New Technology Meetups Reviews

A review of the November, December, and January meetups, which occur the first Tuesday of every month at 6:00 PM in the Wolf Law Building at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Denver/Boulder New Technology Meetup is a venue for technologists to showcase their latest hardware, software and business ventures. The Meetup begins with announcements of available positions, positions wanted and general announcements by the audience and the host, Robert Reich (founder of the Boulder startup Me.dium). The Meetup consists of five minute presentations followed by five minutes of Q&A per presenter. The group meets the first Tuesday of every month in the Wittemeyer Courtroom on the first floor of the Wolf Law Building on the University of Colorado-Boulder campus. A reception begins at 6:00 with presentations beginning at 6:30. Ample time is available after the presentations for individual discussion and networking.

The November 2007 Meetup featured presentations by Friedrick Schweitzer of Txtbus.net, a team from Chess Inc. of Denver and a team from Adaptive Blue. Mr. Schweitzer presented his technology which allows users to receive mass transit arrival and departure information via text message. The audience was appreciative of Mr. Schweitzer’s flyering experience which resulted in multiple cease-and-desist letters from RTD. The team from Chess Inc. presented their expansion from the computer and printer hardware business into the data recovery business. The group claims that their recovery system can reduce data retrieval times from as long as three days to as short as one hour. The team from Adaptive Blue introduced their smart browsing technology to the Meetup audience. The technology uses semantics and user input to create a smarter and better web browsing experience.

At the December 2007 Meetup several groups presented including Ari Newman of filtrbox and Alek Komarnitsky. Mr. Newman introduced his content aggregation website (filtrbox.com) which retrieves content based upon user-defined search parameters. The technology then aggregates the search contents into links available to the user. The technology is useful for people who want to be kept up to date of current events in a certain industry without having to select specific news sources. Mr. Komarnitsky showcased his Christmas light display which can be controlled by remote users via his website. Mr. Komarnitsky maintains the site mostly for fun, but also uses it to draw attention to Celiac disease. The University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research has received over $25,000 in donations to thanks to traffic from Mr. Komarnitsky’s site.

The January 2008 Meetup was well attended and featured presentations by Michael Locatis, CIO for the State of Colorado, Camberley Bates of Bates Strategy Group, and Dan Moore of Moore Consulting. Mr. Locatis gave an introduction to Governor Ritter’s Innovation Council which seeks to promote innovation in Colorado’s technology sector, government, and academic institutions. Mr. Locatis mentioned that an Innovation Roadmap was being produced for the State of Colorado and that he would return to the Meetup to present the roadmap in about three months. Ms Bates drew on her experience as a principal at Bates Strategy Group to discuss the principles of messaging and positioning for technology entrepreneurs. Her presentation was well-received and she may return at a later Meetup to discuss related topics. Mr. Moore of Moore Consulting gave a presentation on his experience using the Google Web Toolkit and compared it to his experience using other similar tools.

New technology presentations were made by Eric Olden of Symplified, Oz DiGennaro of Galgal Systems, Randy Cox of Webpartner.com, and a group from eswarm.com. Mr. Olden introduced Symplified which offers identity management services. Mr. DiGennaro of Galgal Systems presented his work on developing tools for the semantic web. Mr. Cox of Webpartner.com introduced technology which aggregates content from user-designated websites. Finally, the group from eSwarm introduced their purchasing power aggregation website which coordinates individual purchases into bulk orders.

The next Meetup is Tuesday February 5th at 6:00 pm.

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