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.
Travelling by car these days can be a bit much to deal with because everyone is always on the go (traffic) and gas prices aren’t quite so friendly on your pocketbook. Waze, a very intuitive, free app for your smartphone (iOS and Android) helps you get from point A to B in several different ways.
First and foremost, Waze has always been saving you time by being a fun, community-based GPS traffic and navigation app. Currently, with its latest update (3.2), you’re now able to save money by making it easy to save on gas, and who doesn’t want that? Waze helps you find the cheapist gas around you, or along your route. It also has specials at select gas stations. Simply redeem your digital coupon when you arive at the participation station and save. All the pricing, much like everything at Waze is updated by you, the community.
Another new feature is adding a stop along your “route”. You can choose through multiple “Search by Category” features. This feature is kind of like Foursquare’s explore option that they just added, however you get realtime ETA to both your stop and final destination.
Download your free app today and start saving time and money in the coolest waze possible.
If you’ve ever left a comment on any site on the web, ever, you know how hard it can be to keep track of comments directed back to you, or in general in that specific thread. Sure, there are several services that can help with this more than common problem, but none help you engage quite like Engagio does it.
Engagio is a Gmail-like Inbox for your social conversations and relationships. Engagio provides a unified engagement dashboard across the various online/social spaces and gives the user a unique visibility about the people behind these conversations and their social identities.
William Mougayar, CEO of Engagio took a moment to speak with us, and here’s some things you should know:
- Engagio is a FREE service!
- They were launched in early Febuary, and currently around the 10,000 user mark.
- Engagio is all about “one on one” relationships.
- “We are a social conversation network, allowing you to follow others via engaging/commenting.”
- When you follow a user via Engagio, it allows you to see conversations only with them. But, you can also see where they are active (other sites) and choose to interact there or not.
- If you get a reply, you get a message in your inbox.
- You can leave a comment, then go back and edit, if you like, and re-share to sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr!
- Did we mention its FREE!!??!!
At some point, I’m told there will be a premium service with features like managing multiple accounts and analytics. This is where community managers will really be able to thrive and see results, but I’m sure you can expect advertisement to follow. Community managers won’t be the only ones ready to engage with the above mentioned free service. Anyone who is active on the web can benefit from Williams creation.
So, sign up today, and begin your personal relationship management. Bonus for the SF New Tech community (that’s you!): Anyone that signs up to Engagio AND Tweets about it will be entered into a drawing for an iPad 3! And if you also Share on Facebook, you will increase your chances of winning by two! Just follow this link to sign-up and we’ll automatically recognize your steps. (Note: you MUST share immediately after your signup to qualify for the draw!)
For more information on how to best utilize your new social conversation network, check out the Engagio Blog, and don’t forget to come talk to William in person next week at SF New Tech.
What Is PointBurst?
Much like HootSuite, TweetDeck, Seeismic, Etc, PointBurst is a social media syndication platform that allows its users to post to multiple platforms. The BIG difference with Pointburst is, “Organizations can also rapidly share every asset they create with their franchisees/resellers/affiliates/partners (“affiliate”) multiplying their reach, ensuring brand consistency, and providing valuable content to support the affiliates’ social media efforts.â€
A great example of the above mentioned description is as follows: Lets say brand “X “isn’t great with social media (like most brands), so they have “X†amount of affiliates, and/or brand partners, who each have their own accounts to mange. When brand “X†posts one update, it then reaches out to each “affiliateâ€, who then is notified, and then decides if they would like to allow to publish to each one of their accounts, should they choose to do so (awesome sauce).
Who Is PointBurst’s Target Audience?
Any organization(s), with any amount of affiliates, trying to reach the masses or be more effective with their marketing. So, pretty much you, me, anyone trying to effectively brand themselves or company with a simple post. Time is money, and most people simply don’t have the time to post on everything, all day. With PointBurst you don’t have to worry about all that time.
What Social Sites Does PointBurst Publish To?
Currently, you can publish to FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn (waiting on Google+ and Pinterest API’s). Between you, me and the interwebbs, Flickr, MySpace, Instagram and WordPress will be the next sites to hit PointBurst within the next three months, so be ready for said awesome-ness.
If you are as convinced as we are, why not try them out for a free thirty day trial? After that pricing will depend number of affiliates and modules you choose to use.
Side note: If you want the 411 on PointBurst in full, may I suggest you attend our event next week. Word on the street is you will get more than thirty days, but I wont tell you how much more unless you show up (see what we did there?).
Also … this just in for attendees of the event on 4/11:
PointBurst is offering a FREE, 3 month subscription for an upgraded Publisher Account with library sharing privileges.  With an upgraded Publisher Account you have the ability to publish through the social media sites of your affiliates as if they published it themselves.  You can exponentially expand your audience with the click of single button.  No longer will you have to hope your affiliates are maintaining a social media presence and no more worrying about keeping your brand consistent!  With library sharing you can seamlessly share assets of your choice from your library with your selected affiliates.  This is a special offer for SF New Tech attendees only and you can register on location at the PointBurst table.  All of those who register will be eligible for the raffle of a new iPod Shuffle!
Shweet!!
The biggest web-tech contest in Japan now lands in Silicon Valley!
The 7th Mashup Awards (MA7) opens their door to the local startups and developers to present their services and products. We call it the event the “Ninja Challenge.”
At the event, up to 10 startups interested in the Japanese market will be presentingContinue Reading
Looking to start a new mobile venture?
Looking for a co-founder?
Want to validate an idea?
SF New Tech is proud to announce  our partnership with Founder Labs here in SF. We are working with this wonderful group to help inspire a community focused on entrepreneurship. Please join them in their next pre-incubator lab, and then join us on stage to showcase all your talent! https://sfnewtech.com/demo/
Founder Labs (FL) is a pre-incubator for new mobile ideas.
FL is a 5 week pre-incubator focused on the first phase of launching a new mobile venture – building a co-founding team and validating a new idea.
20 founders form 5 teams, work for 5 weeks, 5 days a week (after-working-hours) to validate a new idea and build an initial prototype. Founders learn key startup lessons such as Lean Startup principles, Customer Development and more and present progress each week to Visiting Advisors. Founders also work closely with Mentors who have experience in the mobile space.
Supporters and Mentors in the program include: Dave McClure (500 startups), Eric Ries (The Lean Startup), Steve Blank (Customer Development), Theresia Gouw Ranzetta (Accel), John Malloy (Blue Run Ventures).
Founder Labs is for hackers, designers and hustlers. It will include 10 engineers, 5 designers, 5 sales/marketing mavens
More info: www.founderlabs.org
Meet the Visiting Advisors and Mentors: http://www.founderlabs.org/people.html
Apply now to Founder Labs SF: Aug 11 – Sept 15, deadline to apply is June 24
http://founderlabs.org/applysf.html
TC Coverage: Â http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/22/founder-labs-coming-to-nyc
Xconomy Coverage: http://www.xconomy.com/new-york/2011/05/16/founder-labs-brings-its-silicon-valley-flair-for-fostering-startups-to-manhattan/
Did you see the coverage our 5th anniversary bash received from The Register, the ultra-snarky tech news site from the UK?!
Kieren McCarthy, who penned the piece, did a really great job of encapsulating the “relaxed, friendly, and surprisingly sociable” vibe of our event.
Says McCarthy, “SF New Tech has somehow retained the feel of an informal gathering of like-minded people – people that want to catch the newest and coolest technology that San Francisco can muster… For a company looking to seduce Silicon Valley talent and VC money, a demo at SF New Tech can provide an incredibly useful foothold.”
Nailed it!
If the feedback from our “ridiculously oversized speakers” was the only real complaint (Damn cordless mics!), we must really be doing something right!
Check out the entire article, including reviews of each demo and some cool photos, here.
As an application developer, if you’ve ever used shared hosting service for hosting and serving up your web sites and applications, you know how unreliable the hosting becomes once you start getting a decent amount of traffic. Things just don’t scale. At that point, the most logical thing to do is to ditch the traditional shared hosting service in favor of dedicated cloud servers such as Amazon EC2.
Because the knowledge and experience of an infrastructure engineers is quite different from that of the software engineers (web application developers) managing cloud hosting becomes hard and cumbersome for the software developers.
This is where flexflux comes in. Co-founders Kei Kubo and Hiro Fukami came up with an idea to provide standardized redundantly distributed multi-layered servers with auto-scaling, load balancing and replication to developers who are not comfortable setting up servers for their web services.
Their goal is to forge innovation in the shared web service hosting industry by changing the way of hosting services in each of development, deployment, management and payment phases. Users can use their service as easily and as inexpensively as traditional shared hosting services, but with the difference of professional redundantly distributed multi-layered scalable infrastructure.
This Wednesday at SF New Tech, Kei will show you how easy it is to develop web applications and publish them in distributed servers with fluxflex.
Business Model? fluxflex operates on a freemium model, so there is certain amount of free usage followed by paid subscriptions as and when your usage exceeds the free amount.
About fluxflex
fluxflex is based in San Jose, California. They’ve raised about 240K in angel funding.
Company: fluxflex, inc.
Product: fluxflex
Website: http://www.fluxflex.com/
Twitter: @fluxflex
Founder: Kei Kubo @keikubo
Co-Founder: Hiro Fukami @d_sea
Contact Email: support @ fluxflex.com
Contact Form: https://www.fluxflex.com/contact.html
When serial entrepreneurs Cameron Brain (built and sold 3 web startups prior to this one) and Eric Roach (built and sold a brokerage company to Morgan Stanley, worked with & invested in several early-stage startups) met through a mutual connection, they hit it off right away.
The two teamed together and produced a blog called the RoachPost.com that focused on their own operational experiences as entrepreneurs – stuff like building a board, raising capital for startups and so on. They quickly realized that they didn’t want to write a blog, but the time that they spent producing content, promoting it, and building their readership set them on course towards an idea that would eventually become XYDO.
Given the sheer amount of content that’s published on a daily basis, combined with the number of different channels through which you can consume it, the 2 co-founders felt that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate the signal from the noise. So they’ve build XYDO, an app that approaches news and information from a people angle, not a pure aggregation or algorithmic angle.
XYDO is still in private beta, so we don’t know anything more beyond this, however if you come to the SF New Tech event this Wednesday, you can directly quiz/grill Eric and Cameron, who will be giving a live demo of XYDO on stage.
What else is in store for SF New Tech peeps?
XYDO will be offering beta invites to 100 members of SF New Tech. Simply follow this link to get set up with your own XYDO account.
If you don’t snag one of the 100 invites, it’s not the end of the world. Just
- follow them on Twitter @xydoapp or
- visit xydo.com and input your info and they’ll include you in the next batch of invitations.
About XYDO
XYDO is based in New York City and is self-funded to the tune of $500K. The startup is now actively trying to raise their first round of outside capital.
Website: http://xydo.com
Twitter: @xydoapp
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/XYDO/104923692894968
Contact email: cbrain @ xydo.com
Feedback: http://getsatisfaction.com/xydo
CEO & Co-Founder: Eric Roach, @veroach, http://roachpost.com (blog)
Co-Founder: Cameron Brain @cameronbrain, http://roachpost.com (blog)
Crowd-sourced TV is now just a click away, thanks to the efforts of Redux co-founders David McIntosh, Max Crane, Chris Pennello and their team. A welcome change from traditional cable television providers like Comcast who limit consumer choices and forces bland, boring content down your cable line, Redux enables a discovery layer on top of video, photo and rich media content that could be consumed via numerous platforms.
Discovery takes the form of the social graph and recommendations. In other words, Redux is a personalized channel for you that’s curated and programmed by your friends and people that share your taste.
There is much more to it than this, and that’s why David McIntosh and his team are descending onto the stage to give us a demo of Redux at the Dec 15th SF New Tech event.
What’s In Store For SF New Tech Peeps?
Along with their demo of the Redux platform, they will also be showing off “Redux Discover” for Google TV – a fun and beautiful way to discover the videos that your friends and relevant tastemakers are watching, all in an effortless lean-back experience. Although this feature is not publicly available yet, Redux has promised to give away private invites for SF New Tech attendees, so don’t miss it if you want one!
Plus free custom RVCA Redux T-shirts for a chosen few!
About Redux
Redux is based in Berkeley California. The company has raised venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Alsop-Louie Partners.
Website: http://redux.com
Twitter: @redux
Contact Email: feedback @ redux.com
Contact Form: http://redux.com/contact
While our leaders are busy bickering over Healthcare reform in Washington, OneMedical is bringing reform to our personal health care experience, with their state of the art technology platform that is a combination of their website and a (newly released) iPhone App.
With their proprietary technology and business processes, One Medical Group has re-invented primary care, enabling practices to deliver patient-centered, high-quality care at a lower cost than other high-service models.
Their iPhone app makes the practice even more accessible and convenient by extending a number of their services right to your phone! You can schedule appointments, renew prescriptions and access your health records from anywhere using their iPhone app or by visiting the website from your mobile device.
Tonight at SFNewTech, One Medical will be showing off their awesome technology and their iPhone App.
When high school sophomore Andrew Sutherland needed a good way to study a list of 111 French animals for his French class, he came up with an ingenious idea. A FlashCard site online that he could use to learn the french animals himself and share it with his friends anywhere in the world.
And so Quizlet was born. Since then Quizlet has spread to millions of students around the globe!
Quizlet is a fun, free, way to study languages, vocabulary, or almost anything. It is the largest and fastest growing educational flashcards site on the web, providing powerful online study tools and games to millions of students.
Tonight at SFNewTech, Quizlet will be showing off the latest in educational technology, with its online study games and tools used millions of students.
Frustrated with the information overload (that we all face) while browsing or searching for information online, the husband & wife team Sameer Yami and Sanika Shirwadkar created WikiSeer, a service that finds the most informative sentences in any web page instantly and automatically; shrinking the original by upto 99%
WikiSeer provides a faster and smarter searching and browsing experience. By simply hovering over any HTML link, you can gain insights into web pages without leaving the current page or without spending too much time on it.
How do they do that? With a lot of complex Natural Language Processing, mathematical linguistics, statistical analysis and mathematical modeling.
Tonight, at SFNewTech Sameer and Sanika will be showing off the WikiSeer frontend, which is a Firefox Addon. Don’t miss it!
Online tickets are sold out but we will have tickets at the Door!
After working on some other web publishing projects John Pettitt and Tim McElreavy realized that no matter how good a site is the vast majority of web users will never see it and that bare links are just not a compelling way to share. So they went out and created Curate.Us
Curate.Us gives end users a simple and visually compelling way to repost content, instantly boosting the impact of blog posts, e-mail, websites, and social networks. The visual clips and formatted quotes generated by Curate.Us drive a 5x greater click-through to the original publisher than content distributed via traditional links.
See it to believe it! Tonight, at SFNewTech, Curate.Us will be presenting their awesome service live to a Bar full of Geeks and Technology lovers! They will show you how clips drive 5x more traffic than a bare link and tell you where readers are engaging with content.
The Geo-location War just got hotter! If you thought FourSquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places are cool, wait till you see Wondershake, a brand new geo-location iPhone App that promises to help you “visualize your inner taste, and connect you with other like-minded people around you in the REAL world!”
Conceived in California and raised lovingly in Japan, the WonderShake iPhone App is set to hit the App Store in December. But as you know, SFNewTech peeps get to see it before the rest of the world! So tomorrow, at the Nov 10th 2010 SFNewTech event WonderShake Founder and President Satoshi Suzuki and his Team will present this exciting geo-location App.
Satoshi promises that
With WonderShake your everyday lives will be filled with fresh encounters with people and discoveries of new places!
Come and find out what all the hype is about tomorrow! Satoshi will also be giving out stickers of their cute dolphin mascot.

Hint: “You Are Now Entering A World Of Sharing”
While the process of making Red Vines hasn’t changed much since it’s parent company American Licorice was founded nearly a century ago, the way it is marketed to consumers certainly has!
The “World Of Sharing” program is the latest in a series of consumer outreach programs that Red Vines is currently conducting, to build brand awareness and generate positive “social chatter” about this much loved candy!
Using a mashup of Google Maps and tight integration with Twitter and Facebook,the “World Of Sharing” site enables users to easily log in using their email or Facebook Connect and leave whatever short positive message comes to mind. Each positive message adds a new section to the giant Red Vine circling the planet. As the Vine goes around the world, it will award users 240 4 lb. jars of Red Vines Licorice, 24 Prize packs with Red Vines Candy and Gear, and one grand prize of $5,000 to be used for a trip around the world.
That’s all we can say right now. To learn more about this innovative social campaign come on over to our SFNewTech event tonight and enter the “World Of Sharing” with a live demo from Red Vines.
My positive message to the World?
Make Apps, Not War!
Freebies At SFNewTech?
Red Vines will also be giving out schwag (yay!) to SFNewTech peeps tonight! Michael Kelly of Red Vines says
There will be Candy and T-Shirts!
Forget messy paper printouts, scans and faxes. Go green and digitally sign your documents from anywhere in the world using the EasySign iPhone App.
The idea for EasySign was born in a remote beach in Riviera Maya, Mexico when EasySign founder Sunil Patro had to sign some paper documents for a new job offer. Sitting on the Beach, he wondered
How awesome would it be, if I could sign and return this job offer right here, right now, right from my smartphone.
It was at this moment of clarity, that Sunil decided to create this green, paper-free, signature-on-the-go mobile app.
Fast forward a year later, EasySign was launched as an iPhone app at the Apple AppStore in August of 2010. Since then, the EasySign app has received (and continues to receive) great reviews from its users who use it for signing business as well as personal documents.
This Wednesday, at our Oct 20th 2010 SFNewTech event, Sunil will show you step by step, how you can sign any document using your iPhone/iPad from anywhere at anytime without the hassles, costs and environmental hazards of printing, scanning and faxing paper documents.
Don’t miss it! Mother Earth will thank you!
It is every advertiser’s dream to generate maximum returns on online advertising investments. With it’s easy to use, highly effective and proven display advertising platform, AdRoll promises to deliver that dream and more.
AdRoll will take stage this Wednesday at our Oct 20th 2010 SFNewTech event and show you step by step, how to create a retargeting ad campaign for your product, brand or service using the AdRoll display advertising platform, and how to measure the results.
Unlike a majority of the existing advertising platform where you can’t do anything without requesting contact from a salesperson first, AdRoll includes plenty of self-service options, transparent reporting, and the ability for marketers to manage their own campaigns much in the way they manage their Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns.
Under the hood, AdRoll uses several state-of-the-art technologies including a 100% geo-distributed cloud based infrastructure. If that is a mouthful and the geek in you just has to know, then ask Adam Berke, AdRoll founding member and VP of Business Development to explain it to you in layman terms when you meet him at the event on Wednesday.
Meanwhile here he is, explaining what AdRoll can do for your business in a short simple video.
Freebies?
AdRoll will also be giving out schwag (yay!) to SFNewTech peeps. For the first 3 to 5 questions from the audience, they will give away their ever popular “Roll with me” T-shirts. (Hey, I like how you guys “Roll”!).
I already know what I am going to ask Adam.
What hair gel are you wearing in the what AdRoll can do for your business video?
I am not sure this question will win me a coveted “Roll with Me” (size M please) T-Shirt. We’ll see.
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!
Sometimes you never know who’s in the crowd trying to scoop a hot news story.
On Tuesday, Tim Hay, reporter for the Dow Jones Venture Wire and Wall Street Journal Blogger was in the house … and he nailed a great story about the Belgians breaching our shores in search of fame, fortune and Web 2.0 love.
It’s an excellent piece… especially when he mentions SF New Tech.
Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/OymVh
Thanks Tim!
Early-stage startups strut their stuff at Geek-Out
"Six companies presented five-minute demonstrations for an audience of VCs, media, peer startups and advisers at last evening’s Big Summer Geek-Out, presented by SF New Tech and held at Mighty in San Francisco. Some are nascent ideas, some are already backed with millions of dollars, and all are considering raising capital soon…"
Big thanks to Paul Bonanos for joining us!
Communication Arts, the preeminent publication for creative types everywhere says SF New Tech is "very cool"!
"We just came across another very cool, and ongoing, event for the San Francisco tech community—SF New Tech. Next up: Widgets up The Wazoo!"
If you landed here from Communication Arts — welcome!
Hope to see you at our events!
We may be a little late to the party — but since we are the party, that’s OK!
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What some folks are saying about SF New Tech (March 2008):
"I had a great time last night and met lots of wonderful people. The new tech meetup is a great networking tool; I look forward to the next one! I also want to mention that I downloaded the surfcanyon product and it’s wonderful!" — Heather Dorso (Mar 13, 2008)
"It’s the best tech event in the Bay Area for staying abreast of new software startups and networking with others. It’s also reasonably priced." — Mariva (Mar 12, 2008)
"Very well run. Excellent organization." — Mark Cramer (Mar 12, 2008)
"Always a worthwhile, entertaining, and educational event and the best way to socialize and broaden your mind while networking with technology industry colleagues. Keep it up!" — Scott P. (Mar 12, 2008)
"Glad I came to my second SF New Tech Belly Up Meetup. Great people and great startup tech ideas! I enjoyed telling contacts about our new tech at www.gogrid.com and hearing about other startups." — Richard (Mar 10, 2008)
"I enjoy meeting a bunch of interesting people in so short a time." — Shannon -jj Behrens (Mar 7, 2008)
"This was my very BellyUp! Great people with great attitudes! Nice laid back time." — Lydia Sugarman (Mar 6, 2008)