STIRR Backchannel

Photos Courtesy of Ammie Wang Photography

Fresh from the New Year and STIRR’s 120 Startup Winter Wonderland Holiday party, STIRR starts the year with a packed house at Illusions in Palo Alto. There were three firsts that happened: first is our pleasure to work with SUN Microsystems as the sole sponsor for the event (Sun has STIRR’s Mixer booked exclusively until April). The second is our ‘Audience Choice Award’ which the crowd chooses the winning 60 Second Spot. And last but not least we’ve started experimenting with letting the presenters use slides on stage.

To test the new format, we picked only three participants for the DemoStage:

DemoStage 2.1 Presenters:

	Vizu Answers, Dan Beltramo, Founder Vizu Answers is democratizing market research by allowing anyone to conduct targeted, custom reasearch more easily, cost-effectively and faster than ever before. Vizu provides a polling platform and network of relevant audiences for researchrs seeking answers, and offers publishers a new way to make money while adding relevant content to their sites.
	Stickis, Marc Meyer, CEO Stickis is a social web overlay augmenting browsing collectively by letting users communicate in-place anywhere on the web with their personalized social and commercial community.
	Weatherbill, David Friedberg, CEO WeatherBill Contracts are financial instruments that pay out the buyer any amount based on certain weather conditions (i.e. a golf course that shuts down and loses $2k every day that it rains, can buy a contract that protects it from too many rainy days in a month). WeatherBill also provides a set of tools to help businesses analyze how sensitive they might be to the weather.

Guest Host, Bambi Francisco, CBS Marketwatch and Vator.tv

Audience Choice Award and Raffle:

Dan Beltramo from Vizu Answers accepting the audience choice award.

A new feature at the main event. The audience selects one lucky presenter to win a SUN x2200 M2 Server. How do we measure the response? STIRR’s new trusty portable DB Meter.

This month’s Audience Choice Award went to , by a whole 5 db on the meter. Congratulations Vizu! (And a double congratulations on raising a successful round of financing).

The only downside of using a portable db-meter approach is that we don’t have visual feedback on the display screen for everyone to see while they’re whooping it up. We’re noodling on it, but if anyone has some experience with data capture equipment and display tools, please contact us.

Mixer 2.1 Sponsor:

2.1 was sponsored by Sun Microsystems, which announced new Solaris 10 OS tools and technologies as well as an expanded, startup-friendly Sun Startup Essentials Program that make it easier for developers and startups to create Web applications. Sun announced Solaris Express, Developer Edition. the first release of a free new distribution based on the OpenSolaris project, providing developers with an integrated environment optimized for developing Solaris, Java, and Web 2.0-based applications on commodity desktop and laptop hardware. You can sign-up for Sun Startup Essentials here.

More Sun Startup Essentials details:

• Free software - get popular opensource infrastructure software, such as Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, postgres, Tomcat, etc.—all optimized for the Solaris operating system, and all free and ready to download.
  
• Discounted servers - get deep discounts on CoolThreads servers, x64 servers featuring AMD Opteron processors, and x64 and SPARC workstations.
• Discounted storage - get deep discounts on Sun StorageTek network and direct attached storage appliances, plus a Storage Area Network and Direct Attach Storage product enabling startups to start small and add capacity as needed
• Startups Ask Sun - get answers to your questions about architecture or Sun products and technologies from Sun engineering experts.

Mixer 2.2 is February 21st

If your company or a startup that you know is ready to launch and would like to present please see: http://www.stirr.net/apply/presenters