The second Denver edition of the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup took place in the historic Tivoli Brewery, a location that offered much easier parking but ironically (given its former function) no beer for participants. The second Denver meeting saw attendance over 300 with 25% new attendees as well as more business attire than has been seen cumulatively at all prior meetings in Boulder. After a brief introduction by organizer Robert Reich, five companies took the stage to present their products.
Buzzherd seeks to help small businesses create an online presence and marketing campaign on a limited budget. According to founder Ian McManus, the site, whose beta version launched in November, has over 2000 businesses as members. When businesses sign up for Buzzherd – which is entirely free – they receive a profile page, a “herd page” where they can encourage interaction with community members, a blog, and a listing in the Buzzherd business directory. Buzzherd earns revenue by charging companies $50 per month for preferred placement in its business directory, currently concentrated on the Denver market, which gets in excess of 10,000 unique hits per month. Half of this $50 is used by Buzzherd for online marketing to attract people to its directory.
When Peter Warden worked at Apple, he knew that lots of smart and well connected people were employed by the company, but found it difficult to identify who specifically might have a piece of specific knowledge or know a useful contact. Through his company Mailana, Warden has tried to create a technology that makes it easier to find these connections. When deployed at a company, the technology will scour and map everyone’s subject areas of expertise as well as address book contacts in creating a profile. Once the employee has modified and approved this profile it becomes available and searchable by others in the company seeking expertise. Warden is currently looking for mid-sized to large companies to serve as pilot sites for the product. He demonstrated the technology’s functionality through a similar product he has created for Twitter, which is available at http://twitter.mailana.com/. Users can enter their twitter name or simply a location and see a map of how twitter users relate, and get suggestions of people they should be talking to.
Stuart Davis offered the audience a preview of the new online television series “Sex, God, Rock ‘n Roll” which will be broadcast on HDNet. The series, filmed entirely in Colorado (“Take that, Mork and Mindy”) and staring Davis, is a sketch comedy show including newscasts and fake sponsorships. Based on audience laughter, the highlight of the clip shown was the advertisement for the iXorcist iPhone app, which provides easy exorcisms and the ability to send the exorcised demon to a frienemy. Davis believes that for the show to be sustainable he must find revenue sources beyond traditional advertising and is looking to a subscription model. Subscribers would get backstage pass access including premium content on the website and downloads of some Daivis’ albums, depending on the subscription option. Stuart is still working to determine the best structure for subscriptions and how many levels to include – $5 a month would probably be the basic option with a super-premium package priced in the $1000s.
Pixorial, presented by Gina Miccio and Josh Terry, offers users the chance to put their home videos (VHS or other format) online, along with a suite of editing tools to create new videos which can be downloaded or sent on DVD. Miccio noted Pixorial’s product is designed for “low tech moms,” featuring an easy to use interface enabling users to create video clips, reorganize them into a new video, and add titles. Several subscription options are available with varying fees charged for uploading content, storage, and downloads or DVDs of finished products. Expected additions to the company’s offering include the ability to upload digital videos and pictures, as well as a sound editing product. The company is currently self-funded and is considering whether to take on outside capital.
Eliot Turner of Orchestr8 concluded the evening giving the audience a preview of AlchemyAPI. The product is able to identify and tag any contextual information within content online. For example, in an article it would be able to pull out names, locations and technical terms and allow users to simply click on the links provided to do a Google search of the term (a demo is available here). According to Turner, what differentiates Orchestr8’s products from competitors is its “disambiguation capabilities” which means the product is less likely to mislabel or link terms that could be confused (e.g. it will not confuse two cities of the same name in different states). Turner also noted the product’s support of multiple languages. The value of the product is in its ability to identify relevant information in a timely manner, offering value to applications such as news aggregators, business intelligence, and stock tracking. Turner concluded by demonstrating how the product is able to work off of a camera phone image, where a photo featuring text content can be tagged and searched from a smart phone.
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 Boulder on April 7th at 6:00. If you seek to attend please register for the event here.
