Esther Dyson, Guy Kawasaki and Yossi Vardi Join TechCrunch20 Expert Panel

The TechCrunch20 Panel of Experts is now nearly complete. Today we add Esther Dyson, Guy Kawasaki and Yossi Vardi to the impressive list of individuals who will judge the startups launching at the conference and determine who will ultimately win the $50,000 top prize.

The final companies for TechCrunch20 have been selected, and more announcements are coming soon. Register for the event, which is being held in San Francisco on September 17-18, here.

Esther Dyson and her company EDventure specialize in analyzing the impact of emerging technologies and markets on economies and societies. She is the author of Release 2.0, a book which discussed how the Internet has affected our lives. Esther has been a board member or early investor in numerous startups, including Flickr, PowerSet, ZEDO, Medscape, and Medstory. In addition to her active roles in a number of not-for-profit and advisory organizations, Esther enjoys private aviation and commercial space startups and hosts an annual Flight School conference in Aspen.

Guy Kawasaki is CEO of early-stage venture capital firm Garage Technology Ventures and an active blogger. Guy was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, CEO of ACIUS and founder of Fog City Software. Guy has written eight books, including The Art of the Start. He sits on the board of BitPass, FilmLoop and SimplyHired. His most recent venture is launching Truemors, a site dedicated to democraticizing information by encouraging everday people to post news.

Yossi Vardi is one if Israel’s hi-tech veterans, having helped build some 40 hi-tech companies in Internet, software, telecommunications, electro-optics, energy, environment and other areas. Several companies Dr. Vardi co-founded became successful public companies, among them Alon, Advanced Technologies, and Granite Hacarmel. Internet companies backed by Dr. Vardi include Mirabilis Ltd, ICQ (acquired by AOL), Gteko (acquired by Microsoft), Scopus and Answers.com. He is a member of the World Economic Forum, on the board of Amdocs, and the advisory board of 3i. He has served as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program.

Spock Open Public Beta

People search engine Spock, which we’ve been covering for a few months, has publicly launched.

Spock differs from differs from recently launched WikiYou and other people search engines by using algorithms to find and merge the majority of their content into a unified profile. User generated content such (tags, links, photos) then augment the auto-generated content they spider from other sources such as wikipedia, IMDB, or social networking sites.

Note that competitor Wink seems to be moving toward a more automated model as well. They recently crossed 200 million people profiles and have been incorporating some of the same data sources as Spock.

A key Spock feature is a widget that shows results for a given tag (see embed below). Making the service public makes the widget a lot more useful. You can use it to make any number of lists around a how Spock ranks search terms. See, for example, the results for blogger and tech blogger.

Spock is certainly fun, and encourages user interaction by adding and voting on descriptive tags. It could easily become a definitive source of information about people. It will, however, likely take a massive number of page views to properly monetize the product - people searches do not generate the kind of advertising rates that ecommerce and other searches command.