Olive Juice

Yesterday Arron and I made our way to the 11th Annual MIT Venture Capital Conference, to check out the Entrepreneur Showcase where thirty early-stage businesses from sectors including information technology, healthcare and clean technology exhibited their business vision and technology prowess. 

Three companies in particular caught my interest; in no particular order:

1 – Artaic – Innovative Mosaic http://artaic.com/
“Artaic is a full service provider of turn-key mosaic projects, from concept through installation. The creation of mosaic is brought to a new level, where art meets technology to make the medium more sophisticated and accessible.” 

2 – Delfigo Security http://www.delfigosecurity.com/
“Delfigo Security is the first in the identity and authentication industry to develop a solution using behavioral characteristics as markers in identity authentication. Our solution uses artificial intelligence based algorithms that uniquely identify users based on multiple factors including keyboard biometrics, geospatial metrics, system parameters, and reflective thinking.”

3 – Movolu http://movolu.com  
“This new advertising network is built for the mobile platform – the application is quite simple. Movolu leverages location information to enhance the mobile experience and connect businesses with customers in their area.” A detailed review can be found at http://nicholascifuentes.com/.

Mid-April I said my goodbyes to CPB and moved on to co-found DandyId with Arron Kallenberg and Anthony Dimitre. We’ve since launched an open beta and are communicating with third-parties for partner integration with our repository and widget. While partnerships form, users can sign up and fill out their identities – then grab a widget containing those ‘chicklets’ and respective links, for their blog. I have the widget, in badge form, on this blog.

I’ll also be moving my home base back to Rhode Island  later this month, and setting up Dandy headquarters in the Providence area. We’re hiring two developers, PHP/MySql/Mashup ninjas, and possibly an intern. Arron will remain in Boulder for 2 more months or so, heading our business development. If you’re a developer in the RI area (or in Boulder through July/August) please contact us for more information! 

DandyId is launching on a more official note this August at Gnomedex.  Check out the DandyId blog for future information, and DandyId.org to signup!

Although FOWA has hardly come to an end (double-days of Nikki Beach parties beginning tonight!), and tomorrow I’ll be winning the MacBook Air… however, some notes on todays happenings.

Kathy Sierra opened with a keynote “Creating Passionate Users” and cognitive seduction, stating the seemingly obvious but so often overlooked methods for relating to people and engaging users in exceptional experiences. Kathy spoke of our duty towards humanizing technology, getting people to meet – offline, while making more usable/human software. Develop easy-to-master-FAST apps, leaping to the “passion threshold”, where users are able to be great at what they *do* with the tool. It’s not about the tool. It’s about what the tool allows them to do. Get through to feelings and legacy brain. And place a “WTF” button nearby for your site’s users.

Blaine Cook, Twitter Engineer, held together his whimsical panel throughout audience notifications that Twitter was, no surprise, down. Cook warned of feature creep and the importance of adding what users *strongly* request, keep it clean, open APIs, and “use and love” the app you are creating. If you don’t love the service, others won’t either.Leah Culver, Pownce, followed, also pressing “opening code” as a top priority for any web service. 

Microsoft showcased the ever-awesome Photosynth, and a rad 3D maps application, which I didn’t catch the link to.

A panel pointing “what makes the next great startup”: Brilliance, team, confidence/ambition, depth of knowledge/research/ capital structure/right vw/legal issues, open!, distribution, extremism, and of course serendipity.

Remember the Milk’s Emily Boyd presented a quite enjoyable panel on FTM’s birth and lifespan, $0.19 budget, and various interface options (including the iPhone, yet available to the Aussies) (and a hacked GMAIL! love it). 

Off to the party, hosted by Scrapblog!  

Looking forward to FOWA next week. I’m planning to attend the BarCamp, located in FOWA venue, Thursday instead of the workshops. 

Do check out the Crowdvine page, pre-conference: sign-up for the social events, as well as filter through attendees with whom to meet in the Sunshine state.