Hi everyone! Hope the holidays are treating you well. Here are some pics from last week’s holiday event. Enjoy!
Hey gang! Here’s the Nerd Stalker‘s 60s Spots they shot at our Old Tech / New Tech holiday party…Maybe you’ll see some familiar faces. Check it out!Continue Reading
Thanks to everyone who attended our event on 12.11. The SF New Tech twitterverse pics from the event are here. Enjoy!
Hey, what a crawl today…Here’s what the twitterverse said about it. Enjoy!
Check out what Liberty aka #ThatTechGirl and Greg aka Nerd Stalker says about the pitches on our 10.16 event.
Check out the Post Show with Nerd Stalker’s Greg Viloria and #ThatTechGirl Liberty Madison as they break down the Korean Style Tech Event.
Our friend of SF New Tech, David Spark, interviews some of our SF New Tech startup peeps on – What is your top tips for Productivity? See what they say.
David’s original article is here.
Check out Nerd Stalker’s Post Event Show with Nerd Stalker’s Greg Viloria (aka “SocialGreg”) and Liberty Madison (aka “That Tech Girl”) for some comment on their “favs” of the night for April.
We had fun at the April event and we hope you did as well. In case you missed it or want to catch a demo that really caught your eye, here is the video in the raw. Our video ninjas are creating the individual demos videos as we speak. Enjoy!Continue Reading
Great show yesterday and we hope you all enjoyed it! Here are some pics from our Twitter feed.
Check out Nerd Stalker’s Summary on our February 2013 event. Our congrats to Pedicine App, WalkMe, Blipboard, LoYakk, and Bizzabo who rocked it. Thanks to our sponsors Dice, Outlook, Mylermedia, LeClair-Ryan and CalInnovates for making this event happen. Also, thanks to all of you for coming out and supporting us in 2013.
Thanks to Bitcasa, Referly, Evzdrop, Bugsnag, Playscreen, Dave Mathews -Â NewAer and Soo Meta for the great demos. Check out Nerd Stalker’s Adolfo Foronda’s Recap of our event on 1/23/13. Â Also, catch Adolfo and Greg’s Nerd Stalker Recap live at the event on USTREAM.
Happy 4th everyone! All the videos from our June 20 event are now posted. See the great presentations from Reddit, Waze, Crowdflower, Factoid Games, iBroadcast.tv, Zero1 and more here.
Originate is the leader in a new brand of investment model called “Venture Resources.” We invest elite engineering and business expertise into high-potential opportunities in which we can leverage our past experience to add significant value. A venture capitalist will provide startups with cash and guidance, but we partner with entrepreneurs to actually develop a world class product. We provide the resources to fund, grow, and build a new company.
We work with early-stage ventures as well as more established companies poised for explosive growth. Our portfolio includes investments in some of the most entrepreneurial start-ups and fast-moving enterprises as well as internally generated incubations.
If you are an entrepreneur with the desire to take your startup to the next level, contact us to see how we might work together.
Contact:
Rob Meadows/Partner & CEO
rob@originate.com
originate.com
Wufoo strives to be the easiest way to collect information over the Internet.
Our HTML form builder helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code.
Contact:
Chris Coyier/Lead Hucklebucker
chriscoyier@wufoo.com
wufoo.com
Space matters. It can inspire people to do great things. To engage one-another. To think more deeply. To innovate and make a difference. That’s what inspires us at Turnstone. Because great companies don’t just happen. They’re crafted. For unique culture and brand. For tech-enabled mobility. For collaboration and attracting and engaging great employees. Great spaces are part of great companies. Let us make your space matter.
Contact:
Jeff Joerling/Business Development Manager
jjoerling@myturnstone.com
myturnstone.com
The JetJaw mobile engagement platform enables in-the-moment interaction through any mobile phone, tablet or computer. Act fast on immediate, accurate feedback with rich, quantitative analytics. Increase loyalty and revenue with JetJaw.
JetJaw offers solutions for customer feedback at restaurants and retail, audience voting at events and conferences, data collection for mobile workforces, student polls and quizzes at universities and trainings, advertising response and more.
Contact:
Mark Salsberry/CEO
sales@jetjaw.com
www.jetjaw.com
Jones Lang LaSalle (NYSE:JLL) is a financial and professional services firm specializing in real estate. The firm offers integrated services delivered by expert teams worldwide to clients seeking increased value by owning, occupying or investing in real estate. With 2008 global revenue of $2.7 billion, Jones Lang LaSalle serves clients in 60 countries from 750 locations worldwide, including 180 corporate offices. The firm is an industry leader in property and corporate facility management services, with a portfolio of approximately 1.3 billion square feet worldwide. LaSalle Investment Management, the company’s investment management business, is one of the world’s largest and most diverse in real estate with more than $46 billion of assets under management.
Contact:
Tom Poser/Tenant Representative, Office Space Finder
tom.poser@am.jll.com
tomposer.com
Rackspace® Hosting is the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, and the founder of OpenStackâ„¢, an open source cloud platform. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support® to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. In 2010, Rackspace was recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and listed on the InformationWeek 500 as one of the nation’s most innovative users of business technology. The company was also positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the “2010 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting.â€
Contact:
Celeste Steele/Events Marketing
celeste.steele@rackspace.com
www.rackspace.com
Get your discount on for SF New Tech Mobile on 7.13!
Act fast, as these tickets will go QUICK!
Our second Japan Night on 6/28 is gearing up to be fantastic.
Over 100 tickets are discounted (or free). Get them while they last!
Information & registration @ http://sfnewtechjapannight2.eventbrite.com/
Discount Codes:
2sfjn-seeyouthere = 100% off! (26 avail)
2sfjn-yeahbaby = 50% off! (25 avail)
2sfjn-whatadeal = 25% off! (25 avail)
2sfjn-isnoozed = 10% off (25 avail)
Good luck!
OPOWER is an energy efficiency and Smart Grid software company that helps utilities meet their efficiency goals through effective customer engagement. At OPOWER, our team of software engineers, marketers, social scientists, statisticians, engagement managers, salespeople, recruiters, and regulatory gurus are directly responsible for the enormous positive impact we’ve had to date: the amount of power we save will soon equal a third of what’s produced by the entire US solar industry.
Contact:
Drew Hylbert, Director, West Coast Engineering
drew.hylbert@opower.com
www.opowerjobs.com
Our friends @ btrax posted a Part 2 summary of our Social Data Revolution’s panel’s discussion on how to design ways of interacting with people and how to construct metrics for using social data. Read it here http://ht.ly/46xue
Building San Francisco’s broadband and wireless connection to the world.
Contact:
Lane Kasselman, Strategic Media Advisor, AT&T
lane@kasselman.com
www.att.com
btrax, Inc. is a San Francisco based creative agency serving global markets for over 6 years. Our team has a wide range of experience from handling UI Design, User Experience Consulting, Social Media Marketing, Branding and Identity, Startup Prototypes, Mobile development, to website localization for the Asian market.
Contact:
Brandon K. Hill, President/CEO
brandon@btrax.com
www.btrax.com
Hey Everyone! Here’s the USTREAM for the opening 2011 SF New Tech event featuring: ConsumerBell, DemDash, Topicmarks, TokBox, ConferenceHound, Hashable and more, in case you weren’t there.
We will be streaming the next event on 2/9 @ sfnewtech/live. Catch us there and interact with us on USTREAM using the #sfnewtech hashtag. See u live or online!
Hummer Winblad Venture Partners was founded in 1989 as the first venture capital fund to invest exclusively in software companies.
Contact:
Lars Leckie, Managing Partner
lars@humwin.com
www.humwin.com
John Lin and The Cypress Group at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney work primarily with technology entrepreneurs and executives to identify solutions that address both their personal and professional financial needs. Our objective is to provide value added advice and services to our clients within the startup community, so that they have more time to focus on building their companies.
Contact:
John Lin, Wealth Manager
john.s.lin@mssb.com
fa.smithbarney.com/thecypressgroupsb
Backblaze online backup provides the easiest way to protect all your data.
Built upon the unique Backblaze storage cloud, the service automatically backs up all data for consumers and businesses for just $5/month with unlimited storage. Start your free trial now.
Contact:
Gleb Budman, CEO
gleb.budman@backblaze.com
www.backblaze.com
Software Product Development firm that works as innovation partner for ISVs, SaaS, Consumer Facing Sites.
Contact:
Matt Perez, COO & Co-founder
mperez@nearsoft.com
www.nearsoft.com
The ultimate all inclusive shared office space for tech & new media companies with between 1 and 30 employees.
Contact:
Duncan Logan, Founder & CEO
dlogan@rocket-space.com
www.rocket-space.com
We work with founders, executives and investors to grow high performance companies. Creating actionable business plans to build out operational, marketing and leadership strategy.
Contact:
Kevin Waldron, CEO
kevin@waldronconsultinggroup.com
waldronconsultinggroup.com
SF New Tech gold sponsor CALinnnovates has just announced the Grateful Tech “What Technology Are You Grateful For?” Contest where you could possibly win
- A brand new iPad ($499 value) or
- An iPod Touch ($299 value)or
- An iPod Nano ($149 value)
All you have to do is record a 30 second (max) video telling them what technology it is that you are grateful for, upload the video to youtube, and enter the youtube url along with your contact info on the contest page here.
Your video could be serious, funny, heart-warming or anything else, so long as it is “clean” (before uploading to youtube, think about whether you could watch it with your mom AND grandmom !).
In addition to the prizes above, each winner will get 100$ donated to Kiva.org in their name for them to invest in an entrepreneur of their choice.
Deadlines and Dates: The contest runs from November 23rd 2010 until December 15th, 2010 and online voting runs from December 15th, 2010 until December 31th, 2010.
For a full list of contest rules and terms, click here.
Photo: via joshfassbind
About CALinnovates
CALinnovates is a statewide coalition focused on championing the conversation about the future of California’s critical technology sector. For more information, check out calinnovates.org
You can also stay updated and follow CALinnovates on twitter @calinnovates and fan them on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/CALinnovates
When Benjamin Bérubé was working on a Web project that needed to capture video using a webcam he thought it would be a cakewalk. However, he quickly found out that there was no easy solution to accomplish this.
Instead of complaining on forums and blogs like the average web developer would do, Benjamin did something completely different and innovative. He went out and created Nimbb, a site for recoding and sharing videos from your webcam.
Nimbb is easy, fast* and free**.
Benjamin will be showing off nimbb’s features and capabilities this Wednesday at our Oct 20th 2010 SFNewTech event. Come and check it out.
Benjamin is based in Montreal, Canada. He has recently moved to San Francisco to spread the word about Nimbb, because as he said it himself…
After just one week of marketing in Montreal, I decided to come to San Francisco – where all the action is – to promote Nimbb.
Well, we told Benjamin
You have arrived at the right city and at the right event!
Benjamin loves SFNewTech peeps so much, that he has pledged to give away one full month of Nimbb subscription free to anyone of you that tweets about the service during the demo and follows @nimbb on twitter.
A developer at heart – with over 15 years of experience in application software development – Benjamin will likely answer any questions you may have about the underlying technology that powers the nimbb webcam video recording and sharing service.
So don’t be shy. Come on over!
*fast = I recorded, saved and shared the above 30 second video using my webcam on nimbb in under 1 minute!
** free = Basic membership is free. For a full list of subscription types and price, see the subscription page.
VideoGenie is revolutionizing the way brands connect with their customers. Founder and Stanford Graduate Justin Nassiri will take stage this wednesday (20th October 2010) at SFNewTech so we can say hello to VideoGenie.
We asked Justin what’s in store for SFNewTech peeps, and he told us that he will show you how VideoGenie
- captures your customers on video naturally (unscripted),
- removes the need for complicated editing, and
- displays these videos in a targeted and socially relevant way and
- drives customer conversion and increases your brand reach.
Obviously there is lot more to it than this, but we promised Justin not to steal his thunder, so if you want to know more about how VideoGenie can help your brand and also meet Justin himself, head over to our SFNewTech event this Wednesday!
My Gengo was founded based on needs its founders saw as a gaping hole in the translation business: too expensive and too slow. So they did what entrepreneurs do: they solved the problem by filling that void.
Mygengo.com founders Robert Laing and Matthew Romaine knew the need was there for a consumer service, “big project management and set up fees just don’t work for every day content translation”. Plus, Laing added, machine translations were fast but not useful for business applications and to get access to freelancers and agencies, the cost was prohibitive. Gengo means language in Japanese.
At My Gengo, you have access to a wealth of certified talent who must pass a quality test (of 11,000 applicants, 1200 passed their competency test). As a result, you get accurate translations for 5 cents a word, about 70% less than standard translation services, translators get flexible hours plus a reliable income.
And My Gengo stands by their work, “We’re so confident, we offer a full refund if customers aren’t happy”. That’s led to 80% referrals, 40% repeat customers and doubling of volume each quarter.
It works like this: you post your job at My Gengo, their certified translators will pick jobs they feel most confident completing. Translation requests range from the simple, like a Tweet, to more complex documents.
Their second product, launched Q1 2010, is an API that can be plugged into a site so that users don’t need to go to My Gengo to get access to their services. Currently API partners are Magento (ecommerce site) and Movable (the most used publishing system in Japan, often used for blogs).
Having received seed funding, My Gengo is now moving to their next stage of funding.
“Think of it as a way to say hi,” that’s how Founder, Project Lead & Programmer Takuro Yoshida describes his newly launched social communications site called Drrop. Takuro Yoshida co-founded Drrop with Hiro Kobayashi in September 2010 (barely a month ago!)
Focusing on the need to basically filter or screen people trying to friend you on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Yoshida believes Drrop is a way to offer more control and privacy to social media users.
Why does he consider Drrop more private?
“You can’t see the user’s profile unless you reply to the person’s first Drrop note to you, and if you decide to not reply, you just use a feature called “wipe” to rid your screen of the person’s comments and they are gone forever.
The biggest differentiator? According to Yoshida it’s that you see each person’s comments, one by one, and 24 hours after it’s posted, it’s not visible any more!
Coopa, a product with a name derived from cooperation, launched the same day it presented at SF New Tech.
At the first ever Japan Night event (brought to you by SFNewTech and btrax), Coopa was presented by Tsutomu Sasaki, President & Yashuhiro Yamada (Cloud Solutions).
Coopa is a enterprise level, business application development tool for building cloud-based applications, running on mobile devices.
The company provides an application engine for enterprises developing using HTML5 or JavaScript. With Coopa, companies create customized applications using a framework library of native/hybrid type applications.
Showing its versatility, Coopa supports creating business applications on iphones for enterprise level applications and for Google’s Android environment.
Their applications integrate smoothly within a Google environment, as they run on top of Google apps. Sasaki noted they believe they are one of few companies developing enterprise level applications for the Google apps platform. To ensure consistency, they are a Google certified partner.
Coopa, a product with a name derived from cooperation, launched the same day it presented at SF New Tech.
At the first ever Japan Night event (brought to you by SFNewTech and btrax), Coopa was presented by Tsutomu Sasaki, President & Yashuhiro Yamada (Cloud Solutions).
Coopa is a enterprise level, business application development tool for building cloud-based applications, running on mobile devices.
The company provides an application engine for enterprises developing using HTML5 or JavaScript. With Coopa, companies create customized applications using a framework library of native/hybrid type applications.
Showing its versatility, Coopa supports creating business applications on iphones for enterprise level applications and for Google’s Android environment.
Their applications integrate smoothly within a Google environment, as they run on top of Google apps. Sasaki noted they believe they are one of few companies developing enterprise level applications for the Google apps platform. To ensure consistency, they are a Google certified partner.
GazoPa is a search engine using graphics (i.e. images), instead of text, for search input. Why is that useful? Because, as Hideki Kobayashi, GazoPa’s Project Leader pointed out, “Keywords are insufficient for accurate image searches”, GazoPa delivers more precisely because it uses shapes and colors to deliver comparable results to whatever you’re literally looking at and for. GazoPa is a start-up project within Hitachi.
Using GazoPa, upload any image, and GazoPa’s engine searches through a database of more than 80 million archived images, delivering you the closest images to your graphical query.
Kobayashi, noted its particular usefulness for consumer comparison shopping, especially when it comes to fashion. Simply plug in a graphical image of the high-end item you’re looking for, GazoPa scours the internet, showing similar, less pricey, items. Think of it as similar to sites like kayak.com for travel, in its quest for lower priced, similar items based on images as input.
GazoPa’s goal is to provide the service to consumers, ecommerce sites and photo sites. Given they’ve indexed more images than any competitor, yet can deliver quicker than any similar products, they’re proud of their technology.
In the past 6 months alone, they’ve moved from 30K to 70K visitors a month. Given their style search capability was launched 2 months ago, Kobayashi is now betting on traffic increasing and declared that they’re ready for it!
Starting this month, our SFNewTech blog will be bringing insider scoops on the latest happenings at the companies that demo their application or service on our stage. We will also be interviewing the people behind all the cool new technology!
Our first such company is DooChoo. Doochoo took stage at the July 20th (2010) SFNewTech Event. After their awesome demo, we caught up with the two co-founders Armando Biondi and Paolo Privitera and asked them to give us the scoop on DooChoo, their unique platform and applications for opinions.
What is DooChoo?
DooChoo: It’s a platform — a technological platform with some applications built on top of that. It’s like a Freebase for opinions. Imagine a Wikipedia like site, imagine a place where anybody can post opinions and can ask opinions and can get answers. Doochoo is a public, open platform. We don’t own data. You can think of it like a Wikipedia, but much better. Wikipedia is not semantic; so you cannot query Wikipedia.
We compare our platform to Freebase — that, by the way, has been acquired by Google — we have had great meetings with Freebase and we’re really impressed by their platform.
So you can imagine a Freebase-like site with API on top and applications. We are building some applications that work as proof of concept plus we can go very deep into niche markets. We can power up specific areas of the platforms. We do API. We can offer any developer or user to build an application on our platform.
So, I program in your platform and then implement it on my Site?
DooChoo: Anything you can imagine about using a platform or an application can be done. Keep in mind that it’s not just for developers and users. It’s a platform where anybody, even a non-proficient / non-techie users, can go there and query any possible question, opinions, recommendation and get an answer. Not only for data, but also for structure.
How different or similar is it to social search engines like Aardvark?
DooChoo: It’s very different in this way — virtually any other competitor of DooChoo doesn’t have structured data model — structured data for inbound information. We are starting from building a new type of data structure, very specifically made for organizing opinions and is going to help to build the semantic layer on which we can also, in phase two or three, gather data that are not structured.
Right now, a lot of companies are offering semantic too, to understand sentiment. We are not doing that. We are building a structured data set on which people can offer opinions in a structured way. Imagine a poll or a survey — you like or don’t like — yes or no.
In the future, as I said, we can also have semantic tools to understand what people are thinking, but that is not our goal.
Can you tell me a little bit about the company?
DooChoo: The whole idea started more than a few years ago from Armando, then we met through a company called H-art in Italy. The company has been officially founded in January 2010 and it has been funded as well. We had a price seed of $150,000. We’ve had a decent burn rate and now we are close to the moment in which we are going to need funding to reach our next step.
Who are the founders?
DooChoo: Armando Biondi and Paolo Privitera.
How can people get in touch with DooChoo?
DooChoo: You can call us at +1 415-787-CHOO or send inquiries to info@doochoo.com. And of course you can visit us online at http://doochoo.com/
Thank you and good luck!
Starting this month, our SFNewTech blog will be bringing insider scoops on the latest happenings at the companies that demo their application or service on our stage. We will also be interviewing the people behind all the cool new technology!
Our first such company is DooChoo. Doochoo took stage at the July 20th (2010) SFNewTech Event. After their awesome demo, we caught up with the two co-founders Armando Biondi and Paolo Privitera and asked them to give us the scoop on DooChoo, their unique platform and applications for opinions.
What is DooChoo?
DooChoo: It’s a platform — a technological platform with some applications built on top of that. It’s like a Freebase for opinions. Imagine a Wikipedia like site, imagine a place where anybody can post opinions and can ask opinions and can get answers. Doochoo is a public, open platform. We don’t own data. You can think of it like a Wikipedia, but much better. Wikipedia is not semantic; so you cannot query Wikipedia.
We compare our platform to Freebase — that, by the way, has been acquired by Google — we have had great meetings with Freebase and we’re really impressed by their platform.
So you can imagine a Freebase-like site with API on top and applications. We are building some applications that work as proof of concept plus we can go very deep into niche markets. We can power up specific areas of the platforms. We do API. We can offer any developer or user to build an application on our platform.
So, I program in your platform and then implement it on my Site?
DooChoo: Anything you can imagine about using a platform or an application can be done. Keep in mind that it’s not just for developers and users. It’s a platform where anybody, even a non-proficient / non-techie users, can go there and query any possible question, opinions, recommendation and get an answer. Not only for data, but also for structure.
How different or similar is it to social search engines like Aardvark?
DooChoo: It’s very different in this way — virtually any other competitor of DooChoo doesn’t have structured data model — structured data for inbound information. We are starting from building a new type of data structure, very specifically made for organizing opinions and is going to help to build the semantic layer on which we can also, in phase two or three, gather data that are not structured.
Right now, a lot of companies are offering semantic too, to understand sentiment. We are not doing that. We are building a structured data set on which people can offer opinions in a structured way. Imagine a poll or a survey — you like or don’t like — yes or no.
In the future, as I said, we can also have semantic tools to understand what people are thinking, but that is not our goal.
Can you tell me a little bit about the company?
DooChoo: The whole idea started more than a few years ago from Armando, then we met through a company called H-art in Italy. The company has been officially founded in January 2010 and it has been funded as well. We had a price seed of $150,000. We’ve had a decent burn rate and now we are close to the moment in which we are going to need funding to reach our next step.
Who are the founders?
DooChoo: Armando Biondi and Paolo Privitera.
How can people get in touch with DooChoo?
DooChoo: You can call us at +1 415-787-CHOO or send inquiries to info@doochoo.com. And of course you can visit us online at http://doochoo.com/
Thank you and good luck!
photos by Matthew Silvey
Wow! What a night!
I want to offer up a BIG THANKS to everyone who joined us on Wednesday to celebrate our 4th year anniversary! How thrilling it is to be surrounded by high style, cool tech and great people!
It’s hard to believe we’ve evolved from a meetup of 8 geeks in a bar to a constant barrage of awesome standing-room-only events.
Have you seen the list of companies who’ve jumped on stage with us over the years? Like 200+ of ’em. Check them out (and rate them!) here.
I’m really looking forward to jumping into year number 5 with y’all! Like maybe as early as May 5th when we take another deep dive in to mobile tech, Cinqo de Mayo style? Or perhaps when the Belgians take to the stage on May 18th? Tickets will go on sale soon. Stay tuned for discount codes! 🙂
OK, without further ado, here are some nifty links from Wednesday’s SF New Tech…Enjoy!
* So, Zuumer, Citizen Effect, Collaborize, Threadbox, Task Squid, Encoding.com, Apture .. who was the crowd favorite? Not so much? See the charts!
* Who jumped on stage and why for 60 second spots?
* See the Justin.tv raw stream in its entirety. (We’ll be cutting individual clips of the presenters soon.) Mahalo to Corporate Cinematographer – ConradWade.com– @ThriveHD for the capture!
* More awesome photos . . . !
photos by Jennifer Simpson
photos by Julie Blaustein
photos by Matthew Gonzales
Thanks to everyone who came out to the Inagural BizSessions 1.0.
It was a packed house with a mixed audience of techies, entrepreneurs and VC’s. A successful and educational event, filled with great panelists and good conversations.
The topic of the evening was: VC FTW or WTF? or Funding models for cash-starved times.
Panelists Included:
Ping Li – Partner, Accel Ventures
Jonathan Abrams — Founder, Socializr
Kent Goldman — Principal, First Round Capital
Igor Shoifot –COO, Fotki
Check out more pictures on Flickr and Facebook. See you in August for the next SF New Tech & BizSessions event.