This week’s New Tech Meetup was standing room only. It followed on the heels of a Silicon Flatirons event, which was informative and educational. The excitement in the room was palpable as Julie Penner brought the meetup to order.
BpCentral started the meetup by introducing Liquid Scenarios. It’s a “suite of proprietary software technologies that allow anyone, even a child, to do 40 hours of CPA/CFA analysis in a matter of seconds.” The software demo showed how you can see valuations, cap tables and model outcomes in an easy-to-use spreadsheet-like environment. This seems to be something that a lot of the startups in the room could use.
At this point, the software is only available for Windows. There’s a 90 trial version available. And, in answer to a question from the audience, there isn’t a feature that lets you turn the model into reality. I guess that’s going to require a bit of elbow grease. I’d give it a try. It seemed relatively intuitive and easy to navigate. Calculations at the click of a button as opposed to the slog it usually is.
The second presenter at the meetup was Toolpax, presented by Tim Stephens. Toolpax, “automagically determines prices for products that don’t have prices.” Things like cams, which helped Tim build a “solid model” prototype from start to finish (and checkout) with audience participation.
Toolpax is “the industry’s first automated design & pricing for custom manufactured products where the audience will see 3D solid models built in seconds after answering some simple questions.” It was fast, it seemed user-friendly and requires no calculations. You can pan, rotate, zoom, basically previewing the cam from every direction. One of the coolest parts of the demo, I thought, was that you can order the parts right off the bat. The process seems to have been designed with the customer in mind.
Next up was SocialEyes, Inc., a Social Community Relationship Management (sCRM) platform. SocialEyes will launch with Microsoft Academic in about two weeks. It “puts the brand in control. They can manage customer relationships in this new platform.” David Henderson, one of the first few Double Click employees, seems to think that the younger generation of web users is interacting with brands in a way that most of us in the room at New Tech Meetup aren’t.
Questions from the audience were about social networking fatigue and building critical mass. Henderson says it’s about community and aggregating community. It’s about community engagement. I think he’s on to something. There is a lot of brand interaction within the pre-teen and teen set. Leveraging that by accessing the social graph seems like a logical next step.
Dan Mayer and Ben Brinckerhoff presented on Seekler.com, a “collection of community-built lists that helps users find new stuff like movies, music, and just about anything else.” They argue that finding recommendations online takes too long and that they have created a meta list within the Seekler community.
This meta list can be contributed to by you, the community member. After logging in you can vote for your favorite sci-fi movies, for instance, and add your opinion to the current list. You can’t overpower the community with your vote but you can make it count. They’d like to eventually add a “what’s hot” functionality. If they do that, I think the application could become even more useful. It would have a “living” aspect to it, almost digg-like in its freshness. I think that’s something I would go back to, especially if they allowed me to set up filters to my liking.
Socialthing! was the last tech company to present. Socialthing! was recently reviewed on Colorado Startups after their presentation at VCIR. In a sentence, Socialthing! let’s you, “see everything that’s going with your friends in all the sites you use, easily figure out where you’re missing connections with your friends, interact w/multiple sites at once.” It’s a digital life manager that allows you to group your online identities.
The Socialthing! presentation pumped up the audience. People are ready to see its release to a wider audience at SXSW this week.
Thanks to Julie Penner for rocking the mic on Tuesday. The meetup was a lot of fun with many familiar faces and even more new ones in the audience. See you on April 1 at the next one.
