Dozens of Bay Area startups will be pitching their businesses to investors and tech VIPs at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco from Monday through Wednesday.

Cromwell Schubarth
Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

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The Bay Area startup expo’s fall season gets into full swing this week with TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, where dozens of companies will be pitching their ideas to investors and tech VIPs.

The three-day event at the San Francisco Design Center is followed on Thursday by Plug and Play Tech Center’s Fall Expo in Sunnyvale and the fall Demo expo in Santa Clara from Oct. 1 to Oct. 3.

In addition to the 30 new companies pitching on the Startup Battlefield and the 100 or so who will line Startup Alley at TechCrunch, a series of VIP panels and fireside interviews are scheduled, highlighted by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s first post-IPO public interview.

I will be at this week’s events, including serving as a “VIP Media Judge” for the Plug and Play pitches.

Here are the Bay Area companies that are scheduled to appear Monday in Startup Alley, some of which are also pitching on the Battlefield. They will be joined by dozens more from around the world which I haven’t listed.

The locals are in alphabetical order and include who is scheduled to appear at the booth and the company’s self-description:

AppFlow Inc. — Redwood City, CEO Balint Orosz : “Discover apps with a browsing experience.”

Ascendify Social Recruiting — San Francisco, Lauren Smith, marketing director: “Hiring reimagined – now with more social.”

Best Apps Market — San Francisco, Anurag (Anu) Nigam, CEO: “GameGenomeProject.com – Game discovery”

BetterDoctor ­— San Francisco, Ari Tulla, CEO Co-founder: “BetterDoctor helps find the right doctor in minutes.”

Bootic — San Francisco, Eric Barbier, CEO: “Free and neutral marketplace for the 400k small online merchants.”

Bynow Inc. — San Francisco, Pham Khac Tan: “The mobile digital menu.”

Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.

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Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/2012/09/dozens-of-bay-area-startups-pitch-at.html

San Francisco’s luxury homes are attracting eager buyers. 

Mark Calvey
Senior Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Don’t be surprised if you hear your real estate agent and mortgage lender suddenly belt out a rendition of “Happy Days are Here Again.”

Luxury home values in the Bay Area and other key California cities are chalking up their biggest gains since the housing boom went bust in the last decade.

Bay Area luxury home values soared 6.6 percent in the second quarter, the biggest year-over-year gain since the first quarter of 2006.

And Bay Area luxury home values rose 2.9 percent from the first quarter of 2012. The average luxury home in San Francisco is now $2.67 million, according to the First Republic Prestige Home Index produced by First Republic Bank and Fiserv CSW Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV)

“We have a hot market right now,” said Jay Costello, president of Hill Co. in San Francisco. “We’re going to see price increases over the next three to five years.”

Or at least until the Nasdaq makes a U-turn.

Real estate agents point to the strength of the stock market in driving Bay Area home prices since so many of the region’s affluent residents own stocks and options tied to publicly traded companies or private companies that will one day go public or be acquired, or so they hope.

The Nasdaq was approaching an 11-year high this week, thanks largely to shares of Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) hitting a record high Monday on news of its patent-litigation victory against Samsung.

On the luxury home front, First Republic had more good news. California’s strengthening economy, which first emerged in the Bay Area, is now evident in luxury home values in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Los Angeles values increased 2.4 percent from a year ago and jumped 4.3 percent from this year’s first quarter, marking the biggest quarterly gain since the third quarter of 2005, when the national housing boom was in full swing. The average luxury home value in the L.A. area is now $2.04 million.

Mark Calvey covers banking and finance for the San Francisco Business Times.

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Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2012/08/san-francisco-real-estate-home-prices.html

Too many foreclosures and too little time.

That was the impetus behind the so-called “rocket docket” in Florida, where judges could blow through a thousand cases a day.

And they had to, given a backlog of close to 40,000 foreclosures.

It was an experiment that began at the very end of December of 2008 in Lee County, Florida, the hardest hit county in the state. Retired judges came back to work, and the cases started to move. Then it went into full swing about a year ago in four other counties.

Now with a backlog of “just 8000 cases,” Lee County court clerk Charlie Green confirms the money for the program runs out at the end of June. I spoke with Green a few years ago, when the program started, and then again this morning. The desperation I remember in his voice is now gone.

“We are absorbing a lot of the foreclosed properties, and hopefully as the job market improves, that will improve,” Green tells me.

He describes an all-cash market in his county, where he also points to a strong tourist season. His big concern is about who will be employed and for how long. He would still like to see more retiree interest from back East and a bigger second-home demand.

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Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/43140199?__source=RSS*blog*&par=RSS