The Boulder/Denver New Tech Meetup got started with a little healthy competition this month. A dozen or so youngish men pitched paper airplanes and Patrick Cameron won by a slim margin (against anonymous). If they have a cupcake eating competition next month, I will dominate.
If you’re currently looking for a new job, you might consider a move to Boulder if you’re not here already. Iggli, Public Earth, Slice of Lime, Raspberry Marketing and TrackVia were just a few companies that announced Tuesday night that they’re hiring. Check the jobs board if you’re looking.
Test Common was first to the podium promising the least sexy demo of the night. It may not have been terribly sexy, but it was promising. It’s essentially on demand quality assurance services – a “global community for testers”. Need your software or website tested on demand? Test Common might be a solution for you. When someone from the audience shouted out that they are a dating service the presenters reluctantly concurred, adding, “”we’re match.com—we’re not responsible for what goes on during the date.” Cool idea…if you need some testing done for a short period of time (say two weeks or less) while you’re still in the early stages of a startup, for instance.
Next to the podium was Trackvia, an online database. They’re also hiring, and they are announcing funding soon, too…bonus. TrackVia delivered a powerful presentation that had the audience riveted. The presenter Matt McAdams said, “”anything i want to do with my data… Trackvia is a better way to do it.” He then demonstrated the product by showing how easy it is to search, update records and track changes using the software. Really intriguing. The pricing structure seems competitive, too. At this rate, I think Trackvia will have a strong and growing following very soon. Even Techstars used Trackvia to manage its application process this year.
Yallery.com is the first Social Art Management product and was recently soft-launched. Yallery’s driving purpose is to extend the real-world relationships people form through actual art creation and possession. Yallery’s freemium membership enables artists and collectors to share all of the artworks they have created or possess. Paid subscription memberships are available for artists and collectors who wish to access an additional level of site functionality, or for galleries that host their inventories through the site. I like the look and feel of Yallery. Like many of these companies, Yallery is hiring.
As we’ve been talking about recently, there’s a fair bit of buzz around Brightkite, a location-based social networking site. The founders led us through a demo of the site. It’s live and open to a group of enthusiastic beta testers which are talking a lot about it this week on Twitter. Brightkite allows you to see where people are in your vicinity, to post photos of your current location and to connect with people you know online in real life. The biggest question was about security issues and Brady and Martin demonstrated the privacy policies on the site, which they believe are robust. I’m a daily user of Brightkite (and a bit obsessive about privacy) and so far I have found that it is both feature-rich and safe. David discussed the security features in more detail recently.
A big thank you to Robert Reich of Me.dium for organizing this meetup. He presented on Me.dium’s new search technology which is still in pre-alpha (Colorado Startups covered Me.dium in 2006). The idea has a lot of potential–it essentially conducts searches that are based on “freshness” of a topic rather than the usual criteria. It looks like they’ll be able to use their current product, which monitors what sites its users are visiting (and which links they’re clicking,) to develop the search function. Robert emphasized that the product is still in its very early stages, but the potential is great for this new philosophy on search.
