The company began targeting businesses as customers for its thousands of employees — or rabbits — across the nation during SXSW in March, when it launched TaskRabbit for business. That announcement allowed companies to hire employees on an hourly basis through the service and hire more than one rabbit at once.

But Thursday’s announcement takes this much further, particularly by handling the paperwork for businesses who want to hire temps, and by providing information like resumes to potential employers, who can pick which ones to hire. This is TaskRabbit’s new goal: to shake up the decades-old temp industry. However, the classic TaskRabbit service for consumers will remain unchanged.

The move makes sense, as charging a business a percentage of a month-long salary will likely be a more profitable and stable form of revenue than taking a percentage of fees paid for a few hours of dog-walking, for instance. Plus, TaskRabbit employees said they’d already discovered businesses were trying to use the service for hiring for temporary administrative positions, so making the option official was a no-brainer.

“The temp industry hasn’t had a lot innovation in a long time, said Victor Echevarria, who heads business development at TaskRabbit. “So we’re moving away from the notion of tasks and moving toward the value of jobs.”

The company has taken in a little less than $40 million in funding, and reported that revenue is five times greater than it was a year ago. TaskRabbit already has 15,000 companies signed up for TaskRabbit for business, and expects more to be joining after this new addition.

This new component will allow TaskRabbits to use a LinkedIn connect feature to pull in their resumes to the site, and they’ll be able to write a cover letter when applying for jobs. Potential employers can input information about the job they’re posting and select the corresponding paperwork (1099 contract employees versus those with W2 forms.) TaskRabbit will then show them the candidates for different positions, corresponding resume information, and then provide the required paperwork.

“The biggest challenge was compliance. Businesses who want to hire temps or even want to hire people full-time, there’s a lot of paperwork and headaches involved in having a compliant workforce,” he said. “A large percentage of the work we put into this was creating a legally complaint solution.”

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The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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Businesses have long tried to harness the web’s convenience and efficiency to move physical goods and services. Things like online ticketing, appointment booking and even shopping all let people take care of tasks when they want and where they want. But the newer crop of services are trying to close the gap between online action and real-world gratification.

As the New York Times covered on Friday evening, Google is testing a same-day delivery service. From the post:

Though the service propels Google into commerce, the company does not intend to operate warehouses or a shipping service but to team up with retailers and delivery companies. Several San Francisco retailers, including national chains, are participating in the program already.

For shoppers, the service means they can avoid the trouble of driving to the store and some of the wait for items ordered online.

The article notes that Google’s rationale for getting into this business is somewhat unclear, although it maybe be as simple as meeting rival Amazon on its own turf. It may also be Google’s attempt to understand what will become the next logical leap for the web in a way that doesn’t require it to build out a physical distribution network. In all walks of life, our physical world and online worlds are converging, so it makes sense to try to understand how that might happen, and where the limitations and points of friction are.

And as the article points out, once Google starts delivering products it can track the effectiveness of its ads from the initial click all the way into a user’s home — once again bridging the divide between the online and physical realms, and perhaps boosting the amount it could charge for ads. During the third quarter Google was walloped with a 20-percent drop in profits in part from declining ad costs.

However, I’m old enough to remember Kozmo, which allowed users in cities to order a movie or ice cream and get it an hour later as well as other experiments in same-day delivery. But Kozmo, like many others of the dot-com era, failed to make enough money to cover their costs. One hopes that Google’s efforts here have a real business model or rationale, or this next logical leap for the internet isn’t going to pan out.

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I’m not ashamed to say that I was an AirBnB skeptic when I first heard about the service. Like many people, I thought the idea of someone sharing their bedroom or apartment with complete strangers for money was a pie-in-the-sky idea dreamed up by some San Francisco hippie. It seemed like a variation on the idea of “couch surfing, which I figured would appeal to cheap students and other bohemian types, but not many regular people — and certainly not to business travelers or anyone important from a commercial point of view (in my defence, even uber-VC Fred Wilson missed out on the potential of the company).

Both of those assumptions have been proven wrong, and it didn’t really hit home for me until I tried an AirBnB rental myself. On a trip to San Francisco for GigaOM’s Mobilize conference, I rented a one-bedroom apartment using the service, and it was an eye-opener.

The social web lowers the barriers to interaction

In a sense, services like AirBnB — as well as ride-sharing services like Lyft and crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter — take advantage of the same internet-powered social phenomenon that media entities like Twitter do: namely, a dramatic lowering of the barriers to interaction, to the point where it actually changes the way people behave in some fairly important and disruptive ways. And I think the real repercussions of that disruption are only beginning to make themselves obvious.

The main reason I tried AirBnB was that another conference had booked every reasonably priced hotel room within driving distance of downtown San Francisco — but I was also curious to see what the AirBnB experience was like. So I looked for something in the same price range as an average hotel room, and found dozens of potential rentals, each with photos of the home and the owner and reviews from users. At that point, it didn’t look all that different from something like Craigslist (although much more appealing from a design point of view).

But then the influence of social networks was added to the equation: since I had connected with my Facebook account, I noticed that the owner of one of the rentals and I had a mutual friend in common. Any hesitation I had about renting the home of a complete stranger in an unfamiliar city vanished, thanks to the power of the FOAF (friend of a friend) effect. If the couple who owned the apartment knew my friend, then I figured there was a better-than-even chance that I would like them.

Sure enough, they arranged to get me the keys in a friendly and efficient way, they left me a personal note and sent an email with tips about their home and the location, and they offered me whatever was in their fridge. On top of that, the apartment was lovely and well-kept, with homey furniture and personal touches that no hotel could offer: not only was it nicer looking than a hotel, but the whole experience was friendlier and more welcoming.

The scale that the social web provides changes the game

Granted, not every AirBnB experience is going to be so top-notch — there have been some incidents in the company’s history where renters took advantage of the owner and his or her property, and the service has had to adapt to that. But despite those events, the growth of the network suggests that it is disrupting the casual accommodation market in a way the hotel industry probably never expected. Even though bed-and-breakfast operations and corporate or vacation rentals have existed for some time, the sheer scale of AirBnB changes the game.

As Clay Shirky noted in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” even behavior that has existed before — such as sharing information with our friends and family, or connecting with people who have similar interests — becomes qualitatively different when hundreds of thousands or even tens of millions of people are involved. That’s what I think we are seeing with things like AirBnB and Kickstarter and ride-sharing services like Lyft, or job-outsourcing services like TaskRabbit: they aren’t just an incremental change in human behavior, they are a fundamentally disruptive one.

In a sense, each of these services just looks like a more refined and organized version of something you could have previously done through Craigslist: a ride somewhere, a place to sleep, supporters for your new CD or other project. But instead of being something that a small proportion of people do, the growth of AirBnB and other similar crowd-powered services has the potential to seriously impact some of the industries we take for granted — whether it’s the hotel business or the venture-capital or music or transportation industries.

What other industries could be disrupted in this way? Could we see people sharing health care someday, or their phone services, or swapping their corporate vacation time through some kind of online marketplace? It’s interesting to think about what else could benefit from this kind of phenomenon, and what the long-term effects on us as social beings will be when that happens.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Aih

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The idea behind the app is to connect drivers who want to make a little extra money, with passengers that are looking for an alternative to driving, biking or public transportation in real time. Picture what Uber is trying to do with an on demand car service but for regular car owners. Ride sharing company Zimride recently started offering something similar through its Lyft mobile app. “It’s a rethink of transportation,” Sunil Paul, SideCar’s CEO and investor through Spring Ventures, tells me in an interview.

The app is launching to the public today, and has been in use in beta since February. So far 10,000 rides have been shared over the past few months, says Paul.

The technology came from a team in Michigan, and Paul says he himself holds a patent for using smart phones for coordinating transportation. The company was seed funded from a long list of well known investors including Huron River Ventures, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, First Step Fund, Jeff Clarke, Lisa Gansky (who wrote The Mesh), Robert Goldberg, Jared Kopf, Konstantin Othmer, Mark Pincus, Martin Roscheisen (former Nanosolar CEO), Josh Silverman, and Thomas Varghese.

An interesting hitch is that to avoid having the driver be classified as running a commercial service (and thereby violating his/her insurance policy) SideCar has no formal payment plan in place for rides. The system will show the average donation paid for a ride, but the payment itself is voluntary. While that might seem a little weird, I think that most riders will just default to the average — the mentality behind tipping works the same way. And because the system runs on credit cards, that avoids the awkward exchange of cash.

A big focus for the team in the beta phase has been making sure its drivers and riders feel safe and secure. The achilles heel of the collaborative consumption movement is security, from Airbnb’s security scare last year, to Hi-Gear shutting down its luxury car sharing service after being targeted by thieves.

Paul says that both drivers and riders are screened and vetted. The passengers need to have already entered a valid credit card, and drivers need to have a current drivers license, are interviewed and background checks are conducted. The cars being used in the system also can’t be too old and have to have four doors.

SideCar is an example of two emerging trends. First, the CleanWeb, or using information technology to manage resources and infrastructure. Paul coined this phrase and it’s the basis for his investing thesis. SideCar can reduce the amount of cars on roads (and fuel burned) by providing alternative transportation options. Second, the collaborative consumption movement, or using mobile and social to share “stuff” from apartments (Airbnb) to cars (RelayRides).

Other alternative startups available in the Bay Area include Uber, peer-to-peer car sharing companies RelayRides and Getaround, electric scooter sharing with Scoot Networks, Google-style commuter buses with RidePal and old-school car sharing companies Zipcar and CityCar Share. Paul previously was incubating a peer-to-peer ride sharing company called Spride Share, but decided to shelve that company because he says he decided he didn’t like the business model.

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Why? Barrie explained that as hard as it is for perpetually plugged-in Europeans and Americans to imagine, only about 30 percent of the world’s seven billion inhabitants are online, leaving billions of potential Freelancer.com customers out there yet to get online. In Asia, for instance, internet penetration is still at a modest 21 percent, leaving some 825 million people yet to get connected.

Getting those folks onto the internet will be great for them (we’ve already seen scattered cases of “million dollar freelancers” who have built seven-figure incomes off platforms like Freelancer.com in the developing world) but it will be pretty awesome for Barrie’s business as well, he believes. The flood of newly wired workers will provide a huge and growing customer base of hungry and driven potential freelancers for his site, which already has about 3.5 million users around the world. Barrie’s company charges them and job posters a hefty but variable commission to connect on the site.

Dismissing fears that the trends his site is banking on will mean fewer jobs in the West, Barrie is even optimistic that this explosion in online outsourcing will be good for those of us in developed countries –provided we develop an entrepreneurial mindset and start putting the huge pool of cheap talent across the world to work realizing our ideas and supporting our businesses for, essentially, peanuts. While this inexpensive labor pool may be good news for someone hoping to get a business off the ground on a shoestring, the ability to get stuff done at low cost may be cold comfort for those who are less entrepreneurial by education or character and would like to remain employed. But Barrie seems less than moved by these worries.

Is there anything Barrie isn’t bullish on? In short, online labor platforms that look to compete by serving a specialized sector or targeted geographic location. The likes of Zaarly and ExpertBids “are all going to fail,” according to Barrie because of their inability to scale sufficiently to make enough to be attractive business opportunities. Want to take in a million dollars? Then ten million in business needs to go through the site – the equivalent of something like $100 million in U.S. labor costs if you’re dealing in lower wages overseas – and Barrie just doesn’t see the market being there for niche sites. Those that aim for geographic specificity in the style of TaskRabbit will struggle to reproduce their success in one city in another a bit down the highway, making expanding the business a gigantic money sink, in Barrie’s opinion.

Do you think Barrie’s optimism is well founded?

Image courtesy of Freelancer.com.

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Dave McClure speaking at the US Embassy in Mexico City. Photo by David E. Weekly

It’s around 8:30 on a warm Friday night in Mexico City, and we’re all milling around a podium set up in the lobby of the private residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Earl Anthony Wayne. Dozens of Mexico’s tech entrepreneurs and investing elite are mingling with more than 40 members of Geeks on a Plane, a traveling tech-revue of sorts organized by the Silicon Valley investment group, 500 Startups. Just outside the lobby, an expansive manicured lawn leads up to a massive, high rock wall. Guards with bullet-proof vests ushered the group through the fortress gate only about an hour before.

The Ambassador gives his polished remarks, followed by one of Mexico’s rare venture capitalists. Now it’s time for Dave McClure, the investor behind the two-year old fund and accelerator group 500 Startups, to say a few words. He is decidedly non-descript – glasses that are thick, jeans that sag, a t-shirt that says “500 Startups: We’re kind of a big deal,” flip-flops, and a black blazer as a gesture to the formal occasion (“hiding his hillbilly” as he calls it). McClure is a throwback to a Silicon Valley of the time before the brogrammers.

McClure thanks the Ambassador for the special night and starts to speak. He throws down his first salvo:

“For the last two heads of states that I met with I was also wearing flip-flops, so please don’t take it as any slight. If it’s good enough for the President of Chile and good enough for Hillary Clinton, it ‘s damn well good enough for Mexico.”

McClure is trying to do something a little bit different. What Billy Beane is to baseball, McClure is to technology startups. And like Beane, he is willing to go anywhere in the world to find a slight edge to beat his richer, bigger and fancier rivals on Sand Hill Road. He is quirky, offbeat and unconventional, which is one of the reasons why entrepreneurs love him, and he’s also a marketing machine that can turn out slogans and brands like a finely-tuned copy shop on Madison Avenue.

He’s more like a man with a mission or a preacher with a sermon than an investor trying to make a living. 500 Startups partner George Kellerman describes McClure as being so driven it’s as if his bucket list has just one item: to find the undiscovered entrepreneurs across the furthest reaches of the globe.

These principles are also where Geeks on a Plane comes in. The group brings together dozens of entrepreneurs and investors on a jam-packed, brain-jolting tour to meet with the local investors and innovators in cities throughout the world. Little sleep is had and much geeking (and partying) is done.

Geeks on a Plane Latin America kicked off last Thursday night in South Beach Miami — where the Mayor of Miami-Dade County, Carlos Gimenez, presented McClure with a plaque for tech industry excellence – and continues through Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires over the next week. I’m traveling with the group (yeah, I have a rough life) and will be reporting on tech innovation across Latin America.

Moneyball for startups

So how exactly does McClure plan to disrupt tech investing? The group is starting out with what McClure calls a more “scientific” and “systematic” approach: essentially, it’s a numbers game. Instead of making a few several million dollar investments into promising early startups, 500 Startups is making smaller — $50,000 to $250,000 – investments into a lot more early stage startups; hence the “500 Startups” moniker.

The idea, as McClure puts it, is to fail more cheaply. And with more bets, the odds of hitting a winner is higher. The not-often talked about dark reality of the tech entrepreneur ecosystem is that it is wrought with failure. Some 70 to 80 percent of software startups fail, but if they fail cheaply and quickly, the heartache is a bit less.

For the 20 percent of companies that do hit some kind of stride or scale, 500 Startups offers follow-on rounds. For the couple of startups that are able to break out, 500 Startups helps usher them along to the venture stage, where more traditional venture capitalists step in. McClure points to a company like TaskRabbit as an example of a company that broke out and went on to raise successive venture rounds.

500 Startups’ first fund was for $29 million and I’ve heard that the group is currently raising another larger fund. By the end of 2013, 500 Startups will likely hit its namesake and will have backed about 500 companies, estimates McClure. Already they’ve closed on almost 300 companies.

Platforms & international markets

Part of the reason that more, smaller bets could work is because $50,000 is now enough to test out a Web or mobile idea and begin the scale-up process. Five to 10 years ago, before cloud computing and Web and mobile distribution platforms like Google, Facebook, Apple and Android, the costs to build and scale a tech startup were significantly higher.

McClure’s investing thesis is all about the low cost of building on these platforms. For example, Wildfire sits atop Facebook, SendGrid is about cloud-based email, and 955dreams is a product of iOS. He once taught Stanford students how to tap into these new Web and mobile platforms through his now famous Facebook class and later went on to make investments in the Facebook Fund.

International – and underserved — markets are another investing thesis. 500 Startups is one of a few firms that is willing to go more than 30 miles away from Sand Hill Road to find a deal. The truth is that the more traditional venture guys are scared to pursue this global strategy – the lifestyle is hard (constant travel). McClure, who is married with two children, says he spends close to three to four months on the road traveling. Geeks On a Plane is a large part of this international strategy.

Of course, 500 Startups isn’t all about McClure. His partners travel, hustle, party and forgo sleep (almost) as much as he does. Paul Singh somehow is able to keep up with McClure’s exuberance for entrepreneurs and is leading the fund’s work in India. Bedy Yang, who tells me that she “has the best job in the world,” can speak Chinese and Spanish and is heading up investments in Latin America. Newer partners include Christen O’Brien, who leads all of the Geeks on a Plane trips, conferences and corporate partnerships and Kellerman, who has a long history with the tech industry in Japan and was once a firefighter (really).

A marketing machine and a cult of personality

500 Startups is also as much about Moneyball as it is about marketing. McClure’s partners say his penchant for naming things and branding ideas is one of his invaluable skills – 500 Startups, Geeks on a Plane, the family-tech focused Mama Bear conference, the designer’s Warm Gun conference. As a marketer at heart, McClure is able to help companies think through growth better than pretty much any investor.

He’s also honed a cult of personality around a profanity-fueled, take-no-prisoners character that yells and swears when presentations get boring and writes brightly-colored rants on the company’s blog and Twitter feed. One of the most memorable scenes from the Geeks on a Plane India trip in December was when McClure shook up a startup demo event in Bangalore by telling the unpolished, young and earnest Indian entrepreneur presenters to “stop being so f*cking boring.”

The created personality is the branded Dave McClure. The real Dave McClure is much more mellow and thoughtful. He’s also first and foremost entrepreneur-friendly. In international markets like Mexico City and Delhi, McClure likes to tell local investors that it’s their fault if the tech ecosystem isn’t producing many quality startups — it’s not the lack of entrepreneurial talent in the regions, says McClure.

Will it work?

McClure can be entrepreneur-friendly to a fault. Kellerman described him as bordering on altruistic. That’s one reason why he doesn’t have a shortage of deal flow, but that could be another reason why a Limited Partner might feel more comfortable giving funds to a more cut-throat crew.

Another question is whether or not the return on the fund’s breakouts will be high enough to make back the desired amount of money. The traditional VC model is that one or two companies out of dozens can make back the entire fund. But if the fund’s stake in the firms that make it big is too small, 500 would need many more hits to collectively win big.

McClure acknowledges the risk, but says they’ve helped solve that problem by having 500 Startups do follow-on investments as well as the initial seed stage. And McClure can point to some breakouts that they’ve ushered along through that process like TaskRabbit, Twilio, SendGrid and Wildfire. His most famous exits were personal investments including Mint.com and SlideShare.

Another potential downside could be the pace of the investments. While globetrotting, red-eye flights and constant networking and mentoring can be exhilarating, they come with sacrifices, like being away from family and mental and physical burnout. Such a rapid pace could also cut down on the time for a decent amount of due diligence. Yes, many of 500’s first seed investments are experiments, but the partners need enough time with the entrepreneurs to make a somewhat smart bet.

From here to there

McClure grew up in West Virginia and about two decades ago joined the ranks of Silicon Valley as an engineer and programmer. He ran marketing for job search engine Simply Hired and joined PayPal as its Director of Marketing in the early 2000’s, which he describes as a time where “everything was going to crap but Google and PayPal were doing pretty well.” PayPal doing pretty well meant that when he left he had some funds to use to experiment with angel investing.

In 2007 McClure gained fame when he taught a  Facebook platform class, and then went on to manage two small funds for the Founders Fund and the Facebook Fund. While he had less than $3 million to play with, he made about 43 investments. And that’s where he says he began to hone the idea of the 500 Startups model.

The bigger question is why. Why does McClure have a burning passion to scour the world for undiscovered entrepreneurs? McClure says:

“It’s because I f8cked up. I was Billy Beane. I spent 20 years in the Valley and didn’t make it. Then I discovered I was a lot better at helping other people make it.”

Today, 500 Startups is just two years old, so it’s got a bit of time before it will prove out whether its model will become the future of tech investing. But the coming Facebook IPO could actually become a transformative act for the group.

In the late 90’s, Ron Conway was just another Silicon Valley angel investor. But with the Google IPO, he was transformed into the godfather of Silicon Valley start-ups. Likewise, Facebook’s IPO could act as an accelerant for McClure’s group.

As Facebook grows and also seeks to fill the positions of departing execs, it will look around to buy companies. It’s already started to increase its acquisitions. 500 Startups has backed companies with some of the top product and design people in the Valley, and many of their companies have the Facebook platform baked into their DNA. It doesn’t hurt that McClure spent years teaching and investing in the Facebook platform effect either.

Perhaps next week’s Facebook IPO could turn out to be the fund’s undercover lynchpin to remaking the landscape of tech investing.

Disclosure: Dave McClure was compensated by GigaOmni Media with stock and cash for his consulting efforts during the early days of the company. We have not had a business relationship since the end of 2006.

Image courtesy of Steve Nagata.

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Two NBCUniversal execs — Lauren Zalaznick, chairman of entertainment and digital networks and integrated media, and Nick Lehman, president of digital — will co-chair the new digital advisory board. Board members include:

Amy Banse, Managing Director and Head of Funds at Comcast Ventures; LeahBusque, Founder, TaskRabbit; Beth Ferreira, COO of Fab.com;  Cindy Gallop, Founder & CEO of IfWeRanTheWorld; Megan Gardner, CEO of Plum District; Jennifer Hyman, CEO & Co-Founder of Rent the Runway;  Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something;  Nasreen Madhany, Global CEO of Neo@Ogilvy; Marissa Mayer, VP of Location and Local Services at Google ; Heidi S. Messer, Co-Founder & Chairman of Collective [i];  Alison Pincus, Co-Founder & Chief Partnership Officer of One Kings Lane; Amanda Richman, President, Digital of MediaVest USA; Jessica Schell, EVP of New Media and Digital Entertainment at Universal Pictures; Vivian Schiller, SVP & Chief Digital Officer at NBC News;  Chloe Sladden, VP of Media, Twitter; Colleen Soriano, SVP & Managing Partner, US Director of Digital Communications, Universal McCann; Rachel Sterne, Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York; Alexa von Tobel, Founder and CEO of LearnVest.com; Joanne Zaiac, President of Digitas NY Region.

Women at NBCU board members Gilt Group Chairman, Susan Lyne; iVillage President, Jodi Kahn; tech entrepreneur/investor, Esther Dyson; and Monica Halpert, former CMO of Bluefly, are joining the digital extension as well.

Amy Banse, managing director and head of funds at Comcast Ventures, will be speaking at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads in NYC on May 23. Register today.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock user [Mehmet Dilhiz].

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