Startup Rockstarts 3

1 Piazza hosted another Startup Rockstars demo event yesterday at Viget Labs. I had the chance to catch up with some friends and meet a string of really interesting entrepreneurs. As usual, Paul and Kady came through with a fantastic event and even a surprise guest speaker.

Contribune demoed at the last Startup Rockstars event and it is very exciting to see the scene growing.

Check out my thoughts on the presentations and a ton of event photos after the break.

evDeliv

I really enjoyed talking to Shawn and Julie from evDeliv. They make a great team and put together a very professional presentation. I think these guys are smart to focus on usability with a broad audience in mind.

evDeliv enables users to place food delivery orders from within a desktop application. The core functionality seemed to be well implemented, with clever and thoughtful features, such as recording average delivery time. As some members of the audience pointed out, I think their best early market may be in the corporate environment. While the current scope is limited, I’m especially interested in the broader vision they alluded to in their presentation. The two have also put together a great blog.

Though I only met Shawn and Julie last night, evDeliv has had a presence at a lot of the events Contribune has been at in the past. It wasn’t clear to me what evDeliv was up to until yesterday, though. This makes me wonder about the efficacy of our own marketing efforts. To date we’ve been focused on name recognition, but maybe we need to make our mission more clear in the future.

OurCoupleSpace

I’ve met Gary of OurCoupleSpace at a few events in the past. He is very friendly and passionate, and it showed in his presentation. His project, OurCoupleSpace, seeks to help couples manage their relationships online, with access to community best practice recommendations and couple satisfaction reporting. I’ve have to admit that I approach the intersection of web 2.0 and relationship intimacy with some reticence, but Gary is right to point out the huge and underserved market of unhappy couples.

OurCoupleSpace is actively seeking beta tester couples, so if you are intrigued and can convince your mate, signup.

GamerVixens

GamerVixens is a social network for female gamers. The site is strikingly well developed, with nice ajax touches embedding in a lot of the user interface. The audience seemed to think the site had some really great potential for targeted marketing.

I had a good conversation with Christina, who presented for GamerVixens, about the challenges women face in a lot of technology and science related fields. I hope to see her our at some more events in the future.

BrandClik

The guys from BrandClik put together a very slick presentation. They began by telling an anecdote about their own frustrations trying to defend their brand online. Their technology allows companies to embed links to their own sites in content on the web. This may be a good way for certain content producers to monetize their content. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to talk to these guys personally, but hopefully I’ll have a chance in the future.

They’ve put together quite a local marketing push over the past few months. Their official launch was held at Twin Tech II and I have the bright blue wristband to prove it.

CreateDebate

CreateDebate is a platform for creating and managing debates about virtually any topic. I was particularly interested in the way they offered users the ability to rank and filter arguments. The details on various elections being debated was quite comprehensive as well.

I chatted with the team about potential collaboration with Contribune, since we both are looking to aggregate content related to political campaigns, though for different reasons and with a different scope.

A Great Crowd

A lot of familiar faces were in attendance. I had a good time catching up with Paul and Kady, who organized the event. They managed to arrange for some introductory remarks from Jonathan Aberman Amplifier Venture Partners. Anyone considering starting a company in today’s economic environment should absolutely listen to his remarks. I believe his talk was video taped and will be up on the Startup Rockstars site.

In addition to those presenting, there seem to be some other really interesting startups in the pipeline. I hope to see Inside Job and Stitcho demoing in the future.

Thanks also to the guys from Sun Microsystems for sponsoring a lot of these startup events and always providing entertaining commentary. They’ve put together some tremendous breaks for startups. I plan to read up a little more on Joynet, their partner for scalable Rails application hosting. Check out their website to learn more.