Okay, okay, we’re about three years late to the party, but hey, better late than never.

SF Beta has its own Twitter account now, maintained by me (Christian Perry) and Krystyl Baldwin.

Give us a follow!

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.)

After thousands of votes cast, we’re proud to announce the three winners of the SF Beta People’s Choice Competition: Plurchase, BrainPark, and YourVersion.

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.

Four years and going strong, SF Beta is returning once again with one of our legendary mixers. Registration is up, and tickets are going fast!

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.

We’re combining our two most popular events into one giant Shindig!  SFbeta: the FailCon Experience!

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!

If you have an idea for your startup idea, share it here on our new startup, Trogger. We’ll give it feedback ourselves, as will other members of our community. Whether you’re at the earliest stages, or have a working URL, we’re happy to offer our constructive feedback

Share your startup idea here!

Thanks so much to everyone who came last night and made it our biggest and most exciting SFbeta’s ever!  We’d love your feedback, and Virgance wants your questions!

Head over to our new company site on Trogger, and let us know what you think:

http://trogger.com/tags/sfbeta
http://trogger.com/tags/virgance

We’d also love feedback on the site itself.  You can email that to me at cep [at] rfop [dot] biz, or post it here:
http://trogger.com/discussions/what-do-you-think-of-trogger-s-new-design 

As you may have seen on TechCrunch, we will be hosting the launch party of Powerset co-founder Steve Newcomb’s new company, Virgance.

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.

So I just wrote up a quick post summarizing my advice for men working the tech parties for a date.  This is just written from my personal experience, so feel free to keep your own style and hope for the best.  But hopefully it offers some guidance and assitance for getting that special someone:

http://troggerpath.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/find-that-entrepreneurial-valentine/

PS:  Thats the blog for our new start-up venture; so feel free to check it out.  We’d love your eyes and thoughts.

You are invited to enter your business pitch for a chance to win an exclusive interview on CBS5.

Join the Big Success Business Pitch Contest, the nation’s first video business pitch contest on Facebook!

Here is how it works…

Upload Pitch
Upload your 90 seconds pitch video on YouTube. If you are not sure what to say…check out this article What makes a great 90 second business pitch?

Join Contest
Entrepreneurs who join this contest expose their business to the Facebook community before quarterly deadlines. Next deadline: March 20, 2009 12:00 a.m.

Get Votes
Share your Big Success pitch with friends and anyone who needs to know about your business.

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How to Win?
The top three voted entrepreneurs will be selected to pitch and compete to be a quarterly winner in front of a live audience and a panel of judges consisting of seasoned entrepreneurs/potential investors. The quarterly winner will be determined by the panel of judges and receive a prize of being featured on San Francisco TV station CBS5.

Next live contest: Week of March 23rd

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And what else – the Grand Prize…
Each quarterly winner also becomes one of the finalists for the Big Success Finale which will take place on BizTechDay, the annual technology day for small business which will be held on October 22-23 this year in San Francisco. The 2009 Big Success Champion will receive a 30-minute exclusive interview on CBS5 and win a free trip to Miami.

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What are you waiting for? Tell the world about your business.

Click here to join contest