So today, so far, I’ve seen an 80′s musician & lots of free money in Web 2.0 – does anyone smell a bubble?   Actually, seriously, I think we’re in the start of a long term sustainable boom, with a few bumps along the way – there is a massive paradigm shift underway, and some of the businesses I saw today, don’t have a hope in hell of surviving through to second round funding, but hey – that’s just business in general!

I’m off now to Lucid, for the afterparty!! Long day ahead of me tomorrow though!  If you’re attending the conference, please stop by Booth 44 to see us demo Synthasite!

The inaugural TechCrunch40 Keynote panel gets underway with a great panel of industry veterans:

Michael Moritz interviews Marc Andreesen (founder of Netscape & Opsware, co-founder of Ning), David Filo (co-founder Yahoo) and Chad Hurley (co-founder YouTube).

Michael asks Chad to give some background on his first business – which was a flywood poster business! David came out to California to go to Stanford grad school – didn’t hear what his first business was. Marc’s first business was a lemonade stand in kindergarten! By contrast, mine was selling Thundercat stickers at age 7!

Marc graduated out of the mid-west, and headed out to west coast of the USA for his first job. These questions are really more background questions – nothing too insightful yet. It appears that Marc helped out David in the early days with Yahoo.

Marc says that startups need to have crazy ideas, because big companies don’t chase crazy ideas! The problem is that out of every 1000 crazy ideas, 999 are exactly that and they don’t work!

Chad gives some early backgound on YouTube – Chad did the front end and UI, while the other two co-founders did the backend. Marc describes the CEO role in any company as a constant stream of bad news and having to deal with it! Now that’s pretty insightful! He also goes on to say that every company is different, so try not to base new decisions based on old information. Direction of causality is often misunderstood, vis a vis, why things go right or wrong. He also says that serial entrepreneurs need to try and build new cultures, instead of just drawing on people who previously joined other companies.

Chad said that one of YouTube’s biggest challenges was scaling the architecture, and building out their own data centers. This is very painful to blog as Marc speaks at the speed of light – just a little slower than myself , so I’m going to just post this as is… keep reading for the next session after lunch.

Here are some Startup Tips from the panel:

Marc Andreesen :

Try to ensure that one of the founders is capable of being a CEO

Don’t hire too many people too soon.

Chad Hurley :

Small teams move faster, keep it tight!

David Filo:

Find people who are passionate about what they do, not about the money.

The guys take to the stage, with a couple of good jobs. They are announcing the launch of their product today, called MaxRoam. It’s basically a sim card that allows you to pay local call charges, no matter where in the world you are, by having multiple numbers on your sim card. The Demo Demons got a hold of these guys, so their demo doesn’t work. If it does, I’m going to save a lot of money!

Yap

Yap is a J2ME mobile client that allows you to send text messages, while driving – for example, by speaking into your phone. It’s basically speech to text for the mobile phone and with the new laws in California around teenagers using their cellphones while driving, it’s probably going to take off pretty well! There is a low of vapourware here, as they have promised a lot more than what I know can be delivered, effectively & within user irritability limits, but all the power to them if it can save lives or make it easier to send txt messages. They also got hit by the Demo Demons and the demo’s weren’t effective.

Ceedo

Ceedo is a mobile phone embedded web portal (or something like that). It allows you to store mobile applications onto the flash memory of your phone, and make it operable on a PC. They are focusing on creating custom virtualization sevices, uses the mobile as a store for personalization. The portal it creates, allows you to create a portfolio of applications that you can take with you and use on multiple computers, without changing the settings. It’s like Parallels for Mobile – very cool, very interesting – definitely one of the better products I’ve seen so far.

LoudTalks

Basically, their main value proposition is push to talk:

• Instant talk, no need to call
• Simple single button access
• Asynchronous talk at your pace
• Loud talk to all your friends at once

Nothing amazing, some interesting features though. I can’t see this becoming the next big thing.

Trutap

“Brings together the social life of young people into one, free, universal, mobile service”

They’re basically trying to build out MXit onto Europe, China, India & South America. They didn’t mention that MXit exists despite that it is already boasting 4m users. The nice thing is that they do aggregrate messaging from multiple networks and platforms.

I’m at the TechCrunch40 conference right now and Michael Arrington & Jason Calacanis are kicking it off. I’ll be live blogging this event, starting with this long post – Techcrunch are also covering it. If you’re around, please say hi, and we’d love your poker chips (handed out to the best companies presenting in the DemoPit). Synthasite will be demo’ing tomorrow – and we’re very excited to be presenting!

Powerset

The guys from Powerset take the floor. They are a natural language search engine that’s received a lot of international acclaim. They’ve just announced the launch of PowerSet Labs – a way to :

• explore technology demos
• share ideas
• feed the learning engine
• improve your search karma

Sounds exciting – and definitely leaning toward utilizing the knowledge that’s out there in the search industry. Here’s a YouTube video on Powerset:

They demo some really great search technology, which is not linked to keyword based searches, but instead, semantic mapping of concepts and themes.

Cognitive Code

Next up are the guys from Cognitive Code, who are an artificial intelligence company.

• Practical, conversational artificial intelligence applications
• Development platforms for context-sensitive ai apps

This is very interesting – stuff like out of space age movies like Star Trek. They are talking to a computer and asking it questions, and it is understanding the questions and replying – very impressive, but I’m not sure how much of it is prepared and how much of it is scripted. They claim that there are no scripts running, which if this is the case, then it’s very impressive. They are trying to embed Silvia into mobile devices, toys, web servers and custom electronics over the next few years. This stuff looks far too early stage for prime time, but that’s just my opinion.

Cast TV

CastTV are up next. They’re a video search engine that indexes YouTube, Revver, and all the other video hosting sites. They are crawling and indexing videos from around the web. They aim to index every video on the web. They demo some comparative searches from Google & Yahoo, and compare with theirs, which has a far fresher index. Very interesting, again – not sure how much of this is pre-prepared.

Faroo

The next guy up is from Faroo, which is a P2P search engine. He starts out with a monologue tone and some fantastic claims of being able to index the entire Internet. Sounds very Dunning-Krugeresque to me. The concept is good, however, I’m not sure that these guys can pull it off, based on the presentation that he is giving. This is a really good example of how marketing is key – he speaks with a heavy swiss accent, and it’s difficult for me, and the rest of the audience to follow. I don’t think anyone understands him. Also, again, the idea is good, but I don’t think the implementation is done properly or with a large enough value proposition. He also claims to be able to save billions of dollars.

Viewdle

The guys from Viewdle start off with a nice presentation, which explains what they do. Basically, they index videos frame by fame, to capture people who are in the video, and keep and index of who is in a certain video. They allow you search for people and see which videos they appear in, by facial recognition. Very cool technology.

Q&A:

Chris Anderson, author of the long tail & Wired editor, ask the guy from Faroo on how the users benefit from allowing the web to be indexed from their PC’s. “I think it’s good for users because they’re using search together” – something got lost in translation here. I agree with Chris – it’s a bit wishy washy as a business model currently, either that, or I don’t understand what he is saying. Om Malik has a go at him – this is not going anywhere.