TechCrunch40 is now underway and it's standing room only. Of the more than 750 applications originally submitted, the field has been narrow down to 40 companies. So far, we've hammered through the first five startups: Powerset, Cognitive Code, CastTV, Faroo and Viewdle. Actually, they're presently getting grilled by this Monday's judging panel comprised of Ryan Block, Marc Andreessen, Marissa Mayer, Chris Anderson and Om Malik. The judges are being kind so far.
If there was one theme to this morning's presentations, it seemed to be search. Whether it be decentralized peer-to-peer search (Faroo), clustering video search (Viewdle), or natural language search (Powerset).
The latter company in particular seemed to generate a substantial amount of interest from the panel, and is actually developing a technology that understands the structure and nuance of ordinary language, letting you submit natural language queries. The Powerset crew even said they were able to parse the text of Miss Teen South Carolina. Impressive...
Anyway, we'll be hanging out the rest of today and talking to as many of this year's 40 presenters as possible. There's definitely some cool companies here. Stay tuned!
