Before I get started, a message came yesterday afternoon from TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde. We will get a table on Wednesday in the DemoPit. That’s in addition to yesterday’s time on the floor demonstrating iterasi and our wildly popular import bookmarks feature we announced yesterday. Our painful day of WiFi starvation is not going unnoticed. TechCrunch is making good on yesterday’s nonexistent connectivity. They are giving iterasi another day to really be able to demonstrate what we do. Thank you, TechCrunch. :-)
I often wonder what the conference halls look like at the events I watch from afar in Portland. And so I decided to take a few shots from TechCrunch 50 to give a glimpse of the happenings and this space we are calling home for the next few days.
First, welcome to the “Hall of no WiFi,” as I called the DemoPit yesterday. I talked to a few of the startups there this morning and the connectivity is far, far better.
Londa left the booth to watch Ashton Kutcher yesterday present “Blah, Blah, Blah.” She had her chance yesterday to have Ashton on a platter. That’s Ashton up there with Sarah Lacy, a celebrity in her own right and, I must say, a traveler on the Gnomedex magic bus.
The San Francisco Design Center Concourse reminds me a bit of a barn or grange hall. It’s long and narrow but provides room enough for 1,700 people. It’s a pretty basic set up but it works just fine for the event.
The DemoPit runs parallel to the open space where people gather for lunch. On the far side of the hall from the DemoPit, Microsoft set up a start up center where I found a group playing with the touch table yesterday. It looked like a group hack of sorts.
In the main hall, you can see the size of the conference. By 8:15 this morning, the room started to fill. An hour or so later, tables filled up all the way to the back of the room.
Jason Calacanis said people gave the “National Idol” format a thumbs up. It works. Presenters give their startup pitch. Judges sit behind the presenters. Mark Cuban, Don Dodge, Kevin Rose and Roelof Botha ripped a few pretty good. As I tweeted, I would not want to present a highly abstract concept to this group.
Back in the DemoPit, you see more startups than you will be hard pressed to find in one place. A total of more than 135 startups are in the DemoPit, including Zivity, a startup that “promotes beauty.” You should have seen the number of mobiles hooked up at the Zivity table to get their photos. :-)
