I saw on Facebook that Mike Arrington is "extremely pissed off at the world." So I went over to his personal blog to see what's up. It seems the Blogworld conference "booked" him as an attendee without getting his commitment to say yes. Everyone was disappointed when he did not show up.

As a result - Mike is putting his foot down and not attending ANY conferences for the next year. I can see how these speaking engagements are a big distraction for him. And can you imagine the size of his INBOX trying to stay on top of everything going on?

Here's wishing Mike some peace - and having fun doing what he loves to do.

As the conference progresses, hopefully this list of companies will be linked to their presentations.

Last I hear - this was to be the TechCrunch20 conference - they doubled the number of companies presenting.

This sounds great. Finally a competitor to the DEMO conference. But at this one - the presenting company slots are NOT FOR SALE. At Demo, you pony the cash, and you can get on stage (within reason). TechCrunch20 has a merit-based selection process that costs the selected companies nothing.

Like Demo, the Faustian bargain is that the presenting companies have to time the release of their product so that the FIRST showing, of their technology is at the conference. This rule makes sense for the conference creators as it makes their event more news-worthy. But it also leads companies to show more "demo-ware". By definition, the products you'll see here have not been tested by real users.

They claim that "open source" projects are eligible. How is THAT even possible following their exclusivity rule?

"20" refers to the 20 companies presenting and the 20 industry experts that will form the selection committee.

Quoted: If your product will be ready to launch or publicly demo by September 17, we want to hear from you. The finalists will be selected based entirely on merit by our panel of experts. We will showcase a wide variety of new product launches, ranging from early-stage student work to public-company Internet businesses, to open source collaboration projects. Expect to see mobile products, desktop products and new web services. There might even be a new gadget or two unveiled.