One of my own personal missions over the past couple years has been to contribute to the D.C. web-startup ecosystem as much as I could and help foster a more thriving environment for entrepreneurs. Over the past couple years a lot has changed and a lot continues to change. Over the coming weeks Social Times will be working on some interesting projects which I hope will continue to contribute to the local technology and entrepreneurial environment.

It’s only one component though as it truly takes a community to build the ecosystem. I’m hearing about more and more events and slowly we are beginning to see signs of an emerging hotbed of technology and entrepreneurship. I also believe that we are slowly witnessing the meshing of what was previously distinct sub-communities. There are still serious challenges facing the local environment though.

Entrepreneurship & Technology Education

In the D.C. metro area there are a number of leading universities but when it comes to entrepreneurship and technology, none of them have the national exposure of universities like MIT & Stanford. That’s not to say that the local universities aren’t capable. The University of Maryland for example has the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship dedicated to creating a healthy environment for startups and has a great group of venture advisors as well.

The biggest problem is that many of the people filtering through the local universities are not gaining much experience as it applies to technology. In an article yesterday, Howard Anderson highlighted some of the primary factors that help germinate successful tech startups: “sophisticated money; first-rate technology universities; and a few template successes (a Google or a Facebook, and so on) to”.

D.C. has plenty of sophisticated money, at least one template success: AOL, but no leading technology universities. So this is something that local universities need to focus on.

Conclusion

I would list off a number of other factors but I honestly believe that we have everything else in place. The local media is becoming more active in what has become a highly active community, a local startup incubator has succeeded in getting their first company a Series A (I’m assuming more will come in the near future) and the local events are getting bigger and bigger.

While D.C. is filled with extremely intelligent individuals, many of them are coming here with jobs already filled. Many of them aren’t young enough to take ridiculous risks and learn from a series of failures. Not that you can’t launch a startup at any point in your life, it just becomes harder when your responsibilities increase.

What do you think the next steps should be to build a thriving ecosystem? How can we get the universities building more technical programs?

Less than a month after the launch of Launchbox Digital Demo Day, Mpowerplayer, has announced their Series A funding round from New Atlantic Ventures, the Center for Innovative Technology GAP Fund, and LaunchBox Digital. The company enables mobile gamers to try games before they buy them, something Apple has been criticized of with their new iPhone applications.

Users of Mpowerplayer can access the games via the Mpowerplayer destination site as well as via a Facebook application. This is the first success story to come out of LaunchBox Digital and hopefully it is only the first of many. You can check out their Mobile Arcade Facebook application for a quick demo of the service. The company is still in the early stages but this first round of funding will hopefully give them the resources they need to make it to the next phase of development.

The company is at CTIA in San Francisco to let visitors demo the application. Stop by their booth if you are at CTIA. This is great news for the D.C. area to have yet another internet startup with a great team of advisors behind them.

Today D.C. based CollectiveX announced a full relaunch of the site with a new user interface and some new features. Clarence Wooten, the company CEO, provided me with the video below. The new feature includes a wider user interface, drag-and-drop content modules and group blogging. So how does CollectiveX differ from Ning, its primary competitor?

When asked this question by Robert Scoble a couple weeks ago, Clarence said that the primary difference is that “Ning lets you create a mini-MySpace. If you want to create a 50 Cent fan club then Ning is a great solution. We are more focused on groups that want to get things done.” In other words CollectiveX is targeting professional groups. While I’m not sure that this will be a big enough differentiator, CollectiveX has a great interface beyond what Ning currently provides.

Many of the companies that use CollectiveX use the system as a private intranet rather than making it public. While CollectiveX appears to be growing quickly, they definitely face substantial competition from what Clarence considers a different group called “white label social networks”. I’m definitely interested to see if the redesign and new features can help the company start growing quicker.

Given their proximity to the District of Columbia, it would seem like taking the customizable “white label” route would make sense for reselling to government organizations. For now CollectiveX is sticking to the freemium model but we’ll see if this changes as all in the coming months.

If you are looking to network tonight in D.C., there is a great opportunity being provided by the team over at JobMatchbox. Social Matchbox “brings in members from around the DC creative, startup, social media and tech community for what some like to call an open mic night for hiring teams and entrepreneurs and others call speed dating for geeks. The open format is a fusion of startup job fair and networking event.”

“Attendees include hiring teams representing top startup companies from around the DC area, job seekers, founders with entrepreneurial ideas looking for others to join them, and people interested in getting into the mix.” There is typically a pretty solid turnout and based on the numerous emails I’ve been receiving from attendees, it sounds like this one will be no exception.

The event is out in Tysons Corner from 5pm to 8pm. If you are interested in going, you can find out the location via the event registration page. Registration appears to be closed currently but you can still walk in to the event so no need to register. Hope to see you there!

While the timing may not be perfect, the domain couldn’t be much better. My.com, a Virginia-based company started by Tip Powers, has launched another social network for you to play around on. Who is the site targeted toward? I’m guessing that it’s for those that haven’t yet caught on to the social networking craze which started a few years ago. Tip has an eye for names though as he was the one who suggested launching “Social Times”.

Currently My.com receives a fair amount of traffic just based on the URL. This will help them catch a fair number of users without any promotion. Will it be enough for the site to gain traction? Not totally sure. There are some traditional promotion techniques that the site is using to try to attract new users. For instance, the company is giving away free My.com email addresses that are powered by Gmail.

Currently the site doesn’t have any additional features beyond what is currently provided by mainstream sites like Facebook and MySpace. This will make it challenging to attract the early adopter crowd. As such we will simply have to standby while the site attempts to attract a critical mass. If anything My.com is a great domain name.

The real question is if the company can build a site worthy of such an incredible URL. Check out My.com and let us know your thoughts. Do you think the site can catch on? What type of service would you build on top of the My.com domain?

D.C. based Launchbox Digital is announcing today the launch of 9 new startups at the LaunchBox08 Demo Day in Reston, Virginia. LaunchBox Digitial is an start-up incubator that has been months in the making. I interviewed Sean Greene back in December when the company was first announced. The 9 companies that they will be announcing today are a diverse set of start-ups.

This is a huge deal for the D.C. area given that the area has been in dire need of a start-up incubator. This is the first one targeted toward early stage web startups. Whether or not these 9 are successful, it’s important that there is a company helping fund dreams based in D.C. Congratulations to the first 9 teams that are part of the first round of Launchbox Digital funding. Here are the 9 startups that will be announced later today:
Founded by Satjot Sawhney and Ashish Kundra, BuzzHubb is the next generation of a mobile accessible Yahoo Groups for the college student. The company has renamed groups as “Hubbs”. You can view a screencast presentation of the site via the video below.

Heekya is trying to be the “Wikipedia for social story telling.” The company’s pitch is that “The current model of story telling on the web is pretty fragmented. There are really good individual asset repositories out there (YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket are a few), but they focus primarily on a given category (photos, video), and have limited ability to address linear story telling. Blogging is a potential answer, but while there are close to 200 million blogs, only 600,000 posts occur each day - too many blogs die the slow death of neglect.”

As such Heekya encourages social story telling through: a simple multi-media story builder, the enabling of story cloning and modification, and browsing and discovery tools. You can view more via the screencast below.

Founded by Andrew Lee, Arjun Lall and Ryan Wilson, JamLegend.com is an online version of Guitar Heroes and Rockband. I’ve spoken with the team from JamLegend previously and discussed their approach to this site. Ultimately, I believe the real value here is in creating the tools that help automate the transcription of songs into a JamLegend compatible format. Check out the video below for more details.

Koofers was founded at Virginia Tech by Michael Rihani, Glynn LoPresti, Patrick Gartlan and Doug Feit. Koofers “allows students to make the relatively opaque process of class and teacher selection fully transparent, by providing grade distributions and teacher feedback to allow a student to shape their individual class schedule, based on their own needs and style.”

Founded by Michael Powers (hence the name “mpower”), “Mpowerplayer is targeted to fix the discovery problem in the mobile gaming market today. Unlike ringtones, where the explosive growth and repeat buyer habits of consumers has built a multi-billion dollar market, the mobile gaming market is stalled.” The site provides a PC-based means for consumers to play mobile versions of the games they are interested in and provides them with an easy way to purchase the game.

MyGameMug was founded by Raymond Lau and Erik Yao, two gamers “who wanted to create the match.com for online gaming.” The site will “create a fund and engaging way to find people whose ‘gaming styles’ are compatible to play online.”

Razume was founded by Sam Blum, Kyle Stoneman and Ryan Geist. I met Sam at a D.C. event earlier this year and he sounded pretty passionate about his company. The pitch is that “Razume is addressing the needs of job seekers in the 21-35 year old demographic.” It’s essentially LinkedIn for a younger demographic. Check out the video below for more.

Founded by Ahson Wardak and Luc Castera, “ShareMeme is an easy tool to send messages, polls, invitations and other things to your friends and associated groups on the channels that they prefer. ShareMeme is addressing a real problem today - inadvertent ’spamming’ of friends across all the channels you use to interact with people.”

Finally, Zadby “deals with the intersection of two phenomena: The continued lack of effectiveness of traditional advertising to reach the 18-35 year old demographic, and the poor means independent web video producers have to monetize the value of the communities that follow them.” The site serves as a market maker for product placement in web based video. I think this idea is great and the site looks well designed. I’ll be interested to see how this pans out.

Last week there was an article in the Post which highlighted the division of technology networking groups in the D.C. area. There was “a more formal event, with many silver-haired executives running their second or third technology company.” Then there was the D.C. bash that we helped put together.

The result was two divergent crowds. The reason for all of this? I would suggest that one of the reasons is that some have adopted the “social technology” and others haven’t. Many that read this blog read their RSS Feeds daily, find out about events on Facebook and are happy to jump on the latest micro-blogging platform.

The other group is still stuck in the ways they have learned over more than a decade and are perfectly fine reading the latest edition of their favorite email newsletter. Try telling somebody that receives 100 emails a day and has their Google Reader packed with over 1,000 unread items that they have another email newsletter to read. It just won’t happen.

So aside from what may appear to be technology snobbery, there is an opportunity to further what hasn’t been done already: connect these two technology groups. Currently, the attendees that have registered are largely part of the social media crowd but there are some unfamiliar names popping up and sure hope that continues.

So next week, Thursday July 17th, the first mixer of the NVTC crowd and the D.C. social media community will take place at Local 16 on U Street. I will be blasting out an email to the attendees of the past event in hopes that they attend and hopefully NVTC does the same. It will hopefully be an event to remember and maybe, we will finally see the barriers between the two groups disappear. I’ve definitely been hoping this would take place for a long time.

So next week, come show your support at the Twin Tech Party. Oh and if you needed another reason to show up, as usual there will be free drinks. I look forward to seeing you there!

Over the past few months I’ve been in countless discussions about the future of D.C. technology and ways that we can contribute to making this area a thriving technology scene. One of the conclusions at SocialDevCamp this past weekend was that we need more media coverage from blogs because nobody is doing it in the mainstream media. The Washington Post furthers its disconnect from the bubbling D.C. technology community with a post entitled, “A Tech Stable, But Hardly a Staple“.

I’ve ranted about the trouble facing the Post in the past but this article highlighted my complaints. Steven Pearlstein, a 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, suggests that “now may be a good time to redefine our [Washington’s] aspirations and reconsider our strategies.” Honestly, he provides a great contrarian perspective to counter the arguments held by a number of local residents that voiced their opinions at this weekend’s event in Baltimore, Maryland.

As Pearlstein emphasizes in his article, in the technology market in D.C. “the premium is on reliability, not cutting-edge innovation.” This is one of the reasons why you will meet a lot of conservative investors. If you want to find high-risk investors you might want to head out to Silicon Valley. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t local investment, it’s just not in fresh new web startups.

So where do we go from here? Well it’s obvious that the Washington Post is not a supporter of the 500 or so people that are trying to make this area a center for innovative internet technology. All we can do is continue to blog about the events we participate in and the companies that surround us and perhaps one day this will become a center of thriving internet startups. Until then, all we can do is talk about it and execute on our own business plans.

Last night’s Tech Cocktail in D.C. was great. Over 300 people showed up for the event and it proved that D.C. does indeed have a bubbling tech scene. There were numerous demos and a number of free handouts from Ligit and AOL. All in all I would say it was a successful events. Thanks to Frank Gruber and Eric Olson for putting it together.

I’ve compiled all of the photos that showed up on Flickr from the Tech Cocktail album and from Jason Garber who posted his photos on his Flickr profile. I’m sure there are many more photos that I missed but I included close to 120 of them in the following video. Enjoy! Also, be sure to check out the Tech Cocktail conference that Frank and Eric will be putting on next month in Chicago. I’ll be speaking at it with a number of other great speakers so be sure to attend!

There are a few upcoming D.C. events that I wanted to draw attention to. The first one is this week’s social media club which is being hosted at Viget Labs in Falls Church, VA. Ann Bernard of WhyGoSolo will be speaking about the creation of her startup and how WhyGoSolo can be used as a social media platform. Social Media Club is a meeting of people for the “purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and for promoting media literacy.” It’s a great event which I’ve attended before and I highly recommend it.

The second event is next Monday. JobMatchbox will be hosting a networking event and panel about starting your own business. The panel includes myself, Robert Nellbauer (JobMatchbox.com), Keith Casey (WhyGoSolo.com) and Victor Prince (MiddleSon.com). The main purpose is to expose American University students to the D.C. startup community and also provide them with the opportunity for internships and possible future jobs. If you are interested in attending the event go register via the event registration form. This is event’s expected attendance is approximately 100 people.

Finally, the weekend of the 18th will be PodcampDC. This event is sure to be popular with already hundreds of people registered. The event is being hosted at the Art Institute of Washington. Podcamp DC is an “unconference” focused on educating participants on how to use, implement and share any/all new media tools including, podcasts, videocasts, blogs, Second Life, Facebook, and YouTube.

It’s an awesome event and great opportunity to learn from other people in the local community. If you are interested in attending, go sign up via the PodcampDC registration form. I hope to see you there! Also, if I missed your event please post it in the comments below!