Beta List, Technology - Wednesday, October 1, 2008 11:35 - 4 Comments

WebInno 19: Givvy.com

A group of us hardcore geeks take a trip up to Boston every couple of months to attend the Web Innovators Group. “Webinno” is an extremely fun event in which the Boston Tech community gets together for a night of show and tell. It’s an event for everyone; from entrepreneurs, developers and designers to Venture Capitalists and Companies looking for talent. I remember the first one we went to from a hundred people in the industry and I have seen it grown to what it is now about a thousand people from all walks of tech life, checking out some early stage web startups.

The way the Web Innovators Group works is that there are five “side dishes” which are early stage start ups displayed in a crescent around the room at their own table, making themselves available for you to walk right up, ask them questions, get a demo and learn more about their startup.

Then there are the three “main dishes” which in addition to having a table in the room, they also are allowed a 5 minute presentation in front of the entire room. These are usually some more established startup companies, who sometimes already have venture backing.

The presentations are all very interesting as to how the startup decided to create such a product, usually built out of some kind of need they experienced themselves, then worked very hard to bring the application to beta or alpha.

There are 3 questions from the audience allowed after every presentation, usually one is.”How do you make money from it?” Which always gets good laughs, but it is also interesting at how the startups plan to monetize it. Sometimes through subscriptions, sometimes through ads, sometimes they just hope to be bought out!

The attentive crowd then votes on the best presentation and application by texting their choice to the main system and displayed for everyone.

For this Beta post and the next two, I will be posting the video I took of all the main dishes. The first is Givvy.com – a better way to give to charity. (Video after the jump.)

Continue…