The Industry

Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Report June 3, 2008

Another month, another MeetUp. It is nice to be able to share my excitement about all the exciting things happening on the net with 300 or so other people for an hour and a half every month.

This is the time of year when it is too warm for buildings to run heat and too cool to run the air-conditioning - so the amount of oxygen inside a room, even a large as one as this, is limited and the temperature varies quite a bit, largely as a function of the number of people in a room. And, as usual, this was a standing-room only affair.

At the beginning of the meeting, people are invited to stand up and announce things - like job openings and employment seekings. And, as usual, it was hard to hear some of these. The ones that I heard are:

* Kevin at igniter.com is looking for PHP and MySQL coders
* Someone is starting a iphone developer camp for Colorado,
* TechStars teams were invited to stand up and about 20 people, in about 5 different groups stood up
* The Northern Colorado Entrepreneurial Network is forming in Fort Collins and having meetings similar to this one
* CRMCulture.com is looking for people with javascript, .NET, SQL Server and CRM experience
* Marty Koenig - expert in CFO’ing for start-ups is looking for start-ups
* Gwen announced that she is giving a talk at BlogHer 2008 in CA and invited us all to attend. Also mentioned the BWET group: Boulder Women Engaged in Technology. Maybe Boulder men should form the Boulder Husband Avid Researchers and Developers group?

Komar.org

Christmas Web Cam
Watching Grass Grow Web Cam

A local site with 3 web cams was presented. One, which features a voluminous [viewer controllable] Christmas light display - now with Halloween too [with major Hulk entres].

A second that covers the front lawn - watching grass grow. This now features real time video of a bird’s nest roosting in the eaves of their home. Previously, on Watching Grass Grow, we saw some popular favorites like his sister accidentally backing up over the lawn when pulling out of their driveway - to the consternation of the bloggers on the site. We also got to watch the nasty neighborhood kid dump the trashcan all over the lawn.

Another webcam was started after they started painting their house called Watching Paint Dry. This has led to the idea that people might want to watch their house be built on web cam [when our neighborhood of about 1000 people build our dam - it was also web-cammed. Not that I ever looked at it, but Neli did]. This seems like a good idea - both for the owners who get to watch it while their house is built [and for those daily conferences with the builders where they tell you how much more everything will cost], and later, years down the road - and even for future owners of the property.

WebPartner

Randy Cox
http://www.webpartner.com

This site went into public beta in early May and was earlier presented at the January MeetUp [about 10% of the people raised their hands when asked if they were also at that MeetUp. Even given error rate and slow reaction times of people when raising hands - this seems to imply that there is a pattern of people going and attending a few MeetUps and then dropping off - but also that they are immediately replaced by new comers - like me :-)] . WebPartner allows people to create and use ‘channels’ that gather information from multiple websites about any topic.

It currently works best on Internet Explorer and can fetch information using RSS / ATOM feeds [like everyone else] but can also watch a region of any webpage and grab [scrape] information and images from that region whenever it changes. Users can ask it to poll for changes in feeds and websites as frequently as every 15 minutes.

Channels can subscribe to other channels and over time the advantages for people looking for information to just [finding and] using a [great] channel on WebPartners instead of clicking around Google looking for good feed will be their compelling advantage. So, making these great channels and making them easy to find and differentiating them from the not-so-great channels would be …uh… great.

Some favorite channels pointed out during the presentation were the

Colorado Startups Channel
Technology Channel
Local Weather Channel

During the Q&A they talked about channels getting to access subscribed [pay] content - the author of the channel providing the password? Currently they are working towards an ad-based revenue business model. They save the textual portion of headlines [which is mainly what channels produce] for historical archives.

Passitto

Jeremy
http://www.passitto.com

Just released to public beta yesterday [skipping the de-rigor popular but iconoclastic and cliquish private beta stage], Passitto is a ASP, .NET and C#-based site that is a business social network like Linkedin but with the added idea of ‘broadcasting referrals’ .

The idea is that, when you get one of those leads to a job opening that you really are not interested in, you can use Passitto to pass it on to:

Their Whole Community
Specific Groups
Specific Contacts

Then, people who are interested can bid on and pay credits [aka $] to you to get the referral - though it is up to the person with the lead, in this example that would be you, to choose who in the end gets the referral. [Personally, I do not want to pay for referrals, nor to have to select who gets the referral = I just want to pass it on and get back to work].

Passitto makes money by taking 10% of the referral fees and people who make money by broadcasting lots of referrals can cash out for cash-money if they so desire.

Beyond this they have the typical and now required yet boringly familiar areas for people to have their profiles, groups, messages etc.

They are close to getting a [evil, parasitic and tacit admission of inability to execute] patent for this business process and hope to work something with Linkedin as Linkedin is now opening their API.

Periphery Intelligence

PeaksData Corporation
Bob Welch
indianpeaks at comcast.net

This presentation was about an NSF SBIR-funded research into Wireless Robust Sensor Networks. The example presented was monitoring a forest fire in real time in order to make predictions about fire behavior to help keep fire-fighters safe.

The network of sensors must be:

Self-organizing
Ad-Hoc
Robust
No single-point of failure
Resistant to topological instability
etc.

The network is all peer-to-peer and highly parallel and semi-intelligent. Cost functions are used to find the cheapest path through the network. We’ve done scientific SBIR work before, and worked with lots of scientists, and it was a pleasure to see all the slides [with too much content to write down, sorry] with well-thought out requirements and solutions to difficult problems. Kind of the opposite from working on Web 2.0 applications where you clone your neighbor’s website and change one itty bitty thing :-)

They are looking for partners, software people and CEO / CFO executive types. They are using C++ [ick], MatLab, and TinyOS and SN(?) Hardware. They are about to seek [more? Neli and I disagree on this one] Phase II funding and then to move to commercialization.

One partner, Biowire, is [looking at?] putting sensors in horses hooves and halter to facilitate early detection of colic in horses. This is cool and with uber-cheap sensor networks one can… can… HEAR the grass grow too, and take its temperature… and. But seriously, the military and healthcare applications are obvious [but not so obvious that someone won’t try to patent them].

Shelfari

Josh Hug
http://www.shelfari.com

Well, call me stupid [I mean more stupid than you thought I was] because though we actually OWN 3-4000 books, I was not aware of Shelfari [or librarything or anobii, thinking that Amazon reviews were good enough [having given up on BookPool’s].

But Amazon invested in Shelfari last year, and they were here to show off their widget that people can use to display the books they are reading right on their blog pages. It always surprises me when books can still generate traffic when we hear over and over about the death of printed media. But apparently they can.

Josh asked people who have their own blogs to raise their hands - and with, again, some salt about everybody paying attention enough to hear and respond to impromptu questions - about 25% of the audience raised their hands.

Anyway, this widget comes in various sizes and with different interactive functionalities. It also runs on Facebook and MySpace - through Open Social - though they are not focusing on that right now [I wonder why. Maybe they are reading the same ‘what is a book?’ surveys I am? :-)]. They are coming out with a new ’skin’ next week.

OK. They have about 1.5M registered users compared to GoodReads [another site I knew nothing about] who has about 1M. Josh mentioned that their success might be attributable to the more personal nature of the site encouraging lots of reviews - that you can check out each reviewer and see what books they [say they] own and [might have] read.

I wasn’t the only one wondering all this, as quite a few questions were on the same topics. Josh thought one of their advantages was in their execution - a clean look [and on the site, and in their widget, books look like they are sitting on wooden shelves] and the ability to add new features quickly. They use Amazon’s images for book covers - though they can go to Amazon’s source just as well. They earn revenue through people clicking through from their site to Amazon - though bloggers on their site get 100% of the referrals made through their blog - if they have signed up with Amazon to do so.

They have 4M books ‘covered’ and can import from delicious library.

Idyllon

Stuart Compton
http://idyllon.com

Stuart presented their idea for a 3D social world. With backgrounds in video game art and engineering, they want to bring 3D to the internet social community. He mentioned some technology, like plant growth algorithms etc. whose definition packet can fit in 80 bytes [Lindenmeyer or similar rewrite rules maybe?].

The video we saw can be seen on their website - and essentially they are trying to make an easy-to-use version of Second Life for not-so-early adopters. To make it easier, they are going to focus on User Modified Content instead of User Generated Content [What a great way to put it. We are working on User Modified Designs instead of User Generated Designs. Our whole profession is one of letting users modify code, through a GUI, so they don’t have to generate it themselves. This is a wonderfully abstract concept. Hopefully it will find application in other areas as well.]. This will not be a game, though they will have games, like backgammon, inside the world.

But, seriously, nothing is harder [for most people, anyway, and especially me!] that making good looking 3D things and this is why they will have their artists make up the 3D things, and we get to tweak them to make them ours. The plan is to charge $6.95 / month. They will be profitable with less than 10,000 subscribers and and they are currently looking for investors and seeking $750K. They anticipate beta after one year.

During Questions and Answers - they mentioned the old saw about innovators never making it big - comparing Second Life to Gopher, and themselves to the World Wide Web.

OK. I agree that something like this could be rilly rilly big. I mean, Microsoft is big, and they just sell a rickety OS and a overly complicated word processor and spreadsheet [then again, I’ve always been amazed at how toilet paper companies are worth MM. If you are at the right place at the right time…. :-)].

But what developer didn’t think about doing this back in 94, 95 [we even wrote up a business plan and took it around] when it looked like Snow Crash might maybe could become a reality [not the million $ bills - aka Reagans - that won’t happen until later this year]. Of course, we were Flintstones to Idyllon’s Star Wars, but still, the problems are not in the rendering algorithms. They are in the interactivity.

How do people talk to each other. How do they sync up? How can the avatars show emotions? Can they fly like superman [yes!]. Can they walk through walls? Do they have repulser beams up their sleeves to send annoying people they heck away? [I hope so]. How to handle 10M people showing up in someone’s virtual office after they announce photos of Bill smoking a doobie at a Radiohead concert? It is making the place ‘livable’ and ‘fun’ - like any other ‘place’, real or virtual - that is always the challenge [and so much fun!]. I hope they get it built so we can all practice our flying skills.

TIP

Total Information Pages

Link Everything. TIP has partnered with prnewswire to bring their ‘every word a link’ technology to the world. What they do is link every single word in an article to a search for that word on google.com. They can also use this to search for all uses of the word on, say, cnn [still using google’s search engine].

In contrast to their major competitor, answers.com, they can link to a 100 different sources [cnn, google, msn, their clients’ website, etc.], not just answers.com’s dictionary, and they are server-side, not client-side javascript.

They claim that some corps do not like their employees looking at pages with javascript on them, for one, and that answers.com solution does not run [well] on Apple [they mean Apple’s uncharacteristically lame javascript implementation for Safari, no doubt] or iphone. [on the other hand, to link to 100 different sources, each choosable by the user, means they have to embed 100 different versions of the article when the user views the page - increasing the size of the [native, uncompressed] page by about 100 times].

They link EVERY single word, including ‘a’ and ‘the’ and they will be running on the Blackberry soon.

They will make money off charging money to companies who want to ’sponsor’ words [where a word links to] or providing custom dictionaries.

They bought one of those licenses to slow the World’s technological development from the U.S. patent office. Apparently it was for ‘one word one link’. Given the amount of prior work [trillions - but I’m sure our patent office wouldn’t let that stop them from granting someone a patent for link technology] presumably this refers to linking EVERY single word on a page. It was hard to hear the discussion down front, but it seemed like linking every MEANINGFUL PHRASE to a search engine or website is still possible without paying ‘patent taxes’ during the next 17 years.

Some potentially $B ideas that popped up while thinking about all this are:

1. Auctioning off words and meaningful phrases to be inserted on sites. For example, if CNN [or, say, you] ‘might be able to’ mention a car in an article, why, it might as well be Toyota, who then pays for the privilege.

2. Auction off photos. Like a picture of a cat could be linked to Purina. Or cats toys at Amazon.

Technologically and business process-wise these both are remarkably simple and could be delivered to MM of webpages and implemented similar to the way adsense is. All website owners would have to do is tag their words, or photos, with $CAR, or $CAT and include the little adsense-like thing on their webpage, which the traverses the page’s DOM on load and assigns the appropriate words and links to the tagged things it finds. Each time someone clicks on one of these links, a few cents accrue to the website owner, same as always.

Not that putting ideas into the public domain will work with the wonderfully intelligent people at the patent office or with the ethically superior people seeking to benefit from their mental handicaps - but by this post hopefully lots of people get to put these ideas into reality before the patent chasers.

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