Demos and Dreams at TechCrunch50 Day 2

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-09-15 10:56:00 UTC
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The TechCrunch50 conference is happening just down the street in San Francisco, and although I can't be there, I'm following the streaming video and keeping track of the new companies that have the potential for direct and indirect social impact. As business increasingly moves online, web tools are increasingly providing an apparatus for good, as these companies demonstrate.

Since the early sessions when I first posted about TC50, a number of additional companies of potential social significance have pitched.

Healthywage enables employers to give employees cash incentives for better health. They're running a challenge that will enable some participants who meet a set of pre-determined weight loss goals to win $1000, paid for by advertising and referral fees. I'm not totally convinced about the model, but the cash incentive could be a context that catalyzes someone who's been "meaning to get healthy" take the plunge. With skyrocketing rates of obesity that cost individuals and society both in terms of health and economics, creative solutions are worth trying.

Redbeacon and Crowdflower both offer busy people a potentially easier way to get things done. Redbeacon connects local service providers (think plumbers) with people who need their services in a fast, reliable, and automated way. While it's not directly social, this could improve the general efficiency of local economies. Crowdflower is a Mechanical Turk-like service that crowdsources small tasks more easily accomplished by humans. Depending on how they run their service, it can not only be a more efficient way for businesses to accomplish goals, but could provide decent supplementary income for participants.

Maybe the company I'm most excited about is CitySourced. CitySourced gives citizens and governments a platform to collaborate around identifying and solving basic persistent municipal issues like potholes and grafitti. This sort of basic level of civic engagement is not only immediately useful, but can potentially deepen and broaden the way citizens view their relationships with government.

I'll post one more update later with more information about companies that present this afternoon and the winners of the competition.

(photo: TechCrunch50-2009)

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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