Expect This Year’s f8 To Be Huge — The Biggest Since Facebook Platform Launched

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

Last week at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference, I had the opportunity to interview Facebook’s VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer. It was a great talk: I asked him about his favorite features on Google+ (he said something about loving competition), and there was even a brief mutual death glare.

A few minutes after the interview, I chatted backstage with Schroepfer and Facebook VP of Global Communications Elliot Schrage and asked about their impending f8 developer conference, which takes place on September 22.

Schrage’s eyes grew wide — he paused, then said that this was going to be big, and that it would go down as either the most important, or the second most important f8 yet. When I asked which of the previous three conferences might best it, he said that only the first one, back in 2007, stood a chance. Which is when they originally launched Facebook Platform, allowing third party developers to tap into the social graph for the first time.

He also made it clear that he believes this f8 will be bigger than last year’s conference, which was no slouch: it saw the launch of the Open Graph API, Instant Personalization, and the now-ubiquitous Like Button, among other things.

In other words, we should expect this year’s f8 to bring a lot more than the video and music services that have already been thoroughly covered. Frankly I don’t think either of those would fundamentally alter the Facebook experience — they’ll make some people happy, and they may help services like Rdio, Spotify, and MOG get more users, but there’s still going to be a lot of friction getting people to change the way they consume media.

Instead, I’m guessing we’ll see some much bigger changes — things that alter the way Facebook’s graph works, and that will enable a new class of applications to flourish (like, for example, those aforementioned media sharing apps). I’m still digging to find out the specifics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these changes revolve around broader sharing. After all, so much content on Facebook is already shared with a ‘Public’ setting — Facebook just needs to start surfacing that content to more people.

Facebook’s recently-launched Subscriptions feature is a great example of this. At risk of tooting my own horn more than usual, I’ve watched my Subscriber count grow from zero to 2,500 in less than a week (that’s way faster than I’ve ever accrued followers on Twitter). I can’t take much credit for the growth though — the only thing I posted was a photo of puppies. Instead, this uptick is fueled by the way Facebook works suggestions into News Feed and various widgets. If Facebook can create similar viral growth around content shared from other apps, that would be a big deal, indeed.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Seedcamp Flexes Upwards With Its Biggest Week Yet

TechCrunch Europe is edited by Mike Butcher (FRSA, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts). As well as editing TechCrunch Europe, Mike is involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub (@TechHub), in London initially. A long time journalist, Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including... ? Learn More

Seedcamp Week, the annual week-long session run by Europe’s oldest tech startup accelerator, has kicked off in London, and it looks like the biggest yet. In particular, this week sees changes to the way Seedcamp has operated in the past which indicates a clear uptick in how the European tech scene is fairing.

When Seedcamp first started in September 2007 – the same Week TechCrunch Europe launched – it funded six out of 20 companies that pitched.

This week 16 of the 20 Seedcamp companies presenting this week have already received the initial Seedcamp investment. Seedcamp normally invest €50,000 (for 5-10%) as standard but sometimes they invest less for less of a stake, (though these exact terms are not usually disclosed).

The contrast with last year is that 13 companies got the investment and there was no follow-on funding.

Another change is that last year there was a competition by all the teams for investment. This year the four remaining that haven’t had the initial investment (out of the 20) will be interviewed at the end of the week.

And, at the end of the week, the companies considered by Seedcamp and mentors to be the top three of all 20 will receive a cash prize, which they can use as a part of a ‘follow-on’ round. The winner gets €25,000, second place gets €15,000, third place wins €10,000.

Lastly, there are no “new” teams at Seedcamp this week. All of them have appeared at Mini Seedcamp days already at events around Europe. In years gone by there were always a few wild-cards – this year, this is the “creme de la creme”, if you will.

Now, after four years you would think we would be starting to see some exits among former Seedcamp companies and a new eco-system develop around it. But only Mobclix was acquired last year for a reputed $50m – a pretty good “European” exit.

Meanwhile many former Seedcamp companies are still going, though exits are, as I point out above, thin on the ground.

However, we shouldn’t worry. As a Seedcamp investor told me yesterday “We might see an exit soon form a former Seedcamp companies, but we’re relaxed about that. We’d rather see these companies build up to the point where they can knock it out of the park.” I think that’s the right take on this. It’s unusual for companies to see liquidity events in this short time period, and it’s better not to focus on an exit anyway.

In addition, the trend amongst the companies chose this year are a mix of evolution on existing business models and disruption of traditional industries.

So thus, GrabCad is targeting the traditional sector of engineering. Farmeron is about targeting the agriculture sector. Vox.io is about the evolution of the third generation of telephony – you get the picture.

But I’ll be exploring the startups selected in a separate post shortly.

(Above, Seedcamp’s Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Saul Klein, Reshma Sohoni)

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