The First Stirr

I attended the world's first Stirr this evening.  Stirr is yet another local geeky tech meetup.  Even though I wasn't my normal bubbly self tonight (they didn't serve any food!), I managed to snap a few decent piccies.  As per the usual Web 2.0 dealio, five companies were given 60 seconds each to pitch their company.  The shorter pitches were much appreciated by the crowd.  Here are some of my faves:

• Prosper is a company that allows people to lend money to other people and set their own interest rate. I wonder if I can demand a pound of flesh for loans that default =)  The concept is a neat one, but I'm not sure I see the market efficiency.  When I give me money to the bank (notwithstanding a pitiful 1% APR), they're doing stuff with that money to pay me, including loaning it out to other customers.  Even though The Bank of Philosophygeek might not have the overhead of tellers, buildings, and employees, it's not clear whether I can do better with my own money, considering the risk involved.  Of course, my hope is that the distributed community-based system will rule over big corporations (sorry, C) so this is one to watch.
• Inkling Markets is another in a string of prediction markets.  I should start issuing KSMX shares.  Or maybe I'll go public!
• Meetro integrates with your existing chat clients and gives you the ability to see who's physically around you.  Back when chat first came out, it was cool to chat with other IRC users around the world.  Now that chat is so ubiquitous, bringing place back into the equation makes sense.  Of course, this will be used as a massive hookup service.  Doesn't Yahoo already do this with their chat rooms?  Anyway, I'll probably download and check it out to let you know if one can hook up successfully on Meetro.

Speaking of Meetro, I also met Seth Sternberg, the young & attractive founder/CEO of Meebo.  I got to ask him, point-blank, the rhetorical questions I proposed back when I found the company in December: how ya gonna make money?  He gave some answers about how they've clocked tons of user time (59 man-years or something like that?  I need to bring a freakin' pen next time I go to one of these do-hoppers) and they're going to make money on ads. . . aren't we all =)

I also ran into some folks from the incredibly useful application YouSendIt, which actually got angel funding from one of Kosmix's founders.  Small world!  My friend Jim Kirk, now VP of Biz Dev at Jambo, was also in attendance.  I'll be writing more about my wish-list for Jambo very soon (teaser: imagine your phone buzzing every time someone who had mutually matching profile preference came within 10 meters of you--at that point, who needs Meetro?).  Finally, I met Christine Herron from the Omidyar Network.  She told me that I shouldn't carry my business cards in my back pocket, because people will get nervous about touching something that was in such close proximity to my butt.

That's all from this event.  I hope to see y'all and some new faces at the SF WIN event on April 13 next week.

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Comments

[vinnie]

nice write-up on the event. if you do end up downloading meetro, find me under the 'Meetro HQ' section and drop me a line.

vinnie of meetro.