Just wanted to write a post about the Boulder new tech meetup last night.  This was my first time coming and boy have I been missing out!  What a great forum and a great set of interesting projects tonight.  Most of the presenters are in this year’s TechStars program but there were a couple outside of that including Dan Bricklin (inventor of VisiCalc)  and a really cool interactive art piece called “The Pool” from Jen Lwin / BlueInk.

Dan was basically sharing his thoughts on tech past and present and talking a little bit about his new book.

Jen brought one of the pods from her “Pool” project which has been featured at Burning Man and is set for a cool looking event coming Aug 15th.

Spry
Finally. Everything about your project… in one place. Spry is working to integrate lots of disparate workflow and tracking sties into one actionable stream so your team and those managing your team know where things stand.  They integrate tools like bugzilla, github, capistrano,  error tracking, deployment servers and such to give current status and one consilidated view.  Seems like it has some good potential.

Vanilla Forums
Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able, pluggable discussion forum for the web. A really great looking, highly customizable, plugable forum and discussion system, these guys were here to show off some of their latest work, announce version 2 and a new hosted service offering.  This forum system seems to have a lot of traction and is already in use by a ton of people.  Elegant and not over cluttered it allows for easy focus on the discussions and lots of opportunity for plugin development.  Need a forum?  Definitely give this one a try.

Take Comics
Welcoming Publishing into the On-Demand Digital Age.  The short on this one is “iTunes for Comics”.  I was really impressed by the image quality that these guys were able to get on the comic book art.  This is a great idea and could actully expand the comic book market by making comics more accessible, interactive and expand tie-in marketing opportunities.  The abilityt to tie in data about characters and events and to provide background info or ablities summaries, etc was really cool.  One thing I wasn’t clear on was when making purchases in their system if users actually also get a hard copy of the comic or if it’s only digital, or if there is a choice.  Comic fans I think will love this.

ReTel
Advanced Video Content Analysis and Search Solutions. These guys are working on providing advanced surveillance video mining.  The idea is that there is sooo many hours of video being generated by retail surveillance cams that it’s really impossible to analyze it all.  There are clearly insights to be gained from the footage, such as poor employee behavior or store cleanliness.  ReTel’s solution uses “micro transactions” where a large pool of human workers label and tag short segments of the video footage.  They can then compile all this parallel processed video and present very interesting, mineable data about the footage.  Definitely seems like there is huge value here, especially for retail location owners and particularly those who are trying to manage / monitor multiple sites.

NextBigSound
Actionable Intelligence for the Music Industry.  Very cool idea of bringing together buzz from all over the web on music artists to give insights to industry insiders.  Seems like a really nice way for bands large and small to keep a finger on the pulse of the buzz they are generating. Keep an eye on these guys.

SendGrid
We Get Your Email Delivered. Better email delivery for your transactional email.  As a developer I certainly know that getting email delivered from my web apps can be frustrating.  What I’m talking about are the kinds of emails you are used to getting when you signup on a site and they send you an account verification email, or amazon send you that order summary.  These guys are working on these problems and look like they have a nice non-intrusive solution that also brings other value adds like analytics  and nice wrapping of your plain old text email.