I recently attended the 14th Web Innovators Group meeting, which had an even better turnout than the last one — so much so that it was held in a bigger room to accommodate this ever-expanding group.
The three main presenters were Frame Media Inc.’s FrameChannel, GoLoco, and Swatchbox Technology Inc.’s DesignMyRoom.
I have been reading about the Guild Cafe lately, a Cambridge, Mass.-based social networking startup that is distinguishing itself from the usual crowd of social sites out there.
The Guild Cafe was created by Jon Radoff to give MMORPG gamers a social networking space outside the game so that they could continue socializing with one another. The site is different in that members use their MMORPG game handle (their alter-ego) to create a profile, unlike other social networking sites where people will typically use their name (or something close to it) as their handle. Basically this is a continuation of the social aspect of MMORPG games outside of the games themselves.
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I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Gibson, one of the founders of BetaHouse, a CoWorking group here in Boston. The premise of BetaHouse is pretty simple: For $400 a month, you get a desk, WiFi, access to a fully stocked (beer, caffeinated beverages and fatty snacks) refrigerator, a barbecue every Friday, music, and — most importantly — a group of other geeks with which to network, socialize and bounce around ideas.
The idea is to provide a creative environment in which techies and entrepreneurs can develop their ideas and bring them to market — and of course, get funding.
One idea that Gibson himself has developed in the BetaHouse office is PrayAbout, a social networking site based around support and prayer. Once you join the site, you can put in prayer requests that other people will answer, effectively creating a support group community to help you deal with your challenges.
The site appears to perform a useful social function and attracts people from around the world. One thing that Greg noted was that a number of people who have received support (such as a suicidal man in South Africa) have in turn become more involved with the site, providing support to others.
PrayAbout is quite different from other social networking sites in that it’s not ad-supported — all revenue is derived through subscriptions. It currently has some 14,000 subscribers, and that number is growing.
As for BetaHouse, time will tell how well this works. One issue I see is turnover. Once an idea is funded, the developers behind it will likely move to new offices in order to accommodate an expanding team, continually leaving BetaHouse with empty desks that need to be filled.
A few weeks ago I was invited to attend a CommonAngels breakfast. CommonAngels is a Boston based group of angel investors and these breakfasts take place every six weeks to hear presentations from entrepreneurs looking to have their ideas funded. Members of CommonAngels are allowed to bring a guest along and I was lucky to be invited.
CommonAngels is composed of 70 private investors and several dozen limited partners in two co-investment funds. This group is fairly unique in that they have a small permanent staff of three people who manage the group, taking care of the putting the breakfasts together, managing the deal-flow, due diligence, board memberships, and so on.
StyleFeeder recently launched a personal shopper tool, which made me think it was a good time to sit down with Phil Jacob and his team to get a more in-depth look at the product and the technology.
StyleFeeder has been around since the end of 2005. Initially developed by Jacob, it was quickly bought by TopTenSources and lived as a little widget that you could add to your Web site or your blog. At the beginning of 2007, following a restructuring, it was spun out of TopTenSources as an independent entity, at which point Jacob got funding, brought in a business development team and more technical talent to build out the product.
BOSTON: On July 9th, I attended the 13th Web Innovators Group meeting in Boston. The meetings, which are are organized and hosted by David Beisel of Venrock and held every other month, provide a forum for startups in the Boston area to present themselves to the tech community and to potential investors. They’re also a great place to network.
I would estimate that there were more than 250 people at the July meeting, which was my third. So far, each has been bigger than the last, a sign that the high-tech startup community in Boston is doing very well.
The Boston startup & VC scene in many ways is different from the SF/Bay area one. There was, and to a large extend still is, a strong emphasis on telecom, enterprise software and biotech companies. The consumer Internet companies are still a small minority. However, there has been an increase in the start-up activity, mostly, because many large VCs in the Boston Area (such as Polaris, General Catalyst, Charles River Ventures and Venrock ) are starting to pay more attention to consumer oriented startups. Some have even set up specific funds to address this new market. So I will be writing about Boston area startups as I run into them. Here is my first post for GigaOM:
