What a difference a venue makes! January 25 marked our initiation into the glamorous interiors of 111 Minna Gallery, SF Beta’s brand new home. More than 200 people packed into the front room, where the majority of our event took place.

(Photo credit: Brian Solis)

People who had attended previous events noticed a few changes. For one, we brought in a live jazz band, the Nova Jazz Quartet, who serenaded us with lovely jazz melodies throughout the night. Sauce Restaurant once again provided their masterful catering, only this time, we had a bit extra sponsorship money, so we splurged on shrimp. (Everyone loves shrimp!) The crowd had some new faces, too, including a number of folks from Linden Lab, not to mention our special guest Robert Scoble.

We had four start-ups who pitched their wares to our capacity crowd. Quizlet makes studying easy with web-based tools to build your own flash cards, tests, and so forth. GoBigNetwork connects entrepreneurs to investors from across the country. Approver makes it easy to manage files, offering an elegant alternative to email. SpotDJ lets anyone upload brief recorded comments about songs, which play in between your tracks on iTunes.

And finally, our event wouldn’t be possible without the help of our sponsors. Coming back from last month were ServePath, providing dedicated and co-location services; AboveNet, one of the market leaders in high-bandwidth fiber services (for the next YouTubes of the world); and Jacobs & Ferraro, a local law firm serving the emerging technology sector. In addition, we were joined for the first time by Laszlo Systems, which provides an open-source platform for developing rich web applications.

Thanks to everyone who came, participated, sponsored, and made our event everything it was. See you next time!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 12:14 am and is filed under Web 2.0 Mixer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.