Andrew Mager

It’s always an honor to be in the south bay. Last year’s TechCrunch party in Menlo Park was one of my first experiences being away from the city where I live and work. This year’s event was even better.

Special thanks for Michael Arrington for inviting us to his event and being a great host.

Julia Allison and Non Society

When I first got in, I was very anxious to see Julia Allison and have her sign my copy of Wired. She is the cover girl this month.

I had to video tape her signing it. She said it was the first magazine she’s signed.

I am a fan of Julia’s because she is an outrageous Georgetown Hoya who loves new media. She and her two friends are doing a lifestreaming project where they write short snippets on a horizontal-scrolling blog thingy. I don’t know how else to explain it, but it’s entertaining.

Chamillionaire

There were plenty of other superstars in attendance last night, likeChamillionaire.

This H-town rapper has been on top of his game when it comes to the web. His website is great, and he puts out as many new freestyles as Lil’ Wayne these days. He was talkin about using OpenID on his site for logins.

Shira Lazar

I met KNBC (Los Angeles) Channel 4 anchor Shira Lazar.

First question I asked her was “are you on Twitter?“. Her site is The Pop Report and she writes about anything that comes to mind. She shares sites that she likes, and posts photos from events she attends. Kinda like what I’m doing right now.

Twinkle

Oh yea, there were also new media product demos going on. Here is a cool 404 page for the iPhone/iPod app Twinkle.

Pandora

Even as a direct competitor to one of the CBS Interactive brands, I can say that I really love Pandora. It might be my favorite place to discover new music. It requires no work except entering an artist that you like. Let them do the rest.

Pandora was the DJ, just like last year. The music setup was perfect.

I don’t need to explain how awesome Pandora is… just use it.

Tokbox

The best video demo I saw last night was Tokbox. It reminded me of a mixture between Skype and UStream.

Plista

Imagine a service that would allow you to rate movies on a site like Netflix and have it recommend other movies to you based on what others have said with similar rankings to you.

This social recommendation idea is already in the works with Plista. Rafe Needleman wrote a great post about it on Webware.

iLick

The world’s first lickable iPhone app.

Patrick needs to buy iphonilingus.com.

Blurb

Blurb allows you to make books! I’ve already made one actually.

Medialets and Facebook

Rana (center) from Medialets and Randi (right) from Facebook were also in attendance. Medialets is way for iPhone app developers to figure out how to monetize. They also do extensive statistical analysis on the growing mobile market.

Other memorable demos

Kaboodle is a service where you can rate products that you like and recommend them to a friend. I think it’s mainly for girls because most of the site has fashion items. But it looked cool.

Regator is a perfect news site for lazy people. They go out and find the most interesting blogs for you to read. But how do you know what is interesting? Is this like Digg?

• Facebook photoset
• Flickr photoset