Stylish Bostonians Have Nice Clothes, Lack Self-Awareness
Close to the Edge: Near Death on the Orange Line
This Week In Booze: If You Build It
Randazza Served and Pwnd Glen Beck in 2009
This Monday evening at the Cambridge Royal Sonesta brought about the19th Boston Web Innovators Group meetup. The Web Innovators Group is a venue where startups (mostly) or established companies can show off new and innovative (one would hope) web-based products and services.
The event is organized by David Beisel, a Vice President from the Cambridge office of venture capital firm Venrock, and arranged in a social atmosphere broken up with a set of featured "Main Dish" presentations of products/services, followed by a quick set of shout outs to "Side Dish" presenters all of whom are available to demo their wares before and after the presentation segment.
Demo tables are set up at one end of the Royal Sonesta's upstairs ballroom with a seated area and projection screen/dais at the other. There's a couple of bars in the hall but not a lot of cocktails in the hands of the folks excitedly exhibiting, discussing, or chatting each other up. To say there's a lot of energy in the room is an understatement.
The three "Main Dish" presenters were Givvy, Pixily, and Brring! (thankfully breaking the -y naming convention). Pixily won the Audience Choice award (votes are texted in of course) with 67% of the vote for their consumer/small business-oriented document management and archiving system.
The crowd responded very favorably to Pixily's concept with the only reservations being privacy issues - users' documents are stored in the cloud, and users have to send potentially sensitive documents via the mail to a scanning service, for example. With pricing plans starting at $4.95 a month, helping clear one's office of documents too important to throw away yet too numerous to easily manage easily becomes a no-brainer and could override whatever privacy reservations a user might have.
Bostonist asked Pixily CEO Prasad Thammineni about his experience as a Web Innovators Group "Main Dish" presenter:
Bostonist: Can you tell our readers how you got involved with the Web Innovators Group and what presenting there means to your company and service?
Prasad Thammineni: We attended our first WebInno event in September, 2007, one month into founding Pixily. We were very impressed with the group of people we met and we have since then aspired to present at this conference. Yesterday, that became a reality.
Bostonist: What does winning the Audience Choice award mean to your organization?
Prasad Thammineni: We are very honored to have won the Audience Choice award. Since we were chosen by the audience and not by a panel of judges, it is a true validation of the service. Being the first in the market, we not only have to create awareness for our firm but also have to educate people on the service. Being awarded means people recognize that their is a need, that we have addressed that need and that people want to use it.
Bostonist: How long have you and your team been working on Pixily and how large is your team?
Prasad Thammineni: We founded Pixily in August 2007 and we our private beta in February 2008. We went live with the service on July 19th, 2008 and the response has exceeded our expectations.We were six people on the day of our launch and we just hired the 9th Pixilian today.
Bostonist also had a chance to ask one of the six "Side Dish" presenters, Jason Jacobs of Runkeeper, a fitness tracker for the GPS-enabled 3G iPhone, how he feels about the Boston Web Innovators Group experience:
Jason Jacobs: I got involved with the Web Innovators Group before I had the idea for RunKeeper, when I wanted to stay current on all of the up-and-coming web and mobile companies and entrepreneurs in the Boston area. Now that we have launched RunKeeper, it was great to be on the other side of the table, telling our story and hearing the excitement level and feedback from the attendees. In addition to helping raise our visibility in the local technology community, we got a bunch of great product suggestions, and several introductions to potential partners, employees, investors and advisors. And similar to when I attended this event before we launched RunKeeper, it was great to hear what everyone else was up to as well!
The Web Innovators Group is definitely a networking event. We saw Cambridge-based HubSpot co-founder, Dharmesh Shah in the crowd who was there to network and recruit PHP programmers as well as an entire crew from GamerDNA also on the hunt for developers. We also spotted Boston American Marketing Association's VP of Sponsorship, Cecil Dorman (of BigBad, Inc.) among other local marketing and technology gurus.
The next Boston Web Innovators Group meetup will be on December 9--Bostonist will be there.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Post a comment (Comment Policy)