IMPORTANT NOTE: Applications are due by midnight pst this Friday, June 27 (submit your company here), and our 50 finalists will be selected by Friday, August 1.

We are pleased to announce that joining Marc Andreessen, Roelof Botha, Ron Conway, Chris DeWolf, Dan Farber, Om Malik, Marissa Mayer, Sean Parker, Kevin Rose Sheryl Sandberg, Yossi Vardi and Jeff Weiner are three new additions to the TechCrunch50 expert panel. Marc Benioff, Don Dodge and Mark Cuban have signed on as TechCrunch50 experts.

Keep checking in with the TechCrunch50 blog, as additional announcements about experts and panels will be up next. Background on Marc, Don and Mark is as follows:

	Marc Benioff Marc Benioff is chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Under Benioff’s direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. For its revolutionary approach, salesforce.com has been lauded as one of BusinessWeek’s Top 100 Most Innovative Companies, named No. 7 on The Wired 40, and selected for the past two years as a Top Ten Disrupter by Forbes. Benioff has been widely recognized for pioneering innovation with honors such as the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, the SDForum Visionary Award, Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year by the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business, and being ranked No. 7 on the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT survey by eWEEK. CrunchBase profile.
	Don Dodge Don Dodge is a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks. Don is currently Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. Don has been in the software business for more than 20 years. He started his software career with Digital Equipment, aka DEC, in the database group. He worked with 5 software start-ups over the next 12 years. Forte Software was the first multiplatform object oriented development environment. AltaVista was the first search engine on the web. Napster was the first P2P file sharing network. Bowstreet was the first web services development environment. Groove Networks was the first secure P2P collaboration platform. Now he is at Microsoft… “the biggest start-up in the world”… working with VC’s and start-ups in the greater Boston area. CrunchBase profile.
	Mark Cuban Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and chairman of HDNet a HD TV cable network. July 1982 saw Cuban start MicroSolutions. MicroSolutions became a software reseller and system integration company, selling products such as Compuserve, Carbon Copy, and Lotus Notes, with the company’s biggest client being Perot Systems. Cuban sold MicroSolutions to Compuserve for $6 million in 1990. In 1995 Cuban and friend Todd Wagner became interested in the early stages of the Internet along with their interest in basketball resulted in them starting broadcast.com which grew to revenues of almost $100 million and 330 staff. The internet company Yahoo brought Broadcast.com with Cuban earning himself just over 5 billion worth of Yahoo stock. CrunchBase profile.

More announcements will be coming up next week. Stay Tuned.

In addition to announcing our next three experts, we would also like to thank our new service partner Ustream for joining TechCrunch50 this year. Thank you!!

Ustream is the leading internet broadcasting platform. Ustream’s proprietary technology powers an easy-to-use, web-based interface, allowing anyone with a camera, computer and Internet connection to broadcast live to the world. Integrated with a host of interactive tools including chatrooms, co-host, and shout meter, Ustream’s platform delivers real-time, social experiences on the web. Since its beta launch in March 2007, Ustream has grown to 360,000 registered users broadcasting 15,000 live shows a day. Ustream.TV is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is privately held. For more information, please visit: www.ustream.tv.

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