Techcrunch50, Failblog, Vacation, and Good Morning America

This morning marks the start of an 8-day trip through California. I am taking off this morning to San Francisco where I will be attending the Techcrunch50 event. Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis (conference founders) set me up with a press pass again for the 3rd straight year. It's been pretty wild being part of the press team at these events. It's like... Wall Street Journal Reporter, NY Times Reporter, CNBC Camera Crew, Forbes Reporter, and ummm ME!. They give out less than 10 press passes total so I feel very honored. There is no conference that has made as big of an impact on my business as the Techcrunch40/50 conferences. For those not familiar with the Techcrunch50: the "conference" is an opportunity for start-ups to pitch their new website or company to people to try to get funding. And there are a TON of them! Only 50 hand-picked companies make it on stage but tons more in the demo pit. Some of the companies are truly amazing. I remember the day before the conference in '07 started talking with the CEO/Founder of Mint (I think I was the first website ever to cover Mint) and I said I think they should win the event (which they did go on to do). While Mint was a "startup" it was almost unfair to the rest of the competitors. It was an amazing product and stole the show. But for Every Mint there are 20 sites that are developed by 2 kids living with their parents in college full time who have a really sweet idea. These are the people I love to network with most. They are like a week away from giving up and bagging groceries and only need like maybe $10k to keep them going. Some really awesome opportunities there. After TechCrunch I am headed to ThinkTank in San Diego until next Sunday. I am meeting up with my 2 daughters, wife, and nanny in San Diego so we also will be taking some time out for a mini vacation. We were featured last week on the failblog for the AzoogleAds Magazine ad check pic : Even though it clearly has stated on the image page:

This is not a real check it was for a Magazine Ad for AzoogleAds. Yes its photoshop'd (badly). It was an amazingly good campaign for them. Its been on numerous websites who think they have discovered it was fake... even though it says it here. Good for traffic ;).

I am still amazed how all these sites get duped so easily. ;). It's great for traffic though so I will take it. I do want to straighten out some weird misinformation out there. Some people have asked me if I own icanhascheezburger.com and failblog and the rest of the network and using it to promote my own stuff. I'm not sure where that came from. I am very good friends with the CEO of the network and have advised them on how to make more money with the sites but I do not have any control over their content at all. We have been on Good Morning America twice in the last couple weeks and I just did another interview with them on Friday. They are all over the "Make Money With Google Scams" and were really interested in our court cases. We have settled several lawsuits so far this year from people using our copyrighted Image to promote these scams. I think the next show/article they put out will be pretty informative. I will go into this in more detail after it airs/posts. So this week I am going to be AFK quite a bit and will be posting guest posts and other stuff. I will be making some posts from Techcrunch50 but a lot of the interviews I will save until I get back. Everyone have a good week and be nice to the guest posters =P