It was the hottest Lunch20 I’ve been to. Ever.
I mean literally. It was 105 degrees in Pleasanton where our host Spigit is headquartered. I almost didn’t go because of the heat but was really interested in learning more about Spigit.
“Innovation evolved” is the company’s tagline and their website describes it as a “community platform for launching new ideas.”
I’m going to try not to butcher it because I’m in the process of discovering Spigit myself, but there’s a great video of Founder and CEO Paul Pluschkell about it here. But here’s what I got from the demo today: Spigit harnesses the wisdom of crowds by simulating market conditions in a MMOG via social collaboration (they say social networking but I really think the word collaborate is more accurate). It sounded to me like Cambrian House at first, however how this is different and how this stood out to me was that Spigit comes with a reputation system that’s determined by the combination of users and algorithms, which I think, is the critical element that would differentiate it from all the other social networking sites.
There are three active communities right now, Spigit for Startups, Spigit for Students and Spigit for Election 2008. Spigit for the Enterprise is coming next month.
Networking was definitely great. Since this Lunch20 was not in my neck of the woods I met a whole lot of new folks. Among them Kurt Brockett of IdentityMine, Geof Lambert of IPv6 Task Force, Kristen Kuhns of StoryOfMyLife.com (check them out at Spigit), Spigit CEO Paul Pluschkell was at my table and all the way from Uruguay, Conrado Vina from Moove-iT.
Lunch was good and the airconditioned office suite felt even better. Much thanks to the Spigit folks who were out there barbequing in the parking lot, in the 105-degree heat, just so we’d have something to eat. The food was delicious. Thanks.
In other Lunch20 news, the Wall Street Journal did an article on the increasingly popular event. Congrats to founders Joseph Schmarr, Mark Jen, David Kellogg and Terry Chay.
August 30, 2007 at 2:31 am
Wow, you drove all the way from Sunnyvale to East Bay? Whew, I was just telling Terry that I don’t know how you all make it all over the bay area every week
Obviously, I didn’t make it today, thx for the recap.
August 30, 2007 at 2:47 am
Actually the drive really isn’t that bad, I used to go to Concord for client visits several times a week so Pleasanton is relatively close. Also got some pretty cool tips and learned a bunch of new things from some of the new folks that I met so that made it worthwhile.
August 30, 2007 at 5:27 am
Though I love the Microsoft stack I can’t say I work for Microsoft. I work for IdentityMine. http://www.identitymine.com We’re a User Experience dev/design shop based in Tacoma, WA. We focus on WPF, Silverlight and Surface development (all MSFT technologies). I actually live right down the street from Spigit though in Pleasanton so it was a no brainer to stop by.
August 30, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Hey Kurt, My apologies for the mistake. I made the correction on the post. Great talking (or more like listening) to you and Bennett (sp) yesterday.
August 30, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Thanks for making the trip to the east bay. I hope you give our platforms a try – maybe we should put up a Lunch 2.0 spigit to determine the best locations, food, hosts, offices, etc???
August 30, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Oh I almost forgot – and the best new disrupitve prodcut or service!
August 30, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Hey Paul! Thanks for stopping by and thanks for hosting yesterday. I think killerstartups.com would be a lot easier to browse if it worked like Spigit.
September 1, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Hi Lisa, saw your post and looked at some of the companies. Sorry I missed the lunch, slave driver boss was working us too hard
Killerstartups is interesting and a bit wild that they can find 30 start-ups per DAY to cover, but there is so little depth to their coverage. It’s just more like news blips.
M