January’s New Tech Meetup featured four (rather than the usual five) company presentations to a standing room only crowd. Organizer Robert Reich left the first presentation slot open to discuss suggestions for the Meetup moving forward and opportunities for members to support each other through the anticipated challenges of 2009. Look for features to ease connections between job seekers and potential employers at upcoming meetings – potentially even color-coded name tags. Also put out for a casual vote was the suggestion of holding a Meetup in Denver on a monthly basis, given the strong showing at the November meeting (held in Denver, following the Defrag Conference). This idea was supported by many in the crowd.
Andrew Hyde kicked off the presentations and offered an overview of Boulder.me, a website highlighting the Boulder startup community. While Hyde noted all the advantages of Boulder both as a tech haven and as a place to drink, he thinks the community is lacking in self-promotion, a deficiency he hopes the new site will aid in filling. Boulder.me serves as a resource for those potentially interested in moving to Colorado to join the startup community. The site includes a blog written by several prominent local authors, an events calendar, as well as links to resources including companies and community ambassadors.
CU Associate Law Professor Paul Ohm took the stage next to announce the launch of the Software Regulation Clearing House at codereg.org. The website serves as a definitive online searchable database for regulations and legislation related to programming and coding and currently contains over 470 federal and state regulations. Ohm is hoping to add readable analysis to each of the regulations in order to make the database more accessible to non-lawyers. At this point, Professor Ohm is looking to get feedback on the site through a survey (attached to the site) and support from a Ruby on Rails programmer.
Gnip CEO Eric Marcoullier was up next to announce impending updates to the company’s offerings. Gnip’s technology makes it easier for content consumers – websites that aggregate content from other sites like Lijit or MyBlogLog – to import data from content producing sites like twitter, digg, and delicious. The challenge for content consumers is two-fold in that all sites use different APIs (the way content must be requested) and different terminology (e.g. userid versus username). While Gnip’s previous offering solved the API issues, content aggregators still faced the issue of dealing with different language. Gnip’s new offering attempts to standardize the language as well (e.g. “actor” will always refer to userid or username). This new feature will make it easier for content consuming sites both to interact with data and to add new producer sites to their aggregation.
Lijit’s always entertaining Micah Baldwin closed the evening, first displaying some titillating t-shirt designs from new Boulder arrival threadless.com, then demonstrating Lijit’s enhanced advertising offering launched in December. Essentially, the new features give bloggers the opportunity to sell their own ads and set their own prices for ads displayed in Lijit search results. Lijit will sell any unsold space itself or through its partner networks, with all revenue split 50-50 between Lijit and the blogger.
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 February 3rd at 6pm. If you seek to attend please register for the event here.
