Two more presentations from TechCrunch worth mentioning. The first, a interesting gift-card auction site that aims to expand retailers market for gift cards. RackUp is an EBay-like site where shoppers can bid on gift cards. The people who bid soonest (unlike ebay) and the most get the gift card, typically for less than the actual amount on the card. (You might pay $50 for an $80 gift card.) The discount you receive depends on a few factors which I didn't quite catch, but it has something to do with when you bid (rewarding earlier bidders first) and your 'score' on RackUp. It sounded like they give frequent shoppers bigger bonuses.
TechCrunch50, the industry's American Idol-like startup spring board, wasn't immune this year to the usual roundup of mediocre start-up ideas. Most of them pimped by overly optimistic business types who have convinced themselves their ambitious yet somewhat dubiously profitable start-up dreams are going to make it.
One wonders just how far outside the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley a conference full of fanciful startups will matter. Yes, Tech Crunch, now in its third year, provides a media pulpit from which countless mostly-unknown tech industry startups launch their hot new idea. Problem is, most people who run startups are woefully deluded as to the probably of success and are running on the same kind of bravado found requisite to be a tech startup today: You believe you've got an innovating edge to a growing market (or you believe you can create a market where there wasn't one anymore), you've got some piece of software that does something Web 2.0, and you've got a marketing team. Problem is, most of them don't actually have anything innovative and are running on hot air.