TechCrunch40 Session 5: Productivity & Web Apps
We're live blogging each session, adding to the summary of each company direct from the floor of TechCrunch 40. Click Refresh to view. — Xobni — Xobni products aim to improve the way users organize, search and navigate their email.
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch spent the summer scaling its own event: after announcing a $50,000 prize for the top launching company in July 2007 and watching party tickets sell out fast enough to force a waiting list in June, it opened TechCrunch40 in September with forty companies across themed sessions, live-blogged straight from the floor.
Session 5 is the productivity slot, and Xobni is its anchor demo — an Outlook add-on pitched around organizing, searching and navigating email. The email angle traveled beyond TechCrunch's own feed the same day: PC World's techlog framed its takearound as 'new approaches to e-mail,' while Webware worked the same floor covering Mint's personal-finance launch. CenterNetworks weighed in with a Day 1 recap and top picks, making the session part of a broader verdict on the whole slate.
First-order effects
- Xobni and its co-presenters get same-day writeups syndicated to outlets like PC World and Webware, so the demo-to-coverage lag collapses to hours rather than the weeks a traditional embargo cycle takes.
- TechCrunch's refresh-as-it-happens live blog turns each session into rolling traffic, with the Revenue Models & Analytics session running as the adjacent lens through which attendees judge whether these productivity demos have businesses behind them.
Second-order effects
- Other Outlook and webmail add-on developers get benchmarked against Xobni's organize-search-navigate framing in the same news cycle, since PC World chose to cover the session through the email lens rather than company by company.
- Rival launch events and demo days face pressure to match the live-blog-plus-prize package, because TechCrunch has bundled editorial reach, a cash incentive, and same-day syndication into one stage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, demo conferences become default launch infrastructure for early consumer and productivity startups — selection onto the stage functioning as the first distribution channel, with the $50,000 prize raising the stakes of getting picked.
The trend: Startup debuts are migrating from stealth press releases toward staged demo-conference launches amplified by live blogger coverage, with TechCrunch40 as the template-setting case in 2007.