The Denver/Boulder New Technology Meetup is an increasingly popular venue for technologists to showcase their latest hardware, software and business ventures.
The Denver/Boulder New Technology Meetup is an increasingly popular 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 February 2008 Meetup featured presentations by Peter Batty of Spatial Networking, a group from YowTrip, a group from Inversoft, and a group from Corybant. The idea of Spatial Networking is to combine location information and social networking. This allows users to see not only what other users are up to, but when and where, all in a map. The team is developing a Facebook application and plans to profit by selling location aware advertising. Yowtrip.com is a social networking site for world travelers. Allows search by town and can match travel plans with other people traveling to the same place at the same time. So far they have received some international press and plan to generate revenues from vacation booking referrals. Inversoft and Textruremedia have been developing a new open source rapid application development platform. The platform is similar to Rails and features far more rebust enterprise applications. Clients include texture media sites and law firms. Corybant provides automated communications services focused on a person, not a phone number. Allows easy integration of information from voice, text message, email and fax.
The March 2008 Meetup featured presentations to a packed house by Chris Svarczkopf of bpCentral, Tim Stephens of toolpax, Dan Mayer and Ben Brinckerhoff or Seekler, Matt Galligan of Socialthing, Marko Manriquez, Kate Lesta and Lauren Higgins of The Communikey (CMKY) Festival of Electronic Arts, and David Henderson of SocialEyes. Mr. Svarczkopf demonstrated bpCentral’s suite of proprietary software technologies which allow anyone to do CPA and CFA analysis very quickly. Their product is used by the Foundry Group for such things as modeling venture capital funding cycles. They have offered the Boulder Technology community a complimentary version, visit their website for details. Mr. Stephens presented the toolpax automated design and pricing software for custom manufactured products. The software allows an easy way to determine a price for customized products and can be used by both manufactures and customers. The software significantly reduces prices over the traditional quote system (saves much time). Toolpax plans to capitalize by charging a percentage of the tool price for use. Mr. Mayer and Mr. Brinckerhoff presented their Seekler website which aggregates information about things (such as movies, music, books, etc.) and ranks the products based upon third party user reviews. Plan to monetize by collecting ad revenue from affiliates (such as a link to an Amazon book for purchase). Mr. Galligan presented Socialthing, which aggregates data from social networking sites into one location. Can also push content back to those sites. Plan to monetize by selling aggregated data about users and possibly by offering a “pro” model for those who wish to push content to many sites at once. The group from the Communikey (CMKY) Festival of Electronic Arts introduced their inaugural digital arts festival April 18-20. The goal of the festival is to bring new media artists to Boulder as well as to explore sustainability through digital media. SocialEyes is a social community relationship management platform for advertisers which runs on the web and as a Facebook application. It allows brands to control their customer relationships by offering incentives in exchange for user personal data and tastes. Several audience members were skeptical that users would willingly give away their data for relatively minor perks.
The April 2008 Meetup was again very well attended and featured presentations by Sean Loving of FAVRM, Jonathan Epstein of Treatment Exchange, Philip Cooper of RDFAlchemy, Derek Scruggs of SurveyGizmo, and Tom Churchill of Earthscape. Mr. Loving started by introducing himself to the Meetup community by detailing his experiences working for Motorola and Skytek. His idea behind FAVRM is that customers would broadcast their wants and needs to allow vendors to make offers to them. Mr. Epstein presented for Treatment Exchange which offers online tools to increase the efficiency of out-of-office medical treatments such as rehabilitation exercises. Allows therapists to create online treatment plan using graphic offered by Treatment Exchange or by using their own graphics. Already in use by several therapists and hospitals. Mr. Cooper gave a very technical presentation on state-of-the-art of XBRL apps and how that has extended into the use of RDF Triple-Stores. The presentation is available online. Mr. Scruggs introduced his online survey website which allows a very large amount of customization not only of survey questions but also of style. This allows a branded company to make the survey look like their brand. Revenue is generated business-to-business and they currently have approximately 700 paying customers. Mr. Churchill introduced the Earthscape geo-browser software. The product is similar to Google Earth and supports mapping of many different kinds of data and levels of detail. The audience was very receptive to the demo which looked to be a step-up from using Google Earth.