A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned on Twitter that I was gearing up for a last minute, 72-hour run at the TechCrunch 50 application. It wasn’t for a client – Katherine and I have been working on  a web app project for a little while now. There was never any intention to run it in stealth mode, but TC50 requires that you stay under wraps, so we’ve been waiting to find out if we made the cut.

As it turns out, we didn’t, which wasn’t entirely unexpected – we’re taking an existing model and applying it in a cool new way but we’re not re-inventing fire or anything. However, we did get an invitation to the Demo Pit.  Not every one of the 1,000+ applicants makes the demo pool – there are only 100 exhibitors in addition to the 50 on-stage TC50 finalists – so we’re pretty happy about that.

We are also completely undecided about going.

Here’s the deal – we’re at the point now where we need to raise seed capital of €20 – 25K minimum in order to:

• Move Project X off of gaffer tape and bailing wire and onto a formal framework
• Develop the distributable modules that mean sales
• Pay for serious hardware when we open for public beta

I’ll be very straight and say: we do not have the $3,000 exhibition fee. We also do not have the €2,500/$3,500 it will cost to get both of us there, hole us up in San Francisco, and rent the kit we’d need on the ground there.

In fact, neither of us has enough money to pay our ESB bills right now, so really – we’re Brokey McBrokeyPants here. Trying to find this money would mean… I don’t even know what. A home equity loan, a bank robbery, or something else fairly serious like that.

On the other hand, I am 100% passionate about this project. More than 50 companies have come through my door in the last two years, and while I’ve been keen on any number of them, not one has made me say “I want a piece of that.” This one did, and if DemoPit is what the project needs, then that’s what we’ll do.

Somehow.

So here’s what I want to know:

• Would you do this?
• If you’ve done DemoPit in previous years, was it worth it?
• Did you raise funds as a direct result?
• What did you get out of it other than cash?

We need to decide fairly quickly because there are a lot of logistics involved in getting two tubby ladies and a fully functioning web app to San Francisco in a mere six weeks.

So advise me please, interpipes. Thank you.

For someone who likes films, I see surprisingly few of them because I am, conversely, not a big fan of cinemas. But I was a big fan of Moviestar.ie, the Irish version of Netflix. Moviestar provided a great service, had a great website, and as a bonus, provided me with several nice DVD players and bottles of champagne via their sponsorship of various awards I was lucky enough to take home.

Then I got an email in January announcing that they had been subsumed by Screenclick, and that I was now going to get “even better service and wider choice of movies on DVD.” What I actually got was no movies. At all. For six months.

Apparently, the postal address I provided to Moviestar (the one I, you know, live at) and that worked through my entire relationship with them simply didn’t work when Screenclick dispatched films. I went through this with customer support several times in April to no avail, and then in June films suddenly started arriving again.

The magical, successful apparition of movies in my mail slot and several emails nagging me to update my rental queue prompted me to finally log into the Screenclick.com website for the first time ever last night. Ten minutes later, Hollywood-horror-flick howls of rage and frustration were heard ’round the world. And they were not emanating from my DVD player.

Screenclick is broadly fine if you can type the name of a film you want to rent into the search box. For anything else, it’s useless. If you want to actually browse films, for example, you’re screwed:

• DVDs are listed by category and displayed alphabetically. Want to find a TV series to rent? You better like 24, because it takes up the first three pages of television listings.
• The “Watch Trailer” feature for individual film selections delivers audio only. Presumably this would be useful if I wanted to rent the podcast version.
• If I liked Juno, I want suggestions of more films like Juno. Telling me that someone who rented Juno also rented Die Hard 2 just makes me want to start taking hostages.

I strongly suspect the people behind Screenclick are just popping down to the warehouse to pick up whatever they want to watch, because anyone attempting to actually use this site would have killed themselves or fixed it by now. (Here’s a tip: if your customers resort to checking Wikipedia listings of Academy Award winners just to come up with titles to add to their subscription queues, your user interface is really, really broken.)

And the real pisser:

Screenclick (formerly DVDrentals) was established in 2001 when we realised Ireland could really use a service which was more convenient and less expensive than traditional video stores.

Thanks. We had that. You bought it, ate it, and killed its young.

I hope the Moviestar guys made piles of cash. Because they have to be spinning in it. And buying their films from Play.com.

Late this evening I found the above at the top of my Twitter page – a tweet from Bernie Goldbach, my esteemed partner in expatriate crime and @topgold on Twitter.

Now, 19 minutes is a very long time in the land of the fail whale, but the man has a toddler and a full-time job and needs his sleep. So I clicked over to @Scobleizer to double-check Scoble had indeed already achieved Twitter Nirvana – and saw that he had exactly 99,999 followers.

“Oh,” I thought. “Twitter has capped follow counts at the five digit ceiling. What a good idea.” And because it is a good idea (for all kinds of reasons) I clicked Follow just to test that there was indeed a newly implemented count cap.

And there wasn’t. And I became Robert Scoble’s 100,000th follower.

That was moderately amusing for about 30 seconds. What was far more amusing is that in the 30 seconds following this:

…I picked up 100 followers.

I’m sure these followers will depart shortly, for the same reasons I’m sure I’ll eventually un-follow the mighty Scoble (see FAQ). But it was interesting to observe first hand the flood effect of a high-profile Twitterer merely mentioning a @name – particularly now, when the concept of buying Twitter followers has so many people debating the raw value of pure numbers.

For what it’s worth, I’d advise any client who asked to flush the “Twitter procurement fee” directly down the toilet and consider it money well spent in preserving their credibility.

As for my own 30 seconds of Twitter fame, I’m happy to have these new people following me – it’s always nice to see numbers go up – but I’m not going to be mailing Scoble a cheque any time soon.

The FAQ (yes, already):

1/ OMG, you weren’t following Scoble?!

No. I like Scoble just fine, but Twitter is a social space for me and I limit the number of people I follow to 125. I can’t actually track and converse with more than that – an issue Scoble himself has addressed. I generally follow people I know and people with heavy design streams. When I feel the need for a dose of Scoble, I go read his blog.

2/ Holy SHIT you use the web interface for Twitter?!

Yes. I have tried and used a ton of Twitter apps, but the problem is that they all work. They conveniently push all my tweets to me in near real-time, and I don’t want that. I prefer pull over push for Twitter because it allows me to step into the stream when I have the time and attention for it. Realistically that is several times a day – just not all day.

3/ Do you get anything for being the 100,000th?

I wouldn’t have thought so, no. Since I wasn’t raised in a barn and am not a member of Generation Entitlement, I didn’t ask. If anyone is wondering, however, I would quite like a pony.