George Favvas » TechCrunch40

Synthasite demo, Vinny Lingham on entrepreneurship at TechCrunch40

George Favvas — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 18:14:48 +0000

Here’s a video interview I did with Vinny Lingham in the DemoPit at the TechCrunch40 conference last month. Vinny was at the conference demoing Synthasite, a web-based web site builder.

I also asked Vinny, whose company is based in South Africa, about some of the challenges of building a tech company outside of Silicon Valley:

The US is not the only market in this world. You’ve got 6 billion people in this world. Focus on multiple languages, multiple currencies in your application. Really try to globalize your business, because in that way you’re not dependent on one particular market to make your business a success.

Synthasite launches its beta on November 5th.

Realius – fantasy real estate game TechCrunch40 demo

George Favvas — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 18:29:12 +0000

I had the pleasure of sharing the TechCrunch40 DemoPit floor with Chuck Teller from Realius. (Let me say that being placed next to cool people makes all the difference when spending 14 hours on your feet.) Realius develops fantasy real estate games and their first game, Price me now, awards users with points and real prizes for guessing the listing price on homes.

The property and pricing information comes from real MLS data. Realius’ business model will be to advertise real world real estate services to people playing the game. Here’s a demo:

Live from TechCrunch40: Facebook launches new fund

George Favvas — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 04:20:16 +0000

I’m at the TechCrunch40 conference today (where we coincidentally launched the SmartHippo beta) and caught the tail end of a presentation by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg announced a $10 million dollar fund, founded by Facebook’s investors, earmarked for companies building Facebook applications.

What’s interesting and unique is that these will not be traditional debt or equity deals, but actual grants that don’t need to be paid back. Accel Partners and Founders Fund, the investors behind the fund, will get a right of first refusal on any future financing deals — a more than reasonable price to pay.

Facebook has already shown a commitment to the developer community by launching the Facebook platform; now they’re providing developers not only the tools but also the funding to build their applications.

Deal size will range from $25,000 to $250,000 and the selection criteria is based on how “innovative and disruptive” the applications are.