My First Boston Web Innovators Group
Posted on November 30th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Last night I went to the Boston Web Innovators Group.
WebInno is continuing to emerge as a key event in Boston for web and mobile innovators to connect with other entrepreneurs, visionaries, and creative thinkers in the space.
Three demos, then beerworking. Good format, although maybe a few more demos next time. After the PaidContent mixer a few weeks ago (serious media, finance and power brokers in the room), I’m starting to feel like the Boston scene is heating up again.
They made the usual mistakes new events do. Get people to raise hands to self-identify. Who’s new, a startup, a VC, media, etc. How about tags that identify what you’re looking for?
Speaking of tags, what’s the official even tag?
It was great to see all the people and feel the energy in the room. Where have these people been hiding the past few years?
I used to host salons in the early 90′s, a few technologists and geeks, some designers, a money guy and maybe a philosopher, add lots of red wine and you had an engaging afternoon.
Adam Green from Grazr presented, I’ve been using their widget for months, always cool to see the people behind the services.
City Squares is doing Citysearch right. Ben and I will be getting together soon.
I mentioned to Ben that Myspace is charging companies $30k for a page. Nobody seems to know this fact. Today I read that Yahoo is doing something similar.
I have a few clients that could benefit from the Startup Business School. Richard Banfield gave me a demo, impressive first impression. Great to be able to focus on knowledge transfer and leave the business plan writing to the client, as I’m a firm believer that you shouldn’t hire out biz plan writing, at least the first draft.
FineTune reminded me of Pandora / Last.fm with the Hype Machine thrown in for good measure.
OfferTrax looked good and I enjoyed talking to the founders, My concern for them is that the product recommendation market is so tight, everyone has a Myspace widget for it and the differentiators are not clear to me. Who’s really going to subscribe to a feed of what their friends buy? Interesting idea but I don’t see it really taking off. f they have experts on board, thats another thing but then again how do I know to trust the experts (think sketchy CNET video reviews of products the reviewer hasn’t seen until 5 minutes before the shoot.)
More from Ronin Marketeer and check Technorati for the tag webinno.
5 Responses
test
test
Thanks for the trackback! You sent me scrambling though… I think the Grazr presenter was Mike Kowalchik? I’m not certain because I’ve never met Mike before but I’m pretty sure this is Adam Green:
http://mashup.darwinianweb.com/archive/2006/23.html
One other thing, it seemed like the room could not handle the volume, the A/C wasn’t cutting it.
OfferTrax does seem a bit early, a lot of evangelism to be done there. City Squares is good but seems like a ton of work, do you see that running the local newspapers into extinction?
Not to extinction but perhaps supplanting certain functions people rely on the dead-tree versions for currently. Anything is better than Citysearch IMHO.
Hi David:
This was my first Web Innovator’s meeting as well. I expect to attend the May 22 meeting as well. If you plan to attend, we could probably catch each other at least for an introduction maybe over a beer.
Gopal
Sure, see you on the 22nd.