Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis have just announced a venture for new startups to showcase themselves. It’s called Techcrunch20.

The format of TechCrunch20 is simple: Twenty of the hottest new startups will announce and demo their products over a two day period. And they don’t pay a cent to do this. They will be selected to participate based on merit alone.

The panel includes such people as Marc Andreessen, Robert Scoble, Om Malik, Mark Cuban and more. This might end up being more than just another conference as the startups that will get to demo will definitely need to have something viable to show, rather than plunking down $5000 or so to get into DEMO.com conferences. But on the other hand most startups receive some sort of funding as it is so $5000 probably isn’t that bad. Except for those 16 year old script kiddies maybe, working at McDonald’s and trying to launch a rival to Flickr can be kinda hard.

My first conclusion to think of this is that it might probably turn out to be an elitist event where the panel decides who will be shown depending on what they think might work the best. Somehow I don’t completely agree with that. Just don’t expect any new PayPerPost type of service to be eligible to present with Calacanis as one of the founders See interview of Calacanis with CEO of PPP, Ted Murphy.

They have just one rule… you have to show it at Techcrunch20 first. Date September 17-18, 2007 and the location is the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Now I do have this one idea, I just need a coder! Any coders out there, get in touch with me.

Technorati Tags: techcrunch20, web 2.0 conference, new startups

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.