The Connected Innovators program showcases emerging technologies and companies likely to make an impact on the networked future. After a competitive application process, Supernova organizer Kevin Werbach and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington select top new companies to present their best, quick pitch. Then, a panel of start-up experts analyzes the field, including a surprise twist to keep things interesting, and discusses their potential in the marketplace and what it might mean for the tech industry.
To get things started, a spokesperson for each selected company takes the floor to shine a five minute spotlight on its most innovative ideas. The companies for 2007 include adap.tv, AdaptiveBlue, Aggregate Knowledge, CastTV, Critical Metrics, Jangl, Pando Networks, SodaHead, Spock, Wize, ZenZui and Zing. Together, they represent a dizzying array of web and media buzz words involving tv, music and video, mobile devices, discovery, advertising, blogs, peer to peer, social networks, e commerce, user generated content, web publishing and search.
Next, Mike Arrington, editor-in-chief of the TechCrunch, leads the discussion with a panel of experts to distill the key ideas at the core of the company presentations and judge their entrepreneurial potential. Panelists include Paul Kedrosky, venture capitalist and entrepreneur, Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital, and Julie Hanna Ferris, open source entrepreneur. They dissect the competitive edges, key differentials and novel ideas of the various business models, and offer some wise, and often humorous, insights.
Julie Hanna Farris has guided several early stage consumer internet and enterprise software from obscurity to prominence. She is founder and former CEO of Scalix, where she raised $20M in venture capital and led the company from inception to revenue. She has been an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mayfield and a founding executive of startups - onebox.com (acquired by OpenWave), 2Bridge where she coined "enterprise portal", Portola where she was instrumental in the acquisition by Netscape, and Healtheon, now WebMD. Today, Julie serves on the advisory boards of private companies in the open source and consumer internet markets.
Paul Kedrosky is a venture capitalist, media personality, and entrepreneur. He is an analyst for CNBC television; a columnist for TheStreet/RealMoney; and the editor of Infectious Greed. Most recently he has been the Executive Director of the William J. von Liebig Center in San Diego, California. He is a venture partner with Ventures West, Canada's largest institutional venture capital firm and currently serves on the board of Marqui Corporation, a marketing automation software firm, as well as Dabbledb, a hosted data management company.
Josh Kopelman is Managing Partner of First Round Capital, a seed-stage venture fund focused on technology investments. In 1992, while a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Josh co-founded Infonautics, which went public in 1996. He founded Half.com in 1999, and led it to become one of the largest sellers of used books, movies and music in the world. Half.com was acquired by eBay in July 2000. In 2003 Josh helped to found TurnTide, an anti-spam company that was acquired by Symantec just six months later.
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This free podcast is from our Supernova series.
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