December’s New Tech Meetup featured a Yahoo heavy lineup (three of five) that included two presentations slightly outside the usual scope – a green entertainment company featuring a very large rabbit, as well as thoughts from a Silicon Valley based author on an informal book tour.
David Mendal kicked off the night talking about Big Green Company, specifically the company’s first product, Big Green Rabbit. Think of the Big Green Rabbit as Barney but focused on encouraging kids to take care of themselves and the planet. Although this author experienced a few Donnie Darko flashbacks during the presentation, Charlie the Rabbit has been well received by the company’s target demographic, 3 to 6 year olds. A key element of the company’s strategy is to transform media that has been portrayed as part of the childhood obesity problem into part of the solution by encouraging activities like dancing as opposed to passive screen time. The company is simultaneously launching in broadcasting (through public television) and internet (offering games, activities and selected programs online) markets. The program currently reaches 25M households, and the company hopes to reach 50% of the country by early 2009.
Lloyd Hilaiel offered the audience an introduction to Yahoo’s Browser Plus. The premise of browser plus is to allow users to extend browsers to perform functions that have traditionally been reserved for desktop applications. Browser Plus is an open source platform which takes the power out of the hands of the big browser makers, hopefully accelerating the timeline for new features. Hilaiel demonstrated examples of extended browser functionality ranging from the useful like drag and drop additions of pictures and picture cropping to the quixotic like the use of a MacBook’s motion sensor in a marble maze.
Filtrbox President Ari Newman presented the new features to be included in the company’s G2 release. For those unfamiliar with the initial product, FiltrBox with the tagline “more knowledge, less noise” provides relevant articles based on key word filters set by the user. Common uses among new tech audience members included tracking their own companies and competitors. Newman would not share full details about the financials of the company, founded in July 2007, but did note the company was generating revenue although not profitable and processed about 18,000 key word filters per day. New features rolling out with the G2 release include:
- Ability to set unlimited filters
- A search box to provide immediate results
- Options to pull trend data out of the system in graphs in several formats (html, excel)
- A dashboard feature to tweet an article
- A price reduction to $10/month
Kimbal Musk then stepped up to present the re-branding of Me.dium, now called OneRiot. The premise behind OneRiot is that traditional search engines (Google, Yahoo) are dated in their ability to provide relevant returns, focusing mainly on how many times a particular page is referred to in determining ranking. In this approach, search engines miss a key element of what the web has to offer – real time, up to the minute information. The idea behind OneRiot is to provide real time search results based on what other web users are visiting as opposed to waiting for a web crawler to index a page and determine linking which may take up to several weeks.
When searching on OneRiot, the top results you get are based on what sites other people (in the OneRiot network) have recently clicked on with graphics showing the trend in visits (raging, surging or emerging) and how long visitors spend on the page. Below these current results, traditional search engine results provided by Yahoo are also displayed. Musk noted that the company will soon be making a push for college students on campuses around the country which will focus the OneRiot network, likely providing students with results most relevant to them.
Sarah Lacy, author of Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, concluded the evening. Among Lacy’s beliefs about Web 2.0 is that although it may not produce nearly as many big IPOs it will be more “socially transformative” than the initial Web revolution. A resident of Silicon Valley for over 10 years, Lacy noted that the spirit of the valley is “a state of mind, not a location” citing the interesting tech entrepreneurs she has met around the world and expectations for increased startup activity in other locales. Lacy also writes the ValleyGirl column for Business Week and works on Yahoo’s Tech Ticker show online.
The Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup is held on the first Tuesday of every month and is designed to provide a time and place for technologists and entrepreneurs to showcase the new technology developing in the region. The event is sponsored by Silicon Flatirons, ViaWest, w3w3, and Holme Roberts & Owen. The next meeting will take place at the Wolf Law Building at CU on January 6th at 6pm. If you seek to attend please register for the event here.
