Boston Web industry showing signs of maturity

Monday night's Web Innovator's Group meeting had a different vibe from the meeting in January. January's meeting seemed to be about "I can't believe there are actually Web people coming out in public and identifying themselves as such," while this week's was more "Yeah, we're Web guys and this is what we do." People seemed more comfortable and more about getting down to the business of networking. There were more people this time, but the room was much larger, which may have cut the intensity of the crowd. I actually preferred Monday's session, because everyone seemed to be ready to get to work, rather than just being amazed they were awake again. Of course, this may all be projection on my part.

There were three poducts demoed on Monday, the best of which was certainly LocaModa. I'll have more to say about this in a later post. As for the other presentations, the best comment I heard from one of the hecklers in the room during the demo of Blue Trim was "I guess he believes in tell, don't show." In the case of Nextcode, it was hard to tell which was the product as opposed to an application of the product. In general presentations of new technology should start with a clear demo of the product being sold, then a discussion of applications of that product, and finally a brief explanation of the technology used. LocaModa did this to superb effect.

When we got to the question and answer portion of the demos I realised that Boston may be ready for an Under the Radar type event. I didn't attend this when it was held in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago, but it sure got plenty of blog coverage. There were 32 companies making presentations, which must have been pretty intense, but to me the important part of the format was the presence of a panel of industry experts asking questions. I think having people who can ask pointed questions, and who get a chance to do some follow-up is key for really extracting the best information from a presenter. It is uncertain if Boston could deliver 32 Web start-ups, but if this was held once every 6 months, we could pull companies in from New York and maybe DC. Those are fairly big cities. Together we might be able to compete with Silicon Valley.