F.ounders Hits New York...

The are almost too many tech events in the calendar these days to mark any particular one out as being worthy of note. I say almost because, on the global stage at least, TechCrunch Disrupt (Ok, Ok, but still…) remains up there because of how much other media attend and, well, just it’s general awesomeness. Into this small basket you could also put, for instance, Le Web , Founders Forum in the UK, DLD, The Lobby Conference, the tech elements at Davos and maybe even TED. What few of them are doing however, is celebrating new blood. You tend to see the people who have made it, not the one’s about to make it (apart from Disrupt of course). To that end one rapidly emerging event which is doing a very good job of bringing together the Valley, New York, Asia, Europe and emerging global startups like South America is the simply named “ F.ounders “. And it’s coming to New York on June 14/15, and will be attended by our very own editor, Eric Eldon and co-editor Alexia Tsosis. They’ll make up around 150 of the world’s fastest growing tech company founders gathering in NASDAQ’s Market Site in Times Square. Paddy Cosgrave says he is moving founders to New York to bring together “high growth companies on track to IPO or otherwise in the next 24 months.” There’s that new blood coming through. Joining them will be tech stars including Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), David Karp (Tumblr), David Goldberg (Survey Monkey), Alexander Ljung (SoundCloud), Roger McNamee (Elevation Partners) Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) and Steve Case (AOL, Revolution). You might not have heard of F.ounders as it barely has a web site and you can’t apply for an invite. But it’s been described by Bloomberg as “Davos for geeks”. TechCrunch was more to the point: we called it badass. Perhaps because of that we managed to get a special concession: We got them to agree that TechCrunch readers can ‘apply’ to attend by emailing attendees [@] f.ounders.com. No guarantees, but good luck… Last year’s event was held in Dublin, Ireland. Bono lead a pub crawl, Riverdance put on a private performance and the Irish President hosted drinks in her residence in her last day in office. Rumours that a TechCrunch European editor led a few late party-goers in a 4am guitar-led rendition of Wonderwall in the lobby of the hotel have never been confirmed. F.ounders Dublin is held annually in October, alongside The Dublin Web Summit .

TechCrunch Giveaway: La...

Happy Friday! In less than one week, my colleagues and I (along with many, many others ) will be flying to New York to gear up for one of the biggest conferences of the year, Disrupt NYC. We have revealed the full agenda for the conference, as well as certain speakers and judges like: Adrian Grenier , MC Hammer , Michael Arrington , MG Siegler , Dennis Crowley , Marissa Mayer , Chris Dixon , Roelof Botha and tons of others. This is your last chance to win a free ticket to the show. There will be two separate winners. The tickets, each valued at $2,995, will get you into the full three days of the conference, plus Startup Alley, Hardware Alley, all of the after parties, and more. Want to come with us? To enter just follow the steps below. 1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page: 2) Then do one of the following: - Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag) - Or leave us a comment below telling us why we should pick you. Do you dance? Sing? Hack? Be creative. The contest starts now and ends May 13th at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will choose two separate winners at random and contact them once the giveaway is over. Anyone in the world is eligible. Please note this giveaway is for Disrupt tickets only and does not include airfare or hotel. Good luck!

The Web 2.0 Summit, Tim...

The Web 2.0 Summit will not be taking place this year. The conference, which has grown since its inception in 2004 to be one of the buzziest and busiest annual events for the web and new media upper crust, is “on hiatus” indefinitely, according to John Battelle , the entrepreneur/journalist/author who traditionally hosts the conference along with Tim O’Reilly . PandoDaily was the first to report the news. In a blog post , Battelle said that the decision to suspend the Web 2.0 Summit is due to a simple time crunch. He’s working on a book , and he is not able to dedicate the time necessary to planning the conference this year that it needs to really take off: “As the person who focuses on the core product – the programming on the stage – I just could not pull off both writing a book and creating a pitch-perfect onstage program. It takes months and months of hard work to execute a conference like Web 2 (and not just by me). My partners at O’Reilly and UBM TechWeb are full to the brink with other conferences, and after months of discussions about how we might route around this problem, we all agreed there really wasn’t a way to do it. It’s not fun being the guy who stops the party, but in this case, I have to step up and take responsibility.” Battelle is quick to point out that the Web 2.0 Summit is not necessarily dead — it’s just over for the time being, “on hiatus.” Either way, it’s certainly the end of an era. The Web 2.0 Summit has been a tangible, milestone-like event each year to track the loose concept of the Web 2.0 movement in general. The tech world is in no shortage of conferences, of course, but for me the Web 2.0 Summit has always been a must-attend, as it has consistently drawn high profile people from a variety of industries to talk about the state of all things tech (at last year’s event alone, speakers included Twitter CEO Dick Costolo , Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer , Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff , Dell founder Michael Dell , Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley , LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman , and Napster co-founder and early Facebook investor Sean Parker , among many, many others .) It’ll be interesting to see which event steps up to take its place.

SXSW: Foursquare CEO Di...

Dennis Crowley's keynote should please geo-social marketers.

Video: Dennis Crowley S...

When I was in Barcelona this week, I met up with Dennis Crowley, the CEO of Foursquare, just after he had gotten off stage from a keynote presentation with the CEOs of Nokia and HTC at Mobile World Congress. The check-in app that was once little known outside of the world of tech early-adopters may only have around 15 million users, but that number has actually made it a leader in its field, and that has amplified the company (and Crowley). In effect, Foursquare has become the mayor of mobile social location, and everyone watches it closely to see what it does now, and what it will do next. Earlier today we published a longer interview with Foursquare’s Crowley. That was conducted, appropriately enough, in a very sunny square in the middle of the MWC event. (Dennis, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry again I made you sit facing the sun.) I caught the first part of our conversation in a short video, and it complements that longer post. Which you should read. Some of the subjects covered here: Crowley’s take on who the strong third player might be after Android and iOS; where international sits for Foursquare; and whether the company would ever move into making pared-down services for lower-end devices, as part of a growth strategy. (That’s worked pretty spectacularly for another social network, Facebook.) Take a look.