I'm heading down to the Stirr mixer shortly, where, before Sun's Scott McNealy talks with the audience about entrepreneurship, I'll be moderating pitches from four start-ups. Three of them I've covered previously:
Attendio makes a system that automatically feeds your calendar with events it thinks you'll find interesting (let's hope it gets the times right).
Confabb is a conference directory. Rumor has it the site is soon to be acquired. Maybe we'll find out tonight.
JobCoin is a hosted job board service that I think is really clever.
The fourth company is Collaborative Drug Discovery. In a nutshell: Open-source development concepts applied to drug creation. I can't begin to explain it better, let alone critique it. But if you've ever felt that you needed a more efficient way to upload your high-throughput enzyme inhibition and high-content cell assays, check it out.
On the consumer side, see also Mepath[blog post], an initiative to create public drug trials, or at least make it possible for clinical drug users to compare their experiences (efficacy and side effects) with other people.
I'll also be looking for other interesting Web 2.0 companies at the event. I often find the most intriguing start-ups by talking with event attendees, not by hanging out with presenters. Come find me at the event if you've got a good pitch.
Attendio helps you avoid that dreaded circular conversation: "What do you want to do tonight?"---"I don't know, what do you want to do?"---and so on.
More specifically, Attendio is a social-events discovery service that continuously feeds events directly to a calendar program based on specified interests and geographic location.
Launching here at Demo 07, Attendio is not shy about how new it is--its tagline is "seriously beta." (Speaking of names here at Demo, can we talk about that? Attendio, Yodio, Vringo ... the names sound to me like a series of toys for freakishly smart children.)
(Credit:
Attendio)
Anyway, users pick their interest--hockey, electronica, whatever--and location. Choose the preferred calendar program, and any event fitting the selected interests will continuously show up on the appropriate calendar date. From the calendared item, users can buy tickets and notify friends that might be interested in attending as well.
Each user has a profile that compiles their chosen interests and events that they would recommend. As a bonus, if you're out on the town and at a loss for where to go next, Attendio registered users can send a text message that will retrieve all Attendio-recommended events sitting on their calendar.
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