» Webinno13 - Growing, Growing, Growing! :: 93South

It was an excellent turnout at the webinno13 event last night at the Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge. As you can see by the picture above, this is no longer a small demonstration event but a small conference for the local web 2.0 tech industry. I have not seen a published number yet but the crowd was well attended by start-ups, job seekers and a large contingent of VCs including most of the Venrock Partners staff, organizer David Beisel’s firm.

On the main stage last night there were 3 very interesting local web companies including Nashua based Digital Brix which delivered as expected with their do-it-yourself flash game applications Glite and GBoss and Beacon Street Girls which is actually a very interesting offline book series (500K copies sold) brought to the web. Beacon Street Girls is about to launch a “girls only” social network and jump into the ring with other top Tween (9 -13) communities like Club Penguin (a bit younger target) and Imbee. The existing interactive site already has 20,000 members wordwide and over 300K visitors per month.

The surprise of the night was Windham, NH based BandDigs which creates online video channels and interactive applications for bands. The service is a very cool capability for up-and-coming artists but my concern before the show with BandDigs was that it appears to be just another band listing site. However, Gary Wheeler & Aby Alexander’s demonstration of their live streaming video and 50-person video chat application makes me wonder if there is a larger business concept that will develop from this local start-up? There is already a buzz right now around live video streaming sites like Justin.tv and Mogulus so half of their offering is timely but that chat application was very cool…I may even use it for an upcoming conference call.

I also had some time to talk with David Owens of local event recommendation service Zync which is bringing an interesting concept to “what to do tonight” by using predictive technologies to match you events based on the recommendations of people who are just like you. The site takes your profile and a series of questions it asks to match you with events attended by “like” minded individuals. I would love to have this technology on Needham, MA based TripAdvisor travel recommendations. The service is soon to be launched in Boston. Also, check out the graphics on this site - very slick…who is doing your design?

Simeon Margolis of Utterz and Foonz Finally, I spoke with Simeon Margolis from RPM Communications who operate the very cool Utterz and Foonz websites. These are very cool concepts from the mobile space that everyone should check out. I am sure that we will see one of their products at an up and Webinno event.