I went to my first Plug and Play Tech Center Web 2.0 event (a handful to say) tonight. Sunnyvale’s Plug and Play Tech Center is a project by Amidzad Partners, and if you don’t know who they are, but always wondered how downtown Palo Alto manages to have so many rug stores, New York Times had the answer a few months back. The center’s Web 2.0 event is monthly, and features a handful of startup presentations, and a keynote speech. The keynote tonight was from Ramu Yalamanchi, founder and CEO of Hi5. Ramu is a serial entrepreneur and shared his common-sense advice on starting and running a business. He seemed to favor the business models that did not require raising tons of money right away, and starting his newest venture in 2004 taught him to concentrate on profitability right from the start.
As far as the presenting startups, the topic for the night was widgets and applications, embeddable in social networks. TripWiser presented their social traveling Facebook application Going Places, that allows you to specify places you’ve been to, places you want to go, and see what your friends are up to as far as travel activities. Minekey presented their Facebook application iThink, and announced a promotional $300 giveaway in order to drive up usage of their app. iThink allows the user to agree or disagree with controversial statements (”Women are better drivers then men”, “Angelina Jolie is over-rated”), providing a clearer picture of who your friends are, and what they think.
The College Freeway allows its users to log in using their Facebook IDs, but is a destination site. A few people in the audience seemed to think that this required a special deal with Facebook, but allowing Facebook logins on third-party sites has been in the API long before the Facebook Platform was released. The College Freeway allows students to upload class notes for their college, and considers itself a service to the universities and professors, just like OpenCourseWare is. Pollection is another company that presented a Facebook application that’s already pretty successful - Polls.
Two event startups - imThere and MadeIt. First one focuses on mobile event interaction, the other one is all about creating easy full-blown Web sites for specific events, where people can add photos, videos, audio, etc. for an event and meet new people via events they attend.
Two companies helping application/widget developers to reach markets - gigya offering interfaces for embedding practically any JavaScript/Flash widget on a social networking or startpage site, and Social URL aggregating social networking profiles into one place, and providing some services on top of aggregation.
InnerCircle.cc solves the problem of e-mailing some content or photos over and over to the same people. It allows you to set up a special e-mail address on their server, and then forwards each message to that address to a number of recipients. iPling pitched itself as the first iPhone-only company. It allows users to set up their current mood and express their thoughts anonymously, and then charges for anonymous SMS. So theoretically if you’re at a party and looking for a date, you can set your status to “Seeking date”, and someone else could send you an anonymous SMS expressing their interest.
Overall, interesting businesses and interesting business models. It’s worth noting that even nowadays, at the heyday of Internet advertising market, many startups are thinking about alternative monetization methods, such as subscriptions and add-on services.
