Lunch was noodles in a box. How SF.
Our expert panel has changed for this afternoon; investors Ron Conway and Yossi Vardi, Don Dodge from Microsoft business development, and Rajeev Motwani from Stanford University.
First up is Story Blender, which allows users to collaborate together on video projects. Did someone say copyright?
TripIt's founder came on stage and, to prove his point, emptied out a brown, manila folder of travel information, flight confirmation, weather details and all the other bumpf we scoop up when we travel. His idea is a travel management tool that aggregates all this information - including a calendar and an email-your-details feature.
Flock: I've used this in beta and it is impressive. Flock is a browser with social web features, so it makes it easier to display your Flickr feed, for example, so you can drag photos straight onto your blog, and similarly with video, feeds and so on. Very slick, but as Vardi said - mass take-up depends on how simple the interface really is.
How do you persuade new users to download yet another browser? Flock's founder looks to Firefox, which has 10m users at less than three years. If Firefox is making $50m a year, there must be room in that market.
Musicshake: This one passes the Mum test - our Korean demonstrator said even his Mum uses Musicshake to make ringtones for her phone. He kicked off with a stomping dance tune (and also busted some dance moves) and said a 9-year-old had made the track within Cyworld, the Korean virtual world with 25m daily visitors. It's music for dummies; these guys believe that user-generated music will be the next big thing. This all went down very well, prompting our MC Calacanis to say he'd wanted them on the team but Arrington hadn't. Who knows.
8020 publishing: Pay attention print guys - these people say the web can make better print magazines than, well, than print. People upload photography, users vote on that photography and the editors curate it. "New and unexpected places sometimes harder to find and an authentic one of voice sometimes hard to find." Contributors congregate at a central point on the site is where people go first of all to see current submissions and clusters of ideas, and then they go to each "place" on the site to develop ideas more editorially. There's a print sample of their JPG magazine here and it has some beautiful content. Well printed too.
"I can see the whole publishing industry looking with curiosity at whether this will succeed or not," said Arrington.
"Think about where the magazine publishing industry is going and it's not pretty. Think about what you'll want on your coffee table in your living room - that's where I can see them building a big user base. And do we think this a sustainable long-term business model?
Lastly photography, of course, is one of the most expensive parts of a magazine's editorial budget, so getting contributins form users in canny - and saves a zero off the production costs, say the 8020 guys.
"But we felt strongly that we should pay people and give $100 per submission." Everyone has cameras now, and everyone takes pictures.
"There's a massive untapped market of incredible photography that is not represented. We say there is expertise, but not experts."
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