Every year the tech blog TechCrunch holds a competition for tech startups at its New York and San Francisco “TechCrunch Disrupt” conferences and crowns a winner at the end.
Over the years, the competition has proven to be something less than a fountainhead of world-changing ideas. Past champions include a conference-calling app, a car-sharing service that is not Uber or Lyft, and a half-hearted “Second Life” ripoff that hasn’t been heard from since 2012.
At this year’s San Francisco conference, however, the blog has outdone itself, anointing as winner a startup so frivolous and asinine that it makes its lackluster predecessors look like Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor by comparison. It’s a Boston-based venture called Alfred Club, and as far as I can tell the idea is basically “Uber for servants.”
Alfred, explains TechCrunch writer Sarah Perez, who must have drawn the short straw in the office pool, is “the first service layer on the shared economy that manages your routine across multiple on-demand and local services (like Handybook, Instacart, and the local dry cleaner).”
I was unable to find a precise English translation for that sentence, but I have to agree with ValleyWag’s Nitasha Tiku: It sounds an awful lot like a butler service. More from TechCrunch’s Perez....MORE
Just a couple of hard-working Harvard B-Schoolers, living the dream.
