DJ Sam Ronson aka. Lindsay Lohan's girlfriend was the DJ for the Myspace party

The week of Techcrunch50 was definitely a fun and exciting week to be in San Francisco. The conference was from Monday to Wednesday Sept. 8-10, 2008 as were the after parties every night. I attended the parties all three nights but only attended the conference on Wednesday. The TechCrunch50 conference actually featured 52 demos of startups that basically just launched after the demo. The demos took place over 3 days but also featured plenty of other startups in the demo pit that didnt make it into the 50 or demoed last year at Techcrunch40. Each session also featured some prominent people in the tech industry as judges such as Mark Benioff, Marc Andreesen, Don Dodge, Marissa Mayer, Om Malik, Mark Cuban, Tim O' Reilly, Jeff Weiner, Sheryl Sandberg, Robert Scoble, and many more. An exciting demo of Blahgirls was even presented by Ashton Kutcher. Yammer took the top prize of $50,000 and is basically a Twitter for the corporate environment with a business model. 

Overall, I would have to say it was a pretty good conference that gave people a good exposure to all the different types of startup companies that are coming out this year. Michael Arrington has made the Techcrunch brand quite successful and continues to attract more people to his website everyday. The parties were definitely well worth having the conference and at this rate, next year's conference could be called Techcrunch100 and have even better parties! As I try to recouperate from the long week, I will feature some of the companies that were seen at Techcrunch50. So stay tuned!

Monday's party was held at Mezzanine and was sponsored by Myspace. An open bar until midnight with guest DJ Sam Ronson caused for a packed house even though it was a Monday evening. 

members of Lead-us.org

Tuseday Night's party was held at Temple and featured a performance by MTV's America's Best Dance Crew Season1 winners, Jabbawockeez. It was another night of open bar sponsored by Norton and was obviously a great party for Mark Cuban and Jason Calacanis of Mahalo quite drunk.

Justine Ezarik of IJustine was in the house

On Wednesday night, the official afterparty took place at 330 Ritch and was sponsored by Seesmic. The place was once again jam packed even though there was no open bar. If you manage to get there early enough, you would have gotten two drink tickets and and gotten some of the appetizers being carried around. I also made it to Fluid SF for another Techcrunch50 closing party sponsored by Plista. This place unfortunately was not as packed and there was no food or free drinks. If you manage to stay late enough though, there ended up being a pretty decent crowd of people.

Steve Chen and Jimmy Ku of GoPlanit along with Don Dodge in the middle.

Dancers promoting Causecast.

Searchme provides for a pretty cool web 2.0 interactive way of searching online.

The Microsoft Surface was on display and was pretty neat to play and to see.

FiveSprocket, a virtual Production Studio

More of my pictures can be seen at Flickr.