Cambridge Cluster

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown We have been chewing over the list of companies at TechCrunch50 and I picked up this comment:

“I had a look around, and I might have missed something here.  I’ve just looked through the first 8 companies profiled (evidently the rest will become available as the conference proceeds), and don’t see a single one solving what I consider to be a “real” problem.  They’re all targeting the leisure / chatter industry in one way or another (with the possible exception of Shryk, which seems to be teaching kids finance with the tenuous possibility of signing them up to one bank or another).

Looking through the session lists, I don’t think I can spot a single medical device, any sort of cleantech, no big industrial problem solvers, or a single pharmaco.  I appreciate that TechCrunch is all about “web technologies”, but all of these areas solve “real” problems, and increasingly do so by using the web as a critical aspect (comparing data to everyone else in a massive online database to infer health issues, or by intelligently load-switching in the cleantech sector, or by improving outsourcing capability between manufacturing partners over huge geographic and social distance, or dramatically lowering the costs of clinical trials by connecting first-world researchers to the third-world hospitals where the trials are done etc).  However, the web/mobile is not the _only_ aspect!

In case the TechCrunch50 haven’t noticed, we’re heading directly into a recession.  Pretty much the first thing to get cut by consumers will be anything that charges for leisure, idle chatter, and so on.  The first thing to get cut by companies will be discretionary adspend on unproven advertising platforms.  I predict the Crunch50 ;)”

Perhaps it is time for Silicon Valley to remember; “It’s the technology, stupid!”.

Ps. A pity that the webcast was not recorded as the quality of the speakers was high.  The panels and their comments were of the best – we could only dream of having so many people of such quality in Cambridge.  Of course, so much was VC driven – normal service in SV and we just needed to hear more about how they used Equity Fingerprint in their business plans.

Comment to save you clicking and thanks for the correction:

tom summit wrote
at 12:16 pm – 10th September 2008 Permalink Edit

I think you may be confusing Demo and TC50. Demo costs $ 18K. TC50 does not cost to present.