Confabb Archive

Tonight I attended the "New York Web 2.0 Social Networking Tech Meetup." What a name – covers all bases! We met at a club which unfortunately had horrible acoustics. I was one of three presenters, and it was nearly impossible for me to hear myself over the club music, and the noise coming from the bar. I would suggest that they move it to somewhere that is a bit quieter. I counted about 75-80 attendees. I had a chance to meet the editor of the new AlleyInsider.com, which is a tech blog focused on NYC.

There were two presenters for the evening: Confabb and TrustFX. Below are my comments and thoughts from each presentation.

Confabb

Confabb is a site that lists conferences around the U.S. and provides detailed information on each. Along with the conference information, you can also signup to a social networking option which lets you create a profile which others can "friend" you on. This is a better version of MyContags.

Here are my live comments/thoughts from the presentation:

• Launched November 2006

Claim to have the largest database of conference information

• Do they have travel information for each conference?
• Have to create yet another social profile?
• You can create branded URLs for your conference, they showed a bunch of "issue" related conferences
• Is it real-time, so if something changes on the schedule, do they update?
• How do they get the word out, do they have promos at conferences? Will this replace Twitter at SXSW?
• Seems like a ton of manual labor to keep this site updated
• Seems like a good idea as long as they can get every conference into the system and get a large number of conference attendees active
• My suggestion would be to tie into a social network like facebook so users are not required to create yet another profile
• What about a tie with Meetup or Upcoming?
• Might also be nice to let me save to Outlook, Google Calendar, etc.

TrustFX

TrustFX is attempting to create a way for consumers to "trust" a business by the ratings and reviews posted about the same business. One of my friends called it "yellow pages with ratings". Their mission statement is: "To create credible online reputations". The service just launched.

Here are my live comments/thoughts from the presentation:

• CEO Andrew Ward noted that the system can't be gamed, but from what I could tell on the demo, it looked like it would be easy to game
• They only list businesses that have registered with the system. My suggestion is that they start to fill the database. I searched for dentist in my ZIP code and no results were returned. I think they would have more luck returning as much data as possible and highlight those with a trust score.
• Andrew said that businesses can tie incentives to ratings. I think this could be a big no-no as it could create a payperpost type issue
• The last slide discussed market opportunity: potential for 250k customers in year 4 with sales of $100 million and they are open to acquisition

Overall I enjoyed the event (outside of the location) and meeting many new people. I look forward to hearing from the contacts I made and hopefully covering their startups here on CN.