High Tech Meetup

The monthly Silicon Valley high tech meetup was tonight, nothing earth-shattering, but once again Vincent Luria did a masterful job of lining up demos, keeping the meeting on track and on time, and all without hurting anyone's feelings.

The only demo which showed any sense of humor was for neighboroo.com, a very well done demographics site which shows on a map of the USA all kinds of demographics (one at a time right now, combinations coming soon). The young man giving the demo zoms in on the Bay Area, and selects from a list of stats the female:male ratio, and discovers Walnut Creek has the highest number of women to men. "I think I'll move there" he says. But then he checks some other stats and finds out that the majority of those single women are over 65, retired and on modest incomes. "I guess I'll look for another place to move to" he says.

Stickis.com caught my attention until the demo was under way. It is not a post-it note engine, it's just another way to aggregate RSS feeds and web sites. Kind of like if your LJ Friends List included your friends' favorite web sites and their comments on them.

thinkfree.com was impressive, though their presenter was dull. Not a site I would use, but only because I have the tools at home & work which he makes available on the web. In a nutshell, this site lets you create, edit and share Microsoft Office format Word, Powerpoint and Excell files without needing Microsoft Office. He emulates about 85% of Office functionality with, ironically, Java applets.

The fastest talker of the night (with the least to say) was showing off a home made site called schoolparent.net which is just a bulletin board site for parents of Fremont school district kids.

Fewer people attended than usual - which I am glad about. I had stopped coming because it was too crowded for the venue.

I'll have to suggest that they do some hardware demos. Right now it's all web stuff, and almost all "social networking" which is starting to get old.