Not Dead Yet

Went to the Web Innovators Group meeting last night in Cambridge.  The ballroom at the Royal Sonesta was full, with a healthy mix of entrepreneurs, engineers, students, VC's, corporate types, etc.   Rumors of Boston's demise as a tech hub are overstated.

Memorable snatches of conversations/presentations:

• "I hear there are assets in Germany available..."
• "We started with a subscription model, and morphed it from there..."

and my favorite:

• "We're a real-time mixer service, halfway between Meetup and Dodgeball.  It's 3 o'clock, you want to meet people, you sign in, and at 4 we've got you in a bar with five people you don't know... but you have something in common with!

I caught up with Paige Arnof-Fenn.  We speculated on Whether It's A Bubble.  "No, there's twenty times the money (advertising anyway) there was in 2001, and maybe 75% of the VC money invested back then," was our consensus.  What about a recession? Money flows to the most measurable media, which these days is online, so maybe this time a recession might kill off the old (golf-and-a-rate-card analog formats) instead of the new.