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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It’s a great story on the surface but I like the lesson being delivered by the list of angel investors,several who will also be advisors. It is a close-knit group of other local startup veterans.  This “local networking circle” brings together not only the necessary funds, advice and connections to grow the business but also helps to nurture the startup climate here in Boston.  The future for a sustainable and vibrant tech startup culture here in the area would be very bright if the next round of startups followed this example over and over again.

There was an excellent set of articles from Scott Kirsner (Boston.com) and Xconomy’s James Geshwiler and Time Rowe covering the concepts of fostering local innovation and entrepreneurship back in August that you should read if you have not already.

Here is the list of investors for Shareaholic (posted on CenterNetworks & Xconomy).

• Ed Roberts, founder, MIT Entrepreneurship Center; co‐founder, Sohu.com
• Dharmesh Shah, founder and chief technology officer, HubSpot
• Eric Dobkin, Advisory Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.
• Brian Balfour, co‐founder, Viximo
• David Cancel, co‐founder, Compete (also founder of Lookery where Jay is the VP of Products)
• Andrew Payne, investor in Care.com, Digium, HubSpot, and SmartFlix; co‐founder, FanSnap
• Brian Shin, founder and CEO, Visible Measures

Shareaholic is a very simple browser plugin that makes it easy to cross post links to the top social sharing services on the web like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.  Here is a video tour that was posted on the TechCrunch article covering the announcements.

I wonder if the timing is right for my own long neglected social sharing toolbar service, The Web 2.0 Toolbar, to capture a bit of funding?

More on the announcement from around the web:

• Browser Plugin Shareaholic Passes 1 Million Downloads, Closes Seed Funding from TechCrunch

• Shareaholic Grabs a Round of Angels from CenterNetworks

• Shareaholic Collects Angel Funding Round from Xconomy

Congratulations Jay!

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The video below is an interview posted on Boston.com.  Did anyone get the CNN Live video to work today?  It never seemed to be live.

It’s been a long time since MC Hammer jumped back in to the spotlight in an attempt to reinvent his career as a social media expert. I am not sure it has really worked.  What do you think?

If you are interested in what happened at the event today, Mike Prolux posted a great collection of speaker quotes and Hill Holiday also put up a live post from the event.

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The service is currently in private beta but Adam from TotSpot has arranged for special set of invites for 93south readers. If you are interested, please click here to sign up.

What do you think of TotSpot? Let Boston Know.

TotSpot
Location: Cambridge, MA
Funding: Self-Funded
# of Employees: 9
URL: http://www.totspot.com
Blog: http://blog.totspot.com
Submitted By: Adam Katz

.

What’s your elevator pitch?
TotSpot is a place for parents to publish a page about their kids and share with family and friends. It’s part online babybook, parent journal, and social network.

Who is your target market?
TotSpot is designed for parents of children aged 0-10. Initially, our focus was on parents with kids 0-4, but (in our private beta) we noticed that a lot of parents were using TotSpot as something they did “for” their young kids (0-4) and “with” their older kids (4-10)

What makes you different or stand out?
TotSpot is uniquely designed around the needs and wants of parents. On TotSpot parents can create lifestage-oriented content such as Firsts (milestones), Growth Charts, and more. All content on TotSpot is time-tagged (we want to know when things actually happened) so that everything can be organized into an elegant and compelling narrative. Furthermore, everything on TotSpot is structured to ensure easy data portability, both online and off – we will enable parents to easily take their TotSpot pages and turn them into personalized parent journals or DVDs.

Who are the founders / key people?

• Michael Broukhim (co-Founder) – Michael is the former Editorial Chair of the Harvard Crimson. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in June of 2007. Mike manages product development.
• Adam Katz (co-Founder) – Adam graduated from Harvard in June of 2007 – my focus is on the business development side.
• Fred Oliveira (CTO) – Fred was an early editor at TechCrunch and is a noted Web 2.0 guru, he co-manages the product development with Michael

What is your startup story?
Both Michael and I come from large but close-knit families. Coincidentally, our youngest cousins are both named Max (his was 3 months when we started, mine 2 years old) and we both noticed how much “stuff” (photos, videos, notes) their parents sent out and we noticed how poor the existing tools were, so we decided to try and make something that was better and that enabled parents to share their children’s story in much a simpler and more compelling way.

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View Profile
on Genotrope

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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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StyleFeeder, the local social shopping startup, announced partnerships with both Shopping.com and The Glam Network today. The company will extend it’s reach and technology to Shopping.com users and the Glam Publisher Network of more than 400 popular lifestyle websites and blogs targeting women.

StyleFeeder recently announced a new open API initiative for social media developers and since last year has grown significantly with more than four million page views each month and more than 800,000 unique visitors per month. StyleFeeder is currently the largest shopping application on Facebook with nearly one million installs.

Is it me, or does the team image on their management page look like the back cover of a 90s-era rock band?

Which one is the bass player? Is Shergul on the phone and his celly?

Congratulations!

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The current GuildCafe.com site, a social network built to organizing groups within MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, will still operate and continue to improve as the company focuses on building out the new gamerDNA service.

Congratulations!

Courtesy of Xconomy & FLYBRIDGE.

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Flybridge Capital Partners focuses their investments on early-stage consumer, healthcare and information technology companies.  As part of the name change announcement, they also announced that they have added $280 million fund to their fund. This brings the firm’s total capital under management to $560 million.

Flybridge has made some great investments in the mobile and online space.  Here is a sampling of their investments from their consumer portfolio.

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I also had a chance to talk with a few startups including Raj Bala who is currently developing BigSwerve, a very interesting concept that will aggregate the comments posted on blogs via a web crawler.   When they work out some of the kinks, BigSwerve could present a whole new way to track a persons identity through their comments across multiple blogs.  

In addition to Scott Kirshner, the panel included:

- Don Dodge, Director of Business Development, Microsoft Emerging Business Team

- Jimmy Guterman, Editor of Release 2.0

- Barbara Heffner, CHEN PR Partner 

- Nabeel Hyatt, Conduit Labs CEO

- Bijan Sabet, Spark Capital VC

Event sponsors included Cambridge Innovation Center, CHEN PR, Morse, Barnes-Brown & Pendleton, and Schwartz Public Relations.

I look forward to the next event and will hopefully see you there.

GO RED SOX!  My prediction…Sox in 6.

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The Cambridge-based social shopping site most recently launched a new design and social sidebar application this August as covered in an earlier post.   The site helps users stay up on trends by creating social shopping lists.

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