Web Innovators Group Recap
Tuesday night was the 18th WebInnovators Group and as always it was great to mingle with a huge number of smart, entrepreneurial people. The local social media gang was also out in force, checking out the ideas and products of local start-ups.
When I’d looked at Zeer the night before, I wasn’t impressed with the user reviews of junk food on the front page. But Michael Putnam gave a great demo and really showed off the impressive features of this online food community, including the nutritional information for 100,000 products and the usefulness of the site for those with food allergies. The ability to port your Zeer shopping list to a cell phone is also very handy. Zeer won the audience text-in award, so they obviously won over the crowd as well. I do agree with a questioner who didn’t get the chance for an answer: a feature that would tell you where to find the products will be very helpful. Hopefully it’s coming in the future.
I’m going to give Webnotes a whirl for some vacation planning. There are other web site annotation and organizing tools out there, but I liked the fact that you could share your annotations with people who don’t have Webnotes installed. There’s also the flexibility of a web-based interface if you don’t – or can’t – install the toolbar.
Third of the main dish presentations were my friends at Totspot, an online baby book where parents can create a profile for their baby, post content and track their child’s growth. They’ve made a lot of progress on the site; it looks easy to use and friendly which is important for harried new parents. I was glad to see Adam and Michael up there demonstrating their very nice site.
The “side dish” companies didn’t get a chance to present, and I didn’t get a chance to visit all their tables in the crowded room, but check out the list on the Web Innovators Group site for links to their sites.
The next WebInno will be September 15, 2008. See you there.