Plug & Play Expo Fall 2008

The Plug and Play expo continues to grow in size and scope. The Sunnyvale expo featured keynotes by Scott McNealy and Tim Draper. A total of 43 startups provided 2 minute turbo pitches.

The highlight of the event was Scott McNealy's keynote. Scott is wealthy and many years removed from the nascent days of Sun. Still you can see the fire of a Silicon Valley entrepreuner burns inside him. He is passionate about open-source software and Sun's strategy to contribute to the movement. He is also motivated to harness the capability of the Internet to educate bright minds in third world countries. Scott spoke fondly about the early Sun days and his time at Stanford Business School. The Sun founders included Scott, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla. Quite an impressive group. All leaders in their own right. Yet Scott was the leader of leaders at Sun and his contrarian views, confidence, and drive were key to providing a winning culture. Scott's ability to gain the loyalty and admiration of brilliant colleagues is one of his most impressive qualities. Scott's 20-minute speech was full of sage advise and humorous anecdotes. When Plug and Play founder Saeed Amidi introduced Scott, he mentioned that Scott must be working hard, as they belong to the same golf club, but he never sees Scott there. Scott's response, "That's because I'm in the fairway." I guess you had to be there.

The vast majority of the companies presenting were Internet-sector plays. The three Expo winners:

• Apprema: Friend-to-friend gifting. People can setup profiles at Apprema so their friends can find out a person's shopping preferences and birthdays. People can use the Apprema site to send a gift card and message to a friend. They can also setup a group gift in order to split the cost of a friend's gift. Although the idea of e-gift cards seems simple, the business is complex. Apprema has a nice simple user-interface, and seems to have a good back-end implementation. If they are able to use socialing features to create viral adoption of their solution, Apprema can build a robust business.


• Paxterra Solutions: IT Energy Management Solutions.


• Travelfli: Airline Miles Management Program.
  

Some other interesting presentations included:

• Everywun: Click-to-donate system. People looking to support a cause can use Everywun to let people know about their cause and click-to-donate to their cause. The system works by allowing advertising sponsors to support a person's "badge". The sponsor's name is listed along with the cause. Once a customer clicks the badge, the sponsor will then pay $.30 to the cause. Everywun takes a percent of the transaction to support their business venture. The rest goes to the chosen cause. Nice simple idea which should be able to grow virally through social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. The key will be to get the "badges" out in force quickly while signing on sponsors and charities to donate to.


• Dixero: Vocalize RSS feeds. Competes with pimpmynews.com. Turn your RSS feeds into a podcast. The difference between Dixero and pimpmynews is that Dixero allows unlimited RSS feeds and different voices to be associated with the RSS feeds.
  

The event was well organized, the food was excellent, and the venue was standing room only. Plug and Play continues to impress as a center of startup activity in the South Bay.