Tuesday’s rainy evening did not detract the 350 loyal followers from June’s Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup (Boulder Edition), which featured two luminaries, three companies, and one local bunny:
Local Bunny (Dave Rogers and Karen Rich) presented for its third time in the “Under the Microscope” series, where a company launches a product at BDNT and receives feedback on its progress at subsequent meetings. The company has changed it focus from a consumer facing product to social media automation (Facebook, Twitter, and SMS) for businesses. Via this tool a patron can send a question to a business (@BoulderTheater show tonight?) and the technology will generate an automated response to the person’s account (@rockyradar Band Three Skin, 7 pm, $20) with the answer. Both question and answer will appear in the questioner’s Facebook feed. Given this change of focus, the company’s beta phase has been extended. Audience comments to the new model related to ensuring the technology did a good enough job listening to what customers were asking lest it seem more like spam than an engaged response from the business.
Ken Zolot, a leader of innovation initiatives at MIT and a TechStars mentor, took the opportunity to speak to the BDNT crowd as part of his attempt to “immerse himself in the entrepreneurial environment” during his visit to Boulder. Zolot supports entrepreneurship at MIT as well as generally researching entrepreneurial ecosystems. Among Zolot’s takeaways for entrepreneurs is the need to get from “technology push to market pull” and to frame a product’s value in terms of “who might want it” as opposed to “the box of parts” that make it up. In regards to entrepreneurial ecosystems, Zolot cited the importance of environments that allow for fast failure and support people to quickly get back on their feet.
An official from the Singapore government was on hand to discuss the country’s IT plan. The small nation, which is known for building excellent infrastructure, already has national WiFi coverage via 7,500 hotspots and plans to complete a nationwide fiber network with speeds of 1 GB/second by 2012. The country is now looking to “fill the pipes” and seeking technology that could take advantage of this high capacity. The Twitter feed in the room displayed some interesting – if not entirely productive – suggestions for options to fill the pipes. Grants and government funding are available for companies undertaking projects in Singapore.
Clixo offers search marketing support focused on increasing conversion rate. Conversion rate is defined as the percent of visitors to a website that take the desired action, which could be anything from visiting a specific page to actually making a purchase. Clixo works with companies to increase these conversion rates through improvements in usability and persuasiveness. These services can range from enhancements in web design to simplifying a form that must be completed by a customer.
iVolunteer has the goal of making doing good easy. The volunteer team, which previously presented at BDNT, has developed applications for a variety of platforms including the iPhone, Facebook, Word Press, and the Android that allow people to easily find local volunteer opportunities. The organization’s current challenge is a new name – iVolunteer, or most name variations including volunteer, are not available. Several suggestions were made from the crowd – here2serve, idonatetime, helpmehelp – and more suggestions are welcomed via Twitter (use #BDNT).
Lijit, presented by Micah Baldwin and Grace Boyle, concluded the night by providing a glimpse into the company’s new tool for measuring influence. Lijit provides a search widget for blogs that allows search of all an author’s content (blog entries and social media) as well as the content of others in the bloggers’ network. Lijit’s newest offering tries to measure online influence via the data it can gather from its network of over 8,000 publishers. The rating system focuses on the components of influence – audience, trust, and expertise – and uses more than a dozen measures and weights to come to an overall influence score by the blogger’s category (e.g. business, technology). Currently, there are 22 categories but the number could increase to make the measure more specific. Along with providing an overall score, the tool shows what factors drive a person’s influence (e.g. large amount of trust but small audience). Baldwin then provided screenshots of the tool where his influence was compared to that of Brad Feld and Seth Levine of the Foundry Group (for all those who placed bets, favorite Feld came out on top). Baldwin said the influence tool is currently in “pre-alpha” so testing how your influence compares to Baldwin’s will have to wait a few months.
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 Microsoft BizSpark, Silicon Flatirons, ViaWest, w3w3, and Holme Roberts & Owen. The next meetup will be at Tivoli Turnhalle in Denver on June 16th. More information and registration details are available here.
