I flew down to Atlanta to attend Startup Riot 2010. It was a blast. 50 startup companies were pitching hard and heavy on the Fox stage. The weather outside the Fox was bone chilling but everyone inside was warm, fully amped on piping hot coffee, and flying high from the sugar rush of gourmet style donuts.
Outside the main hall, the demo pit was assembled with table top displays and reps from the startups. The displays ranged from HUGE to muted to small to… non-existent. Ah, variety. Oh, and it was streamed. LIVE.
As with any collection of startup companies numbering in the dozens, much like a variety mix of donuts, some just don’t go over as big as the others. I had a chance to actually talk with just over 28 of the 50 startups. Those I didn’t get to talk with were either conspicuously absent from their table top displays… or they were simply working the room and not working the crowd. In fact, some of the ones I’ll mention are ones I don’t even recall seeing at the table tops. Also, as you might expect, there was a peanut gallery. True to form.
As for the event overall, I’m spoiled when I think of “50″ startups. You see, I attended TechCrunch50 aka TC50. Let’s just say that TC50 is more an experience than an event and one that is hard to envision replicating without significant investment and long term planning. i.e. vision over venue and configuration over convention. So, I’m loathe to try and attempt anything resembling comparison. That said, I did capture live event notes and opted for the latest shiny Google Buzz vs. the most successful tool I’ve used to date, FriendFeed. Next time I’ll be using Google Wave now that there is a public viewing model for this. As with any event where you seek to take live event notes to the cloud… you better have a solid Interwebs connection. Sadly, I didn’t for this particular event… so, while Buzz was killed, I lived.
Here are a few selected Buzz notes before my connection died… I came back online later once the SSID land grab had ended and posted from a relatively solid WiFi connection:
This is not as easy as using FriendFeed for note taking. Yet, I’m done with FriendFeed in evaluation if not the community shrapnel.
Another thing that impressed me was just how many people traveled to be at Startup Riot. I was expecting mostly Atlanta based startup companies… wrong!
Q&A session… folks came from as far away as Kentucky apparently. Wow!
CritSend came all the way from Paris??? Wow.
I imagined there would be someone covering the event with clinical precision… and I was not disappointed:
Paul is a frikkin’ machine http://paulstamatiou.com/live-blogging-startup-riot-2010
My favorite quote from the entire event
“All accounting applications suck… we just suck the least” — http://LessAccounting.com
And then I realized that the Interwebs for the event wasn’t going to lend to live event notes…
WiFi is problematic…. going to chalk this up to pen and paper. bbiab.
After the network issues (or group apathy?) settled down I was able to get online again and it was pretty rock solid from that point forward and I was able to share a few picks.
Okay — here are the companies I found to be interesting in order of reviewing/meeting with them: BeeWellWishes, CoreMotives, CritSend, DoLeaf, DriveSafe, LearnItLive, LessAccounting, Napstay, PawPawMail, Rank’em, Savont, SkyBuyHigh, Softmaxx, and last but not least… Looxii
Best I Wish I Had Thought Of That: ViralPrints
