Promoting Boston’s Web and Mobile Innovation Community
The Web Innovators Group (WebInno) is comprised of people engaged in internet and mobile innovation in the Boston area. We aim to support entrepreneurs, visionaries, and creative thinkers in the field by holding events which foster community interaction. Our regular meetings provide a forum for entrepreneurs from self-funded/early-stage startups to present new services to their peers, as well as an opportunity for everyone in the community to share and exchange ideas. Add our RSS feed to your reader, register for the e-mail newsletter, or check back periodically to learn about upcoming events.
Next Event:
Join us for the next Web Innovators Group meeting on July 15th, 2009 at 6:30pm in Cambridge. An informal gathering of people interested in internet and mobile innovation, WebInno is free and open to all in the community. If you are planning to attend, please sign up on our dedicated registration page.
After a brief spring hiatus, the large Web Innovators Group event is back in one month on Wednesday July 15th:
We’ll continue with the same format of self-/angel-funded startups presenting to the crowd as “main dishes” in the grand ballroom with “side dishes” demoing informally throughout the night from nearby skyline suites room in the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge. The doors officially open at 6:30pm with presentations starting at 7pm, including the “Audience Choice” award given to the crowd’s favorite company as determined by mobile voting. I’m also exploring an additional break-out session, but more to come on that to be announced later.
If your early stage startup is interested in presenting in either forum that evening, just reach out to me at david at web innovators group dot com. Please include the name of your company/site/product, a brief overview and description, and a link to a live site or password-protected beta demo site. Thanks to everyone who has already indicated their interest - I’ll begin to make decisions about the program over the next two weeks.
Looking forward to seeing everyone at the Summer 2009 WebInno22 on July 15th!
It’s been a few years since we updated the Web Innovators Group website. It could definitely use a fresh coat of virtual paint and the addition of a few additional features. Even more pressing, I have one or two content features which I’d like to add to the site which will benefit the community, but I need some technical help implementing those changes. If you’re interested in helping out immediately with some small website tweaks (like adding a wiki page plug-in to wordpress) and/or leading up to a potentially larger project to update the site, please let me know. The work would be pro-bono, but of course I can offer much recognition to the WebInno community for the efforts. Feel free to reach out to me at david at web innovators group dot com. Thanks.
I’ve been experimenting with it for the past couple months, but it’s now official - you can follow the Web Innovators Group on Twitter: http://twitter.com/webinno.
Of course, we’ll use it to communicate updates and other important announcements for WebInno. But thanks to David Chancogne and Pierre-Loic Assayag at Traackr+Ignesis, we’ve been able and will continue to retweet important community conversations leading up to and during the Web Innovators Group events.
I’d encourage you to become another of the 445 (and growing) followers @webinno to join the WebInno community in real time.
As mentioned on Tuesday night at the WebInno large group event, I am continuing my series of WebInno Dinner Groups – gatherings of a dozen or so entrepreneurs and managers who want to connect to discuss and share experiences about a specific topic. In contrast to the larger regular large WebInno events, these are more-intimate less-structured sessions with an opportunity for in-depth discussion. The first six dinners were devoted to the topics “Widgets and Advertising,” the “Intersection of Mobile and the Web,” and “Virtual Items and Virtual Worlds,” “The Secrets of Social Network Platform Apps,” “eCommerce 2.0,” and “Monetizing via Ad Networks.”
The next one I am planning is to be focused on the topic “Beyond Twitter – Harnessing the Entire Realtime Web.”If this discussion-area sounds like a gathering which you would want to participate, please reach out to me (david at webinnovatorsgroup dot com) sharing a bit of your relevant background and interest. Depending on response and availability, I’ll then organize an evening for us to get together in upcoming weeks (likely in April).
I wanted to briefly highlight two local organizations which have upcoming programs which might interest many in the WebInno community.The first is an entrepreneurial bootcamp for founders called TechStars.In the words of Executive Director Shawn Broderick:
TechStars is a mentorship-driven entrepreneurial bootcamp. We accept about 10 companies per location (Boulder and Boston) and stuff the 25 to 30 founders of those 10 companies into a very large blender with 60-80 industry-tempered mentors and hit the ‘liquefy’ button!The result is that after the three month, 500+ hours-per-week program (stop reaching for your calculator, a week is 168 hours) these 10 companies leave TechStars as super-clued-in, super-connected, super-networked, entrepreneurial superheroes who are well on their way to building amazing game-changing businesses. Applications for the summer program are open only until March 21st. More information about Techstars, and the application, can be found on our web site http://www.techstars.org/.
The second organization is MITX (Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange), which is holding its 6th Annual MITX Technology Awards Ceremony in June and is putting out a call for entries for recognition of start-ups, emerging companies and enterprises.This year’s categories include: Analytics and Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Devices, Enterprise Technologies, Gaming, Marketing/Customer Relationship Technologies, Mobile, Online Advertising, Rich Media, and Social Media.The submission entry deadline is Friday, April 3rd and you can find out more and enter at: http://www.mitxawards.org/technology/.
I’d like to thank everyone who came out to last week’s Web Innovators Group meeting.It was a success from my perspective, as we certainly had the largest turnout yet – great networking and promising young demo companies helped energize the crowd.Congratulations to Judy Gern at Adroit Interactive for winning the “Audience Choice” award of the crowd’s favorite Main Dish presentation of the evening.
David Kilkenny and the PermissionTV team recorded the ballroom presentations, and we’ll post those videos sometime soon.In the meantime, you can read recap blog posts (and videos) from Kevin Kosh at Chen PR and Wade Roush at Xconomy.
The next large group WebInno event will be held sometime early-/mid-summer… the date is still TBD.I’ll post details and a registration page once we have the date locked in.As always, we’ll be offering a venue for early-stage startups to demo their services, so feel free to reach out to me (david at webinnovatorsgroup dot com) anytime before the next event with a heads up expressing your interest in participating.
We’re just one week away until our March 10th Web Innovators Group meeting and we’ve lined up another strong set of demonstrators. The doors officially open at 6:30pm at the Grand Ballroom in the Cambridge Royal Sonesta, with the “Main Dish” presentations to the entire crowd starting at 7pm:
LilGrams - Gregarious Narain, Ranvir Gujral, and Adarsh Pandit
Following those presentations, each of our “Side Dish” demonstrators will have an opportunity to give a quick 30-second overview of their service to the audience followed by a showcase of their company at tables spread throughout the periphery of the skyline suites room during the unstructured networking portion of the evening:
Everyone who is interested in web and mobile innovation is encouraged to attend the free event.Please RSVP (and find additional details) on the event page (http://webinno21.eventbrite.com/) if you plan to join us so we are able to print name tags and appropriately size the room.
As 2009 opens to a new year, we’re holding the first Web Innovators Group event a few months from now on Tuesday March 10th.
We’ll continue with the same format of self-/angel-funded startups demo’ing to the crowd in main dish and side dish formats and award “Audience Choice” prize to the crowd’s favorite in their respective categories.Mark it on your calendars now and feel free to register well in advance on our dedicated registration page, as this one will sure be a special event.
And if your early-stage startup is interested in presenting in either forum that evening, just reach out to me at david at webinnovatorsgroup dot com. Please include the name of your company/site/product, a brief overview and description, and a link to a live site or password-protected beta demo site.The sooner you give me a heads up the better, but I won’t make decisions until about a month before the event.
Happy New Year from the Web Innovators Group! What a great event we had a month or so ago in December. With the addition of the Skyline Suites room for the Main and Side Dish company tables, we had plenty of room for the crowd to spread out and network before, during, and after the two programmed sessions. As usual, we had a number of blog posts and reviews recapping the event. Nathan Burke, Bill Ross, Doug Russell, and Sebastian Schmieg all wrote great overviews. And Bruce Lewis took a number of photos.
Congratulations to Local Motors for winning the “Audience Choice Award” — the crowd voted via text message selecting it to be the favorite of the Main Dish presentations. And a special thank you to James Geshwiler of the CommonAngels for leading a special breakout session on angel capital financing. You can find his entire powerpoint presentation posted here:
Finally, thank you to Matthew Mamet and Matt Kaplan of PermissionTV for their help in taping and producing a video of the entire event (posted over at their company’s blog).
We’re two weeks away until our December 9th Web Innovators Group meeting and we’ve lined up another solid set of demonstrators. The doors officially open at 6:30pm at the Grand Ballroom in the Cambridge Royal Sonesta, with the “main dish” presentations to the entire crowd starting at 7pm:
Following those presentations, each of our “side dish” demonstrators will have an opportunity to give a quick 30-second overview of their service to the audience followed by a showcase of their company at tables spread throughout the periphery of the room during the unstructured networking portion of the evening:
Pixability - Bettina Hein, Dale Bertrand, & Randy Barth
Later at 8pm, after a brief intermission, we’re holding a separate strictly optional breakout session hosted by James Geshwiler, Managing Director of the Common Angels, entitled “Raising Angel Financing 101.” Everyone who is interested in web and mobile innovation is encouraged to attend the free event.Please RSVP (and find additional details) on the event page (http://webinno20.eventbrite.com/) if you plan to join us so we are able to print name tags and appropriately size the room.