I attended the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup monthly meeting tonight. I was very impressed.
I’ve mentioned TechStars a few times before, and six of their teams presented their projects for a group of about 80 people at CU this evening. Each team is going to present for a group of almost 100 VCs and angel investors next Thursday to try and get some more substantial funding (even though a few of the teams are already profitable - nice). Tonight gave this group of six a great practice run for next week. The teams which presented tonight were:
My favorite presenter tonight was SocialThing. Because they’re in a closed beta right now, I’ve only had a pretty basic understanding of their project, but after their 10 minute presentation, I see that they have real potential. Chris Stock pointed out that the key to their success is offering enough functionality to not only draw users, but also to maintain a reasonable user base. It seems like their big draw right now is that they can synchronize your contacts across many different social platforms - a really incredible feature, but not quite a complete service (I know they have other features, that’s just one they really pushed tonight).
I’ve also been following MadKast and J-Squared pretty closely, so it was really nice to be able to see the people behind these ideas and their presentations definately held their own. I’m looking forward to seeing what J-Squared will serve up next for the Facebook community.
Another big highlight of the night was the live comment screen powered by BrightKite. David Cohen was a particularly avid user of this feature tonight. I didn’t get in on it this time, but looking back I can’t help but wish that I would have.
Perhaps the most prominent theme this evening was advertising. It seems (unsurprisingly) that just about every team is using some sort of advertising as their main revenue model. It’s worked so far for J-Squared so I don’t blame these other teams for following a similar route. Really though, even outside of TechStars this is becoming a more and more popular trend - as long as the developers can make some reasonable revenue, I see it as a win-win situation.
For anyone that did not get to attend tonight, I saw a video camera in the front of the room. My guess is that these presentations will be on TechStars TV in the next day or two.
