We were one of the strong contenders for the TechCrunch50 People’s choice on Monday. With 37 chips (real votes) we were closely behind IamNews who went on stage as the People’s Choice. But with the RULES not being clearly defined, there was heck of a confusion as to understand what the ethics is around collecting votes (chips). Companies like GAZARO went on a hard core marketing campaign (came to be known as “the red girls”) which backfired with the company being blacklisted for unethical chip manipulation. Wednesday saw PeoplesBrowsr coming up as a strong contender, but also disqualified for collecting chips the earlier day (source: rumour). Several Demo Pit participants helped PeoplesBrowsr since they did not quite appreciate GAZARO’s marketing. Not all companies had “girls” like gazaro did. However, without clear guidelines from TechCrunch as to how you should get votes – it was a chaos among Demo Pit participants. Michael and his team hopefully learned a few tips from this. We went to Demo Pit with a strong hope that we will get on stage. But we do not regret. We made solid connections with several folks. Snipd, PeoplesBrowsr, Gazaro, NutShellMail, IndieGoGo, StyleIt (Korean Comany) – you all were terrific. Special thanks to our neighbours Spoink, Apprema and UFN.com for being a good sport.



Techvibes|Blog|Calgary,Edmonton,Kitchener-Waterloo,Montréal,Ottawa,Portland,Seattle,Toronto,Vancouver,Victoria 9:58 pm on September 11, 2008 Permalink |
[...] It seems that there was some interesting drama surrounding Gazaro and a People’s Choice contest that was being run in the TechCrunch50 DemoPit. Attendees were given poker chips to award to their favorite startups, and the startup with the most chips would win honour and stage time. Apparently other startups disapproved of Gazaro’s use of “booth babes”. A first hand report via XpertLane: [...]
Earl Young 12:14 am on September 13, 2008 Permalink |
I’m not quite sure what all the hoopla was about. There were no rules, and when I talked to the Gazaro guys (and girls) on Wednesday they told me they were never informed of any inappropriate behavior. So in my mind, this is a joke.
There was a bunch of great products, you guys and Gazaro included. I’m sure you all worked extremely hard to get there and in a world where getting noticed is half the battle I don’t see anything wrong with what anyone there did. I got asked by many people for my chips. I finally only gave one of them, to the eventual winner IamNews.