Blog:

Last night I had the chance to attend the TechCrunch August Capital party in Menlo Park. Though I was expecting a large turn-out, the scale was quite a bit bigger than I expected. In fact, I was amazed by the number of people that traveled long distances to attend this mixer including outside of the country.

There were several start-up companies in the Web 2.0 space that were showcasing sneak peaks of the applications they were working on. About half of the demos were very disappointing, a quarter only marginally interesting and a quarter impressive. The most interesting from a collaboration perspective was ConceptShare. This tool basically lets you upload digital content such as a PDF or JPG file to a website and then provides a way for other people to provide comments layered on top of the asset. This is not a revolutionary concept -- this functionality exists in Word and Acrobat, but it's the best implementation I've seen for something within a web browser built with Flash.

The only company that impressed me from a business model perspective was called oDesk. The basic idea is that they're the eBay for consulting jobs where you can find programmers for hire. What makes the idea interesting is that they provide tracking tools that grab screen shots (for example, Eclipse) and webcam images from the people that are hired. This allows you to see exactly what the person was doing at a particular time of day. Were they really in front of the computer? Did the structure of their code not meet your standards? You can roll-back in time kind of like TiVo except just with screen shots.

It even includes advanced analytics tracking features that allow you to see how many bugs they fix per hour or how man CVS comments they've submitted and compare against other potential guns for hire. You can also specify criteria such as the person must speak English or see community ratings for that person's work. Each person also maintains a profile. Not surprisingly, most of the talent pool so far is in places such as Eastern Europe. The privacy concerns around something like this being deployed in a corporate environment are a bit unsettling. Imagine if in your next review you were compared on how many bathroom breaks per week you're taking? Frightening indeed!

Something tells me that George Orwell would have a twisted looking, "I told you so" sort of grin on his face if he saw the demo I saw last night. :)

Photos of the event are available on Flickr under the tag techcrunch7.