TC50 has been going on these last few days.  I attended on the final day of presentation which covered new apps in the Social Stream, News & Discovery and Commerce Marketplaces areas.

I love this event for the unbridled, youthful energy of the entrepreneurs and their followers.  For that rare and exciting idea, the momentum generating potential of success at the conference is huge.  Everyone here is networked and more important, willing to shout it out.  If something is compelling, it can catch fire quickly.

The hit rate on quality ideas appeared fairly low.  Are we nearing a trough for high impact web 2.0 ideas?  I think it’s a period for creating tactical businesses.  Those which fill a targeted need and do it well.  Ideas that leverage, or live within, the existing tidal waves — Twitter, Facebook and iPhone/mobile.  No game changers or companies who become verbs.   There are endless and growing number of opportunities in that domain.  I like concepts that package convenience around existing and emerging user behavior.  For example, there was a company that had a mobile app for ordering from concession stands in stadiums and venues.  The conference winner, Red Beacon, a referral and matching service for local services (plumber, personal trainer, contractor) intends to do exactly this albeit in a crowded space.  A related company that is launching which I think will do very well because of its market focus in Save Energy 123.  This site advises homeowners on energy-saving projects and matches them with local products and service providers.

The downside risk of having a tactical problem-solving idea is that you come up with a feature not a business.  An idea like AnyClip (database of movie clips) sounds that.  On the other end of the spectrum, thinking big is challenging because the window for changing user behavior comes along unpredictably and once in a while.  One winning company, Treadsy, sounds like that despite its very neat product execution (aggregation of messaging and streams from email and social networking).  Reminds me of another take on unified messaging, a web 1.0 concept, which has some success but did not achieve prime-time status.

Right now, we need incremental ideas that solve practical needs in a complete and robust ways.  Another company in this vein includes Yext (a twist on pay-per-call) which launched at the event and announced a huge funding round.  Overall I was encouraged by the more concrete business concepts and BTW, many of those were concentrated in the Local and location-based space, an area I handle for Yahoo!

Perhaps the most unique takeaway for me was inclusion of Chamillionaire as part of the judging panel.  I hadn’t heard of the popular rapper before.  Clearly business mind and savvy, he fit right in with comments as useful as any other panelist.  It strikes me that we could use more voices playing a role in the business-of-technology conversation.  Why limit the perspective to engineers and MBA’s?  For related thinking, you might read The Management Myth, a not-so-subtle deconstruction of modern management institutions.

• TC50 Winners
• Participating Companies

Filed under: Web Apps, Innovation, Local

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Tags: TC50, Red Beacon, SaveEnergy123, Yext, Chamillionaire, Twitter, Facebook,