Winner: red beacon. The 50 startup presentations are over, the judges votes are in, Michael and Jason chewed over the top contenders, and the winner of this year’s TechCrunch50 is RedBeacon.
The startup aims to help consumers find local service providers such as plumbers, bakers, and contractors. As we described in our initial write-up: RedBeacon is a new service making its public debut today at TechCrunch50 that further streamlines this process by bringing the OpenTable model of online transactions to much broader spectrum of services.Using the site will be easy for anyone who has used a local review service like Yelp.
Simply type whatever service you’re looking for (be it plumber, gardener, or hair stylist), and the site will present a list of recommended service providers in your area. RedBeacon also employees natural language processing so it can figure out exactly what you’re looking for (for example, “Cupcake maker” would search for any bakers in the area). Redbeacon Homepage. Best presentation: iMo. One of the cooler iPhone apps to launch last year was SGN’s iFun, which let you use your iPhone or iPod touch to control games on your computer screen.
But iFun only works with SGN’s own games like iGolf. A new startup, iMo, launching today at TechCrunch50, expands the ability to all PC games. Most PC games are still played using the mouse+keyboard combination. A lot of hardcore gamers like this experience, but more casual users prefer controllers like you find on consoles. The most popular of those out there right now is the Nintendo Wii, undoubtedly thanks to its motion-based control system. Another nice thing about using the iPhone or iPod touch as your controller is that it’s much more portable than traditional PC controller hardware.
The system also features onscreen controls for the iPhone and iPod touch too as every PC game won’t benefit from using things like the accelerometer, obviously. Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased) TH: I imagine the whole club becoming. Best international: trollim. Coding is a highly competitive industry where programmers are often pitted against each other based on level of skill and ability.
TechCrunch50 startup Trollim has created a competition platform and social network for programmers that assesses their coding skills through coding battles. Users are identified as “trolls” on the platform and once a user signs up, he or she fills out a profile that includes their age, location and coding language skills (C++, Ruby, PHP etc.). Trollim then gives the user 3 to 6 pieces of code, or a “test,” to fix to asses their baseline level of skill and based on the results of this test, the user is given a skill level of 1 though 5. Once a user has been assigned a skill level, he can then start challenging other programmers on the site to one on one battles, where trolls have to fix different pieces of code, or “rumbles,” where multiple programmers participate in a battle.
Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased) TO: I’m curious about a couple of things.