Best of show: Our top five from TechCrunch50
Spawn LabsSpawn Labs was pitched as a "Slingbox for video games" and that's exactly what it does. The $199 box is a one-time purchase that users hook up to their home game console and their Internet connection. It then lets them play video games from any Internet-enabled computer as if they were playing it on their home TV. The service has three big things going for it: One is that it pipes the content in 720p HD, which is the proper size for most laptops and what its creators tell us is as good as you can get for real-time streaming without bulging the price tag to around $5,000. It's also a one-time purchase, which means there's no monthly service fee beyond whatever you're paying for electricity and Internet. And, the company tells me it plans to offer compatibility with future game consoles through updated hardware drivers, meaning that you can buy the box now and not worry about having to upgrade it when the next generation of consoles arrives.Considering it costs close to what most current-generation game consoles do, it may be a hard sell, but after having tried it out at the company's demo booth we definitely want one--and think many other gamers, and people in one-TV households will as well. Spawn Labs' box can hook up to your game console and let you play your own games over the Web, free of charge. All you need to buy is the box.Josh Lowensohn/CNETSeatGeekSimilar to what Bing Travel (formerly Farecast) does with airplane pricing forecasts, SeatGeek does for other types of tickets like concerts and sporting events. The service doesn't do this for main ticket providers though. Instead it tracks prices on secondary markets like Craigslist and StubHub where tickets are being resold, then tells you whether the price is set to go up or down with 80 percent certainty.Where this service has the most potential to succeed is helping people who don't know a great deal about a particular event they want tickets to. It's taking the guesswork out of the buying process, as well as instilling extra confidence in transactions where people would have otherwise been reluctant to spend a few hundred dollars. It's also got the makings of a great business. According to its founders, it's already become profitable based on a small scale alpha test. SeatGeek can predict whether a ticket to a concert or sports game is going up or down, just like some travel sites do with airplane tickets.CNETAnyClipAnyClip was the only video platform introduced at this year's show. It solves a really basic problem of helping people find specific parts of a movie, then sharing it elsewhere. In the early days of YouTube, before the site really started locking down on copyrighted material, this was common practice. AnyClip's (legal) answer to that is getting the studios on board, with the promise of reinvigorating DVD sales and interest in a large back catalog of movies--all of which are linked to sales sites like iTunes and Amazon where users can buy a full copy of the content.Right now it has a database of around 100 films, all of which are split up into four minutes or less clips. It has a group of users that are going into full film files and tagging specific moments so that its search engine can index them. The service eventually plans to expand into other types of media like TV shows and sporting events. AnyClip can pull up short clips from a large catalog of films. Perfect for when you're trying to remember a movie line or action-packed moment.CNETClick here to see our complete coverage of the show.TechCrunch50 2009 in picturesSee full gallery1 - 4 / 14NextPrev
