Boulder OpenCoffee Club

September 15 2009 Recap

mbedwards@gmail.com — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 09:48:46 -0700

Great meeting on the 15th with lots of discussion. Highlights:

Intuit bought mint -- should Mint have stayed independent? Aggregator position not with a vested interest vs. banks like Wells Fargo that provide similar services. intuit claims it will keep mint free
New iPod Nano has video recording capabilities @ $179 for 16gb
Google Labs released fast flip - lets you flip through articles to read like a newspaper
Rumors that funding levels picking up in Silicon Valley, local Boulder also
USPS app creates optimal packing instructions for boxes
Bing came out with image browser: http://www.bing.com/visualsearch
Oct 10 Python unconference
boco.me - Tech, Music, Food happening in Boulder on October 2
Tigerlaunch gives you an menu of apps on OS X.
Michael Sitarzewski pointed out that OS X allows you to add a Recent Applications stackto the Dock.
Startup junkies @ da vinici institute sept 28 [verify]
Green space startup office space in Denver, started in NYC coming to Denver

Best,
Michael

Sept 1, 2009 Recap

mbedwards@gmail.com — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:20:32 -0700

Great meeting on the 1st. Looking forward to seeing everyone this week for the Sept 15th meeting.

Some highlights:

- Facebook use going down for 6+ yr users, going up for newer, older gen users. Is this a permanent trend or temporary?

- Snapimpact is live, downloadeable in appstore / component fund of the community foundation; line item in their 501(c)3

- Community working space a techstars

- Brad and Jason community working hours at the bunker

- eBay sold Skype to Marc Andreesen for $2B

- Apple's iPhone has 40% of the entire cell phone market in France

Best,
Michael

August 18th Recap

mbedwards@gmail.com — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:17:54 -0700

Small, but very fun group today. Highlights below:

Myspace bought iLike for $20 MM
Sound Jam was a Carbon based MP3 player that became iTunes
Speculation that yellowbox functionality is hidden in Mac OS X that allows for running Mac apps inside of Windows
Microsoft stores ... CompUSA / Circuit City closed, Walmart downsizing software .. want xbox in your home .. maybe Microsoft gets HealthVault into stores and thus your home
Microsoft is releasing a real Outlook for the Mac
Facebook bought FriendFeed, where does the data go?
Data backup / data persistence across cloud services -- how do you backup your data?
Amazon Mechanical Turk
OpenLogic and other companies will automatically scan and audit your source code to determine difference licenses present
You're selling the traffic on a site, not the code, open source or not doesn't matter. License management is important re: risk management -- you don't want to pay a penalty in the way of lower acquisition cost or escrow
Transcription / voice / speech recognition services often filter machine results to humans

--Michael Edwards

BOCC for August 4, 2009

mbedwards@gmail.com — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:50:13 -0700

We had some great discussion this morning. Highlights include:

Apple tablet
Apple pulling Google Voice from app store
why would apple pull?
Is it apple's right?
Anti-competitive behavior on the part of Apple, (marketplace is so big it warrants different rules than something small like Palm's marketplace
Tethering the iPhone
phone.accelerometer for javascript coming
HTML/js apps will eventually supersede natively compiled Objective C apps on the iPhone
Google Latitude
Skype patent issue with peer-to-peer technology licensed from a company owned by the original founders may cause a shutdown as well as cause ripples in the VoIP market as consumers search for alternatives
Eric Schmidt stepped down from apple board of directors
Is there a disconnect between sustainability and technologists?
Energy informatics may be the future of the carbon market idea
170 startups around Boulder?
How many are successful - what is the definition of success?
Online meetings vs face-to-face
If there is no application for the technology you call it 'web 2.0' -- Dave
Slacker radio has DJ's that mix hours of radio that you download onto a device you put in your car
Bluetooth stereo headphones for iPhone
Do privacy issues hinder further adoption by consumers of Mint.com?

--Michael Edwards

July 21 2009 BOCC Recap

mbedwards@gmail.com — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:05:47 -0700

We had some great discussions today with regulars and newcomers alike.

Some highlights:

Tens of thousands more albums released this year than last, yet few sell more than 1000 copies

Seed / early stage funding in Q2'09 up 67% vs Q1'09

Talked about personal social media management and identity management

iHound lost iphone app lets you play a tone/sample from their website when your phone is missing

Organic motion - camera based 3d realtime model and face not ball/suit based

Microsoft stole apple's chief of retail stores to open ms stores -- isn't every store a Microsoft store?

Can't make fat elvis skinny again - Microsoft can't get back into its groove.

Negative feelings re: investment finder's fees

--Michael Edwards

July 7th 2009 Recap

mbedwards@gmail.com — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:07:54 -0700

Awesome meeting this morning with a bunch of regulars and new people.

Some highlights:

We discussed outsourcing, including offshoring to countries such as India. People have had good and bad experiences. Key take away is that if you think you are outsourcing the management of your project you need to make sure the contracting company has managers dedicated to your project. Other hints were contractual agreements for resume review and keeping the same people on for the lifetime of the project.

Aniomagic is a cool local Boulder company founded by CU grad students that enables craft makers to weave programmable LED lights into shirts, jewelery, and other objects. They demonstrated programming a woven bracelet using an iPhone that generated specific light patterns. Very cool stuff.

Callisto.fm is a new startup founded by long time BOCC member Michael Sitarzewski that enables podcast discovery by streaming podcasts together in the same vein as Pandora. They just opened up for public consumption and are looking for comments.

We discussed Marc Andreesen's new VC firm and statements people have made that up to 20% of VC's will close shop in the next few years. The theory is that people are unable to allocate large sums of capital efficiently.

Zeo, a company from Boston that helps consumers track their sleep habits was in town today and is presenting at the new tech meetup tonight.

Hope to see everyone at the next meeting!

--Michael Edwards

June 23rd BOCC Recap

mbedwards@gmail.com — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:38:36 -0700

Some highlights from the last meeting include:

- People are so far very impressed by the Pogoplug. $99 one time cost for monthly storage and transfer ability is a very good deal.

- People are using MS FolderShare (now LiveSync), and DropBox for syncing productivity documents

- iPhone 3GS graphics chip faster than original Xbox graphics chip. Much more responsive for every day tasks.

- No one buying a Palm Pre

- VersionTracker is a great source for Mac related software

Looking forward to seeing everyone at the July 7th meeting!

--Michael

June 9th BOCC Meeting

mbedwards@gmail.com — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:15:07 -0700

We had another great meeting earlier this month.

Some highlights:

shubme.com lets you checkin where you are at a meeting or conference

- Digital conference the other day, ceo -- advertising with teens survey to get into a game

- Colgate video tie-ins running at $40 CPM

- Talked about vesting, shotgun clauses being bad, voting rights vs vesting

- Maybe 30-40% of options avail to employees aren't exercised by leaving employees

- Firing for cause -- cause is impossible to define

--Michael

May 26 Meeting - NVCA, Facebook, Matt Galligan, Palm Pre, Startup Weekend

mbedwards@gmail.com — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:51:06 -0700

Awesome meeting this Tuesday (May 26th).

First order of business was congratulating our awesome host, Jason Mendelson, on being appointed to the National Venture Capital Association board.

Early discussion included the recent investments Jason's fund at the Foundry Group has invested in, including the PogoPlug which is a small device that for $99 puts the contents of any external harddrive into the cloud with sync options and full high speed streaming capability.

We then discussed the recent OpenTable IPO, which is one of, if not only dot com IPO's in the last two years and according to Bloomberg, one of the five biggest tech deals in the last year. Issues discussed were that it was not clear their business model is sustainable due to the fact that some restaurants will use it to build a brand then dump it and go solo. An additional threat is the Point of Sale vendors' recent offerings for web enabling restaurants directly into the POS machines.

Lance gave us a brief summary of the Facebook developer's garage last Friday. Discussion then turned to the $200MM capital injection into Facebook a Russian investment firm made at a $10B market capitalization. Rumor is Facebook is profitable this year and may be set to hit gross revenue of $500-600MM.

Matt Galligan, formerly founder of Socialthing, one of the first ten Techstars companies which sold to to AOL last year, announced his new startup which is an alternate reality gaming platform using mobile phones that integrates real world geolocation and environmental information.

The Palm Pre is being released in June and a dev camp in Boulder is going to be held as well.

A member that had a waterlogged iPhone took it to the Boulder Mac Repair Shop and got it fixed. Apparently there is a water indicator in the headphone jack.

Several people voiced preference for the Apple store in the Flatirons mall in Broomfield for better service and lower wait times than the one on the 29th Street Mall in Boulder.

We then discussed consolidation in the event ticketing industry and the near monopoly strength of Ticketmaster.

Andrew Hyde announced the third Boulder Startup Weekend coming up June 5 - 7. A $40 ticket buys you 7 meals.

The next meeting is Tuesday June 9th at 8am at The Cup in Downtown Boulder.

-- Michael Edwards

Awesome 2nd Year Anniversary Meeting on April 14th

mbedwards@gmail.com — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:11:55 -0700

We had another awesome meeting on April 14th and celebrated the 2nd anniversary of our first meeting. Regulars from the original that were present included Jason Mendelson (our host), Alan Kaplan, Lorenzo Carver, and me.

Topics of discussion included Brad Feld's new job as a Spud Brother's fry cook, CU entrepreneurship week, and Colorado governor Bill Ritter's new enthusiasm for focusing on Internet, software, and information technology based businesses located in Colorado.

We then continued our ongoing discussion of the media industry. A statistic was floated that the average teen spends 18 hours a day consuming media including double/tripple counting (you can listen to MP3's while playing games). 18 hours a day is not changing over time, so it appears it is the ceiling (maxed out for attention). I shared an interesting graph I found that showed the decline in newspaper readership started in 1980. We discussed whether the local Daily Camera paper would survive. Consensus is not pretty whatever the ultimate outcome is.

We then moved into discussing doctors and electronic medical records. $100mm's lost on helping doctors (similar to lawyers, accountants) adopt technology. Discussed initiative in Boulder county to get all medical records online.

Finally, we debated Facebook Twitter integration and general usage patterns for Facebook (more personal) with Twitter (more business, free form).

Our thoughts on MySpace were that the customizable annoying stuff is what MySpace users really like....

Hope to see everyone at the next meeting on April 28th at The Cup on Pearl St, 8am.

--Michael Edwards

March 31 Recap and 2nd Anniversary!

mbedwards@gmail.com — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:04:56 -0700

The March 31st had a lot of interesting conversation.

We discussed Google Ventures and its strategic impact as well as the new Google Voice.

Jason Mendelson proposed open-mic nights for entrepreneurs in Boulder for those of us that need a bit of 'help' with our pitches :-). Lots of people interested.

Jason also asked us if we knew of anyone providing an outsourced SaaS analytics solution. No one at the group knew of anything off hand. I've since
come across Mix Panel that appears to offer a very slick solution that looks like it would be easy to integrate with (using a REST API) which would traditionally be my
biggest push-back area.

Another query from Jason was if we'd have interest in a product that would let us connect an external storage unit to a router and have automatic access to the files from any Internet
connected computer. Some people wanted it, others didn't. One device fitting the bill is the PogoPlug.

The discussion included fertile crescents of technology, ala Silicon Valley, academia, defense, creativity, a culture of not being afraid of failure, non-unions / right to work. We discussed choosing to create a Silicon Valley type startup hotbed w/ your local University ala Silicon Flatirons. Jason went on to give a talk at Ann Arbor, Michigan about this.

Matt Emmi asked for suggestions to an interactive Google map he is working on that displays the density of high tech companies in Colorado. A lot of interesting UI/CHI talk followed. It's amazing what Google Maps and Earth allow you do to. Google Earth, originally Keynote, is the software that powers a lot of visualizations that traditional news organizations generate.

Afterwards we had another meetup re: the BOCC blog and a unified startup events calendar for Boulder with me, Matt Emmi, Lance Weber, Michael Sitarzewski, and Andrew Hyde.

The morning ended with the people still at The Cup discussing bit.ly's recent funding.

The next meeting on April 14th will be our 2nd year anniversary. I hope to see everyone there!

--Michael Edwards

March 17th Recap

mbedwards@gmail.com — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:43:34 -0700

We had a good discussion at the last meeting centered around the future of newspapers (inspired by the recent closings here in Colorado and everywhere else), the Palm Pre, and AIG bonuses. re: Newspapers, Lance Weber pointed to an excellent analysis done by Clay Shirky.

After the meeting, Michael Sitarzewski, Lance Weber, Matt Emmi, and I had a quick meeting re: upgrading the BOCC blog which was followed up by another meeting the next morning.

I also wanted to congratulate our longtime regular Jennifer Ross for starting a new Open Coffee Club in Victoria, BC, CA where she is living now.

Lastly, for those of you who missed Jason Mendelson's recent Venture Capital Crash Course (contains slideshow) at the Silicon Flatirons you can download a video of it.

Looking forward to seeing all of you at the next meeting on March 31st -- we're closing in on 2 years!

--Michael Edwards

March 3rd Recap: Disruptive Technology

mbedwards@gmail.com — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:49:26 -0700

I missed the last meeting and so Lance Weber graciously agreed to fill everyone in. Thanks go to Michael Sitarzewski for helping coordinate this.

"We had a good turnout and plenty of first-timers. One topic was industries that we thought would be ripe for disruptive technology innovation, and in addition to the usual healthcare, education and finance sectors, the construction industry got quite a bit of discussion. It was great to see several people who had been laid off from big companies deciding to strike out as entrepreneurs. The networking part of the meeting was lively, with several folks talking well past 9:30." -- Lance

Looking forward to seeing everyone this Tuesday, 8am, at The Cup. If you can't make it, tune into #bocc on Twitter for our continuing experimentation on that front.

Great Meeting Last Week and New Blog Maintainer

mbedwards@gmail.com — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:21:39 -0700

We had a great meeting on Feb 17. Matt Emmi was compiling a list of free tools for entrepreneurs. Suggestions came back for Google Docs and Lovely Charts among others. Robert Reich was there and we discussed the addition of the second meeting for the Boulder Denver New Tech meetup which will be held in Denver.

Lastly, Jason asked for someone to help maintain the blog and I volunteered, so you'll be seeing more posts by me in the future.

Michael Sitarzewski suggested we try a Twitter back-channel during the meetings. Feel free to follow the #bocc hashtag during the next meeting as we try this out.

If you have any other suggestions let me know.

Best,
Michael Edwards

Happy New Year!

jason@foundrygroup.com — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:22:40 -0700

We had a good first meeting today - great turnout of old and new folks. Discussions surrounded Denial of Service attacks (Yes, Brad Feld, we spoke about you), several new companies started in the Boulder area, will Android kick Apple's butt and Lori Joy from 32 solutions who even had some jobs to place for her new recruiting firm.

Nice to see everyone