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>> How is this you're going. I know we're just about an hour in to it, so far.
>> It's a little bit crazy. As you can see behind me there's about a thousand people in the room. It's very high energy, it's getting hot, a lot of technical issues, but the one thing that's not an issue is the great companies that are launching. We had four amazing companies this morning launched. They had a great reception, one of them was Ashton Kutcher, the famous actor and TV producer doing Blah Girls, Tweegee and iThryve -- very cool online banking for kids, so we've had a great reception in the morning, everybody showed up early, got their tickets and it's a packed house, which is what our goal is. We want a packed house, so that it's high energy for these companies to launch.
>> I liked that you organized all the presentations into categories. We had the kids and tweens early this morning.
>> Yeah.
>> What do you think are the breakthrough merging categories with this really a lot of innovation right now.
>> Clearly there's a lot of innovation in iPhone applications. People are really focusing on that video as a continuing trend from last year's TechCrunch40 event -- when forty companies launched. And we're seeing a new type of search, which is sort of bringing objects from the web, its other applications. So you're in your email program, but Wikipedia is integrated into it and your iPhoto application, your photography management, but it's pulling in other people's Flickr photos or, you know text or -- so people are starting to integrate and mix different web services into standard applications like photo sharing and email. So I don't what to call it yet. It doesn't have a name. But it's working.
>> Yeah, I guess what is this cutting edge when companies are launching like literally as we speak.
>> Yeah.
>> You know, it's very new.
>> It's very new and you know this company will work -- this conference, the Tech Crunch Conference what we're trying to do is we're trying to make it a real platform for raw, start-up that's why we're in a very raw space and it's kind of a raw feeling conference. We wanna -- We really wanna give those two or three people in the garage the chance to get on stage in front a thousand people, the biggest investors in the world, the biggest partners, the Googles, the Yahoos and maybe land funding and maybe have their dream come true. So we looked at what we're doing as the Sundance for the technology industry.
>> Give me the name of three companies that you are personally keeping your eye on that are just fascinating, innovative, pushing the boundary.
>> Now you got me.
>> I know you got to pick a favorite.
>> Favorites. Well it's a very tough thing to say. I think that Ashton Kutcher has, you know is very cool that he is, you know, embracing the web and understands it.
>> Sure.
>> But there's like cute little things like BirdPost, which is amazingly focused for people who are into birds, very simple idea, but very well executed. You have things that are very meaningful, like CauseCast that are, you know trying to put together celebrities and causes and users. We have a lot of environmental and green things, so one of the companies is trying to let you know the environmental impact of the products you're using. Another company is rating existing products, so -- gosh, there's so many, it's hard to pick a favorite. I also love the -- one of the photo sharing sites that's launching here, which is like Flickr 2.0 that would be very big and Fitbit is amazing, a real cool company and Dropbox, amazing. There's so many, it's hard to pick favorites. I sat with 250 ten-minute presentations to get a standard fifty with the rest of the team, sat through another 580. So it's like having 52 kids, you love them all.
>> Fair enough. Thank you so much, Jason. Good luck to the conference.
>> Thank you.
>> Jason Calacanis, I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET.com
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