Austin Tech Happy Hour: a review

I just got back from the Austin Tech Happy Hour. I've been wanting to go to this for a while and I'm glad I made it this time. I also convinced JohnDeo to go at the last moment. I went with my UT friends Adam Nirav and Ronak. When I got there, I met Kristine (or @gloriakt in twitter). She is one the the techy girls in Austin. Its great to have boys and GIRLS interested in technology!

The first people I bumped into was the qcue team. They are longhorns!!! If you haven't heard about them, they are a very promising startup that helps promote price live events and concerts and resell tickets, and give death to scalpers! They were the winners of the 2008 UT Moot Corp Competition. One of them is a PhD in CS and the other one is a PhD in Economics. As JohnDeo said, CS and Economics together... they are going to take over the world.

Later JohnDeo and I sat down and started to talk about our favorite thing: the Semantic Web! I was mentioning him the new venture I am working with: turn2live.com. This site will provide Austinites a search of live music experience using latest Semantic Web technologies. And again... this deserves another post.

During our conversation, we started to talk to Anne Pritchard, who is a communications expert and helps companies be more productive. With our Semantic Web vibe, we decided to explain her what the Semantic Web. To be honest, we weren't that successful, but Anne very kindly gave us some tips. She told us that we should be able to pitch the idea in 45 seconds with maximum 2 examples. And again... my next post will be about how can you explain the Semantic Web in 45 seconds. Anyways, we tried doing this all night and I have to say that I did get better at it (with a couple of beers). I then got the opportunity to take with Brad Davis, a Global IT Professional. In 45 seconds, I got him intriguied about the Semantic Web and how it can help the data integration problem. I am sure he is googling about Semantic Web right now as you read!

As always, I had a great time with Casey Grooms, JohnDeo, John Erik and with Cesar T (who I finally met!). JohnDeo came up with a clustering theorem for networking that was even proved. If a group of people are talking in a closed circle, nobody will come up to you to be part of the conversation. But if you leave an open space, somebody will! We put the theorem to test, and it worked twice! This is what geeks do at bars!

Great night! Met awesome people. There is a StartupDrinks this Sunday but unfortunately I will not be there because I will be at the Startup School in Stanford. Conclusions for the night? We need to figure out how to explain what the Semantic Web is, in 45 seconds.