customizable profile widget actually looks like something you might want to put on your Facebook page.  Mouse over the mEgo widget, and you can call up your Flickr photo feed, delicious bookmarks, twitter messages, Amazon wish list, or Last.fm playlist.  Panelist Caterina Fake is not sure about the widget business model: "It's all satellite and no planet."

xtr3D: Throw away your computer mouse.  xtr3D uses a Webcam to translate 3D hand motions into a computer peripheral controlling what happens on-screen.  Very cool.  But this will require people to learn an entirely new interface.  It could be good for games, though.  The CEO showed a boxing game where he punched the air and his character did the same.

Angel investor Jeff Clavier, on a panel, just announced that he is starting his own $12 million seed fund to put $100,000 to $500,000 into early-stage startups.

Google Docs Presentations: Google is demoing its online presentation software that it just added to Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets.  Now, Google has finally completed its trifecta, and has a complete Webtop suite to compete with Office.  You can't do everything you can do with PowerPoint, but the value to these types of Web apps is the collaborative aspects. You can invite other people to help you create the slide show and all of you can work on it at the same time.  In response to a question about whether it is important to have offline versions of Google Docs (using Google Gears), the Google employee presenting says, "Yeah."  So maybe we'll get that in the future.

Kerpoof:  A new Website for kids where they can write stories, create art, and make movies.  They pick a scene, grab characters, make them bigger or smaller.  Kids can print them out and make birthday cards or coloring books, and also share their creations digitally.  (This startup secretly wants to teach kids object-oriented programming). Guy Kawasaki likes this one.

Mint :This site will be up later today.  Mint ingests all of your financial information from your bank and credit card accounts, and instantly shows you what you are spending your money on in easy to read pie graphs.  The site looks at your financial history and suggests ways to save money by finding credit cards or bank accounts with lower interest rates, or  alerting you to promotions from your existing financial institutions.  It will also find better deals on phone, cable, and other services.  Esther Dyson (on the expert panel) says she'd use this one. I think of it as LowerMyBills 2.0.

Orgoo: Consolidates all of your e-mail and IM accounts in a single browser pane.  Also lets you send video messages and create chat rooms where you can invite friends or colleagues for a real-time conversation, complete with video streaming.

Comments

[Steven]

Has any seen votelicio.us? I think it's got legs and has been getting some buzz. I don't know of anyone else out there doing the same thing but someone is bound to popup soon.

[Stan Schwartz]

It's cool that BeFunky is providing their effects online, but there's better tech available for making automatic cartoons look like A Scanner Darkly, especially in video. For example, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mObtychz_UU produced by my company Toonamation.