Highlights from the SF New Tech meetup July 10, 2013
SF New Tech is the Bay Area’s largest, longest-running, and most-loved monthly technology event and networking mixer for people who can’t get enough of technology. The crowd is mix of people, but common denominator that they have is the passion for technology.
The main highlights of event included:
Talk by Jeremy L. Wallenberg, Director of External Affairs for sf.citi()
San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation (sf.citi) is an organization created to leverage the power of the technology community as a force for civic action in San Francisco. This is an initiative to bring together various stakeholders in the ecosystem to work in unison to improve the tech adoption by the city administration and find solutions to the historic problems that is gripping the entire city. Over 600 San Francisco based technology companies and organizations are members of sf.citi. This talk captured the highlights of what they are planning to do, and you can get the gist of this initiative by watching this video.
Fireside chat with Porter Gale, Author of “Your Network Is Your Net Worth”:
Porter has been making headlines with the release of her latest book. This talk was done in a separate fashion where the author interviewed one of her readers who she had met previously.
This book focuses on helping people identify the importance of the network that they already have. Porter goes beyond the usual understanding of networking and shared many insights with the audience around how to create genuine connections rather than just doing mindless networking. Porter also gave out some copies of her book, which was received very well by the audience.
The final part of the evening involved demos from the following amazing startups
Stained Glass Labs is the first incubator/accelerator focused on Glass and wearable technologies. It is founded by Redg Snodgrass. The current companies incubated in this space are designing and innovating how wearable technologies like Google Glass will enhance the entire human experience in the day-to-day life. For instance, People+ is on a mission to reinvent the contact list and build the killer app for Glass. Another company demoed how they are making a developer library for image recognition, which is currently in use by 1000+ developers. The highlight of the evening was when Chris Hughes showed the hacked Google Glass, which can take the voice commands and control the electricity in the house.
These companies showed how Google Glass is constantly pushing the limits of innovation and technology. I am very hopeful of what is possible in the coming days.
Stagedom is connecting fans, bands and brands at the moment of passion. Stagedom is a re-marketing platform for live events, helping entertainment brands to up-sell and connect with their top, paying customers. Shahar Nechmad, the CEO of Stagedom, mentioned about the focus of the company on taking more than 2 billion missed engagement points a year and turning them to new revenue stream. Fans can use the app to track their favorite artists, get exclusive deals and connect with other fans. Artists, sponsors and venues can use the backend and mobile marketing suite to interact with the top paying customers in real time.
Stagedom seems to be attacking a very niche live events market. It will be interesting to see how this lead generation platform can connect artists with the fans and sponsors with the new potential customers in a sustainable way.
Spots demoed a brand new iOS and Web app that connects people with other similar minded people to play the sports they love. People can select the sports they're into, browse locals who share the interests in similar sports and interact with a community of passionate players. Spots is providing a platform to create a local sports community.
Georg Treu and Nat Robinson are very passionate and this app came out as a need for them to find similar minded people in the community who are available to play sports with them in their community at mutually convenient time. The use case they showed seems very relevant to the today’s world, given that all of us have very busy life.
PivotDesk is an online marketplace for matching companies that have excess space with companies that need room to grow their business. This app creates a marketplace that matches people who have excess space to rent it out to other startups who are in need of space. David Mandell’s argument seems very relevant since sometimes the companies build excess capacity because of the anticipated growth of the company. This marketplace can help these companies help other startups by offering them a co-working space and charge them minimal rent.
Vinny is a free app that instantly shows you the wholesale price of a used car. Alexander Kiss came up with this idea when he was looking to buy a second hand car and got ripped off. After that bad experience, Alex wanted to provide a transparent way to help people so that they don’t pay excess money while buying second hand cars.
This app is very practical and enables people to make purchasing decisions in a way that are transparent and data driven. Alex also mentioned about his plans of creating alternate revenue streams by offering lead generation for other service based businesses, which is possible, once you have a passionate community.
Stay tuned for more exciting events from the Bay Area
