On a clear, crisp evening in Boulder, Colorado over two hundred technology enthusiasts piled into The Foundry Billiards Club to better connect and amplify the technology signal of the region. The event, TECH cocktail Boulder in partnership with DEMO, showcased five startups from the local area. The event was sponsored by Boulder-based Lijit and Chicago and potentially soon to be also Boulder-based skinnyCorp - thank you both!
Since TECH cocktail is one of my own creations with co-founder Eric Olson, we were really enjoyed the evening getting to hangout with some of the technology "movers and shakers" in the Denver/Boulder area. For more details check out the official TECH cocktail Boulder 1 photos, our event wrap-up article and ColoradoStartups' wrap-up. Read on for more on the startups that demoed at TECH cocktail Boulder.
TECH cocktail Boulder enabled five local startups to showoff by demoing in an expo-style for the crowd. The demoing line-up for TECH cocktail Boulder 1 included:
filtrbox
- Founded in the spring of 2007 and still in private beta filtrbox was
created out of the frustration and realization that there had to be a
better, more accessible way for people to track a large amount of
important topics and areas of focus Ari Newman and team created
filtrbox (without an "e"). It is like "Google alerts and analytics on steroids" as it enables users to track any topic and then really dig
into the metrics for a more granular view of the topic. Filtrbox is
building a business-grade alerts system - its a persistent search
application for new media that tracks whatever keywords you want and
provides the tools and features needed to derive actionable
intelligence from all the activity. Looking to launch very soon,
filtrbox will offer users both free and premium services but pricing is
still to be determined. With a team of 3 people based in Boulder,
Colorado filtrbox is currently but looking to hire and grow this year.
Lijit
- Enabling anyone to create a custom search widget, Lijit leverages your
social graph to offer up a social search product like no other. Lijit
also offers search analytics which make it your site discoverability easy to understand as users
can better track their search traffic. I previously wrote about Lijit while reviewing profile aggregators
and currently use the Lijit search widget (see the search in the right
rail of the site). Tara Anderson brought the live Lijit widget for all
the TECH cocktailers to enjoy. Lijit was also a sponsor of TECH
cocktail Boulder and really played an important role in helping to make
it happen.
Newsgator
- With established feed reading products for consumers Christy Schoon
and John Worrell from Newsgator focused on showing off some of their
latest enterprise enterprise solutions calling them "Facebook behind
the firewall" as they offer internal information in a dashboard
approach. With integrates with Sharepoint and other services companies
can leverage Newsgator for sharing and consuming proprietary information
that should never see the light of the open Web.
socialthing!
- Created for all those online social butterflies out there as part of
the TechStars program, socialthing! offers a compelling way to keep
track of all you contacts social updates. socialthing! is currently in
private beta but I have had a chance to signup and use the product and
really liked its capabilities. At first glance, socialthing! reminded me
of the Facebook news feed but for all your friends updates from a
number of networks, similar to FeedFriend, as it is like a wrapper around all your social
networking updates. Users can keep track of all their friends without
having to adding them to manually to the system. Additionally, it
enables users to update status on a number of products with one entry
similar to hellotxt. socialthing! just relaunched its homepage layout
at SXSW Interactive. Additionally, socialthing! has a very slick iPhone
version which can be found at: i.socialthing.com.
In talking with founder and CEO Matt Galligan, that shared that I
wanted to see a socialthing! t-shirt that says: "I am a socialthing!"
Basically, my point in telling him this was to emphasize that socialthing! has a
very marketable name and a simple, solid social aggregator product. I
could see it becoming very popular.
SurveyGizmo
- A two year old bootstrapped and self-funded startup, SurveyGizmo
offers a survey and form solution for larger businesses as it offers
extensive metrics and reporting capablities. SurveyGizmo is a premium
service that offers industrial strength solution for survey and form
needs with current clients like Apple, NASA and universities.
SurveyGizmo integrates with Salesforce.com and ExactTarget email
service provider among others. Derek Scruggs demoed the product before
heading to SXSW where SurveyGizmo will be collecting feedback here:
http://sxsw.surveygizmo.com
I actually got a chance to meet and talk with all the demoers and shot the most recent episode of SOMEWHAT FRANK TV. None demoers that I also got a chance to talk to on the video include John Fischer from StickerGiant.com and Ronald Lewis from Justin.TV. Check out TECH cocktail Boulder 1 video (below). Or you could subscribe to the video podcast on iTunes and watch it while on the go.
