February Boulder Denver New Tech - Coming to Denver

Another great meeting, this time with some fun additions (it seems this meeting gets improve infrastructure every single month - great kaizen!).

Announcements - Only in Boulder

The meeting started with a few announcements. The most important one for me was that the meetings will be coming to Denver. February 17th is at DU - signup now.

For example, someone has real estate on the creek for $500. It's $25 less if you bring your dog into the office. Only in Boulder.

The Bard Center has an open business plan competition coming up. Bard website for details.

There were lots of job announcements and a few people looking for work. They also have a resume table in the lobby now.

Then it was on to the presentations.

SurveyGizmo iRATE

Designed specifically for South By South West. In general, you are going to a conference and this presents a list of sessions. You can say "I'm going to this session" and it will give you the schedule with links to the map of where the event is. It also lets you rate the sessions you are going to and provides the ability for admins to create polls during sessions.

Q: Revenue Model? SurveyGizmo making enough money on its own that they don't need a revenue model for this. Enabling this for SXSW is a way to test out the market.

Q: Available to surveygizmo subscribers? Available to anyone who wants to be a beta tester.

TapTapCards

iPhone and website application to send photos as postcards including photos taken with the iPhone. It's got all the basic features you'd imagine it should have.

Looking for feedback and testers.
* Sell the application and include 3 free postcards along the way.
* Postmark from a specific place.
* Print quality, especially for iPhone photos? Pretty decent.

To become a beta tester, follow taptapcards on twitter.

What is Web 3.0?

The evening had a few trivia moments. One was "what is web 3.0"? The answers:

• A Buzzword
• Semantic web.
• Bullshit.
• Modular.
• API-ish.
• Still in business.
• The third decade of the internet: 2010 to 2020.
• It's web2.0, but mobile, so the internet douchebaggery is not just in your living room but it's in your street.

The winner: a tie between bullshit and still in business.

SDP Engineering

Provides engineering automation. You enter some data about your project, it creates AutoCAD data like a CAD drawing and bill of materials.

Q: Software or Software As A Service?
Released to a specific client. Working on building more uses and make it generalized.
Could it become a generalized estimating tool? Anything that can be drawn in CAD.

SpyderLynk

Take a photo of a "snap tag" with your phone, mail it to an e-mail, get data back.

A lot like the 2dimensional upc symbols that are so popular in Japan or the newly announced Microsoft tag, but these are based on logos with a ring around it. Relatively brilliant since it helps emphasize your brand.

Since the idea is easy to copy their main value is in the patents (which they have). Double brilliant.

FitWiseTraining

Fitness coach via the web. Meh. This is the 3rd or 4th business that I've seen pitching this idea at a new tech meetup. It's just not that compelling to me.

Brad Feld on Starting a Business in Boulder (VC focused)

Personal commentary: I have little interest in VC so this seemed pretty...irrelevant. I get it that some companies can't be self funded, but seriously, people should try to go that route as much as possible.

Brad started by saying "Everything I say tonight is from an entreprenuerial perspective..." Not exactly. It's from A VC/Angel Entrepreneurial perspective.

He proceed to share his wisdom with the crowd, the crowd was...enthusiastic. But I'm having a hard time remembering anything of real value worth sharing here. Perhaps that's because I was turned off by the "VC backed Entrepreneur is the only kind that matters" which got me thinking about a set of shirts to balance out the ideas from VCWear. Here's what I've got so far:

• Fuck it. I'm self funded.
• Get your filthy paws of my silky revenue stream.
• My term sheet is 800 thread count.
• Gabriel is my Angel.

I need some more ideas on this...