Eric Shoenfeld on TechCrunch Disrupt, Carol Bartz, and Foursquare

New York, NY - (Zennie62's trip to TechCrunch is sponsored by Christine Smith Associates, Inc., the Premier Female Contractor in NYC.) This video discussion with TechCrunch Co-Editor Eric Shoenfeld took place on Monday, and just after Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz was interviewed by TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington.

In giving an overview of TechCrunch Disrupt, Shoenfeld said that Bartz "is a pretty tough cookie. She can...She gave as well as she gets. We got a few bombs out of her. She kinda came into the lion's den. We've been critical of Yahoo! and Carol, and for her to come into (this) and do really well speaks volumes about her leadership.

On the matter of the impact of "geo-based social networks" like Foursquare, and their explosion, the question has been when will the next "Foursquare" emerge? "There's a lot of buzz around geo-media companies. Foursquare and Gowalla, and Booya are some of the first ones out of the gate. I think it's going to be difficult for a startup today. The question is not what the next Facebook but who's the next Foursquare?...There are already early, early leaders. If you're not in that pack, it's going to be difficult to get into that pack."

Shoenfeld says that TechCrunch Disrupt is a mix of interesting panels in the morning and interviews presenting the different "disruptions" that are present. A disruption, in the industrial context, is another way of describing the "paradigm shifts" famously described in Thomas Kuhn's classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

A paradigm shift is a dramatic alteration in a process, tradition, or convention. In the case of tech, the growth of the web has been extremely disruptive to the media and entertainment industries, as iTunes, YouTube, and Craigslist (to offer some examples), have caused massive declines in ad revenues to newspapers and radio stations and other traditional forms of media. Thousands of people have lost jobs in the process. Meanwhile new jobs are being created and countries, like India, are now major players in these same industries.

The intent of TechCrunch Disrupt is to explore the anatomy of these disruptions and give a view of what "disruptive" companies are on the horizon. I think it's done that very well.  Plus, it's probably the largest single "dump" of people from the San Francisco Bay Area into New York City ever done.

Stay tuned.