Category: Tech news

We started with location check-ins. Then we moved to media check-ins. Now we’re onto product check-ins. The space is starting to fill up quickly, but are they all too convoluted? If SnapDragon takes off, the answer in hindsight may end up being “yes”.

The new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt isn’t trying to pull you into a specific store (like Shopkick). It isn’t trying to mount an overall attack on in-store shopping (like Barcode Hero). And it isn’t trying to turn barcodes into message boards (like StickyBits). Instead, all SnapDragon is trying to do is get you to scan your barcodes to check-in to products you like. Doing this is more a game than anything else — you can share these products, climb a product’s leaderboard, etc. And as a bonus, it allows you to unlock comic book material featuring the company’s SnapDragon character.

Yes, that’s right, comic books.

The SnapDragon team has gotten some Bay Area comedians to write their little collectable virtual good comic books. You’ll earn different books based on your product check-ins. For example, if you check-in to some tanning oil, you might earn the “Jersey Shore” comic, riffing on MTV’s hit show.

The idea is clearly to make the idea of product check-ins fun without putting up too big of a barrier to entry (which many of the other product check-in services have). That said, the end result is the same in SnapDragon — get brands to leverage the platform as a new form of advertising and marketing.

Here are the questions from judges Josh Felser, Joe Kraus, Todor Tashev, Robert Scoble, and Don Dodge (paraphrased):

Q: How do you make money?

A: We work with consumer product companies to deliver targeted coupons.

Q: Have you talked to the brands yet?

A: Yes a bit. One example may be Vitamin Water — which has a deal with The Situation from Jersey Shore.

Q: I think too many teams are focused on the product problem — but isn’t this a distribution problem?

A: (Shakes head, yes).

Q: Too many companies talk about the business — you need to figure out how to make this interesting to the user. Right?

A: (Shakes head, yes).

The Foursquare model of checking into a location, earning badges and tapping into your social network to share that location has become one that has been able to be applied to other platforms. For example, GetGlue allows users to check-in to shows, books, movies and more, earn badges and share this with friends on Twitter and Facebook. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, OneTrueFan is launching a service for web publishers that allows visitors to earn badges for interacting and sharing content on the site.

OneTrueFan, which will be available as a browser add-on or as a javascript code that publishers embed on their site, aims to help engage visitors while they are on a website interacting with content. The startup revolves around a game-format that allows you to see who is reading content in the site, compete for the most engagement and encourages you to share content within the service and on social networks.

As users share more content within OneTrueFan, and on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, they can earn points, and special badges from publishers. You’ll be able to see a leaderboard of users who have been sharing content and can mouse over fellow contributors to see more information about how they’ve been interacting with a site. All of this info can be seen on the bottom of a publisher’s website.

OneTrueFan will eventually launch a dashboard that allows web sites get a multi-dimensional view of their readers based upon frequency of visits, amount of content read, regularity of shares and traffic sent. Web site owners can use existing channels, such as Twitter and Facebook, to communicate with readers.

In the future, OneTrueFan will be releasing an API so that publishers can customize the experience for their visitors. In the end, the aim of OneTrueFan is to help publishers increase engagement amongst everyday users and time spent on their sites. And the company says that their service will help create repeat visits as well and

OneTrueFan is the brainchild of MyBlogLog’s founders Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson. MyBlogLog was acquired by Yahoo in 2007. Unsurprisingly, some of OneTrueFan’s interface is similar to MyBlogLog. OneTrueFan has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, David Cohen and Bob Pasker.

Here are the questions from judges Josh Felser, Joe Kraus, Todor Tashev, Robert Scoble, and Don Dodge (paraphrased):

Q: What about the retweet problem? Don’t you reward that?

A: Yes, that’s an interesting game mechanic — because you can abuse this. But that’s risk reward that’s inherit in gaming. And we do block bots — this is just for humans.

Q: There are so many people chasing this — so isn’t survival the strategy here?

A: I think you’re absolutely right. But we’ve been doing this for years. All of the fuck-ups that we’ve made have given us a lead. MyBlogLog failed on many levels — that will help us.

Q: But what about fatigue about game mechanics?

A: Frankly, most sites can get social media right. There’s a big difference between playing Xbox and making the games. The companies that get best practices are going to survive and grow.

Q: What about the Foursquare problem — the mayor problem, you might never catch the mayor?

A: With Foursquare, there is only one way to earn points. With us, you can earn points different ways.

Off & Away, an innovative travel startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, is launching a few new features today. Off & Away applies a Swoopo-like auction model to buying hotel rooms online.

The site features upscale hotel rooms at rock-bottom prices; Off & Away auctions off each reservation, and other people bid for the same room. To participate you need to buy bids (they’re a dollar apiece); then you can bid as many times as you’d like until time runs out. Once that happens one user will walk away with the cheap hotel price. Everyone else can use the money they’ve put towards bids toward reserving the room at its normal price.

Now customers will be able to combine losing bid credits from multiple auctions to purchase other hotel rooms (previously you could only use your bidding amount towards a hotel room at the same hotel). So if you sped $25 in bids on one auction and $75 on another auction, you’ll have a $100 credit to use against any hotel.

Additionally, customers now have 30 days to apply their used bid credits to book another hotel room (Prior to this, customers had only 7 days.) Off & Away has also expanded its number of listings, currently offering rooms at over 100,000 hotels globally, including rooms at The Pierre in New York, and The Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. The startup says that winning bidders are now saving an average of 89% off the retail price of rooms. Losing bidders still get more than their money back if they book with the properties being auctioned (up to 110% of their bids).

Off & Away has raised $1.25 million in funding.

Increasingly, there are apps that let you leave messages, photos, and videos for friends in real places. Now you can leave money as well. Many startups are already adding rewards to check-ins, but social payments startup Venmo is tying check-ins to real money with a new iPhone app called Gifi that is launching today at TC Disrupt.

Venmo is a way to text real money to your friends and broadcast those payments on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Gifi is a mashup of Foursquare and Venmo. It lets you leave money for people in specific locations, which they can unlock with a Foursquare check-in.

Imagine that you check into your favorite coffee shop on Foursquare and moments later you get a text message informing you that a friend has left you $3 at that location, along with a personal message that he wants you to have a latte on him. Or you can leave the gift for more than one friend and whoever checks in first gets to keep the money.

The app, which should go live in the iPhone store today, is free to use, but requires existing Foursquare and Venmo accounts. When you leave a gift for someone, you can send them a clue to help them find it. They will get an email with the clue. When they check into the right place, a text message alerts them that they just got a gift. You can also skip the clue and just leave a gift somewhere you know someone always check into.

For friends, Gifi is just a fun way to brighten someone’s day. But businesses could use Gifi as a way to reward loyal customers with cash for checking in, or bigger brands could leave clues and money in strategic places. After all, cash is the ultimate reward.

As part of the launch, Gifi has hidden $2,500 around San Francisco. Look for it!

Here are the questions from judges Josh Felser, Joe Kraus, Todor Tashev, Robert Scoble, and Don Dodge (paraphrased):

Q: Can you do any non-montetary things?

A: Right now no, but sure why not?

Q: Are you a part of Venmo?

A: Yes, we wanted to showcase the data.

Q: Can I add anyone?

A: They have to be your friend on Foursquare.

Q: How do this scale?

A: Friends will help with virility, I think.

There’s clearly something to this idea of mobile/social shopping. Or at least, a huge group of startups all seem to think there is. Already this year we have apps like Shopkick and Barcode Hero attempting to build upon what apps ShopSavvy and others have been working on for some time. That is, enriching the shopping experience by using a device most of us now have on us at all times: our phones. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, a new entry attempting to be the broadest of these yet, CheckPoints, is launching.

Co-founder Mark DiPaola calls CheckPoints “the first mobile shopping rewards app that lets consumers own rewards regardless of what store they’re in.” While the aforementioned apps may have been out first, a number are limited in either the number of stores they work in, or the number of products they work with. CheckPoints has products from partners such as Belkin and Tyson at launch, as well as brands like Amazon, CVS, and American Airlines. At launch, CheckPoints will work in over a million stores around the U.S., DiPaola says.

Here’s how the app works: you walk into a store and you’ll immediately see a number of featured products. These can change depending on where you are in the store. As you walk around, if you find an items and scan it with the built-in barcode reader, you may get a little interactive game that a marketer has made for that brand. This app allows marketers to reach consumers at the point of sale when they actually have a product in their hand, DiPaola notes. He calls this the “Holy Grail” of marketing.

Consumers do this scanning because it earns them “checkpoints” which are accumulated and can be redeemed once you have enough. In fact, for TechCrunch Disrupt attendees, CheckPoints is offering to give you the free app with credits around on it. Sure, it’s only a dollars-worth, but this essentially means you’re getting the app for negative $0.99. That’s a new app pricing category.

DiPaola says CheckPoints is an extension of his first startup, Vantage Media, which he sold in 2007 for $150 million (after taking no outside money.

Here are the questions from judges Josh Felser, Joe Kraus, Todor Tashev, Robert Scoble, and Don Dodge (paraphrased):

Q: Can you get retail establishments and brands beyond what you have?

A: Yes.

Q: Customer acquisition is the hardest part, right? Why go with you?

A: We’re going to approach product companies instead of locations. On the advertiser side, what’s unique is showing the product.

Q: How do you get customers in the door? And why is this interesting to people? These are low-value customers, right?

A: I disagree. I think people like deals.

In his explorations with the Twitter button, Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead discovered that there are millions of tweets a day producing a stunning amount of valuable information, the only problem is that’s pretty hard to separate the wheat from the chafe, the signal from the noise or a bunch of other sifting cliches.

Datasift, in the same space as HootSuite and Tweetronics, is attempting to make this process of sifting through realtime data easier for companies. No longer unique to Twitter, the Datasift platform, accessible through a drag and drop graphical interface, is a curation engine which relies upon realtime filtering, providing developers with alerts, analytics and a realtime API.

Datasift allows mobile, web and desktop client developers to tune tweets through a number for filters, including keyword, popularity, geolocation, and (through a function Halstead calls “augmentation”) sentiment peer indexes like Klout and links. You can start with one rule, and filter it down even further.

For example, Datasift can present you with a stream of the Foursquare checkins at every Starbucks around the world, and then filter them down to everyone with a Klout/peer index score of 50 and saying something positive. This kind of sifting is very valuable to marketers and media companies looking to target very specific campaigns.

While Datasift’s focus on structured data might be too technical for the typical consumer, many businesses revolve around searching through and analyzing realtime information, but don’t have the server resources to filter the Twitter firehose or who don’t want to go through the Twitter app authorization process.

“Datasift is not meant to be an end product,” says Halstead. And his rebranded Tweetmeme targeting developers who need precise streams of data,with a freemium ‘pay for the volume you consume’ or have ads show up in your stream model.

With $1.5 million in funding and the hard lessons learned from the experience of Tweetmeme, it seems like Halstead this time at least has a shot at making all sorts of realtime information a little easier to sift through.

Feedback and Q & A by expert judges Jeff Clavier, Gina Bianchini, Jim Lanzone, Ted Maidenberg, and Chris Sacca. I’ve abbreviated their names, for brevity obviously.

JC: If I want to filter it through my friends, how do I do that with your platform?

Datasift: If you want to set up an alert on a curated list, it’s a platform, so you can use it to anything.

TM: Are you in an arms race with Twitter?

DS: We’re not a client we’re a platform, this is bigger than Twitter, this is about relevant content and push data.

CS: Twitter hasn’t even done search 1.0 yet. It’s not about search it’s about ]push. this world is increasingly driven by analytics. It might not be a huge comany on it’s own.

JL: If you can open this up for people start innovating than I’m all for it.

DS: Tweetmeme processes 1 billion requests. We want to help the people who can make the next Flipboard.

GB: This is a really nice way of bringing it to life.

DS: We already have already 13,000 sign ups from businesses. Tweetmeme is very much a data-driven business.

JC: Can I filter buy # of retweets?

DS: Yes, you can even do it backward and really let your imagination go wild.

JC: Doing this at this scale is hard.

DS: Yes, but it’s viable, 65% of tweets are generated from third party applications.

When Foursquare first launched, there were no deals. There was no way to get free pizza or cheap beer. The only incentive to play their game was to earn badges and bragging rights among friends. Badgeville, a new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, wants to apply that gaming mechanic to all sites across the web.

So how does this work? Well, a publisher sets up a Badgeville account and chooses what type of badges they want to give to readers for various types of actions on the site. For example, if you comment, you may get a badge. Or if you click the Like button on comments, you may earn points for that. If you become a Facebook Fan of a page, you may earn a different badge for that, etc. All of this is defined by the publisher.

Because this involves the publisher placing a bit of code on their site to keep track of these badges, there is also an analytics component to all of this. Badgeville is able to track users (who opt-in to using this, of course) activity such as reading pages, clicking the various share buttons, and commenting. This type of information is extremely useful to publishers, but it can be hard to extract from users — unless, of course, you’re giving them some reward for opting-in to this kind of tracking. In this case, badges.

While they are launching today, Badgeville already has 10 customers signed up and ready to go out of the gate. These customers represent 400 million monthly pageviews, the services says. Thanks to these publishers, Badgeville says it already has tallied up some $500,000 in sales so far. The services charges a monthly access fee based on how large your site is.

Badgeville believes that Facebook Connect has put identity on the web, now it’s time for another layer for loyalty. That’s what they want to be. ”It’s not about pageviews anymore, it’s about engagement,” as they put it.

Similar to Cooliris, Japanese startup Gunzoo aims to change the way people search for and view multiple videos through their Fabric Video product, which launches today at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Founded by Toshikazu Shinohara, Gunzoo and Fabric Video want to disrupt the video search space by combining multiple bitstreams into one bitsream, allowing users to browse efficiently and seamlessly through thousands of options instead of having to try to find what they’re looking for through specific keyword search like on YouTube video search, for example.

Fabric Video customers can view over 1,200 platform agnostic H.264/AVC video videos in a visually appealing way, letting users interact with video by zooming in and out freely and through the video wall context navigation. This Fabric Video mode of presentation is particularly useful for users who would like to find a specific scene in a video, for example or for media companies like CNN who would like to present a wall of videos around a specific news topic.

Compatible with web browsers and mobile phones, the cloud based Fabric Video also allows users to share a list of their favorite videos, increasing a user’s reach as well as time spent browsing. The company is also planning a concierge video suggestion service for sometime in the near future.

The product itself is visually impressive (see photo below), and the company, which has received $1.5 million in funding, plans on making money not only through software licensing but also by making a play to capture the online video advertising market which is currently valued at $4.3 billion in the United States and $5.5 billion in Japan through “less annoying” video ads.

Feedback and Q & A by expert judges Jeff Clavier, Gina Bianchini, Jim Lanzone, Ted Maidenberg, and Chris Sacca. I’ve abbreviated their names, for brevity obviously.

CS: I’m not sure I grasped everything that’s going on. I’m pretty sure that’s how my kids are going to consume media but not me.

TM: I’d thought there would be a little more social element. I’d be interested to hear if there are more social aspects to the video.

FV: You can see the whole video simultaneously. You can see more videos than you can see one by one.

GB: I really liked the dashboard. I’ve struggled a little bit with the different usecases.

The main reason I love services like Tumblr and Posterous is that they make personal blogging simple. While you certainly still can write long-winded pieces about whatever you want, you can also just use a bookmarklet or email to send in individual pieces of content quickly. Storify seems like it could be the next step in that evolution.

The new services, launching today in beta at TechCrunch Disrupt, is all about content curation from other social networking sites. Say there’s a tweet you see and want to build a story around (we do it quite a bit), with the click of a button, you can drag it into your Storify story. Maybe there’s a Flickr picture about the same topic — same idea, just drag it is. Maybe there’s a YouTube video, or a Facebook status update — all of this stuff can be easily pulled in. This creates one story of all this curated content.

We appear to be on the verge of a new wave of content curation. Startups like Storify and Curated.by present users with a very low barrier to entry towards creating their own new content. It’s sad but true that a lot of people simply don’t have the time or desire to blog, so instead, why not let them do something with all the content they’re consuming, by aggregating it? That’s basically my read of Storify.

And the service’s approach to spreading this content is smart. If someone uses a tweet of yours for a Storify post, for example, there’s an option to ping you about it on Twitter so you can then share it as well. And all of the content pulled into Storify still links back to the original source, so all of that can be shared as well.

How do you monetize this? By inserting sponsored content into Storify story streams.

Someone will undoubtedly be able to use Storify to build a killer story about this Disrupt conference, get to it and send us a link.

The company has raised $50,000 up to date. To get access to the beta, use the code: TCDISRUPT

Feedback and Q & A by expert judges Jeff Clavier, Gina Bianchini, Jim Lanzone, Ted Maidenberg, and Chris Sacca. I’ve abbreviated their names, for brevity obviously.

JC: Is your official model getting users to pay?

Storify: We want individual publishers to monetize the app.

CS: Do premium content publishers want their content on their site?

S: There’s always a header, “this story has been made by TC” It’s all about liberating distribution channels, you can drag in an add.

JL: Congrats on the UI this was made by really great people, but it’s more the for HuffPo model than individual bloggers.

TM: Is the quoting of a tweet okay?

S: As a journalist, I want to verify the tweet, and we give people the tools to do that.

GB: How do you thread the pieces together, to avoid Franken story, keep the story the same usecase.

S: We want to display these in different ways, there’s a bunch of different usecases.

JC: Is there a specific usecase?

S: It’s for the bloggers who had a conversation on Twitter, and want to incorporate that realtime content into their stories.

JC: What sort of proof do you have on the shared revenue model? Do you have any proof on that? Twitter is going to come out with sponsored tweets for example.

S: Our product is social media and consuming news, right now we’re focusing on gathering a lot of attention.

In the late 1980s, Apple created a few concept videos about a device they called the Computer Knowledge Navigator. These videos came up recently when Apple unveiled the iPad, because the machine in the videos is a tablet computer. But that’s about all the iPad has in common with this conceptual device. Instead, a new startup launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, Qwiki, is much more like the futuristic computer in the videos.

To be clear, Qwiki isn’t a piece of hardware. Instead, it’s a piece of software meant to run on the web and as an app on mobile devices. What it does is present to you data about millions of topics in an extremely interesting and visual way. Imagine if someone created a movie highlight reel of Wikipedia pages — that’s sort of what Qwiki is like. You search for something — a topic, a person, etc — and Qwiki talks to you, telling you all you need to know about what you searched for, while also showing you key things about the subject or person.

You can also click on sub-topics or related topics to access more Qwikis with vast amounts of other information. It’s a fairly incredible way to consume information. And the data isn’t just from Wikipedia. Say you do a search for a person, Qwiki can look at their social connections and tell you about their LinkedIn profile, for example. It is very, very impressive.

Qwiki was created by Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier. The latter you may know as the founder of one of the original web search engines, AltaVista. He’s also worked at eBay and Google, which he left to join the search startup Cuil as the VP of Product. Obviously, that product didn’t work out so well, but Monier left only one month after it launched. And now he’s full into this visual approach to search and discovery.

Qwiki has currently raised $1.5 million in funding.

Feedback and Q & A by expert judges Jeff Clavier, Gina Bianchini, Jim Lanzone, Ted Maidenberg, and Chris Sacca. I’ve abbreviated their names, for brevity obviously.

GB: What’s the usecase? In terms of the front end of this, I would focus on the front end and the use case, I need this tomorrow.

Qwiki: Don’t call Qwiki search with a voice.

TM: The potential for international audiences is exciting.

JC: Every person you’ve shown this to has come up with a new use case.

JL: Is the wiki part of the name signifigant?

Qwiki: We’re think that every user could have their own Qwik, so yes.

CS: I see the future of this is in self-affirmation. “You can do anything.”

Qwiki: The opportunies are unlimited. This is a very important technology.

Details are still vague, so consider this speculative for now, but Amazon is poised to do something that involves Android — and it looks like it may be a competitor to Android’s official Android Market, which is analogous to the iPhone’s App Store. Beginning late last week, Amazon began reaching out to developers about an opportunity; interested developers are being asked to sign an NDA before they’re sent more details. We’ve confirmed with multiple developers that Amazon has been sending out feelers, and while we’re still working on confirming the details of Amazon’s project, there are a few clues scattered around the web.

In a thread on Listware, multiple developers are apparently talking about Amazon’s proposal. One notes that the opportunity looks “more restrictive than Android Market”. Another talks about Amazon’s global payments system, which has much broader reach than Google’s payments.

Some other blogs have speculated that this might be something that Google is doing in tandem with Amazon (after all, Amazon’s MP3 store comes as a default app on stock Android installs). But these comments seem to indicate that this isn’t the case.

If Amazon is planning to launch its own Android app store, it could further add to the app store fragmentation that’s already begun (Verizon is launching its own App Store). Openness is great, but if users have to go shopping around to multiple App Stores where apps differ in availability and pricing, that could result in confusion.

We’ll have more on this soon.

Update: Yep, Amazon Launching Their Own App Store For Android Too

Update 2: Rumor: An Amazon Android Tablet May Follow The Amazon Android App Store

Product: Bluetooth Headset/ Camera Combo

Manufacturer: Looxcie

Wired Rating: 5

Warhol was only half-right. Sure everyone is famous these days, but only for 15 seconds and in 15 fps.

At least that’s what the Looxcie, a wearable video camera, presumes. Integrated into a flashy Bluetooth headset, the device is meant for capturing happenstance moments where whipping out a phone or cheap portable camcorder may not suffice. It also pairs with a mobile app that transforms your cell phone into a viewfinder, in case you want to frame specific shots. Still, it’s not for documentary films, just quick clips (up to 4-GB of ’em). Which is supposedly why Looxcie only shoots HVGA in 15 fps, instead of anything even close to HD.

In theory, it makes sense. With a quick double-tap of an easy-to-find button on top of the headset, we were able to record almost five hours of random footage from a variety of places: buses, trains, crosswalks, the office (the bathroom!). It’s particularly solid for driving or other hands-free tasks you might want to document like, say, deconstructing and fixing a gadget (hat tip: @Alanwordguy ). In all of these instances, 15 fps is perfectly “good enough.”

Outdoor clips are noticeably grainy and pixilated, the sensor adjusts to bright sunlight very slowly, and the color contrast is pretty disappointing. However, it’s worth noting we found our indoor footage comparable, more or less, when tested side-by-side with an iPhone 3GS.

In practice, Looxcie still doesn’t seem quite ready for its close-up. The entire headset is less than 28 grams and fairly comfortable—until you really start moving around with it on. A light jog crossing the street required holding the camera in place. Every time we bent the flexible boom to frame a shot, the whole package jerks out of ear. The problem isn’t just hardware, either. Looxcie’s app is easy-to-use: Short clips are e-mailed within a minute. But for now, it’s compatible with Android phones (sorry iDrones). Plus, you can only share footage via e-mail and Facebook (BlackBerry and Apple compatibility along with Twitter/YouTube shortcuts are purportedly on the way, but until then, it’s a limitation worth noting).

A more bitter hindrance is the $200 price tag. Consider that a GoPro 960 helmet cam comes with a waterproof casing and various mounts suitable to a plethora of conditions. It costs only $180. Oh, and it captures a 170-degree field of view … in HD (60 fps). We’re not saying you shouldn’t buy the Looxcie. If you’re a Bluetooth headset kind of a person to begin with, killing two birds could be sensible. If not, well, you’re already carrying a smart phone that shoots 15 fps. Is using one of your hands that raw a deal, guys?

WIRED Alert every 30 seconds to remind you you’re filming. Lightweight at less than an ounce. Filming, viewing, editing a clip and sharing is a breeze. No limitation on clip duration. Excellent range (33 feet as advertised: CONFIRMED).

TIRED Sharing only works for short clips (30-minutes, 183 MB? No dice.). Terrible camera stabilization—some footage looked like deleted scenes from Cloverfield. Lackluster, muffled sound quality. No zoom. Right-Side Fred: Headset can’t be configured to wear in left ear. Behind-the-ear battery looks like a hearing aid. Sorry nerds, cannot be worn comfortably with thicker-rimmed glasses.

We’ve all had a pretty long week dealing with all this, for lack of a better term, AngelGate stuff. For the people involved, me included, it hasn’t been much fun.

Mostly because angel investors as a group do so much for our community. They are the the grease that let so many young startups go from being an idea to something more. The fact that some of them may or may not have had discussions that may or may not have been inappropriate is, in the end, a sidenote. In fact, the only reason the discussion is interesting is because of how important angel investors have become to the startup ecosystem.

I’ve listened to impassioned pleas from both sides of the argument. I’ve also listened to a few rants that were less than pleasant to listen to. The story is probably not over and there are more private emails that some are lobbying to get posted.

But one thing I’m not going to let happen is this – AngelGate won’t take over the TechCrunch Disrupt agenda. Yes there is a panel on Monday morning that includes two of the major figures in the story – Ron Conway and Dave McClure.

I’m reaching out to both Conway and McClure and asking that the discussion stay on the rails and I’m pretty sure they’ll both think that’s just fine.

We may touch on the issue but for the most part the half hour conversation will be about much more interesting issues. I had a chance, for example, to talk with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha today about the panel and what he thinks we should discuss. He wants to talk about how venture capitalists and angel investors can help entrepreneurs succeed. And I think that’s a grande idea.

In the end TechCrunch disrupt begins and ends with the entrepreneur. We have twenty five absolutely amazing startups launching at the event, and announcements from tons more. You can even meet the guys that turned an idea at the HackDay at the New York Disrupt into a full fledged, funded startup.

Now that sounds like fun to me.

See you all on Monday.

A few months ago, Sarah wrote about group-buying travel site Jetsetter.com, arguing that it solves a ‘big problem’ in hotel booking. After the post went live, she received plenty of feedback suggesting other sites to look at, but one came up time and time again: Oyster.com.

Founded in 2008 by Elie Seidman and Ariel Charytan, Oyster is – essentially – a curated version of Trip Advisor. Focusing on Hotels in major US cities, Oyster sends real-life reviewers to each property in the hope that users will come to trust a professional editorial voice over the crowd-sourced opinions of user-generated rivals.

Now the NY-based company is about to start raising a series B round. We invited Seidman to join us on this week’s episode of ‘Why Is This News?’ to explain what the funding is going to be used for, and also to defend a costly editorial operation in a market where user generated views are king.

(After which we spent five minutes discussing room service)

Video below.

Buried in the San Francisco Chronicle’s story about Zynga’s massive new office space is this little nugget:

The Zynga deal occurs as significant portions of South of Market are filling up with biotechnology and other new media companies, like technology blog TechCrunch, video-streaming site MetaCafe and microblogging service Twitter Inc.

The latter is on the hunt for another 200,000 square feet…

While we appreciate the mention, the news is that Twitter is is apparently already looking for more office space. So is it true? Well, Twitter certainly isn’t denying it.

“We have about 250 employees. And based on our current growth trajectory, at some point we’re going to have to look at other options,” a representative told me when I specifically asked about the hunt.

I followed up to see if they were looking around the SoMa area of San Francisco specifically. “All we know is that we can’t stay in the two floors that we currently have, based on our growth, so we’ll have to look at other options,” is what I was told.

It was only last November that Twitter moved into its new offices in the SoMa district of San Francisco (home to us, the new massive Zynga building, and a wide range of other startups) — taking over the old Bebo offices. And it was only a few months after that, that they took over another floor in the same building. At that point, in June, they had just hit 200 employees.

But if Twitter is looking for another 200,000 square feet of space, they must be planning to expand rapidly very soon. Zynga’s huge space is 270,000 square feet, and that’s supposed to house up to 2,000 employees. So if Twitter finds this space they’re apparently looking for, it should house well over 1,000 employees.

There was some news earlier this week that Twitter also recently opened an office in New York City. That’s not entirely true, according to Twitter. “In NY, we have a temporary area in rental space for a handful of people who are based there,” Twitter says. They don’t classify that as an office (despite tweets to the contrary), instead they consider the San Francisco office to be the only one.

And apparently, it’s soon going to get a whole lot bigger.