I went to this meetup (aah Kleenex Xerox) last night that David Beisel put together. For the first time, I feel like I am a part of something happening in the web space in New England. (The other day I met the the founder of bulbs.com, which is a successful ecommerce play and one of the few successful web companies in Worcester. I got a little giddy when I met him, and I think he thought me a bit weird. Oh well. I get a bit excited when I meet people doing web stuff.)

Back to the story... I had no idea that this much innovation was happening in and around Boston. There were - I'd guesstimate - 60 people-or-so in attendance. And everyone I spoke to was doing some cool things.

The following companies presented their projects:

Kiko, Emmett Shear & Justin Kan (Online Personal Calendaring ala eventful, zevents, upcoming.org/yahoo callendar. Very ajax heavy extremely desktop like interface. More calendar sharing and contact management capabilities coming soon.)

reddit, Steve Huffman & Alexis Ohanian (Mix of Stumbleupon/del.icio.us)

Blogniscient, Ben Ruedlinger (A categorized Blogdex. Similar to pubsub's new lists, but automated.)

These companies were all pre-revenue and quite new. Not much in the way of big traction yet. They are also entering pretty crowded spaces, but they each have some interesting twists. All were consumer plays with presumably: advertising as their revenue model (kiko was the only one that confirmed that and as I've said before, I'd love to buy local ad inventory on consumer calendar sites.) I am looking forward to watching these companies as they mature, as I am sure they are moving in the right direction(s).

I met the following people for the first time and learned about their businesses through chatting. Here is the stripped down public version of their stories. (I did have some good conversations with some people about more in depth things and challenges and opportunities that we are each facing. If you want to know that stuff, you should come out to the next one.):

Josh Schanker, Sconex (Largest Social network for high school students. They have some very cool ways of building the high school community. )

I met Jason Pavel of Sconex too.

Emmett Shear, Kiko

Justin Kan, Kiko (described above)

Greg Gibson, Helium Exchange (collaborative filtering of info) & Mall Networks (runs affiliate shopping malls for companies. Consumers get rewarded with points when shopping.)

Caren Cioffi, Brightcove (Video distribution and licensing services. Also, *new* ad network for video. Jeff Clavier's take.)

John Treadway, Digibug(products for photo community sites for letting users design - and buy - printed products.)

Sriram Thodla, (Lancerstudios, Infominder, Watch360) (In this order 1. Graphic design studio; 2. a diff engine; 3. a competitive intelligence service using the diff engine)

Ray Deck, Element55 (Desktop based - tracks time spent on each customer project for attorneys automagically - so they can rape us with their bills - more accurately and with less effort. Cool smart business.)

Brandy Karl, IP Attorney (does a lot of copyright, trademark, RIAAA defense)

Ryan Sarver, Qiio, Sarver.org*

Tim Walling, Qiio, timwalling.com (They aren't talking public yet. They are in a hottt space, though. I know and you don't.)

Pito Salas Blogbridge (open source cross browser compatible feed aggregator - has topic experts categorize blogs and provide reccomendations too. Private bookmarking is integrated directly into app and integrated with public bookmarking services.)

UberBlogger :) & WhizSpark chief evangelist, Susan Kaup Exploit Boston, sooz.com came out too.

Maybe its just that Silicon Valley has much louder mouths and Boston is a bit more humble in the blogosphere. But, there were some very smart people there last night, that are doing some very smart things. And I had no clue they existed.

I am looking forward to inviting a bunch of other "web innovators" to the next one. As I am sure Sooz is too.

Here's some pictures Sooz took.

Here's some link love for everyone in attendance. Please trackback (You too Sooz) if you blog about this. I'd like to keep track of what you all are doing. And want to subscribe to all your blog feeds.



If you are on this list and you don't have a blog, you should get one. The rest of the world needs to hear Boston tech's collective voices. And we also need more of the above mixing and mingling. Online and in person. Great job, David for getting this rocking.