I'm just now over my jet lag enough to think through a few brief thoughts on TC40 last week.

General Overview

Pros:

• Laid back atmosphere
• Fancy hotel
• Demo pit was fun
• Keynotes were excellent, and imo, justified my attendance.
  
• Free swag bag was nice. It's replaced my wal-mart backpack.

Cons:

• At the event, I felt like it could have been kept the TechCrunch 20.. Then some time passed, and I thought it could have been the TechCrunch 10. A week out, and I feel like TechCrunch 5 would have been appropriate. Mint didn't just stand out -- they blew everyone away. It's a sad day when whats supposed to be the best of the best includes three video wikis and at least a dozen companies with no hopes for revenue.
  
• Would have been nice to do the happy hour thing in the lobby on the first day as well.
• Panelists were way, way too soft on the companies. Second day was better. Guy Kawasaki, despite the travesty that is trumors truemors, was fun.
• Some of the presentations were awful. Just awful.

Companies

• Cake Financial has interesting potential, but I'm not sure on the implementation yet. I'm going to have to play with it some more.
• Mint, as you've probably heard by now, is gorgeous and will kick Quicken's ass for most use cases.
• Silvia will be neat in toys.
• The hand motion interface stuff was really neat, but can't remember who-done-it. Viewdle screams acquisition.
• Xobni lived up to some of their pre-launch hype, but I don't use Outlook (gmail up in this hizzy). Their search looked like it kicked ass though, and made me jealous.
• TripIt actually solves a problem, which given the sad state of the presentations, made me happy. It's just not a problem that I personally have.
• I'm excited to see Flock reach 1.0, but... Out of that room, which would be a decent sample of the infamous "1 percent", how many of them are hardcore youtube users, facebook users and flickr users. Probably half or less. Seems like a terribly small market to me.

Favorite Demo Pit Company

• Satisfaction, by far, was my favorite. Maybe it's because of the Spirit Airlines debacle, but I truly believe there is a huge opening in the customer service space. This product is basically customer ticketing rethought. It has a b2b angle and a great consumer level face. Lane Becker, formerly of Adaptive Path, is one of the founders. In Adaptive Path like consistency, the application looks and feels like it's truly thought out. GetSatisfaction.com to check it out.

Saturday's game was amazing. A few opening-game quirks (running out of water, for one), but otherwise I couldn't have asked for anything more. UCF gave an amazing effort and almost knocked off the #7 team in the country. A few plays go another way, and that game was ours.

Thanks to the Sentinel for outstanding coverage leading up to the game. I hope it continues -- we're going to need a great crowd for the memphis game!

I'm out in San Francisco as of last night. We're here at the Palace Hotel for TechCrunch 40. So far so good, except the internet coverage is abysmal. Hotel internet is only via ethernet, and is $18 a day. WiFi is overloaded from all the laptops and iPhone's in the crowd. What was supposed to be 400 people has swelled to 1000 all in the ballroom here. High class problems, I suppose ;)

I'll do a writeup on my favorite companies after tommorow. A few of them have been great, some of them.... Not so much. I'm wondering if 40 may have been too many. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" though, and I'm one of those pesky east-coast cynics.

Mark Zukerberg chats with Mike Arrington for the keynote tonight, which should be good times. I'm really looking forward to that!