I ran into people I haven’t seen in years, (Hi Karen!) clients showed up and I met some very smart/connected/successful people I hope to do business with in the near future.

Afterwards a few of us went over to the Muddy Charles pub at MIT where there was some sort of Brazilian/Columbian networking party. Transitioning from talking with VC’s to watching cute 20-year-old Brazilians dance around wearing flags while we talked about  mobile phone design made for an interesting evening.

It was fun to go downstairs from the Muddy to walk by WMBR. In 1993 I had a radio show there called ElectricSpace. We interviewed lots of amazing people that went on to become Internet legends, had a lot of fascinating late-night conversations and my roomate Michael proved that dance music can be Intelligent.

GregPC does his usual WebInno scorecard. Definitely worth a read if you want to lowdown on the presenters and side-dishes.

See you in November at Webinno 15.

There are three main dish presenters who will take the stage for a six minute demo of their service to the entire crowd:

Frame Media – Alan Phillips & Jon Finegold
GoLoco – Robin Chase
DesignMyRoom (Swatchbox) – Jesse Engle

Following those presentations, each of our side dish demonstrators will have an opportunity to give a quick 30-second overview of their service to the audience followed by a showcase of their companies at tables spread throughout the periphery of the room during the unstructured networking portion of the evening:

Fafarazzi / Dirtlocker – Chris Keller & Todd Galloway
SNIF Labs – Noah Paessel
TheUpDown – Michael Riech
GuitarStar (AdMe Corp) – Peter Eggleston
Mobleo – Tom Boilard Oncero – Phil Kim

Please RSVP at http://webinno14.eventbrite.com/ if you plan on attending.

I did however have a great demo of Webkins over the weekend. I will be hanging out there with my god-daughter to play games and goof off with her from time to time. Webkins is 8,0000% more fun than Myspace and there is a ton of stuff to do. We did a 20 minute demo and got through less than five percent of the features. It’s like cartoony game-driven SecondLife for the under-10 set. First you go to Webkins, then you graduate to Beacon Street  Girls or any of the other tween-focused social sites.

See you at WebInno on Monday July 9th.

Funny how Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was simultaneously saying Silicon Valley could use a downturn right about now. That’s because he’s burnt out, surrounded by people that just want to use him and he realized that running a popular blog can have a serious downside to your well-being. Welcome to the club Michael. Kara Swisher at All Things Digital has a nice retort. No more tears, Michael.

Silicon Valley is full of energized, greedy and insanely rich people. And then there are the VC’s (that’s a joke people). Speaking of VC’s, what’s up with the talent loss at Masthead? Rich Levandov left for Avalon Ventures and David Beisel, founder of WebInno, left Masthead for Venrock. Supposedly Masthead’s fund is running out of cash.

Boston, on the other hand, is only beginning to re-exhibit the group hallucination/personality disorder we call a bubble. Developers are hard to come by, purse strings are loosening and people are coming out in droves to see the next big thing. If I could invest in incubators…

People kept asking me if I new any .NET programmers, which was troubling as I’m a die-hard LAMP kind of guy. I would smile and hand them one of my new business cards. I enjoy watching people’s reactions to my Moo cards. My only complain is that they could be a bit taller. Then again, that saves trees.

GregPC at Over the River wrote about his pre-impressions of last night’s Webinnovators presenters and side dishes. Go read that, as I’m not going to say much about the side dishes other than to say that the hyper-local social/e-comm plays and the video/photosharing apps are all too similar for my tastes.

DNSstuff.com was the most compelling offering of the evening. They have a clear value proposition, know who their market is, have thousands of paying customers, and to top if off it’s an extremely useful service (I already used it one this morning when my hosts nameserver were acting up.)

Geezeo may have some features up there sleeves, but dialing a number to check my bank balance seems a lot easier than their account-aggregator soution. Concerns about tracking pending transactions derailed the presentation, hope they learn from that.

You Have Not Changed One Bit wins the award for one-trick pony that can be too easily replicated by the competition. How difficult is it for Classmates or Reunion.com to add a before and after photo? Wait a minutes, Classmates already does.

Webinno isn’t really about demo’s, it’s about the networking. Witness herds of developers wandering around co-mingling with polished B-school grads with that Newton-inspired confidence that gets them places. Lot’s of people who know how to Get Things Done.

And then there was That Woman. You know who I’m talking about.

Afterwards a few of us headed down to Dante for apps and drinks.
I had a thoroughly invigorating conversation with GregPC and a SecondLifer about the future of SL, which totally made my week. I was doing virtual environment stuff a long time ago and it’s great to see SL going in it’s current direction. Open sourcing everything to become the lingua-franca of the 3D Internet. There are so many ways Linden Labs can make money even if they give away all their code, it boggles my mind.

Linden Labs picked up Windwardmark Interactive this week. I met the Windwardmark team a few years ago when they presented at a rubber-chicken entrepreneur meeting. All I could think was “what realistic blood!� Nice to see Linden making smart acquisitions to beef up their rezzing capabilities. Linden’s Boston office is hiring.

I definitely want to present at a future WebInnovators event to show people how easy it is to set up a revenue-generating niche site by tying together different applications and content. Originally I wanted to do it as a main presenter, but upon further thinking, I’m thinking a side dish would be best. I’ll start building a website at 6:30pm and we’ll hopefully have our first revenue by 8pm. I think people will get a kick out of watching a site get built in real-time.

See you at the next Webinno.

Shameless plug: If you are looking for someone with over a decade of experience with internet startups, management consulting, product development, leading-edge marketing and social media initiatives, my resume is in the sidebar.

I am starting to make connections and see more familiar faces at these events, which is good considering I have done little local networking the past few years. My clients are all in San Francisco, Florida or Europe and my marketing all happens through my blogs.

By way of introduction to new readers, I started my consulting biz, Digicraft, in 1994. I built a lot of websites for IBM, Modem Media clients, and then helped build an interactive unit for a boutique advertising agency in New York. I remember going to SIG (pre-Digitas days) and seeing their web shop, all of about five people. Working in Silicon Alley in 95-98 was amazing, and burning out and taking off to Bali to live on the beach before moving back to Boston was the best time of my life, at least so far.
My resume is in the sidebar, I’ll let that speak for me if you’re interested. Basically lot’s of early-adopter stuff that most people in the room last night are probably too new to remember. andwidth, social nets, open API’s and cheap hardware are fueling the current wave of web innovation. I’m excited to be excited again, and not looking back on past accomplishments, but ahead to the future.

Polling the audience about their pick for the Main Dish presenter most likely to succeed was interesting. It was somewhat perplexing to hear so many people champion web-based writing application Virtual Ubiquity. I’ve spent some time with Writely and Zoho and reacted favorably to VU’s feature set, which addressed some of the most annoying issues with MS Word. However, It’s a hotly contested space, and the demo didn’t address addressable market, revenue models, etc. All I heard is that high-school students are going to use it, they are going after the .edu market? It’s a demo, but I do expect to hear about why I should care about your company.

I personally cheered for MyDesingin the loudest. I don’t think people grokked the complexity of what they have accomplished technically. Easily importing fixtures, windows and associated stats and prices from external websites can be a screen-scraping nightmare, and the demo went off smoothly. Just the right amount of CAD-iness and ease of use. The social aspect of sharing designs with other users was a nice touch. Why build from scratch when you can search, filter on attributes and start off with a template that’s close to where you want to be in the end?

MyDesign had me thinking about Yahoo Pipes. I’ve been having a lot of fun mashing up different website and services there. MyDesign is after a big market with lots of cash moving through it and a chance to reduce the friction between couples during the remodeling process, two thumbs up. If they get Lowe’s or Home Depot to market the system, watch out.
Cardvio reminded me of Moo Card. My Moo Cards were supposed to arrive in time for WebInno, but they didn’t. Once a year I go to a card store and buy a ton of cards for every possible occasion. I stick them in a drawer and when iCal birthday alerts pop up I write a note with a pen, and fire it off. Cardvio is a nice execution and will no doubt be popular in the corporate thank-you note market.

The networking at events like these is ok, if not a bit daunting for the uninitiated. Color-coded badges are eschewed, instead, grab a drink and start staring at name tags while perusing Side Dishes.

I participate in a lot of alpha demos from companies before they hit TechCrunch, so my bar for what is cool/useful is set pretty high. I saw a demo for a blog comment system on steroids yesterday that would have had the crowd doing the wave. Do presenters have to be Boston companies?

I would like to be a presenter, except I’m not going to pitch a company. I would like to do a short bit on what I would like to see presented at future Webinno events and finish up by building a social web app in the alloted six minutes with Pipes, KickApps and Brightcove. That would blow minds and get people thinking in new directions. Or not.

Event organizer David Beisel announced the formation of dinner groups, which are a welcome addition. One week I’d like to sit in on a VC dinner, next week hang with devlopers and the week after see what people are saying about the social media.

As a consultant, I want to know what’s going on around town. These days, I would like to spend some time talking with VC about working with their portfolio companies or performing due diligence on potential investments. I’ve done this in the past and enjoyed the experience.

I tell people I’m the perfect 5th guy for a startup. 2-3 founders are insanely driven to realize their dreams, then you have the developer(s) and hopefully a greybeard for seasoning and then there’s me. Usually it takes about half a beer to decide if we should work together, which was the case last night with one company.

Speaking of deals, right before I walked into the event last night I got a call from a client I just met yesterday afternoon via Skype who is looking to do due diligence on a certain website community they are looking to possibly acquire, today.

The endorphin rush of being in the middle of a deal, then immersing myself with 250 peers and getting turned on to some cool startups was a welcome change to my normal day. I hope the trend continues.

David Cutler, GregPC (who blogged about last nights event) and I retired to Dante downstairs to continue the conversation. My girlfriend called from Australia and I went to a quiet corner to talk. When I got back it sounded like Dave and Greg started a company. I was only gone for 10 minutes!

I made some quality new connections and in general consider WebInno a must-attend event. See you at the next event. Add me to your newsreader or you can subscribe to this blog via email, see the sidebar.