Launch season

When it rains, it pours. We've been immersed in work - stirring up publicity for five companies the last two weeks.

At the Techcrunch 40 conference, we were behind the scenes with two companies on stage - WooMe and Metaplace. We also accompanied Imagini in the demo pit. Both WooMe and Metaplace were on stage during the same session entitled "Entertainment for all ages." I was quite excited that MC Hammer was one of the "expert panelists" that came on stage afterwards to provide opinion and commentary (see the photo in the previous post ;-) ) Apparently, Hammer is dabbling in the Internet these days which qualifies him as an expert on Web 2.0. Whatever the reason, it was nice to have a new personality in the crowd.

TC 40 was fun in that we were able to spend some quality time with old friends and also got to know new friends as well. It was fun to hang out with Mattias Ljungman of Atomico, plus we also met up with the Skype team, Niklas and Janus. We also had a great time with Jon and Andrew from the BBC the night before the event started. Thanks to Darren for the intro.

Our posse of entrepreneurs included Alex Willcock of Imagini; Raph Koster, John Donham and Jason Hable of Areae/Metaplace; and Stephen Stokols, George Berkowski and Steven Sesar of WooMe. On our side, Dominic, Andrea and I kept a watchful eye on the team, made sure they were ready to go with their on-stage presentation, and were lined up to talk to the press.

This week, we launched dimdim at DEMOFall 07. DD Ganguly and Prakash Khot of dimdim were working on the presentation and press release all the way up to the final moments and it all paid off. The blogosphere was abuzz with the talk about the WebEx challenger, but it escalated to a whole other level after DD and Prakash took the stage on Wednesday morning and declared "WebEx is history!" The crowd loved it.

The following day, we launched DECA, a new digital entertainment studio that will soon be announcing deals and distribution. It was great to Michael Wayne, the co-founder of DECA being compared to Michael Eisner, former Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman and former Yahoo Media Group head Lloyd Braun, comic actor Will Ferrell, and Hollywood producer Albie Hecht in the coverage (they have all launched various versions of digital studios in the last year). There will be more news coming out of DECA, so keep an eye out for this rising star.

Now it's finally Friday - time to catch up on the thousands of magazines and catalogs that have been collecting dust and the 10 copies of old NY Times that I need to leaf through. I've also take more photos, which I will sort through and post.