Get $100 by helping SurveyGizmo
January 4, 2009
SurveyGizmo is looking for people with a relative degree of computer experience and are comfortable doing online search and navigating websites in a browser, to participate in a usability study in Boulder. Participants will need to come to their Boulder office on January 20th or 21st for approximately 60-90 minutes to be observed using the software.
The company is offering a $100.00 American Express gift card upon completion of the study.
If you are interested in helping out SurveyGizmo and getting $100, just follow this link.
Survey Gizmo: Moving On Up!
April 7, 2008
Survey Gizmo hosted a fun, friendly open house party last Friday. Located on Spruce St (with an unobstructed view of the Flatirons) in a charming blue house, co-founders Scott McDaniel and Derek Scruggs were cool enough to give us this tour of their new digs.
*In the video I reference the presentation at New Tech Meetup which you can read about here.
“New company meetup” - it was the worst of times and the best of times
April 1, 2008
The new tech meetup started off tonight in typical enough fashion with 10 or so companies announcing that they’re hiring. If you’re a developer reading this from afar and thinking about coming to Colorado, the opportunities here are still huge. Then PodCamp Colorado was announced for “fall”. Watch the web site for more info.
Tonight, there was literally standing room only in the 300 seat auditorium at CU. You could tell everyone was expecting an April fools joke this late in the day.
Gnip announced that it had funding from Foundry Group and was hiring developers in Colorado. UI people need not apply as there is “no UI” in the product. Cool. The company is founded by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier.
Sean Loving (founder of Skyetek, which has raised $20 in venture funding) showed off Favorite VRM. Doc Searls came up with the concept of VRM which is the inverse of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The idea is to turn CRM on its head. CRM is not for the consumer, it’s for the vendor. Favorite VRM instead allows consumers to request proposals from vendors, and puts them in control of the conversation. In this model, consumers “acquire” vendors, not the other way around. Seems almost obvious, doesn’t it? My favorite question from an audience member after this five minute powerpoint was “Can you walk me through from start to finish, exactly what it is you’re talking about?“. Awesome.
Jonathan Epstein then talked about Treatment Exchange, which is an application for delivering, monitoring, and managing rehabilitative care online. I first met Jonathan about a year ago when he had this idea. Jonathan said he wanted to talk about “market progress” and not “software” and invited the audience to contact the company to see the software. Oh, and like everyone else, they’re hiring.
Let me pause here for a second. The new tech meetup here in Boulder keeps growing, but I still think Robert needs to insist on tech demos, not company pitches and hiring announcements. Perhaps somebody should start a “new company meetup”. I don’t think many people would attend. I don’t mind hearing pitches, but the new tech meetup is not the place. Show us something cool, or go to the RVC. Know your audience.
Finally we got to something audience appropriate. A joke on April Fools Day.
Jason Mendelson (of Foundry Group) saved the night by lightening it up about 47 notches.
Jason presented the Flatirons United Capital Corporation. It’s a new investment fund here in Colorado, and raised 500 million dollars. The fund plans to buy all Boulder companies to compete with Facebook and Google. The target is to acquire 25 companies within 3 months. David Mandell pointed out that the company name is too long and that the company should consider abbreviating it. The guy next to me asked intelligently “Is this an April fools joke?” - Enough said.
We then heard from OpenVest Research, who presented XBRL, which is “what a corporate financial statement would like if it were created by a mutant, alien accountant bitten by a radioactive XML spider.” Cool. Full presentation here if you care. Bueller?
Thank The Magic Diety in the Sky for SurveyGizmo, who is doing well and is having an open house at their new digs in downtown Boulder later this week. The room erupted with glee when they showed actual technology that was cool, as well as “a demo of Keynote transitions.” SurveyGizmo has a very deep and well established product for creating, managing, and analyzing surveys. If you’ve experienced Survey Monkey, it’s kinda like that but has a more “enterprise” feel and is targeted slightly upmarket. It has nice-to-have features such as two-way Salesforce integration and stuff like scalability (they currently handle 20-40k responses per minute). Pricing ranges from free to $159/month. Go check it out if you need to find out what people think, and you need it to be real.
Earthspace is yet another incredible app from the total badasses at Churchill Navigation. It’s a geobrowser that demos much better than Google earth. This was a truly mindboggling demo of the power of spatial data that I cannot do justice to here in words. They showed a social application coupled with a truly fantastic map based user experience. Super hot.
OK, so I’m less grumpy now. At least it ended well.
Micah Baldwin on SXSW
March 17, 2008
I didn’t get the chance to head down to SXSW this year, but from the sound of it Colorado was well represented. Gwen wrote a bit about her experience down there, and what follows below is a guest post by Micah Baldwin on the same subject. Micah asked if he could chime in with a guest post, and I love Micah’s hilarious and occasionally-straight-up blog (Learn To Duck) so I thought he would have some interesting perspectives. Micah is the VP of Business Development at Lijit.
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Every year, thousands of people in the interactive space descend on Austin, TX for SouthbySouthWest Interactive (aka “South By” or SXSWi). The Colorado tech community was no exception, with representatives sponsoring events, speaking on panels, and in the case of SocialThing, using the conference as a platform to launch their company publicly.
Here is a quick rundown of what Colorado startups were involved in at SXSW.
SocialThing:
Of all the Colorado companies at SXSW, SocialThing considered the conference highly important in their marketing plan.
Following on the heels of DodgeBall in 2006 and Twitter in 2007, SocialThing hoped that SXSW would be the launching pad for their digital life management application. Prior to coming to SXSW, SocialThing had developed an iPhone version of their application, that they wanted to see on every iphone at the conference. In addition to sponsoring a party at the Pure Volume Ranch (the only venue in Austin to stay open past 2am), they had two exhibit booths, with Rock Band setup (there were no less than two Rock Band parties, and several Rock Band setups in the exhibit hall, clearly everyone loves this game).
Their party was a relative success, with a packed house and internet luminaries such as Pete Cashmore of Mashable and Robert Scoble of FastCompany.tv attending, and more importantly, during the party SocialThing was TechCrunched.
While I am not sure if they could be labeled “the break out app of SXSW 2008″ (In fact, Michael Arrington tweeted and blogged that their competitor, FriendFeed, might in fact be), they did a great job of creating awareness and buzz. One tweet, from Ben Brightwell, the SocialThing CTO, showed that SocialThing had gotten 10x the signups that they normally get in a single day. Time will tell if the expenditure and effort will push SocialThing in front of a very crowded space.
Survey Gizmo:
Scott McDaniel and Derek Scruggs of Survey Gizmo headlined the panel: Core Conversation: GTD for Startups: Getting Things Done in the Real World. The Core Conversation panels are some of the most insightful and attended panels at SXSW.
Villij:
Another TechStars company, Villij’s lead investor brought the team to SXSW, and among other things, Anthony Dimitre’s logo for the greatest Rock Band band of all time, could be seen everywhere.
StartupWeekend / VCWear:
While these are two very different companies, they are lead by one dynamic individual, Andrew Hyde. Andrew was on the panel Bankrupt your Startup in Five Easy Steps, which was covered in Wired (best line of the article: “Since the whole panel was about failing at startups, it was appropriate that Strebel, Tierney and Hyde failed at their panel”, and attended by a unicorn. He also was interviewed by Loren Feldman of 1938Media about StartupWeekend, and many of the past attendees of the event were at SXSWi. But, the real breakout of SXSWi was VCWear, an (almost) joke that has grown into a profitable Colorado based company, with a distribution deal and several celebrity endorsers, including Guy Kawasaki and Techstars Mentor Eric Marcoullier.
Several panelists and keynotes also repped VCWear, including Gary Vaynerchuk and Kathy Sierra (at about 1min into the video).
Lijit:
Lijit co-sponsored three events: The Colorado Interactive Party with PocketFuzz, The BlogNetworkCamp and Ranch with b5media. Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit, spoke on the panel: Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! and was interviewed by Robert Scoble, who is a Lijit user. I (Micah) was interviewed for BlogTalkRadio and got the greatest Rock Band band’s logo tattooed on my arm. Tara was interviewed by b5media’s Aaron Brazell, The Conversation Group’s Deborah Crooks, Deborah Schultz and Jason Falls, of Social Media Explorer TV.
One by One Media and RonaldLewis.com:
Jim Turner, Social Media expert and Daddy Blogger, attended SXSWi, as did our very own Ronald Lewis, who spoke on a panel: Where Are The Black Tech Bloggers?
PocketFuzz:
PocketFuzz headlined the wildly successful Colorado Interactive Party (co-sponsored by Lijit). With more than 3,000 attendees and a line that got so long that at 3:30am more than 500 people were sent home. Danny Newman of Pocketfuzz continues to throw the biggest party of SXSW. Their SMS to screen technology was showcased especially during the Digg party where thousands of SMS messages were displayed on two screens, and the SMS messages came from all over the world.
Good times at TECH Cocktail Boulder 1
March 7, 2008
Thanks to Eric Olson and Frank Gruber, as well as DEMO, Lijit and Threadless for throwing TECH Cocktail last night here in Boulder.
I think there were about 200 people who came out from the local tech community and SocialThing, Filtrbox, Survey Gizmo, and Newsgator were there showing off their (soft) wares.
Go and check out the official recap post on the TECH Cocktail site, and while you’re there you can read about how to attend the DEMO conference and get $800 off. Warning: That’s still like $2,000 to go, buddy.
I’ve been a long time reader of Frank’s blog Somewhat Frank, and it was nice to finally meet him in person. This morning (not too early, mind you) he and Eric showed up at TechStars and noticed that we had a poster on one of our walls featuring a post from his blog. He said that made his whole day.
Frank and Eric said TECH Cocktail will be back. Let’s hope so - thanks again guys.
Lots more great pics of the event are here.
PocketFuzz rocks SXSW
March 13, 2007
Just got home from a quick two day trip to Austin for SXSW. For me, the panels were so-so. I can’t say I really learned much new by attending them. But I sure did meet a ton of amazing people, which is really the only reason to attend these things in person.
Denver’s own PocketFuzz and TechStars threw THE party of the night at SXSWi on Monday night. At one point around 2am, the line wrapped around the building and down the block. As Andrew Hyde pointed out to me: “if there’s a line, the party’s cool.” I bailed “early” at about 3:15 in the morning, and I’m told the 200 breakfast burritos being delivered right when I left didn’t last long. Sounds like things wound down around 5:30am.
Lots of great people stopped by the party to say hello. It was fun to meet Micki Kremmel (of Mickipedia and community director at Revver) who was hanging with the cool kids as usual. Nick Douglas (Mr. Valleywag) was there hanging out by the house Wii quite a bit. SXSW draws some really interesting folks from around the country - I met dozens more like this. It’s a different kind of web conference - people are there to have fun and to hang out and get to know each other. You can also tell it’s different because the usual webset of 96% while young male geeks was more like 60/40 at SXSW. All in all, it’s a nice change of pace and scenery and makes SXSW unique.
Dennis Crowley of Dodgeball was also at the party and I had to ask. With all this Twittering going on everywhere, did he have to laugh? Lots of people (even me) were calling Twitter “dodgeball simplified”. Dennis is right when he told me that Dodgeball is an application and Twitter is just a microblog. I doubt the Dodgeballers who are getting very specific functionality would jump ship for something like Twitter, which doesn’t really “do” anything. I tried to comment on Fred’s post about how annoying Twitter is in everyday life, but the comment post kept timing out on me. Basically I wanted to tell him that it is totally useless, unless you’re at something like SXSW where it’s good to really be kept up to date where your friends are and what’s happening. I thought it was really cool to know who was sitting in row 8 in the same panel room (especially when I was in row 100).
The party drew a great Colorado contingent - interesting that I had to go to Austin to meet guys like Scott McDaniel of SurveyGizmo, who works about a block from me on Pearl Street. Greg Reinacker of Newsgator popped in for a while, and it was also good to get to know Derek Scruggs a little better.
I also got to meet some great guys who work for the TechCrunch network (thanks Mike for letting them know to look for us there). I went to a few sessions today with Steve Poland, whose Techquila Shots blog I instantly loved when I saw it. Steve has documented 40 startup ideas so far, and he’s on a tear. I think he had one or two in the hour I sat with him. Blake Robinson (of CrunchGear) had literally lost his voice by the time he showed up at the party. We thought about sitting there and emailing each other on our Blackberrys, but we wanted to look cool so instead I just talked and he nodded alot.
Lots more pics of the party over on Flickr. Danny, Austin, and the PocketFuzz guys did a great job with this party. I gotta know who did the paint job on the silver bullet. So sweet.
