I will be following (and rooting for) Virginia-based companies over at the Richmond Good Life’s Tech News section.  There are two Virginia companies represented at Demo: (1) Paidinterviews (Blog) of McLean, VA and (2) SitScape of Vienna, VA.

As for TC50, they just released the companies, and from my initial research (clicking on the crunchbases), I don’t see any Virginia-based start-ups.  :(  There are lots of California, but I guess that should be expected.  I haven’t even looked at the Demo Pit companies (Too much work…Sure wish they’d publish a list of origin city/countries like Demo).  Once I figure out who’s Virginia, I will start covering them (UPDATE! I clicked on all of em.  I only saw Samepage of Falls Church, but there were tons of companies without location data).   In addition, the Commonwealth is being represented at TC50 by the folks at Mixx (McLean, VA) who’ve created the official TechCrunch Mixx (a mashup that aggregates all the “Diggs, Feeds, Tweets, and Blog Posts” onto one page).  Mixx was recently profiled by Somewhat Frank (Video: Visiting The Mixx HQ Mixxing Bowl) who is covering the TC50 event in person. 

If I see any good, working search engine type products, I will create a special limited search channel for ButtonALL later this week!

Damn, with press like this (Startups: your web site sucks), who the hell needs the Big Conference launch?  Well, there’s that old adage any publicity is good publicity even if “they” say you suck.  But seriously, we start-ups should heed some of Scoble’s advice (1) leverage video (which we’re NOT currently doing, but should.  None of us are telegenic, but I guess Scoble is living proof that you don’t need to have a hot geek chick host and a Panasonic VariCam to do this) and (2) explain the pain that your start-up solves (This seems to be Commandment Number One: see Kawasaki, Calacanis (1 | 2), Solis).  

How does ButtonALL stack up on pain relief (or at least, our attempts at communicating our pain relief message)?  Right now, I think we do a fair to middling job in describing our “value proposition.”  The home page is purposely simple (deceptively simple…Google is our role model on that decision).  No signup barriers, and a default screen that even a caveman’s grandmother can figure out (actually, field-tested with Grandmothers…none were harmed).   There are only three links right now that go to pages that describe how we deliver our solution (About Us, What are the Red Buttons, and Customization…the first two links economically double as gateways to this blog)   Customization, of course, is what makes us cool, useful, and different as an all-in-one search engine.

So I guess to follow-up on Scoble’s post, Commandment Number Two might be don’t launch anything this week (September unless you are freakin insane…Let’s see…

70 companies debuting at Demo
+
53 companies launching at TechCrunch50 (plus a 150 companies in the demo pit…see why ButtonALL chose not to demo pit.)
=
273 New Launches + Every tech journalist going to California with an aching in their heart*.

So call us crazy, next week we plan to blast a press release and launch a new website… It’ll make sense once you see it, eh. (I’ve been furiously working on it all day).  It’s almost akin to counter-programming the Super Bowl or Olympics.  Yeah, it’s gonna be the moral equivalent of the ESPN Cheerleading competition.**

*For my Richmond readers, Janet Martin Band’s cover of this song is almost as good as Zeppelin’s!
**Speaking of cheerleaders, I need to send a shout out to my good friend Marni Singer.  Marni is the first person that I ever met who actually competed on ESPN’s cheerleader challenge (where she brought it on).  She went on to law school at Emory, passed the bar, and joined the rat race.  She recently quit that racket to follow her dreams of opening a dance studio in Atlanta, Georgia teaching young children.  That, my friends, is a real start-up.  None of this Silicon Valley bullsh…