TechCrunch 2008-12-16: Germans, flash laptops and Britney Spears

Came, saw, was bored. Broken wifi. Dear Internet, have my gonzo notes as a xmas present.

Presentations in the back room of an underground twit-bar are never a good idea. I'm blogging this from the back row of a room full of people dressed in suits and Gap's "preppy" range and I can't hear a word of the presentation. Britney's latest hit is belting out of bar and no amount of pulling the curtains shut will muffle her. The demographic is in itself curious, we're talking 30+ and I'm probably the youngest person here. I think there's a reason for this - if you're under 30 you know about the Internet already and you're out there doing Internet instead of in here talking about it.

"Free Public Wireless" doesn't work. Not enough seats. For £25 a ticket my ass wants a parking space.

Content . Community. Organic growth. Scalable revenue streams. Social Media. CPM. I have a cold and a headache and am losing interest fast. I shouldn't (big boy now, the sticker on my jacket says "founder" and everything) but really, come on. They're all so bloody effusive - mildly techy but fresh from some web2.0 garden of eden full of fairies and angels and VC growing on trees. Until about four months ago that's perhaps how it was: since then they've had a rude awakening and most are still figuring out what these gosh-darn business things are supposed to do.

It's dead simple. Make some money. Make it from customers and not investors because the investors all went away. Think of something people will pay money for, build it and pray to god they will. Don't spend too much to find out if your idea's a good one and drop it as soon as you work out it isn't. Like, y'know, a business. Many of the acts bang on about this new law of nature like they only discovered it yesterday.

One silver lining flagged: office space is getting cheap. Landlords will practically give it away, better than getting your office block squatted. But the world's changed a bit since the last boom; now we have 3G and coffee-shops on every corner and until the headcount gets to ten you don't even need an office anymore. Floorspace is cute but a luxury - rent a basement from your mates in Brighton for one day a week and code from the pub the rest. Some people report this works well.

Next up: a parade of daft startup ideas described in excruciating detail by their proud parents. Social media for pets and how to monetize it. One gets the feeling that in the biz2.0 echo chamber no-one dares criticise their ideas - once they've squeezed one out it's all systems go without a moment to ask "hey, will anyone buy this?"

"Hands up who has a DVR? Hands up who skips the ads?" --> there are ads? I have a computer. It's connected to the Internet. Telly now comes through the Internet, through Iplayer if Auntie's generous through BitTorrent if not. If you knew about computers you'd probably do that too.

60 minutes in the blonde 2 rows in front remembers to take off her coat. She doesn't look like a perl hacker.

Oh, there's a talk still going on. I catch a few words - "Qype, best local review site in europe". Jolly good and I wish them luck, it's not an unreasonable business model.

Crikey, they've found an investor. Look, they still exist! We caught one!" - yeah but she's from the music business, a sector with an already-successful product that just needs the distribution fixing. People want music. People don't want social media for pets.

"Optimize the deal flow". "Value exchange".

Would somebody like to talk about something that's not social media or selling music?

To my mind there's a problem here. This room is full of self-declared entrepreneurs in good suits with American accents and good teeth. This is because if you can't code and want a Startup (rhymes with "monorail!") you need to be here - you can't build that idea alone and you're gonna want someone else's money to pay for a Clerkenwell office full of geeks. And this is why you're in a world of business plans and chatting up investors [who all just died anyway - how do you flatter a corpse?] instead of opening up your battered old laptop and, y'know, bashing out a few thousand lines of ruby.

My friend (name omitted to protect the innocent) punted a great idea this afternoon. "I know, let's start selling Fail 2.0" t-shirts. So I have. You know you want one.