KutcherCrunch

Something quite brilliant has been happening for a couple of years now and the guys at TechCrunch are behind it. TechCrunch50 is the second conference to be held by the TechCrunch guys and is aimed at finding “the best start-ups and launch them in front of our industry’s most influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs and press”. 

According to the reports coming out of this year’s conference, the place is buzzing and there are a lot of cool start-ups there including TweeGee.com, Hangout.net, Goplanit and Blahgirls.com, a venture backed by Ashton Kutcher. The idea behind his venture is to provide gossip with attitude and was inspired by driving round the daughters of wife, Demi Moore.

TechCrunch received over 1,000 applications companies wishing to take part but at the three day event, as Christopher Lambert once uttered,  “there cam be only one”, and that one will walk away with a cash prize of $50,000. I have some friends at the event and have been following them on Twitter, Dave Ambrose said yesterday “A lot of people here at TechCrunch50 very open and looking for suggestions around their ideas”, which is awesome to hear, because that’s what this space is all about – sharing, growing and developing ideas with a bunch of people. Feedback is the buzz word of web 2.0 is more ways than one.

MyTake – It’s been a while since there’s been this amount of buzz and excitement around a conference and I think it’s great. We get to hear about people and companies that are out there thinking up cool things for us to play with and ultimately make the web a more interesting space. The more we collaborate, the more we learn and the more we learn the better the end product.

Yesterday’s fish & chip paper gets turned back into news

Alright, that’s a British saying and if you haven’t heard it before, it goes something like this “Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish & chip paper” it’s a saying from an ear when we Brits used to get our fish & chips handed to us wrapped in newspaper, demonstrating that nobody cared what was in the newspaper the day before. Getting to the point, Google announced that it has partnered with around a hundred newspapers to make old copies available online both as scans and text.   

The announcement was made at the TechCrunch50 in San Francisco where Google showed examples of newspapers covering the U.S. moon landing. According to the demonstration, you’ll be able to see the paper as it was printed, with information and articles separated out for ease of reading. The initiative appears to be beneficial for all parties, with Google running its AdSense service as part of the project with profits being shared with the newspaper partners.      

MyTake – it’s long been Google’s aim to make all the information ever available to everyone (or something like that) and they are getting closer and closer, first Google books and now this. Despite what is said about print, it is a barometer for the times and allows us a glimpse at what was. An idea I had when my daughter, nephew and niece were born was to buy them the newspaper from the day they were born so that they could get a feel for the world when they were born – I can’t even imagine the information that they will have available to them when they grow-up. They probably won’t look at that newspaper, but maybe we’ll have fish & chips on them.