Dinos and Drinks at 111 Minna

by Rebecca Reeve

Minna 111 is the current default location for SF tech events and the first half of this week saws Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary party and Christian Perry’s SF Beta’s April mixer.

Monday night was all about a very happy open source community celebrating its amazing journey and ever-increasing popularity, massive pieces of chocolate cake, and shameless recruiting for developers. The instant photo booth brought in for the night also provided entertainment for the crowds as video of primping antics taking place inside the booth played on an outside T.V. screen for the entertainment of the crowd.

The evening drew a huge crowd, including several people from Songbird and Flickr, as well as the omnipresent Frank Chu of 12 Galaxies fame, Scott Beale of Laughing Squid, Owen Thomas of ValleyWag, and Dan Farber of CNET.

Tuesday involved more shameless recruiting for developers, with one bootstrapping co-founder keeping an eagle eye on his chief engineer lest he be snatched away by a recruiter while innocently waiting for a drink at the bar. The intense search for talent qualms a lot of anxiety about an impending R-word that has been stirred up in a lot of other arenas, but hanging out at Minna 111 you’d never know the word had been mentioned.

The smartest demo strategy of the night at SF Beta was done by CoolIris. They had one of their guys walking around the bar with a laptop giving on the fly demos. Their image-centric product puts them at an attention-grabbing advantage when walking around a bar with a glowing white laptop, and the demo itself was compelling enough to check out the stationary post complete with touch-screen interaction. CoolIris’ PicLens is a browser add-on that brings up all the photos on any website and streams through a screamingly entertaining full-screen, 3D, user-interface. They currently boast 50,000 downloads a day and I can only see that increasing. Check out PicLens here.

SurfCanyon, a browser plug-in compatible with Firefox and IE, was also demoing at SF Beta. Their simple, easy-to-understand product returns better search results based on recommendations given to you based on your actions. If you type in “Dallas, tickets” the plug-in will let you quickly bring up more of the results you’re trying to get, whether that was buying a ticket to see your favorite football team or a plane ticket home to visit the parents.

Next week… SF New Tech “Dinosaur Robots and more!” at Mighty.