Disruptive Tendencies

Early on Day One of Disrupt SF , Silicon Valley legends Peter Thiel and Max Levchin came out on stage with a grim message of doom: "Innovation in the world today is somewhere between dire straits and dead ... outside of computers and the Internet, we've had forty years of stagnation." Meanwhile, Startup Alley boasted a large number of trivial, me-too apps, all too often marketed as "Airbnb for X" or "the gamification of Z" or "the business card … reinvented!" The judges were acutely aware of this: one of them dryly commented, re JiffPad , "It's nice to see people tackling harder problems than restaurant check-ins." Also: VCs there all seemed to agree: if you want to start a company, move to the Valley. I suspect TC Disrupt will be remembered in part as the event where mobile travel apps finally erupted into the mainstream. And, yes, that's right, Shaker won . More on all of the above behind the click --