Probably the biggest party of the year for the next-generation web crowd was held by Techcrunch last night at the offices of VC firm August Capital.
Techcrunch, the blog creation of Michael Arrington, prides itself on getting the scoop on the latest start-ups and there were plenty on hand displaying their web wares on August’s terrace.
Among the emerging trends, the proliferation of social networks is leading to services that will centrally manage your identity for the different sites. Boyan Josic, founder of profilebuilder, demo’d to me his service profil.es.
As well as allowing users to create a profile on the site, it allows them to control how it is seen from other sites such as Facebook, MySpace and blogs where they have pasted the code for the profil.es icon. Techcrunch itself has more on this.
I also met someone from a European site called Blymee, which had a similar pitch but isn’t expected to launch until the end of the year. Both expand on the common identity that OpenID offers and are appearing before Google’s take on unifying social networks in Socialstream.
Finding the Techcrunch party should have been easy with directions provided by Dial Dir-ect-ions, a service that allows you to dial a number, say where you want to go and receive an instant text message with a turn-by-turn guide.
Dash Navigation was also present. The Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins-backed company has a novel Dash Express product that supplements normal GPS satellite navigation with traffic information culled from other users in the Dash network. They automatically transmit route and speed to Dash’s central servers using a built in GPRS connection, which can also be used to carry out internet searches for nearest petrol stations, restaurants and other information.
There was a sizeable British contingent at the party, I met Pete Flint, chief executive of Trulia, and King.com’s Robert Norton, a veteran of the UK bubble, who compared the event to the old days of First Tuesday.
Alex Tew of Milliondollarhomepage fame was there as part of a first visit to the Bay Area and talked about the refreshing atmosphere and attitude to entrepreneurs he found here. He said he was currently working in London with two friends on some social networking tools.
Michael Birch, chief executive, of Bebo was upbeat about the prospects for his social networking site, which he said was now growing fastest in the US. He was also enthusiastic about a short-form video series Bebo was funding and featuring on the site from the lonelygirl15 team.
Kate Modern is about the life of a 19-year-old Londoner, but the Bebo chief said his San Francisco staff were already hooked on the show.
It certainly offers better entertainment than Michael Arrington and Om Malik in orange and green wigs.
