So for those of you who didn’t know, I volunteered at the TechCrunch50 conference Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday this week.  It was actually probably one of the highlights of the summer.

So oddly enough, I didn’t discover TechCrunch until fairly recently.  I had only just happened on their site when I saw that they were looking for student volunteers to help work at the conference.

Anyway, TechCrunch is a blog that focuses on companies doing cool things with the Internet.  They’ve been around since 2005, and have a bunch of connections with products that have been fairly successful.  I guess over the years, the staff at TechCrunch gathered enough money/reputation to hold a conference.  TC50 was their second conference, the previous being TC40.  What I wasn’t expecting was the scale of the thing.  It was held at the SF Design Center Concourse, a relatively small exhibition hall.  But, even though the conference was relatively small (think 1800 people), it was ridiculous how busy the conference was and how many people were just buzzing around the booths.

The companies demo-ing their products were all very different, and from very different places and backgrounds.  Some companies had products that resided completely on their own web domains, while others had products that worked with the "now always important" Facebook, Myspace, iPhone , and other platforms.  Still others created products that were exclusively for the user, that would be used mostly offline.  But what was amazing was the fact that all these companies had come up with products that were completely new ideas.

Take Swype for instance.  It’s something that looks cool, and is really useful.  A lot of times, people have problems with tablets because the computer lacks a keyboard (while in tablet mode), and it is inconvenient to open the laptop.  A lot of text recognition software isn’t too good now either.  This company created a new input platform using the standard QWERTY keyboard combined with the flexibility of a touch screen that allows users to enter text.

A demo of Swype at TC50

I personally thing this is really cool technology.  I know that, from my current tests of the iPhone keyboard, I am terrible at using it.  I was able to try out Swype while at TC50, and although i wasn’t too familiar with it, it was easy, and at the same time, really cool.  The company wants to license this technology to other companies, and i think that they will be able to do it, easily.

Just being at TC50 made me realize, I’m really excited to be living in this whole Internet age.  So many developments are being made in the realm of consumer use.  Stuff like Facebook, Youtube, heck, anything in the Google dynasty make life so much fun.  I can’t wait for what comes next.