Out on the town

This week marked my first time venturing out into the vibrant scene of networking and events that the Bay Area digital world has to offer.

On Tuesday I went to the SF Ad Publishers Monthly Meetup and on on Wednesday I went to SF New Tech.

SF Ad Publishers is an informal gathering and a smaller group of people in the publishing space. I noticed that the majority of the attendees were in the performance marketing space. The event was held at the offices of VigLink in SOMA. VigLink is an affiliate marketing company that can turn your content into affiliate links to major etailers like amazon, zappos, walmart or ebay and if purchases are made by people clicking on the links, then the publisher is paid. I saw a couple of familiar faces from the isocket team as well as a few folks I met at the Blumberg Party at Adtech SF.

On Wednesday I headed over to SF New Tech, a bi monthly meetup that highlights half a dozen new start ups and gives them 5 minutes a piece to talk about their company. I found out, once I'd attended the event, that these are VERY early stage start ups with no, or very little funding. In most cases, it's a couple techies that "had a good idea" and built something. I learned also, that most of their ideas were to simply build something neat, with no worry about how it will ever make money. The, "if you build it, they will come" mentality seems sort of like wishful thinking to me, but hey, there's always twitter and foursquare to prove me wrong. I could be proven wrong about the companies I saw that night, but for the most part, I don't see them really getting big. There was one exception, a very cool company called Storify. Essentially, it's a publishing tool to make news article looking posts that can pull together a series of tweets. You can then publish the articles in a blog. The company just got a round of funding and they are looking for developers.

I also met a guy that cofounded a company called Nimbuzz that is a single deck to manage multiple voice chat accounts like gchat and yahoo voice etc. You can use it to chat or do voice calls on those platforms and they said video is in the works.

So, all in all, it was a very interesting evening and I enjoyed the free (?) ice cream, tacos and waffles that came with the $25/admission. It's not the best event to go to where I can find clients that need AC Lion's Bay Area recruiting services at this point, but it's a great place to meet people with an unquestionable passion for technology and innovation, so I felt right at home.