Olina Qian

I signed up in www.meetup.com for my entrepreneurship and startup interest. So I receive lots of event information daily. One day, an email from SF New Tech about ‘Sizzling Hot Shots! Woya, Notable, Blurb, Scout Labs, Chartbeat, Alltop!‘ drawed my eye ball. It is meetup on Jun 10th, and Guy Kawasaki from Alltop will be there.

Guy Kawasaki is a famous venture capitalist in the valley. He founded Garage Capital. He is also a serial entrepreneur. His most recent startup is www.alltop.com. It is interesting that he is also the first person I followed in twitter. Since when I asked my friend who is worth to follow. He said, Guy Kawasaki, of course.

So now it’s a good chance to meet Guy Kawaski! I decided to sign up the event and drive all the way from Milpitas to SF to see this handsome guy. It is also the first time I attend the SF New Tech. Things are getting interesting.

I got off work around 5:30pm at the event day, meet my friend Devin Charles Holloway(http://dcholloway.com) in Los Altos and car pool together to SF. We arrived there around 7:30pm, and the happy hour just passed and the demo is about to start. The followings are some startups I found interesting:

The first demo is from Woya(www.woya.com), it’s a cool site about price comparision. Through analytics like the price trend for the past few months and availability, it will tell you if now it’s a right time to buy that product. I wish I knew this website when I am hunting my DSLR Camera. It will save me lot of lot of time. Qiang Sun, the CEO of Woya is a decent guy. I later added on him in my linkedin account and find out his GPA in CalTech is 4.15 something out of 4. Does it mean this guy is a genious? Hehe, I don’t know, but at least he is super smart. I guess.

Blurb is startup for Book publishing(www.blurb.com). You can design your book on their site, buy it yourself or sell it to others. It’s a great business idea. The founder mentioned that once upon a time, there is a girl who is striving to publish a book,  but no publishers are supportting her. So she used Blurb’s service to publish several samples by herself and mailed it to publishers. When the publishers see the real thing, they like it, so they decide to publish it for her. Since most of the people are visual person. It is an interesting idea. I am planning to write a book later too. I will use Blurb if at that time I am in the same situation.

Chartbeat(www.chartbeat.com) is a site to do the Realtime Analystics. I work in Nielsen Online, so this topic kinds of make me excited. Since what we do is traditional analystics, we base on the past data to predict the future. And Realtime analystics is like AB testing, it will shows Real Time customer behaviors to help companies make better real time decisions. I decide to do more study about it later on and open a topic for real time analysis.

Finally, it’s time for Guy Kawasaki to talk about AllTop. I watched lots of videos about Guy from Youtube, like 10, 20, 30 rules. He looks very confidents in the video. The real person looks even smarter. I like his idea about alltop(www.alltop.com), I sometimes go to their entrepreneur session to find the information I want. It’s a handy site and like he said, we are making money now, but not necessary making profit. But he is still doing it. I guess that’s the passion about vision and chaning world.

The event end up around 9:30pm, the final session called 60 seconds sell, which means if you have anything to announce, you can use this 60 seconds to tell everyone. For example, you have a new business idea, looking for partners, you need a job, or you are about to launch your product. Lots of people queueing there and share with us about what do they want.  I find it’s an intersting way to do it, maybe I should include this 60 second method in my next event hosting too.

Unne 10th, the first time I attend the SF NewTech event, it was a great experience. I will attend their event again.