Next week is a big one for the technology startup world. Both DEMO and Techcrunch50 will be held from Monday-Wednesday; DEMO in San Diego, Techcrunch50 in San Francisco. We’ve received press passes to both events and I thought it would be interesting to share how both conferences differ in the way they handle the press before the conference begins.

DEMO

DEMO allows the presenting startups to contact the press before the event begins. Approximately two weeks ago the emails started hitting my mailbox from PR firms pitching their clients for coverage on CN. I am sure all press outlets received the same emails. Of the 72 listed startups, I received pitches from about 24. Not sure why the others didn’t come forward with their pitches. By contacting me ahead of time, this allows for a story to be created before the event begins and then I only need to publish when the embargo opens. The downside here is that some press outlets may break the embargoes.

What I’d prefer to see is a portal which DEMO creates that houses all of the startups, their press releases, etc. I would receive a login to the portal and this would allow me to select the startups my audience is interested in. I could click to setup an interview with the startup and/or get more information. This would make things much easier than receiving so many emails from the PR firms and I could go directly to the startup.

Techcrunch50

Techcrunch50 handles the pre-press coverage nearly opposite to DEMO. They have decided not to share any information about the selected startups until the night before the event (thats’ what they did last year). Presenting startups have been informed not to speak with the press either although from watching a chat between FastCompany employee Robert Scoble and Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur, at least a few of the startups have started to talk. By not sharing any information until the night before, this makes it difficult for the press to get any coverage ready pre-event. Last year I worked through the night to get several reviews and other posts prepped.

This week a few of the demo pit companies have contacted me. The conference organizers note that their policy is designed to prevent any leaks and to "increase audience engagement". Their method of handling pre-press coverage certainly accomplishes that.  

Final Thoughts

I am excited to see the 124 startups that present next week. As for which method is better overall, that’s up for debate. In my opinion a hybrid of both would probably be the best overall solution. Perhaps no public announcement until the day of the conference and utilize the portal idea I mentioned above for press.

More CN Coverage:
– FriendFeed
– Amie Street
– Startup Tips

Yesterday Techcrunch Editor Erick Schonfeld wrote a review of a new service called JustHackIt. Schonfeld called JustHackIt, "a dating site for hackers". Basically it’s a classifieds board for hackers and developers to easily post openings and have developers submit interest in those openings.

Less than 24 hours later, the JustHackIt service is now up for sale on Sitepoint. The current auction price is $20. In the 24 hours post launch the company reports the following stats:

• 18,258 pageviews
• 8,580 unique visitors
• Main traffic sources: TechCrunch, news.ycombinator.com, Reddit and Netvibes

The description notes the reason for the quick sale, "I launched JustHackIt.com last night. I’m really enjoying managing the site but didn’t expect the huge amount of traffic and don’t quite know how to manage a community site like this. I’m doing my best with it, but thought I’d post it on Sitepoint to see if someone is looking for this type of opportunity." They claim that they will have 600,000 pageviews this month - of course that doesn’t take into account that any blogger buzz dies off within a few days max.

Anyway, if you are interested in a cheap dat(ing) site for hackers and developers, JustHackIt is the one for you. And upon purchase you can tell VCs and friends, "I was on Techcrunch". Here’s their pageviews chart - note that this is by the hour not by the day, week, month or year.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

Over the past two weeks I’ve had over 50 companies ask me for advice on launching their startups. Many of them have come to me with a launch date in early September. My advice each time is simple, "don’t do it". With the DEMO and TC50 conferences overlapping, launching a startup during that time means the likelyhood that you will get good press coverage is slim-to-none.

If you are planning a release, either a full product launch or major update, I would launch either before September 4th or after September 15th. While DEMO and TC50 will only occupy September 8-10, there will be discussion after the events are over about both the startups and the events themselves. This is why I would wait another week before pushing your message. Plus it gives the writers a few days to rest their fingers after the massive amount of writing that will take place.

The early part of September should be exciting and very fast-paced. I have been working my Mavis Beacon videos hard! Looking forward to meeting everyone in California and don’t forget to register for our brunch.

Check out our previous TC50/Demo coverage:

• TC50:1 DEMO:1 Startup:0
• Scoble Wants to Kill DEMO and TC50 (video)
• My Blogger/Journalist Proposal for TC50/DEMO

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

Which map above is a better representation of regional interest in TechCrunch?
Before you answer that, first some background. Some blogs are putting up posts today based on maps and data generated by Google Insights for Search, a service that was launched a week ago. Just like with Google Trends, you can put […]

I’d like to present an idea this evening regarding the upcoming DEMO and Techcrunch50 conferences. Both conferences will rock and are great places to launch a startup. This year both conferences will overlap in early September. Bloggers and journalists will have to try to cover the 100-125 startups that will launch simultaneously, startups will need to meet with some large number of reporters and readers will be hit by potentially thousands of reviews.

Check out my proposal in the video below. Here’s the basic idea. We all work together. Instead of 50 reviews of the same startup, we create 1 or 2 reviews of each startup. The reviews would be licensed to all of the participating sites with attribution back to the sources. Writer combinations would be picked at random and could create some great matches. A main conference portal site would be created to house all of the reviews plus all of the overall conference coverage. This would allow for a great amount of discovery between the content sources. We’d work to get sponsorship as a whole from larger companies who would absolutely love to be involved with this all-star lineup.

The benefits of this idea are:

• writers can focus on interviews, industry information, overall conference coverage, etc. and not on scrambling to get reviews done. writers also get the chance to work with one or two other writers and pick up tips and techniques
• startups would be able to focus on their presentations and not worry about coordinating 100 reviews
• readers would be able to engage with more content from more sources over the duration of the conferences 

This is just an initial proposal and if the idea is well-received, we would need to get started right away on the details. As a side benefit, these new blogger and journalists relationships will provide education, and you never know what the new relationships might hold for the future. Of course it could just be a crazy idea that won’t go anywhere.

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Over the past 24 hours, a story has blown up regarding video blogging and the lack of disclosure. We first wrote about the issues of video blogger disclosure with regards to Morgan Webb and her show Webb Alert. When she launched the show, it was produced (and still is I believe) by ad network Federated Media.

It sure seems to me like video bloggers have a different code when it comes to disclosure. Whether it’s with stories like the above, Amanda’s fiasco with DuPont, or other video bloggers, there seems to be little to no disclosure. Is that ok?

Let’s recap what happened over the past 24 hours. Techcrunch had a post about mobile video technologies and included Sarah Austin of Pop17 in the videos. Apparently Sarah is paid by Flixwagon to use their service and for some "consulting". There was no disclosure of this on the Techcrunch post. Author Jason Kinkaid says that Sarah was just the video model and didn’t actually comment on the reviews in any regard. Editor Mike Arrington says TC didn’t know of this sponsorship deal when they wrote their post. Pat Phelan caught word of this and posted an investigation of the Flixwagon deal. There’s a good discussion about video blogging disclosure on his post.

Let me disclose that I am friendly with both Sarah and her boyfriend Andrew Baron, Rocketboom founder. When Sarah uses Flixwagon it’s not required that she discloses that she is getting paid from them. But when she is promoting their service, she does need to disclose. Here’s what disclosures I believe were missing from the Techcrunch post:

1. Sarah is paid by Flixwagon
2. Techcrunch sponsors Sarah’s show Pop17

These simple statements would have avoided this entire issue. Sarah notes that she always discloses but I am not sure this is the case. Earlier this week she had Rocketboom on Pop17 but there was no disclosure of her fiduciary relationship with Rocketboom or her personal one. Should there have been? Hells yes. Last night she wrote about this topic and linked to Techcrunch. Should there have been disclosure that TC is a sponsor of Pop17? Hells yes.

Now let’s take this topic one step further to really drive home the point of video blogger disclosure at the macro level. In the videos she pimps her Web site, and says her favorite blog is Techcrunch. Which by the way is her show sponsor. Now let’s watch this video outside of the context of Techcrunch and view it on the Qik site. Here we see a video with a "popular" video blogger who pimps Techcrunch. Where’s the disclosure? The key to remember is that videos will travel further than text will and disclosure needs to be included in the videos so they travel with it.

Perhaps video platforms need to build in a disclosure option - this would certainly save us from future issues like this. As product placements in videos (see Diggnation) grow, this topic will become more widely discussed.

Here’s my video with some further thoughts on the topic of video blogger disclosure:

On a side note, it’s interesting to hear that for "a few dollars more" Sarah is willing to abandon Flixwagon for Qik. She says she would never take money if she didn’t believe in the product but she’s so willing to jump ship for a few more dollars. If I was running FlixWagon, she’d be fired immediately because that statement shows she is in it for the cash, not for the quality of the service. She pulled a Tila Tequila.

It’s simple. Disclose your relationships. Whether you blog on video, text, audio, whatever.

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Yesterday I spent some time with the Evite and JS-Kit teams to discuss the updated Evite beta platform launch. From a Web perspective the most impactful update is the addition of JS-Kit’s comment system and polling platform. Now when you create an event, a message board is automatically added to the event where guests can speak before, during and after the event. JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux notes that this deal pushes JS-Kit past the blogosphere in terms of integration. This is a major distribution deal for JS-Kit who are just coming off their acquisition of Haloscan.

Other Evite platform updates include integration of Flickr for images, YouTube/Vimeo for videos and Plaxo for contact management. Event pages are more "hip" by adding images and videos. Evite also signed popular artist Robert Holmes to create a variety of new event designs. There’s also a private comment feature which allows guests to send notes to the host without the entire guest list viewing them - quicker than an email. More mobile options have been added including event reminders and the ability for hosts to send event invites to guests via sms.

Users can now contribute their own designs as well. This was an interesting area of discussion. All designs are automatically approved and available in the event gallery. The Evite editors will hand pick some of the popular designs to place on their home page. They expect the community to police the user-submitted designs for illegal and objectionable content. Wonder how long before we see something way out there - my odds are one week.

The Evite platform is built in Java. eVite is part of IAC and has 35 team members in Los Angeles. eVite’s self-reported stats include: 18 million registered members, 15 million monthly invitations sent, 6 million parties planned and 24,000 Evite invitations sent every hour. The average event guest goes to Evite four times per event.

The Evite team explained that the biggest challenge the face is working on a new platform while still maintaining the current platform.

To be honest, the updates are a bit of a letdown. When JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux and I spoke about this announcement a week ago, I was really looking forward to yesterday’s meeting. I was excited to see a whole new Evite that was more 2008 and less 1998. The team certainly was excited to demo their changes and that’s what makes this so difficult. But what I’ve seen is somewhere in the middle, call it 2005. When you are the market leader, it’s ok to be years behind.

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Source:CenterNetworks

Are there actually startups outside of Sillicon Valley and the USA? For us Europeans this is quite an akward question. Of course there are startups here. And thanks to Mike Butcher and TechCrunch and his European tour we can show the world how great our startup scene actually is. As one of twelve cities on the tour, Mike came to Zurich on July 17th. As a techblogger and engineer myself and as a CenterNetworks writer, I had the great pleasure to attend, take photos and videotape the event.

One of the highlights of the evening was the 20-second pitches each startup had the opportunity to give. We have compiled together a video with all the pitches. If you have 14 minutes and want to see a variety of Swiss startups, check it out below. I’ve also included some photos as well - over 150 people attended. Please share your thoughts on any of the startups represented in the video.

Editor’s note: Corsin Camichel covers technology and European startups on his blog, Geekness. Also, we’ve provided reviews of two of the startups from the event, Poken and Mixin.