VentureBeat

The dates are out for the next TechCrunch conference, and surprise: TechCrunch50, in its second year, will be held on almost the exact same dates as venerable — or some might say vulnerable — tech-startup conference DEMO, which is about to enter its second decade.

DEMO had previously announced that it is being held from September 7th to the 9th. TechCrunch50 has scheduled for September 8th to the 10th.

This is an important story for the startup world, because both conferences do essentially the same thing: Launch new companies and bring accolades and attention (not to mention funding and users) to the best ones. Companies in both conferences are asked to remain in stealth mode until their day at the conference, when a press blitz is kicked off in an attempt to predict the winners.

Michael Arrington, the founder and editor of TechCrunch, claims that he’s not trying to create a schedule that conflicts with DEMO, telling me the decision was all about the venue, The San Francisco Design Center. “We really wanted this venue,” he said. “It was really hard to get any time slots in the fall, and this was what we could get.”

There is, of course, little love lost between Arrington and the DEMO organizers. Last year, the conferences were held only a week apart, which created an uneasy choice for entrepreneurs: Launch your company at TC40, or at DEMO? Two companies got kicked off the DEMO list after launching at TechCrunch40 — essentially forcing entrepreneurs to choose which conference they wanted to focus on.

“It baffles me, because ultimately it’s not very good for entrepreneurs,” said Chris Shipley, one of the organizers of DEMO, when I contacted her. “There’s a ton of room in the market for competitive events and supporting entrepreneurs. It doesn’t make sense how this will help them.”

Its worth pointing out that DEMO brought its conference two weeks forward this year, while Techcrunch brought its conference one week forward. Neither one wants to be pre-empted, so now it’s an even more conflicted choice for which conference startups should focus on. Maybe the two conferences could coordinate and let companies launch at both places at the same time?

TechCrunch started its conference just last year with TechCrunch40 in which, you guessed it, 40 startups presented over the course of several days.

Another conflict here is pricing. Demoing at DEMO is no cheap proposition, coming in at about $18,000. TechCrunch was free for presenting companies. Those companies that weren’t selected to be among the 40 instead had the option to pay half off the regular $2,000 entrance fee and then present in a part of the conference called the Demo Pit.

If it’s a choice of one or the other, the question is whether TechCrunch’s clout as a widely-read technology publication will help it to eat into DEMO’s revenue — or if DEMO itself will be able to compete based on its long-standing reputation as the place to go for interesting new companies.

Eric Eldon contributed to this article.

Google’s badly named Google Image Labeler made us scratch our head this weekend. The clunky title is one more reminder that Google remains vulnerable despite its invincible image — something that start-up expert Paul Graham also points out in a recent interview.

One advantage that big companies have is leverage. Google, with its many millions of users, is now attempting an end-run around other Web 2.0 photo search sites, by launching a game (Image Labeler) that might end up getting a good portion of Google photos “tagged.” In this game, Google pairs you with another random user, and asks you both to label a photo it shows you both. If you both select the same word to label it, it is a good sign that the label is accurate. You get points, and you move on to the next round. Now, Google isn’t using the conventional word “tag” for this project, perhaps a sign that it fears being sued for using the term (popularized by competing photo site, Flickr, now owned by Yahoo).

But what a name. Google has had a problem building an interactive “community” around its features, and this name reflects that weakness. It may come as no surprise, then, that the game is licensed from outside of Google — specifically, from Luis von Ahn, the inventor of the “ESP Game,” which the Google game is modeled after. Ahn says the game could tag all of Google’s photos within a couple of months. So this game may work.

So where are Google’s blind-spots, if it can simply license technology from outside to do the sorts of things it can’t do internally?

Paul Graham, who leads Y Combinator, a incubator that invests in start-ups, had a noteworthy answer in an interview with Techcrunch a couple of days ago.

He said one of his companies, calendar start-up Kiko, failed in going up against Google, because Google Calendar is the kind of application that Google hackers use at work. Another application that they use is GMail. But other, social networking companies, such as Orkut aren’t used by Google’s internal folks, and so they tend to not to do well.

So a startup could compete with Google if they had an idea so wild that it would freak out the internal [Google] gatekeepers, no matter what area it was in.

And the more wild and freaky, the better, which is why Graham says he is funding an “insane” idea to be pursued by the same Kiko team.

37signals, the jazzy Web 2.0 company, takes funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — See the company’s announcement here about why. We last mentioned the company here. The company boasts: Since we launched Basecamp we’ve been contacted by nearly 30 different VC firms. We’ve never been interested in the typical traditional VC deal. With a few exceptions, all the VCs could offer us was cash and connections. We’re fine on both of those fronts. We don’t need their money to run the business and our little black book is full. We’re looking for something else…We found a perfect match in Jeff. Jeff is our kinda guy.

Why is Jeff so exceptional? We’ll take a stab at the answer. Amazon, an online site fighting in the tight-margined retail world, was losing lots of money during the Internet bubble, and still was losing money after it burst. Bezos managed to attract billions of dollars of debt to sustain his effort, even through those worst of times, when investors were pulling the plug on just about every other company in the red. Somehow, Bezos pulled it off. He is exceptional indeed.
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