SFBeta

Find a bathroom or a significant other for you and your gerbil

Two start-ups that caught our eye at last night's SFbeta here in San Francisco were MizPee and DateMyPet.com. Not so much for their services, which to be honest, aren't the most necessary we've seen, but rather their ingenuity for finding some interesting ways to direct people towards something they're looking for.

In the case of MizPee, that direction comes in the way of bathrooms. Yes, MizPee helps you find and rate public bathrooms. Like HotSpotr, another SFbeta demonstrator of the past, users can login to the service on their mobile devices and hunt for available … Read more

BandBot to help indie bands manage their online presence

RightRound, which had a presentation table at SF Beta last night, was showing off a new product it's working on for people in bands: BandBot. It's a one-stop shop for managing a band's online presence. Initially it will manage an e-mail list, a Web site, and a band's footprint on a few social network sites. So all a band will have to do is update its info in one place. Then its Web site (under its own name, e.g., www.thebandthatsucks.com), MySpace page, and other social networks will all get updated at once.

Unfortunately, … Read more

Start-ups in the city: SFBeta mixer

Webware is a media sponsor of the SFBeta mixer that's on tonight. I'm looking forward to finding some new companies there to cover. Most of the official presenting companies are not new to Webware, so I'm hoping that somewhere in the crowd I'll find the CEO of some tiny, unknown, and very cool start-up. Wish me luck.

The official presenters get demo table space, but there's a changeover halfway through the evening since there are more presenters than tables available. With any luck, there will be a CEO stare-down--or worse!--when the first shift of … Read more

Weekend Webware: Find Wi-fi hotspots with Hotspotr

I discovered Hotspotr at SF Beta this past week. It's a neat little service that mashes up Google maps with a local Wi-Fi hotspot finder. The real pull of the service is you can rate and comment on hotspots as you would with restaurant reviews on a review site like Yelp. It's the perfect service for the casual Wi-Fi traveler to benefit from road warriors who are willing to take the time to review a wireless access point.

The ratings aren't just things such as the overall quality of the wireless signal either; you also can rate … Read more

There once was a start-up from Frisco...

The last SFBeta party featured CEOs pitching their company concepts in Haiku. Note to other party organizers: Quiet, contemplative Haiku is not the best format for a crowd of young, frat-boyish entrepreneurs...who've been drinking.

So at the most recent SFBeta party, organizer Christian Perry (from Zaptix) changed the poetry form to limerick. Much better! Bawdy rhymes tend to cut through barroom chatter more sharply than soft leaves underfoot.

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YouSendIt is a … Read more