Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Stamford Tech Meetup #19 (Part 1)

Well, Irene washed Stamford Tech Meetup #19 away. We'll come back in September with the same lineup, same sponsors (thank you Ron Paliwoda), same bat time, same bat place. In the meantime ... for all of you data junkies, here's our attendence numbers:
#1: 30 members
#2: 26
#3: 19
#4: 24
#5: 16
#6: 33
#7: 29
#8: 33
#9: 29
#10: 33
#11: 32
#12: 66
#13: 56
#14: 47
#15: 59
#16: 47
#17: 41
#18: 33
#19: 57

This almost reads like a home run hitters stats, where (pre Steroids) 60 was the magic number.

Stamford Tech Meetup #18

A year a half of doing these meetups! We lost some users here but overall I'm pretty happy. This month we had Clipik, who was founded by fellow Wharton Grad Adriano Blanaru, a community for video editors. Smarp is a site that mines the Twitter firehose to tell you where certain celebrities are. Fitocracy is a game that helps you stay (or get) in shape. Clipik won the audience choice award but it was close.

Stamford Tech Meetup #17

The beginning of summer! Our June meetup featured some really interesting technology including our first bio demonstration: Biomotion Suite. I met Michael during the INSITE program where he first told me of his application to monitor Parkinsons. While the application was still being developed it looks really impressive (and also won the audience choice award). Culture Matchup is a niche social network for meeting others that want to go to cultural outings. Beansprout is a similar network for business development. Looks like we are starting to see a trend with these niche social networks... but can they compete against Facebook groups (or can they work with it?)

Stamford Tech Meetup #16

Alas we were in Hong Kong during this time but I'm sure Zishan Ahmad did an awesome job as MC. We had Meeteor and a few other companies demo...

Stamford Tech Meetup #15

Fifteen had the biggest turnout yet. We had Yan Tsirklin come back with SocialWish to show us their pivot: an embeddable widget that allowed folks to contribute to the non profit of their choice. MiMedia was a very interesting cloud application that allowed you to retrieve any piece of media via any device anywhere. (This sounds like the future!) Finally Addieu is an iPhone application that allows you to add to all of your social networks someone you met in one click...sort of like Hashable. Socialwish won convincingly (although Yan has been here before!).

Stamford Tech Meetup #14

An entire year of meetups + 1. This was the 14th meetup we had and the momentum was with us. We had two homegrown CT startups and one Brooklyn based company. ColorModules is a very interesting company that provides color matching based on photographs. No more bad matching ties or shirts! QRSYNC is a QR reader that works well on any product. Founder Brett Goldberg has done an amazing job building out the Stamford community. Finally Hermann Mazard's Homeshoppr provides an application for grocery shopping from your palm. Color Modules won the audience choice award in a tight race...congrats to all!

Stamford Tech Meetup #13

Lucky 13 brought us three really interesting demos. Jane Kim from Hashable came to demo their product. An address book with game dynamics, Hashable has drawn some big name investors and users to their platform. Tynt is an interesting service that tracks cut and pasted quotes in emails. Finally Emily Lutzker came down to show off OpenInvo, a marketplace for ideas!

Stamford Tech Meetup #12

The new year saw some new startups in Stamford. SpeakLike is an interesting mechanical turk type translation service that prides itself on its accuracy. Honestly Now is an application that allows you to solicit anonymous feedback from your friends. Stylophane mines Facebook data to determine trends over time in regards to fashion brands and styles. Finally, Citypockets is a way to manage daily deal vouchers in one dashboard. It also provides a marketplace for vouchers. Cheryl from Citypockets won the audience choice award and eventually raised a seed round of financing. Congratulations to all!

Monday, August 29, 2011

Stamford Tech Meetup #11

This was the holiday edition of our meetup. I didn't expect such a good turn out for it but tis the season! Urbanbloke is Gilt Groupe for all stuff dude. Eggzack came all the way from Central Jersey to present their B2B demo for small to medium sized businesses. Murray Jones demonstrated his Talk About Health platform; connecting folks with similar ailments online. In the end Urbanbloke took home the trophy. I'm pretty excited that we finished our calendar year on an uptick. It's been a great first year for the meetup.

Stamford Tech Meetup #10

So this meetup was held at the law firm of Robinson and Cole and done in conjunction with Ephraim Cohen from the Fortex Group. We had an American Idol type of feel with some great "judges" including investors and VCs such as Mac Lipscomb and William Gordon. CMP.ly came back the second time around and wowed folks with their compliance platform (they raised a nice sized round shortly after demoing). Jesse from Getminders showed off his mobile reminder platform for folks needing to be reminded to take their pills. Broad Street Analytics demonstrated their platform for crunching big amounts of data. Green Bride Guide talked about their content on how to be a "green bride." All in all I think people got something out of the discussion. Jesse took home the people's choice award (since then he's pivoted into Guyhaus, a tool for providing men with essentials.)

Stamford Tech Meetup #9

I've been away from this blog for a while so I need to recap the last year of meetups! We had Wingtip.it (now HavetoHave) and SpotOn at this past meetup. Wingtip provides you with a closet of stuff that you "Have to Have". Pretty self explanatory, great for gift giving or for retailers to figure out what's hot. SpotOn is using Foursquare data to create recommendations for friends. Another cool tool. SpotOn won the meetup and we look forward to great stuff coming from them!