DISQUS

Paul OFlaherty · 3 months ago

Well at least big companies making announcements won't be a problem they have to contend with next year as there will be no more Techcrunch50's. It looks like Arrington and Calacanis may have had a falling out.

The question now is will someone else take up the mantel of a similar style conference?

Jason McCabe Calacanis · 3 months ago

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. Regarding your two main points:

1. The Demo pit is $3,000 for TWO $3,000 tickets, a table, wifi, etc. So, basically we're giving people two half-priced tickets and a free table. Or, letting them in for free and charging them a small fee for the cost of setting up the event (which is VERY high). Also, we have 200-300 companies that want a demo pit table and we need to get that down to 100... so, charing for two half-priced tickets makes that happen. If you have another idea of how to setup a huge venue like this for free and feed everyone I'm all for it!

2. We ask Microsoft, Google, AOL, MySpace, facebook, etc. to launch something big each year and two or three take us up on it. We do this because it adds excitement to the event and bring in a LOT of extra press. These demos take like 15 minutes each and everyone loves them. There is no downside to having these because, as you might not know, they are not in competition with the 50 companies. This is basically icing on the cake... I've never heard of anyone having a problem with this... so I'm sort of confused. Perhaps you could expand on why specifically you think this is a bad idea?

all the best,

Jason

StevenHodson · 3 months ago

Sorry Jason I meant to reply to this earlier but got sidetracked. First off thanks for taking the time to post such a great reply - I appreciate it.

I'm not sure what part of my post your first point is in reference to because I have no problem with you guys making money from the conference.

To the second point my only problem (and it's not really a "problem" per se) is that TC50 is suppose to be about the startups and DemoPit and when companies like Google and Microsoft make announcements I worry that depending on what they are announcing they could overshadow and take away attention form the starts. To be honest what I remember about this year's TC50 is Bing's Visual Search and Google's Fast Flip.

I can understand the reasoning but I just hate to see attention taken away from the whole reason for the conference in the first place - the startups.