Revisiting the TechCrunch50 conference as an alumni company is great! You get all the fun and attention and none of the pressure. And besides that, you already know people so you don’t have to linger around like you’re out of a scene from Dumb & Dumber.

It’s great to see that monetization is back in the game. That was apparent with both the presentations as well as with the lines of questioning of the judges. Some companies even went as far as bringing their partners and customers on stage. One company had a slide depicting the signed contract. The infomercial similarities aside, we at Burt think this is a sign of health and sobering up of the post-sub-prime tech ecosystem.

During the first day we sat in at the working lunch: “Creating scarcity, value and brand protection as we face limitless ad inventory” hosted by AdMeld. We really enjoyed the discussion. But it’s worth noticing that out of a panel of six people meant to represent the food chain of online advertising not one represented the Creatives. That’s like having project review while missing the project manager.

If you look at how much of the web made available thanks to advertising, it’s amazing how little share of the conference it had. There were only two companies presenting that are within our ecosystem.

The most interesting of these companies, without a doubt, was 5to1. They address the problem of unsold inventory, and by leveraging the knowledge of the publishers they can turn that inventory into premium inventory.

Their take on this has little do do with algorithm and more to do with building a great interface that empowers the publishers to make better decisions quicker. This angle is a smart angle that we believe works well. Sometimes, especially when working with silent knowledge, bringing the tools to create the best solution is better than trying to bring the solution itself.