TechCrunch40 Round Three: Community and Collaboration

Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski is blogging from TechCrunch40 in San Francisco. Technical difficulties at the conference site prevent him from live-blogging, so he summarized the third session on community and collaboration.

The third round of presentations and expert reviews comes off more as a series of infomercials than evaluations. Fitting, I suppose, since as panelist judge Ron Conway notes, “M&A is the most vibrant liquidity path today.” All these presenters are likely looking to be acquired.

Paucity of hard questions from panel, although Don Dodge (once of Napster) does pose the copyright violation question to a MusicShake, a venture that seems destined to run afoul of copyright law.

Interesting. Conference organizer Mike Arrington comments on the softball questions being asked and puts a harder question of his own to Flock, noting that the social Web browser, which has been in development for years, has only launched its 1.0 version today. Why should someone who uses a browser as well-supported as Firefox switch to Flock, which hasn’t proved its reliability? Can the community depend on support and regular updates? CEO Shawn Hardin says yes, rattles something off about the company’s commitment to its software.

(Wondering now if conference might be more effective presented in a “Gong Show” format. Expert panelists scrawling their scores and interpretive drawings on oversized white notecards, with a big ‘ol gong behind them just waiting to be struck. Rip Taylor and Yossi Vardi. Onstage. Together. Agh. My head hurts.)