The community system for DEMO

Thursday, August 28, 2008 by Dave Winer.

When I was in Boulder on Sunday, David Cohen and Brad Feld, the organizers of TechStars, kindly set up four meetings for me with Boulder startups they thought I'd find interesting. It was great fun! Bright motivated people with big ideas, the discussions were interesting and I learned a lot. 

One of the companies is EventVue, who, like a company I invested in last year, is doing software to manage online communities around physical world conferences. Their customers are the conferences themselves. EventVue helps participants find each other, and gives them tools to describe and share their experinces at the conference.  

This week they're announcing that they have a customer that you'd think they'd pay for the priviledge of serving, the DEMOfall conference in San Diego, Sept 7-9. But to my surprise, they're being paid for providing the service. It should prrovide some very valuable exposure to this Colorado-based startup. 

The DEMO announcement is online now, as is a site Scripting News readers can explore to get an idea of how the service works. 

I hope to write up the other companies as they have stories to tell.  

I should meet with random startups more often -- I get ideas and get my enthusiasm for tech entrepreneurship is renewed.