The debut meeting of BDNT (Denver) was held Tuesday evening in the Davis Auditorium at Denver University, a beautiful campus apparently designed before the invention of the automobile. With about three hundred fifty technologists in attendance, Robert Reich opened the meeting with the traditional call for announcements, eliciting a MapQuest representative to inform the collected of fifteen open positions. Dr. Bruce Hutton, Dean Emeritus of the Daniels College of Business, then took the stage to welcome the audience and promise that technology would eventually lead us from recession. The audience was then treated to presentations from three companies, the state of Colorado’s CIO, and a very cool museum.
Contxts was presented by friend-of-the-firm Matt Galligan, who gamely stepped in for founder Daniel Newman. The company’s presentation was essentially the same as that offered at the October Boulder Meetup, with slightly different seasoning ala indiekid. Contxts is an SMS based contact organizer that allows users to trade digits and details through a single text message to the firm’s servers at “50500”. Contact information can be pushed or pulled by either user so long as the correct mobile number is used to access account information. By way of the company web site users can design the profile they want to share, as well as provide details on where to find them on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and a handful of other social networking sites. The company’s service is currently free but plans are in the works to offer a premium paid service. The paid version would likely include the option to store different types of cards (e.g. business and personal) and analysis tools around contact information pulled.
PingIdentity, presented by CEO Andrew Durand, focuses on enabling and simplifying the connections between businesses and various vendors and service providers. Durand began his presentation talking about “identity,” which may have led some in a web-focused audience to think of their online persona, but instead referred to the credentials and accounts that are needed to access different services (e.g. login information to Salesforce.com) that increase in volume as more corporate functions are outsourced. PingIdentity is focused on enabling enterprises to provide their workers with “single sign-on” – one username and password to access all services internal and external to the actual company. While this may sound simple, there is actually a reasonable amount of back and forth needed between different servers to achieve this simplicity. Durand noted that companies are willing to pay upwards of $10K per connection to an outside service as significant time and cost goes into password resets. Another benefit to enterprises is better control over an employee’s accounts with external vendors should they leave the company.
NewsGator, which is a familiar to many for RSS related services, presented its social site intended for enterprises. The service is largely based on Microsoft’s SharePoint, with NewsGator “bringing the 20% special sauce.” This social service will allow employees to better track what coworkers are doing in a passive way by providing an activity stream, essentially a feed of what content a person is using or tagging. Product Manager Ashley Roach noted use of this product will aid employees in achieving better “situational awareness.”
The fourth presentation was offered by Michael Locatis, the CIO for Colorado. Locatis offered perspectives on what the state has done to improve online services and connectivity. Among the state’s core efforts have been consolidating data centers (the state had 39) and modernizing outdated systems, many of which still run on a mainframe. The state is also looking to facilitate data sharing to enable better access to information for analysis by state agencies and improve the penetration of broadband especially in rural areas. Three key bills were passed in 2008 to further these efforts.
Bruce Wyman presented the efforts of the Denver Art Museum to incorporate new technology to attract visitors beyond the traditional core museum demographic. The goal of his undertakings is to make the visitors more a part of the museum experience rather than passive observers. Among the projects is the “bubbloo,” which enables guests to pop virtual bubbles on the ground and presents visitors with previews of works found inside the museum. Wyman and a colleague also created “Touch of the Brush tables,” which are essentially tabletop computer displays that allow multiple visitors to simultaneously zoom in on different areas of a painting via touch screen. Touch of the Brush has the added benefit “of getting visitors to cluster and talk.” Guests can even see their own contributions on display in the museum through the Flickr Cascade wall, which shows pictures taken by visitors and uploaded to Flickr. Wyman encourages all to visit the museum and consider membership.
The BDNT 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 March 3rd at 6:00. If you seek to attend please register for the event here.
RockyRadar recently ran a profile on Robert Reich and the history and future of BDNT, which is available here.
