stirr

Finds at the Stirr Mixer: Texting T-Shirts and Brainy Flash

Found at Wednesday night's Stirr mixer:

Reactee, which will print a custom T-Shirt for you with an SMS short code and your custom keyword. When people who see the shirt text your word to the short code, they get your custom message back. And you, my clever self-marketing friend, get their phone number. Just the thing for (a) L.A. actors and actresses waiting to be discovered by agents and producers whose tables they are serving, (b) people who want to broadcast their cause (there are a lot of Reactee customers in nonprofits, CEO Ariel Poler told me), and (… Read more

Stirr wrap-up: Yes, Freebase really is that cool

It's a little late, but I want to wrap up the Stirr event I emceed last week. As with all other Stirr gatherings I've been to, this event included four carefully chosen presenters pitching their new Web companies. These were the companies we heard from last week:

MetaWeb, makers of Freebase, had the most popular presentation, judging by the silence of the audience during the pitch and the applause meter at the end of it. The MetaWeb database platform underpins the Freebase application and is designed to be a shared repository of structured knowledge. The blogosphere loves it, … Read more

Justin.tv goes live

Justin.tv-- the live helmet-video blogging site we wrote about last month--went live this morning. The site combines a live video feed, public chat room, and head blogger Justin Kan's daily schedule--which loosely resembles a content programming guide. Entertaining bits of content are archived for later viewing, complete with a blog post with context for what's going on. The entire production is run through Kan's backpack, which holds a laptop hooked up to an EV-DO card.

Chatters can discuss what's happening on the show with other viewers (using Lingr, the live updating chat service … Read more

Stirr wrap-up, part 2: Assorted Web 2.0 appetizers

As I suspected, there were interesting Web 2.0 finds in the audience at the Stirr event. Many of these online products are still being built, but they're interesting to experiment with:

Allth.at: Lets you set up custom, persistent searches. In other words, you can tell it which sites to search (Google, eBay, Technorati, etc.), and which sites to exclude. You can also have the system alert you when there are new results in your searches. Somewhat redundant for those of us who use RSS agents (like Google's) to track keywords on the Web, but has the … Read more

Stirr wrap-up, part 1: Sun, slogans, and how to cheat your audience

Before I hustled the four pitchmen on and off the stage at the Stirr event last night, Sun's Scott McNealy got up on stage and ran down his advice for entrepreneurs. Most of it was standard book-of-Scott stuff, including this peculiar bit of advice (#5): Manage through slogans.

McNealy also reiterated Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos' statement that, "the world needs only five computers." Loosely interpreted, that is: Google, in McNealy's mind, is one really big grid-based computer. The PC on your desk? Your phone? Your kid's game console? Not worthy of being called computers.

Still, … Read more

Preview: Start-ups at Stirr

I'm heading down to the Stirr mixer shortly, where, before Sun's Scott McNealy talks with the audience about entrepreneurship, I'll be moderating pitches from four start-ups. Three of them I've covered previously:

Attendio makes a system that automatically feeds your calendar with events it thinks you'll find interesting (let's hope it gets the times right).

Confabb is a conference directory. Rumor has it the site is soon to be acquired. Maybe we'll find out tonight.

JobCoin is a hosted job board service that I think is really clever.

The fourth company is Collaborative Drug Discovery. … Read more

More Stirr startups: Lift tickets, Flash games, price fights, and a search engine

Once a month (or so), I get up in front of a room of drinking entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and moderate a Bay Area Stirr event. There are a lot of these social/working mixers these days. I'm also going to try to wrangle the SFBeta mixer tomorrow night. Those pitches will be in limerick. Should be fun.

But the Stirr events are really excellent. Great energy in the room. Lots of deals happening. Nice location. And good startups:

Frucall. Nasser Manesh showed us his new price comparison service for mobile phone users, which he calls "the shopping … Read more