Gallery: The sights of TechCrunch 50

The demo pit is warming up. Qik’s booth.

Video search engine CastTV.

Seesmic is here. Think of it as a video Twitter.

Social search startup SearchMe is taking a group photo.

There are lots of goodie bags for the press and presenters.

Microsoft brought its Surface computer.

Fish were swimming in Microsoft's Surface computer.

Lots of fun Microsoft schwag.

Tired of listening to startup pitches? Rock out with Rock Band.

Jason Calacanis arrives. They are playing Kanye West on the stereo.

The presenter’s stand is fully equiped with the best gear.

Calacanis chats with Google’s Marissa Mayer.

Blogger Calley Nye came up from LA to do some interviews and help out with the conference.

Presentations begin.

Meghan Asha from Non-Society is livestreaming the event on Qik.

Arrington consults with TechCruncher Erick Shonfeld.

Hangout Industries: “Where MySpace becomes my place” It’s a digital playground. Imagine a virtual house with you and your friends. You can customize your avatar with shirts from Threadless.com, streaming from the Internet. If you like the shirt, you can click “Buy”.

Blah Girls: What is it?

Blah blah blah is a dynamic interactive celebrity pop culture environment. It’s designed for teenage girls. It’s a blah blah blog. It’s gonna bring you the most up to date celebrity trends and gossip.

It’s a true collaboration between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. It’s an interactive hub for all things celebrity.

We understand that the web is not a passive playground. Every piece of content we put out will be interactive.

TweeGee:
The future of social activities for kids 8-12. Content, gaming, social networking… you name it.

Here are the first two unique users of TweeGee:

A panel of experts gets up on stage. Marissa Mayer, Chris DeWOlfe, Ron Conway, Chad Hurley, and CNET's Dan Farber.

Marissa: I really liked Hangout, I thought they had a lot of cool merchandise coming in.

Aston Kutcher: It’s a video so it can go anywhere. YouTube will be launching the first episode of Blah today.

Farber: One of the challenges of Blah girls may be interactivity. It sounds like a good idea, but maybe the name isn’t memorable.

Angel investor Ron Conway

They are livestreaming the event on TechCrunch too

CNET’s Kara Tsuboi interviews Calacanis.

The guys from The Web Service. They host your data and help you control it.

Dotspots:

It is a symantic annotation layer. Imagine the wisdom of crowds… everywhere. Our first release is focused on the news. This is a browser plugin that follows you on the web, and remembers your preferences.

Angstro News about your network. Business news about the people in your companies.

It’s great to have an online professional network, but it’s not always as interesting.

Robert Scoble

LiveHit:

A speech was given about LiveHit, but I didn’t understand it at all. It seemed way too thought out and almost like MySpace.

StockMood: Turning the news into numbers. Easily analyze stocks and see where their “mood” is.

Marissa Mayer from Google

Google News is launching millions of articles from old newspapers today. The technology behind it is the same that is used for Google Books.

We all sang happy birthday to Google.

Isreali tech entrepreneur Yossi Vardi gave some of the most valuable commentary.

Girls from Gazaro pose with Larry Chaing of Asse9.com.

Yahoo! sent some people to show off BOSS, but they look pre-occupied.

Norton is showing off it’s new Internet Security 2009 product.

If you gadgets aren’t charged, there are plenty of stations to juice up.

Gordon Peters from SocialCash came all the way from DC to be here. Pictured with Shira Lazar.

SocialCash funds startups and literally gives them a debit card with cash on it. They will it up as needed.

Building Scalable Web Busineses: The Right Entrepreneurs Focused on the Right Markets (David Stern, Clearstone Venture Partners; Frank Addante, Rubicon Project; Rahul Sonnad, Geodelic; Ariel Poller, Serial entrepreneur; Bill Trenchard, LiveOps).

The guys from UStream.tv are busy playing Halo 3.

The man who makes the event run smoothly. Mahalo’s Tyler Crowley

Fair Software:

Start and manage a business online. Avoid lawyers!

Just fill out a bunch of forms and your business is off the ground. The service includes a software bill of rights and a step-by-step process to begin setting up your company.

Yammer:

What’s happening at your company? You can login with your company email and get into your company’s private network.

Yammer's an office Twitter. It gets kinda noisy, but people can create conversations like FriendFeed.

Yammer's a great way to discover other people in your company. You can create tags by putting a # before a word. You can follow tags too. SMS and IM supported.

Opentrace is building a database like Wikipedia, with all products shipping information. With a simple webcam, you can scan a barcode and then see information about the product.

From the experts:

Andreeson: Fair Software is a good idea. Micro markets are only growing. Yammer sounds good too. Blueprint multicore is the biggest programming challenge of our time. OpenTrace is brilliant idea.

Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace

Adgregate Markets
is increasing conversation rates through product sell-through. Advertisers can now calculate hard ROI on clicks.

MusicShake was in the demo pit.

San Francisco interactive design company Design about Town is here. Their huge pencil caught my attention.

Other Inbox:

You probably have a separate email account that you use to sign up for things, and send “junk” to.

Peter Thiel, Founder’s Fund