TechCrunch40mania!

I'm at TechCrunch40, the conference incarnation of the highest-profile blog on Web 2.0 sites and services. So far, the show--which is at San Francisco's Palace hotel--is pretty much bursting at the seams with people and companies--actually, it's so crowded that I'm sitting on the floor at the back of the room here, hogging one of the few available AC outlets.

Lotsa interesting startups are in the house, although in 2007, most new Web companies seem to be choosing names that don't give you one iota of an idea of what they do. (Examples: Ponoko, Xobni, and Zivity--although I just learned that Xobni is "inbox backwards.")

Also, most of the stuff I've seen so far isn't ready for public consumption--there are lots of services that are still in private beta, or not even ready for a beta of any sort.

A few demos that have impressed (or at least intrigued) me so far:

--Cubic Telecom's MAXRoam is a smart SIM card for wireless phones that can manage multiple phone numbers in multiple countries, so you can bounce from locale to locale and use local numbers, thereby sidestepping nightmarish roaming charges. (I could use this right now--I'm headed to Madrid in a couple of days.)

--I'm not sure if BrightQube is useful, but it sure looks neat. It's an image search engine that puts thousands of tiny thumbnails on your screen and lets you pan around 'em, thereby eliminating the need to page through results.

--Yap had so many troubles with their phone-based demo that the conference organizers invited them back onstage to try again. (Anything that depends on phones working well at conferences of this type is on shaky ground from the get-to, and trying to patch in loudspeakers never seems to help.) Yap's a real-time voice recognition system that lets you use services like instant messaging and Twitter by talking rather than typing, and if it works in real life, it should be worth checking out.

--I don't think I want an iKan, but its inventors deserve some points for creativity, at least. It's a little scanner you sit on a counter in your kitchen; as you use up food items, you scan their UPC symbols, and iKan compiles a shopping list on the fly which it transmits to an online grocery shopping service. iKan says that it's going to announce a partnership with a major grocer soon, and that the scanner will be free at first. (Which sounds like a good idea: They plan to charge $300 eventually, and that sounds steep.)

More notes from the show to come over the next couple of days...

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