The Web Innovators Group or Webinno23

I only wish that I could make it myself!  Unfortunately, I have another commitment that I can not break but that should not stop you. I really need to work my schedule better. It seems that this is a common theme for me and Webinno but you can check out some of my previous posts on the Webinno events here.

When: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 6:30 PM (ET)

Where:

Royal Sonesta Cambridge
40 Edwin H Land Blvd
Cambridge, MA 02142
Yahoo | Mapquest | Microsoft

Main Dishes (presenting at 7pm)

• Book of Odds – Pre-launch Sneak Preview – Amram Shapiro
• Epernicus – Eric Silberstein & Mikhail Shapiro
• BatchBlue Software (BatchBook) – Pamela O’Hara

Side Dishes (demo’ing throughout the evening)

• Clickframes (by Beacon16) – Vineet Manohar
• BetterLesson – Alex Grodd
• Baydin – Alex Moore
• TheIdeaStartup.com – Matt Chepeleff and Ray Di Nizo
• Happn.in – Jay Boice and Matthew Latkiewicz
• Tripleseat Software – Jonathan Morse

Special Optional Breakout Session – “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR” (held at 8pm)
Entrepreneur and marketing/media executive Mike Troiano will host a conversation with a panel of media reporters/columnists/editors including Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe,Wade Roush from Xconomy, Peter Kafka from AllThingsD, and Bob Brown of Network World.

Despite the fact that media coverage is as an essential component of any web start-up’s marketing mix, full-blown PR support may not be in the cards. This on-stage discussion will provide the inside scoop on engaging with the media – everything from how entrepreneurs can generate awareness of their company through the media to what do you need to know before you connect with the press. In addition, panelists will cover questions like “What’s the best way to engage with reporters?” “What do reporters care / write about?” “What could entrepreneurs learn from PR people?” and “What really ticks reporters off (pet peeve)?”

It looks like another great event.

Please RSVP for the Event Here:
September 29^th Web Innovators Group

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My favorite demo from the main 3 presenters had to be Totspot but Zeer and WebNotes both look like promising startups. Of the side demonstrations, it was great to see former colleague Michal Hlavac from local virtual world CreaturePark and to meet Robert DeFranco from 211me. I also had a chance to meet upcoming blogger Amanda Gravel of SocialHoneycomb – add her RSS feed to your reader.

Pictures: You can check out all of the pictures on Flickr. If you have pictures of the event, please add them to the Boston Tech Events group that I just started on Flickr.

Social Media: You can follow the event on (Summize) Twitter Search or join the new Webinno room on FriendFeed started by my colleague and FF star Hao.

Presenters: Please check out each of the local startups from the event last night.

• Totspot – Adam Katz
• WebNotes – Ryan Damico
• Zeer – Michael Putnam
• 211me – Robert DeFranco
• WordChamp – Daniel Blumenthal
• PaperG – Victor Wong & Roger Lee
• Creaturepark / Ingeeni Studios – Michal Hlavac & Henry Kaufman
• YouCastr – Ariel Diaz, Jeff Hebert, Matt Hodgson, & Brad Johnson
• LuckyCal – Sanjay Vakil
• Snipd – Alex Schliker
• Tikatok – Sharon Kan

The next event will be September 15th!

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I will attempt to attend all of these…hope to see you there!

• Build Guild, July 8th, 6:30PM
  Salem Beer Works [ REGISTER ]
  The new kid on the block and my winner for the best use of Twitter to promote an event, Build Guild brings together the cream of the North Shore web design crop in one event.  I love an event that brings together the web, micro-brews and  my old stomping grounds.
• WebInno18 – July 15th, 6:30PM
  Royal Sonesta Cambridge: [ REGISTER ]
  Back after a short hiatus, WebInno is back with a jam packed list of companies including Totspot, WebNotes, Zeer, 211me, WordChamp, PaperG, Creaturepark / Ingeeni Studios, YouCastr, LuckyCal, Snipd, Tikatok
  
• NSWG, July 17th, 6PM
  The Grog (Upstairs) [ REGISTER ]
  Another great event for the North Shore weberati, the North Shore Web Geek event is a monthly drinking / networking event at the Grog in Newburyport set for the third Thursday of every month.
• PodCamp3 Boston – July 19 – 20
  Joseph Martin Conference Center, Harvard Medical School [ REGISTER ]
  Considered an “unconference“, the next installment of social media popstars Christopher Penn (no, not that one) and Chris Brogan’s PodCamp comes back to Boston. Check out the list of presenters already signed up for the show.  This show also takes the “open” concept to the next level by publishing their books.
• TECH Cocktail Boston 2, Boston – July 24th, 6:30PM
  Tequila Rain by Fenway [ REGISTER ]
  If you liked the PopSignal event earlier this year and are looking for the party side of Boston web networking, TechCocktail is your event.  Check out the photos from last years TechCocktail event.

There are actually quite a few events and conferences in the area this month and next month even brings the Mashables event series to Boston…am I not cool because I do not have an event attached to my blog?

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Had a great time last night at the North Shore Web Geek meeting.  I arrived a bit late so I did not get a chance to meet everyone there but I’ll put it on the list for next month if I am not traveling.   The great thing about this event is that is not too large yet.  It is just a small gathering of web industry people that live up in the great white north.

I did get to meet some very interesting people including JC from VendorCity and Joshua Porter who recently released Designing for the Social Web.  He is also working with Chi.mp (actually out of Honolulu) a top-level domain company that is going to try a different take on social networking, content management and identity.  You can sign up for the beta on the Chi.mp site.

Today, I got pinged about yet another North Shore web industry event that will happen on July 8th in Salem at the Salem Brewery.   Marc Amos & Angelo Simeoni (love the CSSboy url – is that the new Cabinboy?) will hold their first web networking event called “Build Guild”…an event that I first thought was a WOW gamer club but looks to be another great networking event.

Now web heads on the North Shore will have 2 excuses per month to drink on the job!

• North Shore Web Geeks
  Every 3rd Thursday @ The Grog, Newburyport
  Start between 6 & 7
• Build Guild
  Every 2nd Tuesday @ Salem Beer Works
  Starts at 6:30 ( RSVP )

See you there!

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What do you think of StyleFeeder? Let Boston Know.

StyleFeeder
Location: Cambridge, MA
Funding: VC – ($2M Series A in Jan. 08 plus an earlier round)
# of Employees: 7
URL: http://www.stylefeeder.com
Blog: http://blog.stylefeeder.com,
http://blog.tech.stylefeeder.com
Submitted By: Dina Pradel

What’s your elevator pitch?

StyleFeeder combines the best of Web 2.0’s social and personalization aspects in the Web’s only personal shopping engine. By learning about each person’s unique sense of style, StyleFeeder helps shoppers discover new products they’ll love and others who share their tastes. Even search results are returned with the user’s predicted order of preference in mind, providing a much more efficient way to find products like clothes, furniture and gadgets. StyleFeeder has also created the largest shopping application on Facebook, helping social networkers share their latest shopping finds and access their personal recommendations within the Facebook experience.

Who is your target market?

StyleFeeder can help anyone shop better, as our recommendation engine is designed to show users only the people and products we think are going to appeal to them. That being said, we’re really popular among 18-to-30-year-old female power shoppers!

What makes you different or stand out?

There are a lot of sites that say they offer “recommendations” to users…but often, the recommendations are extremely generic, or the onus remains on the user to browse other people’s finds. Current search engines work well if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but what if you only have a vague idea of what you want? We’ve used technology to cut through the clutter and make it much easier to discover products that the unique individual that is you is going to like. Our preference algorithm allows us to recommend not only products from around the web, from major retailers to long-tail boutiques, but also people who share your similar sense of style. Our site is social, in the sense that we’re drawing on the wisdom of the many, but it’s the combination of that social data as interpreted by our preference technology that is really powerful in providing actual utility to shoppers. We’ve also managed to crack the “cold start” problem that has plagued other recommendation engines based on collaborative filtering techniques – we can incorporate new data from users in real time.

Who are the founders?

Philip Jacob, a software architect, technology consultant and veteran of several Boston-area startups, created the initial version of StyleFeeder in 2005 and now serves as the CTO.

The management team is rounded out by VP of Business Development, Shergul Arshad, an e-commerce veteran with experience at companies like eBay and Fairmarket, and VP of Marketing, Dina Pradel, who had a background in targeting young web-savvy users at companies including MTV/Viacom and Y2M: Youth Media and Marketing Networks.

What is your startup story?
(Where did the idea come from, inspiration, funny anecdote, etc., etc.)

The story is actually one of the sections of our site that gets the most comments from users: http://www.stylefeeder.com/about.html! The short version is that Phil noticed that his wife was having a difficult time Christmas shopping with her friends — they were finding great stuff online, but losing track of the links when they tried to email or IM them to each other. Phil developed a site that would allow users to bookmark the items they were shopping for, and that’s how StyleFeeder became the first site in what is now called the “social shopping” space.

But it soon became apparent that shoppers were hungry for more powerful product discovery methods; hence the hiring of Jason Rennie, who holds a PhD from MIT in collaborative filtering. Rennie developed various data analysis techniques to create a sophisticated recommendation algorithm that powers the personalization aspects of the site.

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I also spoke with quite a few small startups either are launched or just about to get going including 2 "wisdom of the crowd" (love the buzzwords) plays that were interesting.  There first person I talked with was Craig from a NH based startup called Vendorcity.  Vendorcity will create a new way for SMBs to source services. There was also micro-entrepreneur James who is working on a stealth way for open source projects to "crowd source" (buzzword again) their project management ideas.  I’ll keep you updated on both startups as they develop.

And not to be outdone, tripadvisor pulled out their full-sized mascot. I wonder what the executive meeting was like when they debuted this costumed character?  Who pulled the short straw to where this last night?

Cheers!

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Congratulations to our own HubSpot for pulling down $12M in funding as reported on TechCrunch.  The Series B round led by Matrix Partners is in addition to the $5M the company raised last September in a round led by General Catalyst.

This may give the HubSpot team another reason to celebrate at tonight’s PopCocktail…I mean PopSignal event!

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What do you think of Marathon? Let Boston Know.

Marathon Technologies
Location: Littleton, MA
Funding: VC-Backed
# of Employees: 80
URL: www.marathontechnologies.com
Blog: www.marathontechnologies.net
Submitted By: Brian Mullins

What’s your elevator pitch?

Why Respond to Failure? PREVENT IT.

What if you were able to prevent business interruption instead of merely
planning for the recovery when a failure (inevitably) occurs?

Marathon Technologies prevents outages and data loss in physical and
virtual infrastructures – without requiring an army of IT people or
specialized IT skills. More than 1800 companies around the globe use
everRun(r) software to achieve uninterrupted availability, 100% data
protection and rapid recovery – all with “one-click” operation.

Who is your target market?

Mid-market customers with very limited IT resources and enterprise
customers who need to improve the resiliency of their IT systems.

What makes you different or stand out?

Five “First and Only’s”

1. FIRST AND ONLY FAULT-TOLERANT, HIGH AVAILABILITY SOFTWARE FOR
PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL SERVERS everRun VM provides Compute-Thru(r)
protection without the use of specialized hardware. The fault-tolerant
redundancy of everRun VM ensures no outages and zero data loss.
Companies can reliably run production applications in virtual machines -
gain virtualization benefits across much broader range of applications.

2. FIRST AND ONLY FULLY AUTOMATED HA SOLUTION FOR PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL SERVERS everRun VM has completely automated setup, configuration, fault
detection and policy management. Fully deployable in 30 minutes or less.
Removes traditional availability burden for IT. Brings automated HA and
DR to mid-market and F500 remote facilities.

3. FIRST AND ONLY AVAILABILITY SOFTWARE THAT ALLOWS AVAILABILITY TO BE
SELECTED BY VM Users have the ability to dial-in different availability
levels – from true high availability and fault tolerance to disaster
recovery and remote availability – based on specific application
requirements. Companies only pay for the protection needed – get the
best price/performance.

4. FIRST AND ONLY GEOGRAPHIC FAULT-TOLERANCE SOFTWARE FOR PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL SERVERS – everRun VM goes beyond local server-level protection
by enabling fault tolerance between geographically disperse locations to
maintain system availability even through more serious environmental and
regional outages. Production applications running in VMs available even
when entire data center is down. Compliance & production requirements
met even if disaster.

5. FIRST AND ONLY AVAILABILITY SOFTWARE DESIGNED AND PRICED FOR BROAD
ADOPTION everRun VM is the first software that combines the
availability benefits of server virtualization with simple automated
availability software. Companies can afford to protect applications they
aren’t protecting today.

Who are the founders?

Marathon Technologies was founded by senior executives and engineers
responsible for developing Digital’s VAX FT fault-tolerant systems. The
team used this experience to create the first software and networking
technology that allowed multiple Windows/Intel servers to operate as a
single fault-tolerant system.

What is your startup story?
(Where did the idea come from, inspiration, funny anecdote, etc., etc.)

Marathon’s original name, Marathon Computer Company, was chosen because
of the association of running with incredible endurance and resiliency -
two core components of the company’s high availability technology. Also
as a New England-based company with strong ties to the region, it was
fitting to be associated with The Boston Marathon, the world’s
longest-running marathon.

Marathon didn’t want to be seen as just another computer company, but as
a company with an enabling technology that protected businesses from
downtime, so they quickly changed the name to Marathon Technologies -
still highlighting their ability to keep customers’ systems and
applications up and running.

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93Startup Profiles are submitted by the companies themselves. If you would like to have your startup profile on the site, please read this post.

What do you think of Bizak? Let Boston Know.

BIZAK
Location: Brookline, MA
Funding: Self funded
# of Employees: 1
URL: www.bizak.com
Blog: www.tomokeefe.com
Submitted By: Tom O’Keefe

What’s your elevator pitch?

Bizak is a business network which computes the profitability and valuation of Internet startups. Startups can compare their visitors, revenues, costs and valuation to their competitors and industry benchmarks. Investors use this analysis to discover new funding opportunities and professionals utilize Bizak’s traffic analysis to form new business partnerships.

Who is your target market?

Bizak’s geared specifically for Internet entrepreneurs and investors interested in funding their startups.

What makes you different or stand out?

Bizak is different from most web analytics firms in that if you tell us what your statistics are then we’ll tell you how you stack up against your competition.

Who are the founders?

Bizak is founded by Tom O’Keefe. Tom is the president of TOKiBiz, Inc. which helps entrepreneurs create profitably startups and will also launch infoMedMD in June.

What is your startup story?
(Where did the idea come from, inspiration, funny anecdote, etc., etc.)

I was a financial analyst out of college (BC) and I’m very familiar with the benchmarks used to analyze public companies. With Bizak I thought why don’t we create a benchmark to analyze and value internet startups?

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I’ll post profiles from interesting New England startups ranging from the individual entrepreneur launching a micro-business to the larger tech startups with buckets of funding. I plan on posting 1 – 2 profiles per week depending upon what I receive. I’ve already received a few profiles from some local startups and some of the finalists from the 2008 MITX awards. Please submit your profile today.

Interested in Having Your Company Profiled?

Companies interested in having a profile up on 93osuth should answer the following questions and email it to dave [aht] 93south {dot} net. Please keep it brief – just a few sentences per question.

PROFILE QUESTIONS
- What is your elevator pitch?
- Who is your target market?
- What makes you different or stand out?
- Who are the founders / key people? (Name & 1 sentence on each)
- What is your startup story? (Where did the idea come from, inspiration,
funny anecdote, etc., etc.)

OTHER BASIC QUESTIONS:
- City, State
- Funding Status & Amount (if public)
- # of Employees
- Site URL
- Blog URL (if you have one)
- Career Page URL
- Screenshots: A good representative image(s) of the product – please send .JPG or PNG formats.

View The Current 93Startup Profile

Thank you!

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