The Boston Web Innovators Group is a great place to see emerging products, services, and companies, strut their stuff. It’s organized by VC mave, David Beisel, of Venrock. If you live in New England and are into technology/web – this is a must see event. They are held every other month and htis summer’s event, which was jamp-packed, featured at least a couple companies that made it to the TechCrunch50.
Boston Web Innovators Group
16
Jul
2008
2008
Yesterday I went to the 18th Boston Web Innovators Group meetup at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. The event is hosted and emceed by the very friendly and congenial David Beisel from Venrock. I was extremely impressed with the 200-300 people who showed up to the event at the height of summer. What the heck are these going to be like in the FAll?
The event was held in the ballroom at the hotel with several tables around the perimeter at which 11 companies were displaying their product concepts – most of the products were in beta and of course, all of them were web-based. The companies at this meeting were:
Zeer
Web Notes
TotSpot
Snipd
211(me)
PaperG
YouCastr
LuckyCal
GlobaLinguist
Ingeeni Studios
Tikatok
The three Main Dishes were: Zeer, Web Notes, and TotSpot. Now while a lot of these products/services were very well put together, I was surprised at how many were consumer-oriented: only PaperG and WebNotes had potential business-oriented angles: is the VC community really so enamored of websites that let you create a profile of your toddler? And another web-based calendar? The latter is particularly cirumspect since I just read a recent Fast Company article about 10 web-based companies that failed, RSSCalendar was one of them.
After the Main Dish presentations, attendees were urged to split off into 4 corners: Facebook Apps One Year Later, Hiring/Looking for Job, VC/Looking for Funding, iPhone/Mobile. Not much action was in the Facebook area but the employment area was hopping. Had some great conversations and managed to introduce myself to David Beisel who was gracious and sounded receptive to my company appearing at an upcoming meetup. I’m looking forward to the September 15th meetup – I think we might have something ready for the November show, better get cracking!
