{"id":523,"date":"2009-06-02T22:09:56","date_gmt":"2009-06-03T04:09:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/000523"},"modified":"2009-06-05T10:39:50","modified_gmt":"2009-06-05T16:39:50","slug":"june-2009-new-tech-overview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/523","title":{"rendered":"June 2009 New Tech Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just attended the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bdnewtech.com\/\">Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup<\/a> (the one in Boulder) and it was fun and enlightening as always.\u00a0 The presenters were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/localbunny.com\/\">LocalBunny<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Ken Zolot, one of the mentors for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techstars.org\/\">TechStars<\/a><\/li>\n<li>A presenter from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ida.gov.sg\/\">Singapore government IT department<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/clixosearch.com\/\">ClixoSearch<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.actionfeed.org\/\">iVolunteer<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lijit.com\/\">Lijit<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>First, after the networking over beer and snacks, we all went into the auditorium.\u00a0 We started off with some crazy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ted.com\">Ted<\/a> video, while everyone chatted.\u00a0 This was the first event I&#8217;ve been at with a <a href=\"http:\/\/search.twitter.com\/search?q=%23bdnt\">twitterstream<\/a>.\u00a0 Robert Reich did some administrative stuff, including a plea for money.\u00a0 Apparently, the new tech meetup requires about 1300 dollars a month to keep going&#8211;mostly for food and drink&#8211;and sponsorship has dried up.\u00a0 Then there was an opportunity for job announcements.\u00a0 There were 4-5; most were for php programmers, though I did hear one for a Django programmer.\u00a0 We did not do &#8216;looking for work&#8217; announcements&#8211;is that ominous?<\/p>\n<p>Events were announced after the job announcements petered out.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.andrewhyde.net\">Andrew Hyde<\/a> announced that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/calendar\/event?eid=ZmprNGs5dWlzM2RwaDZkNWl0ZmRhYnE0bmcgc3RhcnR1cHdlZWtlbmQuY29tXzNqbW5scWdkYmtuM2k2bGx2YzdpcXY5MzZrQGc&#038;ctz=America\/Denver\">Startup Weekend Boulder<\/a> is this weekend. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bouldersbdc.com\/\">Boulder Small Business Development Center<\/a> (who knew there was one?) is having a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bouldersbdc.com\/?site_id=167&#038;id_sub=34604&#038;page_id=48710&#038;productgallery_id=1\">workshop June 3rd about &#8216;access to capital&#8217;<\/a>.\u00a0 There&#8217;s an <a href=\"http:\/\/igniteboulder.com\/\">Ignite Boulder<\/a> coming up in July.\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure I missed one or two announcements.\u00a0 Then we were on to the presentations. Apparently, if you launch at the New Tech Meetup, you have the option of going &#8216;under the microscope&#8217;.\u00a0 I think this means that you crowdsource some of your business ideas to the New Tech Meetup; Robert mentioned that it also included some other services, including 30 minutes with one of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foundrygroup.com\/\">Foundry Group<\/a> founders.<\/p>\n<p><strong>LocalBunny<\/strong> apparently launched last month and chose to go &#8216;under the microscope&#8217;, and had an open board meeting tonight.\u00a0 They have a service that allows users to ask questions on facebook, sms (soon) and twitter, and get answers from companies.\u00a0 They used to have some kind of consumer play, but after a month of market feedback, have decided to focus on providing &#8216;white label&#8217; social media integration to businesses.\u00a0 The use case is, I ask a question of the Boulder Theater via my facebook status.\u00a0 This goes to the Local Bunny servers, which attempt to answer it in an automated fashion, via whatever avenue you asked the question.\u00a0 If the answer is not available, it is passed on to the company in question, and you are notified of that.\u00a0 My take is that this could be very useful, but it will be hard for me as a user to know how to contact the appropriate company.\u00a0 In addition, one of the selling points is that the answer to the question may be broadcast on your facebook status (again, depending on how you ask the question)&#8211;I&#8217;m not a fan of that.\u00a0 And the idea of automated answers seems like a hard sell; I did miss the initial launch and perhaps that demoed this crucial piece.<\/p>\n<p>Next up was <strong>Ken Zolot<\/strong>, who was a TechStars mentor.\u00a0 He&#8217;s an MIT professor, interested in the ecology of entrepeneurship, and specializes in taking products from &#8216;tech push to market pull&#8217;.\u00a0 He mentioned that ta key peice of the ecology for startups is mentors, and not famous ones.\u00a0 Real local mentors who engage with you and help you through your mistakes.\u00a0 Specialized mentors who have rolodexes, specialties in team dynamics and\/or market connection expertise can be especially helpful.\u00a0 And Ken doesn&#8217;t have a blog!<\/p>\n<p>Then there was a presentation from a <strong>representative of the Singapore government IT department<\/strong>, aka IDA (I did not catch his name).\u00a0 He had some difficulties with his presentation, but he called off some great statistics about Singapore.\u00a0 It has 4.5 million people in an area smaller than the San Francisco Bay.\u00a0 Singapore has a national infrastructure plan: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ida.gov.sg\/About%20us\/20070903145526.aspx\">Intelligent Nation 2015<\/a>.\u00a0 They are really good at building infrastructure&#8211;they&#8217;ve already saturated the entire country with wifi (7500 hotspots) and will have 1GB fiber everywhere by 2012.\u00a0 (They are also replicating the infrastructure throughout Asia.)\u00a0 His presentation wasn&#8217;t all that focused, but he was evangelizing Singapore as a hub for tech development, especially for companies that need fat pipes (video, etc).\u00a0 He did tell a funny story about an investigation into a GPS driven bus location system, so that you could know exactly when the next bus will come.\u00a0 He said the proposal was considered, but not funded when further research showed that the buses ran every three minutes anyway!\u00a0 (Shades of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.snopes.com\/business\/genius\/spacepen.asp\">NASA pen urban legend<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nextbus.com\">Nextbus<\/a>!)\u00a0 He didn&#8217;t really address concerns about the government choosing winners (versus the marketplace); I guess with the US financial crisis and China&#8217;s rise, the marketplace is out of favor a bit.\u00a0 He did say that the government doesn&#8217;t want to run, say, a fiber optic network, so it hands over operations to private concerns; however, the government still apparently has a say in the pricing.\u00a0 All in all, it is pretty impressive that the meetup can draw a foreign representative.<\/p>\n<p>Then Matt from <strong>Clixo<\/strong> presented.\u00a0 They are a boutique search engine marketing and conversion firm in Denver.\u00a0 He condensed a one hour presentation into 5 minutes.\u00a0 Matt gave a great example of improving the conversion for a software company.\u00a0 Their focus is on lead generation and basic SEO&#8211;they primarily aim at taking companies that have awful websits and making them better by researching and focusing on target audience and measureable outcomes.\u00a0 I think Matt might have missed his aim a bit&#8211;I can&#8217;t imagine anyone at the BDNT not taking conversion seriously.\u00a0 I talked to one of his coworkers afterwards and pointed them to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/000498\">GWO<\/a>, which I thought might complement their current offerings nicely.<\/p>\n<p>The <strong>iVolunteer<\/strong> folks did something different with their five minutes.\u00a0 They talked about 30 seconds about the concept&#8211;networked apps on the phone and elsewhere that make it easy for you to volunteer&#8211;and then asked for help from the crowd.\u00a0 Apparently, all the good domain names with anything resembling &#8216;volunteer&#8217; in them are gone; these folks wanted help with a new name.\u00a0 They wrote down a bunch.\u00a0 Interesting use of a lot of intellectual firepower.\u00a0 And by <em>interesting<\/em>, I mean I&#8217;m not sure if it was wise or not.<\/p>\n<p>Last up was <strong>Lijit<\/strong>.\u00a0 After a quick overview of what Lijit does (combines a bunch of sources of online information into one profile; allows you to search on them via a javascript widget; they also run their own ad network), the presenters (<a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/micah\">Micah<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/gracekboyle\">Grace<\/a>) gave an overview of Lijit&#8217;s new, pre-alpha tool that allows you to measure online influence.\u00a0 Influence, according to Lijit, consists of three things.\u00a0 Audience, trust and expertise.\u00a0 Return visitors and discovery based visitors are proxies for audience.\u00a0 Relationship number and strength is a proxy for trust, and Lijit searches are a proxy for expertise.\u00a0 He showed a demo of &#8216;influence&#8217;, which Lijit condenses down into one number.\u00a0 Currently, it is done at a large granularity, but the plan is to have it get finer and finer.\u00a0 This seems like a great idea, especially if you are Lijit and want to sell ads, until you realize that influence is a very fluid thing.\u00a0 I might be an influence on <a href=\"\/wordpress\/archives\/category\/gwt\/\">GWT<\/a> to some folks, (friends that are evaluating it).\u00a0 I would not be to others.\u00a0 My parents consider me influential regarding computers; my IT friends don&#8217;t.\u00a0 I guess where Lijit loses me is that they don&#8217;t appear to treat &#8216;audience&#8217; with enough respect&#8211;the type of reader is at least as important as my content.\u00a0 Again, this was all based on a 5 minute presentation of a pre-alpha project, so I&#8217;m sure it has room to grow.\u00a0 Lijit certainly has the data to make it interesting.<\/p>\n<p>And that was all of the June 2009 Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup, Boulder edition.\u00a0 As always, it was a great networking scene, lots of energy and excitement, and good laughs.\u00a0 I will say that the twitterstream made things more interesting; there were at least two funny comments that got everyone laughing up on the screen.\u00a0 I think it would be interesting as a presenter to see the stream (it was behind them) and hae a chance to interact more.<\/p>\n<p><em>Update June 5, 10:37 am: Via the the <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/COStartupTrack\">CO Startup Tracking Twitter feed<\/a>, I found that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rockyradar.com\">RockyRadar<\/a> has a nice write up of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rockyradar.com\/infotech\/?p=416\">June BDNTM<\/a>.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve written <a href=\"\/wordpress\/archives\/000494\">about them before<\/a>, glad to see they&#8217;re still going strong.<\/em><br \/>\n[tags]bdnt[\/tags]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just attended the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup (the one in Boulder) and it was fun and enlightening as always.\u00a0 The presenters were: LocalBunny Ken Zolot, one of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-tech-meetup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}