TechCrunch Disrupt, May 20, 2012. Photo by Jon Gosier.
TechCrunch Disrupt opened in New York City today, in pouring rain with a bit less people than last year but with an intriguing turn of the apps from the self-referential virtuality of last year to more integration with real life and real-world activities.
Even if last year there was a 3-D printer and an Israeli company's app that enabled you to send an EKG to a doctor, as well as rental of time slices of your car to strangers on the Internet, most of the start-ups then seemed to be obsessed with merely rearranging the same puzzle pieces of Facebook and Twitter, designing various ways to meet people online, share music or pictures, or search for the apps themselves.
This year, it just seemed as if there were more hardware on the floor, more apps attached to real things in the real world, and more real activity besides the social media staples of sharing chat, images, and music. Here's the list.
Babelverse has created a way to get video translation online and quickly put captions to video. And get this! They actually have a model, unlike Google Translate which wants to put people like me out of business, that helps good interpreters get paid. You can tip the translator or arrange payment -- they have lists of professional translators and then people who want to train and practice can work their way up and earn reputational points. Maybe this will drive the price down on translation, which has already been driven down by the Internet itself, but maybe it will make more people use translation services and create more opportunities.
StyleSaint lets you make a style book online by uploading photos or clipping them from other people's intellectual property, like Pinterest. But since other people's IP are mainly photos in fashion magazines that are meant to sell the clothes anyway, maybe they won't care? Or they will consider it "fair use," like a kind of review?
I was exactly one of those young girls like the site designer Allison Beal who cut up magazines and "repurporsed" them into collages. I didn't care about fashion, however, but just made art works or satire.
But the purpose of her site leads outside the echo chamber of online life to actually crowdsourcing clothing design. Now, they aren't going to design a dress by committee, but they take input from the users in an "inspired by you, designed by us" social contract. When they monetarize the dress instead of you, do you care? No, because you are supposed to bask in the collectivization of a design process that enables you to participate meaningfully while socializing with your friends. This will be fun for a lot of people, like Pinterest, only with a real fabric outlet.
There's also indication that the personal-data exposing riot of some apps last year that seemed to broadcast everything about you all over the room and 3,000 miles away on the Internet has backlashed so much that now at least some engineers are going in the other direction. In his interview with Alexia Tsotsis, Andrew Keen said that he fully expected that some start-ups would focus on monetarizing privacy, in fact, but when he asked for a show of hand of developers working on then, he only got one hand (and we're waiting to found out who that was!)
There was also a company in Start-up Alley called Roundpop that has figured out a way to have the fun of location and appearing on maps, but control so that it is only your chosen friends, and if you like, only minimal data, i.e. a zip code and not the exact location.
"We're non-creepy," said the guy at the booth, but of course, this remains to be heard from the customers. As we learned in Second Life, which in fact is the great prototyper of all these ideas (and never appreciated as such), it's not just location exposure, but proximity data exposure that bothers people, i.e. if they are shown to be with another person that they don't want broadcast all the time related to location, even if a friend.
Twake, a service for companies, is also concerned about not exposing customer data and has anonymous referential data about preferences. While it says it doesn't predict the future, in a way it does by collecting enough aggregated data about what people are doing to figure out what they are likely to do next. There's pre-crime, and then there's pre-shop, you know?
Twake intrigued many at the show with a display that some people seemed to mistake for some kind of augmented reality thing, while it was actually a metaphor for "targeting customer preferences" or something. So you punched at various preferences on the proferred i-pad, showing your picks for which weapon you liked, which office furniture you wanted to destroy, whether you preferred beer or wine, etc. So I picked out an AK47 to shoot a keyboard and indicated a soda preference. Then in real life, at a camp in upstate New York, a guy selected the weapon you had chosen, and as you watched him on the webcam, proceeded to shoot at the office furniture you had "disliked". The leaderboard on the screen showed mainly left-handed males who preferred beer chosing pistols to blast computers, but right-handed females who preferred wine and also chose pistols were at the number two spot.
Interestingly, this company, which may have a future in LARP and AR as a sideline, is "bootstrapped," which mean it did not have VC cash and put in their own money, and then took fees from actual customers.
Unwind is an app more in the virtual realm with the ability to make "lounges" where you can show movies or books to friends, but unlike the mad long scroll of Facebook or Live Journal or Twitter, you could arrange the content into "collections" which made it more useful. The app was made by a man who wanted to make something he himself and his wife could actually use -- and did.
Voteit nearly single-handedly restored my faith in geekitude by doing just one simple, right thing: allowing the "no" vote. Readers of this blog will recall my many rants on this subject, along with my illustrious career on Linden Lab's JIRA at Second Life where I long fought for a "no" vote (and the JIRA people themselves refuse to code it, urging me to put in a feature request and see if it attracts "yes" votes. Sigh.)
Voteit seems styled on its site and in the presentations as more related to how companies can use voting to "reach consensus" or "increase collaboration" or where groups of friends can "decide where to have dinner". But where I hope it will really be used is on the Internet in politics, and provide an alternative to the double-plus-yessing that pervades the entire online opinion space, i.e. you can "like" on Facebook but not "dislike". I will return to this subject in more detail as I had a long conversation with the founder.
Domain.com (wow, how did they get that domain?!) is trying to disrupt what they feel is an overpriced domain registration space, where normally you have to pay $30 plus to companies like Network Solutions. So they offer registration at $10.99 or even less.
Gtar is sort of a real Guitar Hero and will give you the feeling you had in The Sims Online when you picked up the guitar and started shredding after you got to about 5 skill points. It's attached to an i-phone, of course, and it lights up the frets to show you where your fingers go. It even mutes out notes that are mistakes so they don't kill the buzz. You can learn at your own pace or just play along.
Strayboots is an interactive walking tour or scavenger hunt sort of game. It isn't augmented reality -- in fact, no RFIDS are used and no humans harmed in the making of this app! And guess what, it charges you to play (like World of Warcraft! Like most normal things in life!) -- a reasonable amount that you'd spend getting a drink or going to the movies anyway on an evening out.
Imagine that, charging money -- and not having any user-generated content, only curated content. I'm telling you, this is revolutionary. It already has thousands of customers and a deal with the New York Times Travel section.
Interestingly, I didn't see a single "augmented reality" app because like Strayboots, most companies wanted to have an interface and experience that was really dirt simple for the user.
Tokkster will remind you of Weblins which I think long died after it was launched in 2007 or 2008. If you are a Second Lifer, you will recall Philip Rosedale explaining why he made Second Life, because the experience of browsing a web page was so solitary, that he thought it would be great if people could drop down into a virtual world where they could talk and interact and build things together in real time.
Tokkster doesn't have a creepy interface like Weblins did -- weblins were anonymous avatars and were more like gremlins griefing people who showed up to socialize along side them (attaching it to Second Life may have accentuated that).
In Tokkster, there's a neat row of icons along the bottom tray on a page -- you can sign in with Facebook and add an avatar from the company's icons or upload y our own. You go to a web page, say, a news site, and you can either go to group chat, a nice small square to the side which doesn't block the page, or chat one-on-one with the other "tokkers". If you have a site with zillions of visitors, doesn't it get out of control? It's not like you can use avatar de-rendering!
But apparently as you drill down to individual news stories, you will find less people -- and you also can filter people out by interest, location, etc. I don't think I need any little friends to help me browse web pages, thanks, but it's "nice to have" because you never know when you might want to go see who is chatting on say, a news page and see if they have any more news.
There's lots more, and I don't expect even to get to them all, but I will have more tomorrow, including some start-ups from the Israeli pavilion and another voting-style opinion page, and also comments from Fred Wilson and Andrew Keen.
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