“‘What?.’ ‘We made it to Disrupt,’ Sarah said calmly. ‘We screamed so hard we woke up the building.’”

After the screaming ended, the Israel-based Shaker ditched Burning Man plans for TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 rehearsals in San Francisco, devising a plan that would buy them some time (asking if they could have all 13 founders on stage) and having that plan backfire (we said “Yes.”).

After living through Erick telling them that theirs was one of the “most boring presentations I’ve ever heard” and digesting his impassioned plea, “Take me with you to Shaker, make me feel I am at the bar! Instead of listing 25 added features, give me one good experience,” the team spent a sleepless night practicing their presentation before being thrown onstage.

“The rest of the story is well documented,” Yonatan says “The music that didn’t work, the computer that froze just as we went on stage, the team in Israel participating inside Shaker dancing on the bar, releasing red hearts to the audience, and of course Mike’s – full of tact – announcement.”

It’s no wonder that instead of attending the after-party as winners, the Shaker team just crashed in their hotel room (photo above).

Says Yonatan,”The guy in the picture is obviously Andy, our head of finance… He is the one holding back every dollar in our company – he couldn’t let go of the cardboard check until he literally went to bed with it.”

oh, it’s a mess yeah, and the acoustics

[xx] [xx] [xx]

Yeah.

Oh, I have no idea how that levels out. It’s amazing. Alright, are we good? Please welcome to the stage from Shaker: Uritan Mayer [sp?] and Jasmayone [sp?].

So we’ve all been socializing and networking in the last two or three days. Raise your hand if you met someone new in a party last night. I did and we also know that that’s not the way we socialize online today. But none of you ever told yourself, I had a great night on Facebook last night and that’s not so much because there’s something wrong with you or him, it ‘s because social networks great as they are, are simply not built to provide this type of experience.

How can you compare this To a night on the town. Right? So, I’m Uritan . CEO and co founder of Shaker, that’s Bob, brother and co founder and with Shaker, for the first time, you’ll be able to hang out online much like you do from real life.

Ok. So let’s just dive in and broadcast straight for the life better that Shaker has in Israel. Recognize me dancing? Of course you do. That’s my Facebook profile hanging above my head. The people that you see right now, on the screen, are real people. They’re hanging out, in real time, together with me.

It’s 2:00 am in the morning. Well but, they’re from bed in their PJ’s but they’re listening to the exact same music and sing the exact sight. The ones in blue are my Facebook friends. I can recognize them easily. The ones in yellow are friends of friends. These are people who are not accessible to me on Facebook.

But here, I can meet them and talk to them. I usually see them just in real life. And the rest are gray, but we’ll see soon how I can get to know, what do I have in common with them? Let’s see who’s here. We’ve met, two days ago, Yosi and Kristi. Let’s go and say hello. Yosi is our co-founder and he’s blue, so he’s a friend and he’s talking to this girl, Kristi.

How do I know that they’re talking? Because it’s easy. They’re facing one another, just like we do in real life.

Now if I want to join their chat,I just have to come closer for them to see me. Let’s do it, Andy. Once I do it, my Facebook profile just walks there and joins their chat just like many of you joined our conversation in the alley and the day. So while I am talking to Kristi, I can see what we have in common with her.

Let’s check her out. I can view her profile to see what did she choose to share with the people in the room. She feels comfortable sharing some of her data just with the people that are with her right now. So, things in common. We have common friends. We can also see that we’re both friends/fans of David Bowie and that we both attended Burning Man, and we’ve been to Burning Man a week and a half ago.

That’s already three conversation starters even before I bought her a drink.

Andy? Now we’ll see if you take it or not. So, just, so let’s see, let’s take a walk here and see what else we can do. On the wall, on the wall behind you, you’re going to see the ‘like’ wall. The ‘like’ wall is the likes and interests of the people in the room projected on the for everyone to see together.

Let’s play with it. I can click on one of the pictures and see who likes them so I can just choose a band and see who likes it, here in the room, and talk to him and just discover new interests. Now, let’s have a look at the bar. On the bar, what you’re going to see is the Shaker team. The people, they’re dancing, they’re happy, high in the office, the people that actually brought this thing to be more of a reality than a fantasy.

Ladies and gentlemen, just three weeks ago, Shaker opened its private data, it completely exploded. Tens of thousands of users are flooding just as we speak. Why? Because they love being able to have meaningful conversations and meaningful experiences online. They love being able to do more than post and comment.

We’ve been waiting to share these experiences, the images that you see, and you all are going to see them a lot from now. With you for a long long time. The revolution of experience already began.

Ya. But Shaker is much more than any specific, right? Obviously, the people who were there will determine the type of experience you’re going to get. So, you can imagine for example, a sports bar. That’s… that will help you imagine the score bar where you can root for your team or talk smack. Imagine, [xx] Beach turns into a giant concert hall where all of their fans can listen to their music or imagine Washington Square Park where NYU Freshmen can gather before orientation week to meet each other.

So, Shaker is a platform for social experiences. It is layered on top of existing social networks. A couple of days ago, we opened at Tech Crunch Disrupt venue just for you guys to be available to hang out. So let’s see what actually happened on Shaker in that environment and in Israel. Its like second life except you’re yourself!

Those are all true happenings We don’t need that. This is a famous DJ in Israel. He’ll keep up the music and the good. They exist, right? And that’s a beach party. It all happened in the last 48 hours. Eighteen thousand drinks were sent, 27,000 conversations, 561 friend requests. All those things that happen in Nashville way are significant.

Social network interactions can’t happen on social networking the way it is today and obviously, there’s a miracle. It is inconceivable that in the future, fun, casual experiences will be reserved to the physical world only. Some of them will happen online. So wait for us, for Shaker, it’s launching soon and it has new features and opportunities that you can only imagine from real life what you never thought you’re going to see on line so quickly.

So stay with us and thank you.

Shaker everyone!

The Shaker cheerleaders also in again tonight I see. Let’s start with Ron this time. How similar is this to Second Life, I’d just like to hear you talk about that. And does this morph into a dating site?

So two questions: for the Second Life, some of the interactions you see here, you saw them on Second Life before. But here, you are yourself. So, Second Life is all about alternative identity, right? That’s why it’s called Second Life. Here, it’s real life. It’s 1st life, if you wish. So all those interactions are truly happening now.

If you can show us Israel in the background or the Tech Crunch Disrupt menu, it doesn’t matter, so all those people are really there, and they’re really talking, they’re creating meaningful relationships. For example, the chat that yousaw was in Hebrew. It was actually a girl that hit on one of our bracket designers during those 48 hours.

And she wrote him, “Where do live?” And they found out they live near by and she asked if they could go on the real date. So, that sort of taps into your second question. So, yes, if you build a bar, expect to see a dating scene, not dating, but flirting scene, right? It’s not that HTML dating thing.

If you built a different thing, we tested it on a quad. And you know what? There was not so much dating there. It was more people talking together about school, about stuff–people that knew each other. So the type of venue you choose and the people that will be there will determine what kind of experience you’re going to get.

OK. Matt.

It was a little hard to hear some of the numbers. Can you guys just tell us again, what’s your peak concurrent user number to date?

So, Shaker is not public launch in Israel, right? We just opened one venue with a couple of floors. Plus we needed to shut down the invitation. The numbers are really staggering in terms of goals because we did this with now PR. Gaud, do you want to tell some of the numbers?

Yeah. Right now we’re limiting it to 540 people so no matter how many people you have on applications. But we see that in peak hours we’re in like 5%, which is an amazing number, 6%. It’s important to say that Shaker is live and vivid 24/7. Different people visit Shaker in different times of the day.

So, it’s not open at night. Even the bar is visited at 5 o’clock but there’s different people there.

So, I think one interesting challenge or question for you guys is, to the extent that the core of this is dating either explicitly or implicitly, having real liquidity is really important. And if you require everybody to be using the service at the same time, it’s a much less liquid environment, no pun intended, than if you have something like match.com where you can just, you know, browse through millions of profiles, at any given time, you don’t have everybody needing to be online all at the same time; how do you, how do you think about the tension in that issue, and how to you resolve it?

So Shaker is all about natural engagement and it so happens to be that natural engagement does not happen asynchronously. You can have not have a stage, where one comes and hangs out, goes out, another one comes, hangs out, goes out, it just doesn’t work. So, to some extent it would have to stay simultaneous.

You don’t – and then on the second, on the second, my second thing would be to say that we will create relationships and connections that can be, that can happen as we promised. So you would get contact info for for someone and so you’ll know when he’s online again and be able to catch him there.

so yes.

Spring and Rolan.

Have you read Snow Crash?

Excuse me.

Have you read the book, “Snow Crash?”

No, I haven’t.

It’s a science fiction book written about 20 years by a guy I think in the East Bay here, I think, in the San Francisco bay area Neil Stevenson which basically, sort of predicted exactly this, which all of you should read science fiction because I think it gives you a sense of what’s going to come in the next ten years in technology, so it’s sort of interesting to see this.

I think it’s really interesting to mimic social behavior in this sort of way online. I’ve always remarked how much online behavior very solitary, or maybe it’s one on one communication, but it doesn’t really make the way that we would communicate over here, for example. I think to Matt’s point, synchronicity will require oval will be a subset of the behavior because you require people to be there at the same time.

Oh ya.

But that time will be a lot more valuable so, I like a lot of those things and I also think there’s, there’s some interesting things online dating, because I can see how people get together here to watch movies together, listen to music together or do other activities, so that’s pretty cool. The one question I had was what has surprised you so far in the usage?

What are the things that didn’t turn out quite the way you expected, positive or negative? I’ll take it. I think that when you think about it, it’s not that surprising. But you untapped it, when we tested and we been doing a lot of tests. When we’ve tested different environments with communities, and sometimes even with the same communities we saw completely different interaction.

So he mentioned the quad and we’ve other environments even the beach environment that we’ve showed you. So, it was amazing, it was very interesting for me to see that people feel that their interaction has to do with the graphic environment and this give us an amazing potential to be a platform for social experiences.

We can take experiences, communities and a graphic environment and bring them to life and this is amazing for us so we can vary.

Nobody dances on the bar during morning time and it’s not like it’s not locked in the morning time.

Mersa?

Well, I think the point I’m trying to make is online more compelling is quite clearly, then I hear is one of the reasons, for example, on Google Plus where we saw a big reaction to hangout. It’s something that’s happening this morning. I think there’s a bunch of cool things. It looks like, it’s very multi layered already and I’m impressed with how Far along the demo is things like the “like wall” and there’s some cool concepts even beyond just the initial concept that you’re bringing out.

I think one concern I had is the number of people cause there’s like one of the things that makes the party fun, one of the things that makes hanging out fun is whose around and actually getting enough people. I think is one of my big concerns and I guess my question is really around how you decide to move in the space.

How do you decide when to dance and how does it decide how your avatar dances? . I mean if it really is just putting it in dance mode and forgetting about it then it really is just kind of glorified chat. How is it you have a new personalized movement, and what is the actual user experience of deciding how you move?

So, first of all, in terms of users, it’s always a concern. The pattern that we’ve seen, we’ve opened for the first three weeks, that we opened, we saw 100,000 people on that App among the active users. That’s 1.3 of the user population. So that work. In terms of controlling your avatar in a personal way, so as a beginning, you can It’s a very casual experience.

We didn’t want to make the, plus the emphasis is not on your avatar, right? The avatar, we never call it avatar, we call it “iCarrier”. So lets say this. And this iCarrier is, it’s just they carry your profile. They make your profile do things. But you really connected your profile not with that image.

People care about their online identity. It’s them. And we give it now. We can move.

Ok, Hardy?

Ya I have a question and just sit it out. And maybe I don’t. When you launched us in Israel it was one room for all the people that you guys invited. Do you split it up into two rooms when it gets too crowded and so how do you decide who goes in one room, and who goes in another room without, because I assume you invite people virally, you’ll run into the issue of, you know, I’m friends with suddenly she went into that room.

How do I go where she was? And I believe that and my other friend.

When we open it we open it toward Kathy because we didn’t crash all of your computers so. We didn’t expect that. We had no PR. There was one blogger who wrote, “Oh, come to my good-bye party”, before she went abroad. And we had one room, it was packed, constantly. You couldn’t get into it 24/7. We kept adding rooms but that’s not the strategy going forward.

We’re going to have a system that’s going have an infinite number of people inside that room. That’s part of our patent and I cannot elaborate too much about it right now but that’s an issue we’ve been dealing with very carefully.

Mike.

So, I am a big fan. I am an investor, right? Right? I think I’m an investor.

It is time to disclose if you don’t know who your investors are.

So what is, I’m just continually surprised at thebreadth .

Thank you.

Was I just insulted? I couldn’t hear you.

I have no idea, at this point. No, I think it was…

Can I talk?

I’ve got like an hour left at TechCrunch.

It’s all yours. The glory’s yours Mike.

I’m continually surprised at the breadth and depth of start-ups coming out of Israel. It’s like We had a absolute one a couple times ago. It’s clearly the second strongest market even over New York for disrupt and this is like, you know. And anybody who says all Israeli can do is build and you see stuff like this and it’s like, to me it’s like this is just took a snow crouch in Neil Stevenson.

This is absolutely something that is going to exist, and I think you’re biggest risk in my opinion is just how quickly it’s cloned and how quickly we can roll it out. I’m interested in markets where people can meet new people on the internet. I think it was part of the fascination that chat roulette, penises aside.

It’s why, it’s why I invested in Shawn Fanning’s new company. And I think other people on stage had it as well, because there aren’t many so many places to meet people online and tag is going after this and try to differentiate themselves. Facebook shut this down at some point and I think they’re. Maybe they’re gonna try to open the back up.

But any time that you have a place to go and meet other people I think you have a lot of value you can capture. So, that’s why I like it.

I think Facebook would love this because it increases interaction on Facebook and on their social graph
.

Well you work at Facebook.

I’m an investor for Facebook and I made that comment without thinking. But this doesn’t seem to me, I mean it’s built on Facebook’s API’s. It increases chatting and connecting and friend connections.

Of course, we see a lot of friend requests. They were in the hundreds just in the last few days.

Yeah and it increases time on site for one reason, and you’ve asked me what surprised me. And I’ll say something that, again, it sounds reasonable, because this product sounds reasonable. It’s just making real life again.

If I was Versa, I would say, “We’ll buy this today. How much do you want?” And then we would immediately make it Google+ related. That’s what I would do.

Well, you have my phone number, right?

Marissa, are you going to say So, just a…

one thing I…

a lot better than tripling our…
I’m sorry…
Alright, we’re out of time, so one big round of applause for Shaker.

Thank you, Thank you. Alright.

• SHAKER

Shaker brings social networks to life by allowing people to interact in real time in a shared environment, making the online social experience of hanging out with friends and meeting new people, feel natural finally.

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