The Jeff Pulver Blog: In search of Technology Innovation in Las Vegas:

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October 21, 2008

In search of Technology Innovation in Las Vegas:

Usually when I’m looking to be inspired and find innovative new technologies I find myself in Tel Aviv meeting with early-stage startups. Yesterday I was in Las Vegas on a similar mission. Except rather than looking for a company to invest in, myself together with Kevin Kelly and Ryan Block were the judges at the first ever “i-stage” event and our goal was to determine the winner of the first i-stage competition.

During the course of the day we had the opportunity to see presentations from all 14 finalists. Each person had five minutes to make their presentation which was followed by four and half minutes of questions from “The Judges.” Molly Wood did a great job making sure everyone kept on the schedule.

The 14 companies demonstrated and spoke about a wide range of consumer products and services, although some of the underlying products and services were more baked than others. From my perspective I was impressed by a number of the presentations and the fact that some of the presenters came from Asia and Europe to i-stage. While none of the judges were trying to make it a point to be the Simon Cowell of i-stage, there where times where our questions and comments were pretty direct and we may have been responsible for some of the additional sweat seen on the faces of the people making their presentations.

While the judges were responsible for deciding who would win US$ 50,000 and a free turnkey exhibit space at CES 2009, members of the audience were responsible for deciding their own winner who also received a free turnkey exhibit space at CES 2009.

None of the judges spoke to each other about their own votes so when the winner was announced, I found it interesting that we all agreed that boxee’s “social” media center was the winner of the competition. “Boxee is free, open source software that gives your Mac, Windows or Linux PC a TV-like interface to enjoy your personal videos, music and photos as well as content from websites like: Hulu, CNN.com, ABC.com, Last.fm, Flickr and PicassaWeb. Boxee can post things you like to social networks like Facebook or MySpace and shares information about what you’re watching with friends so they can find it and enjoy it to.”

Presentation & Display Technology’s Novo Minoru 3D Webcam was the company chosen by the members of the audience. Personally I found their 3D webcam to a pretty cool product and I still carrying my 3D glasses in my back pocket.

And for a little bit of irony, it turns out that while Boxee is based in New York City, the research and development for the company is done in Israel. :)

Graduations to Boxee and Presentation & Display Technology and all of the other finalists in the first i-stage competition.

I enjoyed being a part of i-stage and I look forward to an opportunity to be a judge at a future i-stage event.

---

(Ryan Block and Kevin Kelly)

(Avner Ronen, David Mathews, Boxee)

(Avner Ronen, Boxee)

Tags: i-stage, boxee, Startups, CES, Avner Ronen, Jeff Pulver

Posted by jeff on October 21, 2008 04:08 PM | Permalink

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October 21, 2008

In search of Technology Innovation in Las Vegas:

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