A total of 52 companies launched at last year’s TechCrunch50 conference. Five of them got jury selection prizes, there was one big winner and a very special crowd pleaser: Japan-based Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera, an iPhone app that presents tagged information in the form of a graphical layer over images in the iPhone camera.
Charismatic CEO Takahito Iguchi delivered a memorable demonstration, making the audience go crazy by fending off questions of TC50 judges such as Tim O’Reilly if Sekai Camera really works with the words “Join us!” or “We have a patent!”. The reason for the skepticism: Iguchi’s on-stage show mainly centered on a pre-produced video clip, not an actual product demo. This left people wondering if Sekai Camera isn’t just vaporware for almost half a year during which it seemed like nothing happened. But today I saw the app is real and working – on an iPhone.
