Techcrunch40 conference: All TC40 presenting companies and “what they do” is summarized here in one single page. Effort is made to keep it brief and simple, representing facts in layman’s language minus the marketing fluff and all other heavy mambo jambo. Shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to finish the page.

After reading short company reviews here, if you want to know more about a company, you can click on the profile link, which will take you to startup’s profile page at Crunch Base. Also included are the links to the live coverage at Techcrunch in detail towards the end of this post. Enjoy!

List of startups presenting at Techcrunch 40 conference -at a glance:

App2You lets you create do-it-yourself database driven web-based applications using a simple browser based interface. (profile)

8020 Publishing lets online communities actively participate in creating print magazines, crowd sourcing the print magazine creation process, and providing the logistics and editorial oversight. (blog, profile)

Cake Financial (blog, profile)

CastTV is a video search engine which help users finding and cataloging videos from the web. (blog, profile)

Ceedo lets you take your Windows desktop environment with you on mobile devices. Just connect mobile device to a Windows-PC and start working. (blog, profile)

Clickable (blog, profile)

Cognitive Code provides SILVIA, a complete system for the development and deployment of intelligent application that allows humans to interact with computers in completely natural and intuitive ways - uses artificial intelligence. (blog, profile)

Crowd Spirit is all about Electronic Product Crowd sourcing - Define, design, invest, finalize, test, recommend electronic products and share product revenue. (blog, profile)

Cubic Telecom Cubic Telecom is a mobile startup focused on reducing roaming and call charges for overseas calls. (blog, profile)

DocStoc DocStoc is YouTube for documents. Upload, share and rate your documents with the world. (blog, profile)

eXtreme Reality (blog, profile)

Faroo is a Peer-to-Peer distributed search engine with a distributed index providing more democratic user centric ranking while sharing advertising revenue with users. (blog, profile)

Flock is a web browser which makes discovery and sharing of rich media (video, photos, blogs etc) easier while enhancing social networking experience. (blog, profile)

FlowPlay (blog, profile)

GotStatus (blog, profile)

Kerpoof (blog, profile)

LoudTalks is a push to talk free downloadable application, which allows you to talk to your friends or colleagues instantly with a single touch of a button. (blog, profile)

mEgo (blog, profile)

MetaPlace (blog, profile)

Mint (blog, profile)

MusicShake lets your create music without previous knowledge of music or expertise. You can create ringtones and personalized music. (blog, profile)

Orgoo (blog, profile)

Ponoko helps you convert your designs into real products, helps sell these products online or deliver directly to the customers. (blog, profile)

PowerSet (blog, profile)

PubMatic (blog, profile)

Spottt (blog, profile)

Story Blender lets your create video mashups from video clips, images and audio and share with your friends. (blog, profile)

Teach the People Lets you create communities for fun, education & innovation and share knowledge. Allows uploading of audio, video, docs and provides broadcasts, chat discussion boards etc. (blog, profile)

Tripit Tripit is a do-it-yourself online trip planner which lets your share your trip itineraries etc with friends. (blog, profile)

TruTap lets you IM from mobile phone, share pics etc across different Instant Mesaging (IM) networks. Requires app download to your phone. (blog, profile)

Viewdle allows monetization of videos by indexing and making embedded meta data searchable. Its facial-recognition technology enables better cataloging and more relevant search results. (blog, profile)

Wixi is a media sharing desktop which lets you store and share all your video, music and photos in one place. (blog, profile)

WooMe (blog, profile)

Xobni (blog, profile)

Yap lets you use your ordinary mobile phone to access applications by just talking into your phone, by providing voice-to-text translation services. You talk, they type. (blog, profile)

Zivity (blog, profile)

ZocDoc (blog, profile)

Techcrunch 40 Day 1 presentations:

TechCrunch 40 Session 1: Search & Discovery

TechCrunch 40 Session 2: Mobile & Communications

TechCrunch 40 Session 3: Community & Collaboration

TechCrunch 40 Session 4: Crowd Sourcing

Techcrunch40 Day 2 presentations:

TechCrunch40 Session 5: Productivity & Web Apps

TechCrunch40 Session 6: Revenue Models & Analytics

TechCrunch40 Session 7: Rich Media & Mash Ups

TechCrunch40 Session 8: Entertainment for All Ages

Note that some links will become functional on Sept 18 once the demos. Please leave a comment if you find any mistakes or inaccuracies.

Retrevo gives us a peak into the future of search. For day to day searches Google, Yahoo and Microsoft live are great. But what do you do when you are looking for something very specific like setting up that hi-tech printer or configuring the latest <drop in a name here> mobile gadget or any other cosumer device. We all know that setting up most of the hi-tech gadgets is a living hell.

Steps in Retrevo. Retrevo is the ultimate in consumer electronics virtical search. With Retrevo you get quick access to product documentation as well as search, and as per the demo I have seen, the results are very very relevant. The search provides a preview of the documents you are looking for. Results can be mailed to your family and friends with ease. Retrevo categorizes the results in different sections to help you get closer to solution faster, helping you narrow down to the product model and solution the problem you are facing faster.

The sucess of Retrevo would lie with adoption by the customer support sites of consumer electronic manufacturers and adoption by non-geeks. I can clearly see Retrevo reducing calls to tech support, reducing the support cost per customer and also helping improve the customer satisfaction. If Retrevo can help my Gradma and help her figure out that latest camera and dvd player, they can write their own check.

Retrevo was founded by Vipin Jain, Jiang Wu and Manish Rathi.

Knock knock Google…. Google Book Search is great, but Retrevo is serving a very different need.

Further Reading:
Retrevo’s Vipin Jain on Vertical Search
Interview with Retrevo Founder at Podtech
Retrevo at Wonderful Thoughts
Retrevo’s “Snapshot” Graphs Products By Price And Feature at TechCrunch

Qipit is an online mobile service that allows you to capture and share information that is around you with a camera phone. Now pictures taken from that cheap camera phone can be shared and put to more productive uses.

Here it how it goes. Take a piture of any document, simply with your camera phone, the image is ready to be faxed, emailed and to be published. There are number of things you can do with this picture now - like you can e-mail to yourself, to your blog, email it to your friends etc. Or you can fax that important PO to your HQ or simply take the pciture of the whiteboard in presales call and store it safely so you can share it with the rest of the team back home. Qipit allows you to mail or fax from the web interface.

As seen in the demo at Demo Fall 2006, the quality of the pictures seems clear - apparently qipit provides some assistance to optimize the images and does some noise and dust removal. It also readjusts the images.

Qipit competes with Soonr, a company offering a more rounded feature set of mobile applications. But in mobile imaging space, Qipit is ahead of the pack with clear advantage in converting images to scan-quality documents including correcting the document orientation and perspective.

Update: Qipit just added the capability to rotate the pictures.

Further Reading:
Text photos to PDF from your camera phone

Stirr.net’s Mixer event No.4 had great success and great crowd. I had the chance to take some pictures and talk to some of the companies and founders that presented. Here are the links to the conversations (podcasts)…

Andrew Martinez-Fonts, Product Manager, Prosper

David Snider, Co-Founder, Boompa

Jeff Zwelling, President and Founder, EchoSign

Jakob Snilsberg, VP, Jajah

Stirr Mixer 4 pictures (click here).

Guest Post by Chris Gill, President & CEO, SVASE

Having been invited by Vic to be a guest on Silicon Valley blog, the problem comes in thinking of something that other people will find interesting. I recently attended the Kauffman Fellow program in London for up and coming VCs where I moderated an outstanding panel on “Helping portfolio companies develop globally”, and on my return ran a workshop for startup CEOs on creating a winning funding pitch. Both of these surfaced a wealth of interesting information on entrepreneurial foundations and survival, so I thought I’d share some of this with you, saving thoughts on success and significance for another time. - Chris Gill

Entrepreneur Foundations

Put yourself in situations where you can meet & evaluate potential team members.

You can’t do it all on your own, so you need a team. A pretty good founding team consists of a visionary, a technical guru, and a market specialist. Take jobs that put you in direct contact with these types of people and give you some experience & insights into what makes good & great ones.

Keep your eyes & ears open for significant problems or opportunities. This usually means you have some interface with your potential customers, typically in a sales or marketing role.

Have a good understanding of who has the problem, what it means to them, what you have to promise/show for them to take action & how much they are prepared to pay for possible solutions. Prepare yourself to be able to describe these issues clearly & concisely.

Have a good understanding of how you can deliver your promised solution, the resources required to create, market & sell it both initially & in volume production, how much it will cost to do this & therefore how much profit you can make.

Evaluate the potential of the business. Can it be a great business that could grow to $30M in 10 years time, employ hundreds of people and allow you to live a very comfortable life? Or could this realistically be a global corporation with revenues of over $100M, profits over $8M and dominant market share within 5 years?

Be prepared to share your ideas & information with potential team members, so you can infect them with your passion, to recruit the best & brightest to your business.

Entrepreneur Survival

Spend as little money as possible. Use a spare bedroom instead of renting an office; borrow, or buy used equipment instead of new; convince your attorneys to defer payment until you get funded. If you think you’re going to need venture capital to succeed, double check to make sure you have a fundable team and proposition, otherwise while you will hopefully learn a lot, you’ll waste a whole bunch of time, friends & family money, & goodwill, and have fewer friends & less credibility than when you started.

If you’re going to need venture capital, use a Delaware “C” corporation as your legal structure. Use an attorney in a reputable law firm with a lot of experience & contacts developed over years working with startups. Set up a standard stock option scheme, and be careful who you give stock options to. Be prepared to share your solution with potential customers, to get their feedback on what they really see as the problem, what they’d really like to see as the solution, how much they’d be prepared to pay for it, and how eager they are to be paying beta customers.

Someone needs to be the CEO, and the team needs to understand that.

Make sure everyone understands that the success of the company comes first, and that anyone on the founding team, including you, will be replaced as soon as it becomes apparent they don’t have the experience and skills to meet the growing demands of their assigned roles.

If you’re looking for venture capital, reconcile yourself to your first institutional round of funding looking something like:

• 50% to the investors
• 20% for future employee options pool
• 30% split between the founders

If you’re looking for venture capital, reconcile yourself to your share of the equity in the company being diluted by further rounds of funding. But if the venture capital you seek will enable you to rocket ahead, that’s OK. 7% of a $1B market cap company is worth a whole heck of a lot more than any percentage of a company that failed to become mainstream.

Get a really good handle on the buying cycle, the decision tree and the budgeting constraints of your potential customers. This generally requires you to talk with lots of customers and to get to know them intimately.

Build a business model and business plan that shows how you understand the problem, can deliver a viable solution, and make money along the way. Your assumptions are more important the numbers, but the numbers also need to show how well you understand the market and the business, from the bottom up, not from the latest Dataquest report.

Understand that your initial goal is to get a representative number of paying beta customers who will give you constructive feedback in return for early access to your solution. This provides evidence that there is demand for what you’re offering. Everything else is just a milestone along the way.

Understand that venture funding is just a milestone on the way, and actually a great test to see if you, your team and your proposition have got what it takes to deliver to the promise.

Don’t give up too easily. Almost nothing works the first time it’s attempted. Just because what you’re doing does not seem to be working, doesn’t mean it won’t work. It just means that it might not work the way you’re doing it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn’t have an opportunity. But if nobody wants to buy what you’re offering then maybe you need a different approach or a new idea. You don’t have to give up your passion for being an entrepreneur, it’s just that only a small proportion of ideas can spawn businesses, and relatively few teams are capable of the outstanding planning and execution required to turn the promise into viable, fundable businesses.

See Also:

The Great Startup Game

Startup Funding Experience at Podtech

Evolving Market for Startup Funding Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Raising Startup Funding at Onstartups blog

We are in the processes of building this blog. We are moving from our old typepad home http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com to here http://startupnewz.com/blog .

Silicon Valley photo album is ready for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy the photo collection and see the geeks in action.

Indian blogger are getting together in Chennai, India on 9th and 10th September for a BlogCamp. This is going to be the biggest get together of the Bloggers, Podcasters and Video Bloggers in India.

Here is the high level confrence agenda:

• Blogging and Governance - How blogs are being used to provide assistance during times of crisis, uncovering potential crimes, activities, taking on the government, etc.
• Blogging and Entrepreneurship - Many professionals are using blogs to change their world. Here we talk about how blogging can work towards career development and related areas.
• Corporate Blogging - Many corporates have started blogging, taking them closer to customers. Here, you could share your stories on why you are incorporating blogs in your products and media strategies.
• Getting Geeky - The Art and Science of Blogging, how to go about it, tips and tricks of trade and taking blogging to the next level.
• Blogging as New Media - As blogging goes mainstream, it complements journalism. Here we talk about why traditional media should care about blogging as a form of citizen journalism.
• Blogging as a Hobby - How blogs help you in showcasing your talents and skills, in sharing your deep thoughts.
• Blogging and Community - As a tool for action, collective or distributed, as a binding force, as a way for individuals to contribute, and to get back something.

Organisers say that BlogCamp works on the basis of the rule that “the expertise of the speaker is less than the collective expertise of the audience”. We want you to participate - without you, there is no BlogCamp. You can conduct sessions, help out with the organizing, and take part in the conversations or just absorb the spirit. Most importantly we’d like you to share the spirit of the BlogCamp - learn, share and grow.

The Platinum sponsor of the blog unconference conference is Yahoo India which a contribution of $6,500. Good gesture Yahoo. Microsoft…. missing the bus again?

BlogCamp, Blogger, Blog, Podcast, Video Blog, India, Media, New Media, UnConference

Plug & Play hosted the Sherif University Reunion Reception, on the 6th of August. Saeed Amidi as usual was a great host, and had planned a great Gala Dinner with all the festivities and regional food.

A bigger delagation from the university was planned I was told, but some folks ran into visa problems due to tense relations with Iran. Sherif University is Standford of Iran, so I had the chance to meet very smart people from that part of the world and was throughly impressed.

I had brought in my camera and took some pictures.

Click here to view pictures from the event

Thanks saeed and Rose for the wonderful evening and inviting me over.