Category Archives: Events

Exciting news for startups eager to make a name for themselves while getting a big chunk of change for their effort. In today’s LAUNCH newsletter, Jason Calacanis announced that his LAUNCH competition has raised over $250,000 in prizes thanks to the help of Charles River Ventures. In next month’s LAUNCH festival, Calacanis and the select judges will award one of 10 prizes to some lucky startup within two separate competitions: 1.0 and 2.0. Within each category are five individual prizes, including Best Presentation, Best Business Model, Best Design, Best Technology, and Overall Winner/Best in Show.

What separates 1.0 from 2.0? For those who have never had any press, public demos and if they’re in closed alpha or beta, then you’re in the 1.0 category. However, if you’re experienced and just launching a new product or a significant new version of an existing product, then you’ll want to be in the 2.0 category. Of course, LAUNCH doesn’t want you to feel left out if you’re already been around the block and just want to promote yourself. Unfortunately that means no on-stage theatrics for your company, well not necessarily. You can apply for a spot in the demo pit and if the judges come by and love your stuff, they may select you to jump on stage to pitch the crowd.

With Charles River Ventures supporting LAUNCH, one winner will receive a $100,000 investment in the form of a convertible note without a discount or cap (similar to the notes provided to Y Combinator companies) and will have George Zachary as an advisor.

Other prizes that the LAUNCH festival will have include admission for one fortunate startup into the TechStars program next semester, while another startup will get a $51,000 investment for being the winner of the 1.0 competition. Of course, Calacanis makes us all aware that you could win multiple prizes — if you win the CRV award ($100k) and then get the TechStars prize, then that startup stands to gain a $269k investment just for being at LAUNCH! Who knows what will happen this year at LAUNCH!

You can buy a ticket to the LAUNCH festival at the Design Center Concourse in San Francisco by clicking here. The event is from March 7-8 and features judges like Cyan Banister, Paul Bragiel, David Cohen, Tony Conrad, Don Dodge, Rob Hayes, Dave Goldberg, Tony Hsieh, Dave McClure, Peter Pham, Kara Swisher, Robert Scoble, Andrew Warner, and Bill Warner — and those aren’t all of them!

Startups, get your entries in and good luck in your launch!

Welcome to the 2011 Crunchies!

Here in Silicon Valley, there’s no question that there’s an enormous amount of talent everywhere you go and it’s this talent that’s going around and creating some of the most memorable and successful startups that the industry has ever seen. Just who’s talking about these guys? Well besides us at Bub.blicio.us (small plug), you’re going to hear about it from at least one of the most influential tech publications out there: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and GigaOm. Each year, these three competitive groups join together to celebrate all that is tech and have what some may consider to be the industry’s version of the Oscars: the Crunchies.

Last Tuesday, entrepreneurs, journalists, investors, VIPs, fanbois, and those passionate about tech gathered at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco to bear witness to some of the best of the best appear on stage, interested to hear who would win. Many were nominated for a chance to win from among several categories, including Best Technology Achievement, Best Social Application, Best Mobile App, Best Design, and more. But it wasn’t all just limited to the company and the technology. Other categories were created to celebrate the individuals themselves and not just the startup team, but the investors themselves.

Bobby Hammer performs!

The show opened up with a great opening monologue by Harris Whittel and then an outstanding performance by Bobby Hammer, son of MC Hammer, singing “Is The Name“ before we dive right into the show. And what a show there is…nearly everyone from the tech scene is here. From Path’s Dave Morin to Google’s Marissa Mayer and Don Dodge to Ron Conway and Mayor Ed Lee! A bevy of who’s who showed up for this once a year celebration of tech!

Path's Dave Morin accepts the award for Best Design

Some of the biggest wins of the night went to Google+ for their award for the Best Social Application what may have been an upset against Instagram (runner-up) and even Path 2.0. In the category of Best Mobile Application, Evernote dominated the field against worthy competitors Flipboard (runner-up), Square, and Pandora. In a tough-battle, in the Best Design category, Path 2.0 took the award over recent blossoming startup, Pinterest. And in what would be the start of a great night for Dropbox, the cloud-based storage service took home the award for (what else?) Best Cloud Service, besting their rival Box.

Heather Harde addresses the audience at the Crunchies

In-between the awards, we took a quick break to pay a much-deserved tribute to former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde for all her hard work over the years with the tech publication. Legendary Angel Investor Ron Conway took the stage to give a fitting tribute of Ms. Harde and even a brief interview with her industry colleagues was shown…it was quite moving and the only time a standing ovation was bestowed.

Twitter & Square founder Jack Dorsey accepts Founder of the Year

In the individual awards category, the Angel of the Year award went to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman while the VC of the Year award went to Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz (who coincidentally also announced they’re raising another round of funding). The Founder of the Year award went to Jack Dorsey for both Square and Twitter denying Dropbox’s Drew Houston a chance at a third major Crunchie award. But it was LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner who took the win for CEO of the Year denying Spotify’s Daniel Ek.

Lastly, the most important awards were for the newbie startups and also for overall in the year. In 2011, the winner of the Best New Startup of 2011 went to Pinterest over Codecademy and the Best Overall Startup of 2011? Why that’s Drew Houston’s Dropbox returning the favor to Jack Dorsey’s Square.

And so there you have it…the winners of the 2011 Crunchies!

Oh, but wait, there’s more to fun to be had at the Crunchies…now we get to talk about the after-party, complete with photos!

Ben Parr, Twilio's Danielle Morrill, VentureBeat's Jolie O'Dell, and Aaron Gotwalt

8Tracks' Kate Imbach and Pandora's Tom Conrad ("Shit Silicon Valley Says")

Google's Don Dodge & TextPlus's Heather Meeker

Evernote's Phil Libin & TechCrunch's Susan Vander Kooi Hobbs

We won a Crunchie!

The legendary Ron Conway wheeling & dealing

Bessemer Venture Partner's Ethan Kurzweil claims a Crunchie!

This startup won a Crunchie!

Saleforce.com's Kevin Marks, Hubspot's Laura Fitton, & Seesmic's Liza Sperling

Shasta Ventures' Jacob Mullins & VentureBeat's Dylan Tweney

PandoDaily's Paul Carr & founder Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lane, CrunchFund's MG Seigler, TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld, Travis Kalanick, Menlo Venture's Shervin Pishevar, & Ana Pishevar

For more photos of the 2011 Crunchies, you can view them on my Flickr photostream by clicking here.

Photo Credit: All photos shown here are from Ken Yeung.

Last Tuesday, at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, Face.com decided to throw a party. Why? It wasn’t to launch a new product. No, it was actually a celebration designed to help the team let loose and also have some fun with their close friends and family. At this event, there was no pitching or press there to hear about the product — it was an evening designed to be jovial and to relax after months of hard work in developing a new product for the service.

Yes, Face.com had completed a new product. Called Klik, this is Face.com’s camera application that uses facial recognition to help you quickly tag your friends in real-time. No longer will you need to take a photo, then upload it to Facebook, and then tag your friends. This app will have your friend’s name appear next to their photo instantly before or after you snap it! An example of what image is rendered appears above – you can see clearly that the names are embedded right on the photo to help you associate who is who. But that’s not all…while the main benefit from using Klik is its facial recognition software, the application also includes filters, very much like Instagram, PicPlz, Streamzoo, Hipstamatic, and many others. And what would a photo application be without its social component? You can post the photos to Facebook, Twitter, or even on the Klik public page. Okay, so it’s another photo-sharing application, BUT this time it’s with facial recognition – don’t forget your friends ever again.

So now we have a photo application that can tag all of our friends in real-time, what’s the one thing we can do to celebrate and really give it a test? Why, throw a party! And that’s what Face.com did…they flew in their entire team to San Francisco to celebrate, had specialty-made themed drinks, and had an amazing band called Feedbomb on stage to perform. And this isn’t any normal band…Feedbomb is comprised of some of the most talented individuals in Silicon Valley, mostly former Facebook employees, but still talented people in the tech community: Randi Zuckerberg, Chris Pan, Robert Johnson, Sean Chaffin, Andy Barton, and David Ebersman

And boy do the Face.com people know how to throw an event! People like Chris Tolles (CEO of Topix), Bear Kittay, Joe Braidwood (CEO of SwiftKey), Shervin Pishevar (Managing director of Menlo Ventures), Sarah Austin (Pop17), Hermione Way (The Next Web), Owen Thomas (Daily Dot), Justin Kan (Justin.TV), Sol Lipman (AOL), and many more!

And now here are the photos from the evening:

Presenting tonight’s musical artists: Feedbomb

The Next Web’s Hermione Way and Randi Zuckerberg

Facebook’s Program Manager, Chris Pan

Throughout the evening, Face.com had iPads live-streaming to televisions around the room & tagging people using Klik

At one point, Face.com’s CEO got on stage & performed with Feedbomb — he’s the one with the tambourine

Not to be outdone, Daily Dot’s Owen Thomas was serenaded by Randi Zuckerberg during Katy Perry’s “Hot & Cold”

AOL’s Sol Lipman, Marie Domingo, and David Speiser

Chris Pan, Face.com’s Gil Hirsch, Shervin Pishevar, and Justin Kan

More photos of the evening, including Feedbomb’s performance from the evening can be found on my Flickr photostream by clicking here.

Photo credit: Heroshot photo taken by Gregg Delman. All other photos shown here taken by Ken Yeung.

Last week one of Bub.blicio.us‘ long-term media partners and friends, Liana Burtsava of Trendy Lime, was a partner at the Startup Week Vienna that welcomed 100 investors, 70 speakers, and over 1,000 guests to beautiful Vienna, the city known as the bridge between Eastern and Central Europe. Thanks to Liana, we are connected to blogger Vukasin Stojekov of Seebhub.me and the unfolding of startup events in Europe.

Contributed by Vukašin Stojkov of SeeHub.me of Serbia:

Morten Lund, investor and entrepreneur from Copenhagen, Denmark

A plethora of keynotes, presentations, panels and workshops participated in last weeks event in Vienna. Oliver Holle and Erik Bovee of Speedinvest held fantastic informational presentations. I have heard a fair share of VC presentations, but these guys really killed it. Not only did you learn a lot, you could enjoy it too due to their great presentation style. The Startup Week Viena is a must for early stage startups, and I hope to hear them in the future, ideally when they come to Belgrade. One of the best motivational keynotes was given by Pascal Finette on Wednesday, when he compared startups to running a marathon and shared his lessons with entrepreneurs in the audience.

TechCrunch day was awesome. A small part was due to Mike Butcher being on the stage where he is a Superstar. He is awesome presenting himself, moderating a panel, having a fireside chat or even presenting an awards ceremony.

A great piece of motivation and inspiration came on Thursday with Facebook’s Christian Hernandez highlighting Serbia’s Nordeus as his favorite European success story. This was an illustration of how close Nordeus and Facebook are which I believe many in this region take as a signal that one can indeed make it BIG on a global scale no matter where one comes from. Our last day on Friday, we had a chance to hear Doug Richard’s amazing story about his biggest mistake and I can not wait to hear from him again.

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch, soaked with champagne by the winners of the Start up competition, MySugr

The Networking was the best part of Startup Week for me. My biggest impression from this event was a who’s who in the CEE startup scene which was a significant upgrade from the traditional circuit of conferences I have attended in the past. I had the chance of meeting and talking with amazing people from Germany, Austria, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia. You name it, they were there. It was a great experience at what is poised to become one the central European startup events. This year’s edition was just a sign of things to come.

More photos from the conference found on Facebook. (photo credit Luis Kentzler)

It’s an exciting week, it’s the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City! In addition, it’s my first trip to New York City and I’m enjoying experiencing the local tech scene.

Since arriving, I’ve had the pleasure of learning quiet a bit about what the city is doing on both the social and technology front. Coming from San Francisco, a huge technology hub, it’s easy to assume that the rest of the tech world is very similar. In Silicon Valley, there are new start-ups launched everyday and an amazing amount of entrepreneurs, engineers, marketers and more to support a robust technology atmosphere.

This morning, I sat in on a presentation by Seth Pinsky, President of New York City Economic Development Corporation, as he outlined the key efforts New York City is working on to keep key technology talent in the city as well as attract entrepreneurs and engineers away from the better known technology hubs like Silicon Valley. From incubators that provide low rent office space to city-funded angel investors to local training programs and competitions, NYC is committed to moving the tech start-up talent to the East Coast.

One part of this effort is geared specifically at education institutions to attract and foster science and engineering talent in New York City. The program, dubbed Applied Sciences NYC, is even asking institutions to submit and RFP (request for proposal) and the city will provide property to build on and develop from the ground up. So far, more than 25 top tier institutions have submitted proposals.

As the session closed, I asked what I think is a key question: can this model be applied beyond New York and the technology sector. Seth very much believed that it can and should although his focus in 100 percent NYC right now.

What do you think? Is NYC in a good position to attract the talent they need? To learn more about Applied Sciences NYC, click here.