Andre on Tech: SF Web Innovators

I went to the SF Web Innovators meeting last night. It's a good venue for mixing with people in the industry. There were product demos too -- I didn't see all of them, but of the ones I saw:

Zooomr. An impressive piece of work, created by a clearly talented 17-year old. The geo-tagging of photos is cool, but the implementation doesn't really work out, because Google maps is too slow at rendering lots of locations on a map. This is a problem with lots of Google maps mashups, and highlights the general problem of relying too heavily on browser-side rendering.
Zvents. A San Francisco-centric events engine. A very clean and fast site, with some nice web 2.0 touches. I love the search bar on the home page (What, When, Where) -- because it's simple and speaks your language -- the "when" field takes phrases like "today," "tomorrow," and "this week." Nicely done. They populate their events database by scraping known sources, as well as accepting your submissions.
MindRetrieve is a hobbyest-level tool to help you organize your bookmarks and browsing history. There's a lot of overlap with various bookmark managers out there, and unfortunately MindRetrieve is installed software -- probably too high of a barrier for many prospective users. Two things I liked about it: 1) utilized both hierarchical and tag-based organization; 2) the method for editing your hierarchy is incredibly simple: the app gives you a text box, and you copy, paste, and indent the items as you see fit. When you click save, it translates the locations and indents into a hierarchical structure. Very simple and intuitive if you work in plain text a lot.
BubbleShare is a photo sharing site, designed to pass the "mom test" (is it intuitive enough to use that you would recommend it to your mom?). It's the only photo sharing site that doesn't require registration to start using -- a nice way to lower the barrier to entry for new users. A clean, well-designed interface.

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