PitchEvent
On the heels of today’s TechCrunch Disrupt wrap-up, last Thursday AT&T ballpark was invaded by the nerd-chic bubble, and by coincidence I showed up too. The event was PitchEvent, and it took over the third floor of the ballpark. Various tech startups pitched their wares, connected with VCs, as well as tried to scavenge any available developers walking around, like hawks to prey.
(hat tip to WebWallFlower for event information)
One of my favorites was Doot, a social messaging concept that depended upon geo-localization. If you’re at a pub, for example, you can leave either a public, or private, “doot”, that’ll be read by either the public, or one of your friends. It’s like a message in the bottle concept, and though the concept sounded familiar, there was an obvious appeal just in its usage. I could see people just having fun with it, and I guess that’s why I was interested in it. That, and the team that I had met all worked on this during their off hours, but had the enthusiasm that makes you just wanna root for them to get somewhere. Doot should have been launched just recently, so feel free to give ‘em a shot (btw, they ended up winning the event’s People’s Choice Award, so congrats to them).
I liked Room77 as well, as recommendation platform for individual hotel rooms. Maybe it’s because of a soon-to-be long-distance trip I’ll be taking, but I can see the appeal of using this app to dig further into ensuring whether the hotel you will be staying at has the view to justify the price. I was impressed with how professional the product was designed, and how systematic their operation had been: they either obtained the listings from the hotels themselves, or had people go and scout the locations in order to provide a relevant room floor map. I could totally see this service being acquired by a major provider like TripAdvisor.
Going further into the travel realm (of which there were a noticeable amount) was Hipmunk, a flight and hotel search service just as comparable to Room77, if not more because of its flight scope. It’s a definite winner, and I appreciated the flight-schedule chart arrangement (as well as the appropriate category: agony). Started by a recent graduate from MIT, HipMunk has been racking up the awards as of late, and has definite momentum, not the least at which from the crowd that I experienced at the event. I didn’t even have a chance to talk to the founders. Anyways, when they make it big I plan to sue them for something.
Qwiki is an ADHD’s dream. It’s the white noise for the informatics crowd. Just type in a search term, and go tie your tie while it runs, to see what I mean. Stylish, positioned for our shortening information attention spans, and configured for video. I can see the global temperatures rising off of the cloud work that’ll go into people using this site, or retailers displaying the relevant information on their store premises.
Rentalic is a service which combines social with local rentals. I have heard of this concept before, but not enough to think of it’s appeal as saturated. Actually, the appeal is interesting with both this current economy, and it’s potential appeal in developing countries (like this one?), as you can use it to hawk your wares, for a fee. I’m not sure if retailers would approve, but those looking to save money would, and this idea represents yet another affront on just what changes are to come. Another side concern is security, but that can be handled over time, just look at eBay.
In this hot American economy, Silicon Valley remains one of the few bright spots, and I had a chance to see just what was what in the bubble. The overall theme amongst these 50 or so startups was obviously social, and highlighted the ever-increasing trend of going social and local. All startups had launch times ranging from either two months, to five years, though the trend was definitely towards the month-end. Though there was that overuse of “social”, there were still some interesting iterative takes on things despite the bias.
And, uhhh, yeah, that’s it (adding pictures in a subsequent post).
