Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Foursquare-type startups? Robert Scoble at TechCrunch Disrupt



John Doerr with Charlie Rose 
New York, NY - Tunerfish.com is up as the "For Show Launch" company as this blog post is written at TechCrunch Disrupt. Zennie62's trip to TechCrunch is sponsored by Christine Smith Associates, Inc., the Premier Female Contractor in NYC.

TechCrunch Disrupt is a wonderful, dizzying array of people, companies, tech, and ideas. We're in a huge office space that was once used as a Merill Lynch Trading facility. TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington made the point that the space and what it's now used for is an example of the kind of "third wave" of tech change that the World is facing - even if it doesn't know it.

The idea of TechCrunch Disrupt is to bring together media, tech, and advertising industry representatives. So far, the idea is working very well. It even produces controversy: Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, let loose with an F-bomb and an S-bomb, in the former case telling Michael Arrington to F-off.

But Carol Bartz and Yahoo! aside, for a moment, the interesting aspect of TechCrunch Disrupt are the sheer number of "Geo-based" social networks along the lines of Foursquare. That's what I talked with tech blogger Robert Scoble about in the video.

If you're not familiar with Foursquare, it's a mobile based software application that allows you to essentially tell the world (that's on Foursquare) where you are, be it a restaurant, an airport, or a football game. You can also locate other users at the same location or other places.

There are some really interesting startups that are variations on that theme. One of them, DeHood is designed for you to report, say, a crime being committed in your neighborhood in real time.

So as much as the buzz here is about Facebook, and something called "Zuckerberg's law of information" (after Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's determination that the rate of information flow between people has doubled in something like five years), the real interest is not in the next Facebook, but in the next Foursquare.

So far, Arringon's interviewed TV interview legend Charlie Rose, who in turn had a great talk with Venture Capitalist John Doerr. Doerr reported that Zynga, the startup famous for the Farmville game, is the fastest growing company his firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has ever funded, and that includes Google.

Stay tuned.

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