On Monday night I went to a meeting of the Boston Web Innovators Group. It’s basically a bunch of folks either with their own Web 2.0 startups and those that wish we worked on much cooler stuff than we actually do. I fall in the second group.
It was alright – its mostly a shmoozing/networking session. There were two main presentations: the first ProxPro is this location aware application for phones/pdas to facilatate chance meetings. Sort of like dodgeball for business. They also have this application can you can look up background information on business folks so you can find out how to best exploit your chance encounters.
The second, and by far the cooler of the two (or at least more conceivably usable for me) is Plum Its a web-based tool that lets you connect snippets from the web and save them, online, in their original form. One application demoed was group trip planning – you can save a collection of web pages (even in the middle of sessions) and share them with other people. Sort of cool. There’s aleady a firefox extension that does this, and at least one Mac app I know of, but there are certainly some benefits added on here like community, tagging and autofinding of related content in the plum system.
The complete list of demonstrators can be found here.
As a schmoozing-handicapped individual, I would have liked there to be more time spent on formal presentations (it was only ~15 or 20 minutes) rather than rushing through to the free for all afterwards. Or I could just talk to strangers. What would mom think though?