Our demo theme is Unconventional Advertising. We’re looking for companies that are redefining advertising, creating new, novel, and innovative ways of capturing interest and attention. Stay tuned for a list of who’s joining us — the results may surprise you.

Register for SF Beta on Wednesday, September 15.

As your organizer, I was both humbled and exhilarated to see so many people attend. In addition to the capacity crowd, we had ten startups demo, two drink companies promote their tasty beverages (thanks, Honest Tea and Magner’s!), and GoGrid was with us, as always, introducing people to their stellar cloud hosting services.

SF Beta makes enough money to pay my bills, but it’s first and foremost a labor of love, and nights like the last one make all the hard work worth it.

Thanks again, and see you next time!

Register today to take advantage of our early bird pricing, and see you in July!

We’re proud to announce that Ticket Truck will be launching with us at SF Beta.

Ticket Truck is an innovative Facebook app that helps travelers book hotel rooms. As a twist, however, you earn reward dollars for every purchase you make, which can be redeemed for Amazon gift cards.

Ticket Truck will be showcasing their startup and offering giveaways throughout the night. We’re thrilled to have them with us. Make sure to stop by their table, right across from the bar. (And if you book a room with them, they’ll probably buy you a drink.)

The three startups are all leading contenders in the Search & Discovery space, which is this month’s demo theme. We’re honored and excited to have such great companies with us, and hope you’ll enjoy seeing what they have to offer.

In addition to the People’s Choice winners, we’re proud to feature five more startups who will be demoing alongside them: Collecta, TextDigger, Splunk, WebMynd, and Zemanta.

On March 23, join more than 300 founders, investors, developers, and technologists for an evening of demos, drinks, great conversation, and endless opportunities to network and connect.

In a new twist, we’re adding a theme to our demos. This time around, it’s Search and Discovery. If you’re building the next Google-killer, we want to have you at the event! Email cperry@sfbeta.com for more info.

If you haven’t heard, we’re working on our next startup conference: FailCon, and offering our readers 25% off!  This conference is the first of its kind and not to be missed.  We’re shaking things up with specific stories, data, and recovery advice for entrepreneurial failure, from the people who have lived it.  Learn about early team struggles from the guys at Meebo, about adapting to the social web from Mark – founder of Tribe.net and Zynga, hear how Max prepared for PayPal and Slide, and how VCs handle their portfolios when they start to go under.

If you, sadly, can’t make it to the event, well we hope to see you at the SFbeta after party!  We’re expecting 350+ of the newest, hottest, and most fun startups, founders, developers, investors, marketers, and bloggers to be at this evening extravaganza.  More information as we get it, but demos are open!

A brief summary from the article:
“Virgance focuses on fostering and promoting benevolent, wide-reaching and important campaigns that also stand a good chance to make money. The Virgance engineering team, headed by VP of Engineering Naseem Hakim (who helped build the very popular Facebook app Circle of Friends), is building a platform designed to help promote these campaigns across a number of social platforms. Newcomb describes the platform as “the next iteration of what President Obama did” – leveraging the power of social media to reach the masses. But these campaigns are not simply about raising awareness – they have to let the community somehow interact, and they have to have a solid business model. Depending on the campaign, Virgance gets a portion of the incoming revenues.” 

At our next SF Beta, we’ll be featuring the ventures and adventures of Virgance, with tons of bloggers, press, and investors in attendance.  This is definitely NOT the beta to miss this year.

To change things up for the new year, we’ve decided to standardize our prices. Now, instead of two pricing tiers, everyone will pay the same amount: $15 online, and $25 at the door. We settled on these amounts because they were half way between our two former prices, which we hope you’ll find fair.

Interested in coming? Buy tickets here.

Interested in demoing? Startups can show off their site for free. Sign up here.

We’re calling it the SF Beta Holiday Bash. Tickets are now available and we’re keeping prices the same as always.

As always, we have tables set up across the venue for startups to demo. And, like always, the cost to demo is free. If you’re interested in showing the world your stuff, sign up on our wiki.