The Industry

Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Report - October 7, 2008

This will be a shorter report this month as I am supposed to be packing for the High-end Audio show this weekend at the Denver Tech-Center Marriott this weekend.

I got to the MeetUp a little late, but did catch that Boulder.me is signing up companies that are looking for top software talent.

Also that the November MeetUp, on election day, will be at the Denver Hyatt at the deFrag conference.

Appian Ventures

Presented by MARK SOANE
Mark Soane Managing Director of Appian Ventures is going to talk about how the current financial crisis might effect the Boulder Denver Venture Market.

The meeting started with a special appearance by Mark Soane from Appian Ventures. He talked about how the ‘Financial Crises’ [what a Orwellian name that is.] will affect VC investments in software technology. He said that VC for software tech has been at about $20B to $30B since the recovery after the stock market bubble burst - and that, although the funds used to fund tech are usually 10 year funds - that 2008 funding is down 20% year-over-year for software tech, but up for greentech/cleantech and something else I did not catch.

Valuations are also down, IPOs are essentially null and void [because, he speculated, Sarbanes Oxley adds a $3(0?)M tax to public companies]. But he thought the current situation will not be as bad as the wasteland that was tech those few years after the [last] crash.

He seemed to know which VCs had money to invest now - and what else are they going to do with it? Put it in a bank? Or the market? But that you had to more or less be a VC to know which VCs had the good stuff [and that there are pay-for newsletters with the scoop, but poor folks could also look at NBCA? and Price Cooper Waterhouse…]

OK. Enough cheery stuff.

Chalk2Me

Presented by Nick Sowden, Rob Witoff
They will be Demo’ing a communication tool that allows organizers to instantly send a single message to a large group of users via phone, text, email, IM or social network

Well, the summary pretty much describes what they do. Written in C# and ASP their target audience at the current time is teachers, who for $10 can send messages to all their students. There was a question raised about special privacy laws in CA et. al. vis-a-vis teachers contacting their students [outside the classroom? using email? by phone? what a world] - but the answer was that all communications are available to school administrators to monitor.

I couldn’t tell whether students used the system to indicate their preference for how they are contacted or whether the teachers filled in the data for each student.

Verving

Verving is a information site for people who are old. Very old. Like me. Lots of population statistics is driving marketing which, using their r proprietary development methodology, assures their technical team will stay marketing driven.

78M people are above 50 years of age. 86K will turn 50 this week. 67% are online, Of those 97% lookup health websites, 96% email, 93% pursue contacts with friends and family - but 67% do not like the current social websites.

Their site offers reviews of great content to be found on the net. 500 so far. They have partnered with Boomer Alley and are looking for more partners.

One of our projects was a site with goals very much like this one - but with an entirely different approach vis-a-vis look-and-feel - and the feedback we got was that people already knew all the sites that they thought were important to them. Why would they want to know about others? If they are any good they will, in the natural course of time, find them through the current sites they frequent. Maybe they were afraid of bring overwhelmed with great sites :-) - or of the idea of reviews that were managed by people with an agenda - or by lowest-common-denominator types [like most review sites].

So partnerships seems like a GREAT idea - get they people to visit for other reasons, THEN they will find the goldmines of information.

Umapper

Presented by Andrei Taraschuk, Brett Grissinger
They will be Demo’ing a web-based map authoring

A flash-based map editor that supports just about every geo format that people can distribute with or without advertising. Standard graphics editor operations were demoed, with nice integration between the graphics and the underlying semantic and stream-based content of the location-aware data on the map.

HTML is generated upon save so that the map is usable and search engine indexable on any website. They are growing rapidly and it looked like [the slides go by fast when you are trying to scribble everything down] they now have 80,000 users after about 5 months. Their wordpress plugin alone has garnered 6000 downloads.

They are looking for additional funding of $2M and indicated that, with respect to Google, their potential competitor, that they support many more formats and that they are not Google, which many companies are looking at as a positive as the behemoth-that-is-Google starts to scare people away by its very size.

IOUNote

Presented by Erika Archer, Ben Monlezun, Scott Archer
They will be Demo’ing an innovative Web-based tracking and management system for interpersonal loans.

Again, a good description above there. A social lending site for people who want to document their borrowing/lending things to their 1st and 2nd degree friendships network [i.e. friends and friends of friends]. They stated that 16% (or 14%?) of people renig on paying back what they borrowed, but that with documentation, only 5% to not pay back or return the borrowed item.

The site, still in early beta, is set up to handle the 3 things people mooch/lend: stuff, money and services.

This idea seemed to resonate quite well with the audience, though I wonder if it is really because lenders want to get paid back [and, of course, they do], but that it can add depth and fun to the lending/borrowing interaction between friends - and it gives the moocher more leverage to actually get the lender to cough up the items - what with it being documented and all. And having it be a uninterested 3rd party keeps the focus on the relationship between the friends, and not some stranger like a lawyer [nor another friend who does not want to be in the middle of something like this!].

They will charge money for a premium version that sets up monthly payment schedules, etc.

Statistics they presented [it was a night for statistics and the $700B wallop to the wallet was also in the room] indicated that person-to-person lending is growing (and I had to write this quickly, so this is the jist of what the slide said, don;t quote me):

2005 $118M
2006 269M
2007 647M
2010 5.8B (projected, duh)

Also that the minimum credit score to borrow [what?] has risen from 680 to 720, so now the average American now has a bad credit rating.

So, yeah, I like this idea and I think the more fun they put into the website the better [and from the demo, it looks like they are already doing this].

Contxts

Presented by Daniel Newman
They will be demo’ing a new way to quickly exchange contact info via SMS.

This site lets people send text messages to people that more or less sends them your business vcard. The free version lets you only have one business card, the premium model adds the ability for you to have multiple business cards [one personal, one corporate, one for family, etc.].

These vcards have much more information than your traditional business card, like how to get to your Flikr photos, MySpace address, etc. Anything you want other people to see about you.

I am not sure I understood this very well - I think the face-to-face of handing someone a business card is important to many people, and it is just not as easy to forge yourself as CEO of Google on a piece of cardboard than in an online vcard (the cardboard card costs money - mostly shipping). So perhaps there are trust issues with vcards. And presumably you can only send vcards to other people who are signed up?

Back in 1999 Palm set up something similar at JavaONE and people were going around squirting information and who knows what else between each other.

Well, I am in the “cells are for business and emergency management - not for fun - generation”. Perhaps the texting generation will love this approach. If that includes you, send

JOIN FIRSTNAME LASTNAME EMAIL

to

50500

And you will be signed up.

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