I was on the panel of judges yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt to select the top startup of the conference. The finalists were a very impressive group:
gTar, OpenGarden, UberConference, Ark, Babelverse and Sunglass.
The winner was UberConference. gTar came in a close second. Both of those companies are impressive and I support the wisdom of the judges:
Fred Wilson, Roelof Botha, Marissa Mayer, Mike Arrington, Chris Dixon, Eric Eldon and Chi-Hua Chien
The choice of the winner and the runner up was almost unanimous except for a lone nutjob who liked a different one.
My favorite was Open Garden. By a long shot. Because what they are doing is the most worthy of the conference name, Disrupt.
Open Garden is a free app for windows, mac, android, and soon iOS. What is does is connect all of your data services on your various devices (and your friends and family's devices) into a single network that all of the devices can access at the same time.
It allows you to create your own mesh network and provision it to the people you want on it.
This is a big idea. And I don't know if they have nailed it. I have just downloaded Open Garden onto my macbook air and my android phone. I will let you know how it goes.
If you want to watch their initial pitch (not the pitch we got yesterday afternoon, I have embedded it below).
