Scenes From TechCrunch50

Hosts Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis warm up the crowd with an introduction to TechCrunch50, which boasts 10 more presenting companies and more than 700 attendees from last year’s TechCrunch40 show.

Is that? Could it be? It is… Ashton Kutcher, also known as Michael Kelso, the simple but hunky character from the nine-year running “That 70s Show” on Fox. In addition to being a TV and movie star, Kutcher is also an Internet entrepreneur and took the stage at TechCrunch50 to introduce the irreverent, interactive Web video program “http://www.blahgirls.com/ Blah Girls.” It’s for teens. Duh.

Not exactly but, CNET’s Dan Farber, investor Rob Conway, Google Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer and YouTube Co-Founder Chad Hurley (left to right) told the first set of demonstrators what worked and what didn’t.

Google’s Marissa Mayer does double duty. After judging on a panel, Mayer took about 7 minutes to introduce the News Archive Partner Program, where Google is letting users earch and browse newspapers exactly as they were first printed, with original headlines, articles, photographs, advertisements and cartoons. This picture is a Pott Rum ad from 1972.

Currently, people may access historic news content via Google News, but in a few months users will be able to search these newspapers via the main Google search results. The idea is to help Google’s newspaper publisher partners widen the readership of their archives online, and of course, get more people stumbling upon and clicking on Google ads.

Mayer is presented with cupcakes in celebration of Google’s 10th birthday. While Google’s real inception date is the source of much debate, most people recognize Sept. 7, 1998 as the dawning of the Google Empire.

Fair Software’s goal is to help users start and manage a virtual business on the Internet. Programmers and Web site publishers hire and share revenue with other team members.

Fair tracks financial records, rendering income in bar graphs and paying members in virtual shares. Judge Marc Andreessen and serial entrepreneur (NetScape, Opsware, Ning) loves the idea but wonders how Fair users will make money and what the company’s recourse is if participants decide to sue the company to get money for their ideas.

Yammer is an enterprise collaboration for helping business employees ask and receive answers to the question: “What are you working on?” A feed ensues as employees answer and share ideas, post news and share content.

Looks like Twitter or FriendFeed doesn’t it. Yammer borrows the model from those popular consumer micro-blogging sites and points it toward businesses. Judge Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com CEO), gushed about it, noting that he could use such a tool for Salesforce.com customers.

From Collective Logic, Blueprint is a software development platform that lets programmers write and run multi-core software applications without needing multi-threading experts.

The most unique of the enterprise applications debuting at TechCrunch50, OpenTrace collects information about product materials and gauges the cost of the environmental load to indicate them. A truly “green” application. Benioff suggests OpenTrace partner with human rights activists, such as the Fair Trade Federation for traction.

After their demos, Fair Software, Yammer, Blueprint and OpenTrace receive feedback from, left to right, Benioff, investor Yossi Vardi, Ash Patel, head of audience products at Yahoo, and Andreessen.