This year's Tech Crunch event expanded to 50 presentations in three days. Last year, the original scope was supposed to be 20 presenting companies, but it quickly grew to 40 by the time the event launched. In 2008, the submissions grew to more than 1000 and the event grew to three days, probably as big as they want it to ever grow. Tech Crunch is one of our new favorite events, touting to be the Sundance Film Festival of the Investment community, compared to DEMO, which I suppose represents the Hollywood insiders. While the presentations at DEMO are definately better, probably because the presenters pay hansomly to get there, I think investors are more likely to discover diamonds in the rough at Tech Crunch.
For 2008, our favorite products and presentations were:
- FitBit Tracker - a small unobtrusive health and fitness tracker based on 3D motion sensing technology.
- World Camera - a vision of real world tagging by a Japanese content.
- Swype - tap-free typing up to 50 WPM on a touchscreen keyboard.