The Product Excellence Awards represent “major areas of innovation in the Linux and open source community,” according to an IDG World Expo press release. ServePath won a LinuxWorld Product Excellence Award for “Best Grid Solution” in 2007.

What really makes this Best of Show Award stand out is by simply looking at some of the past winners of Best of Show which include Mozilla FireFox and SUSE Linux.

Among the past Best of Show winners are:

• 2001 - IBM eServer iSeries
• 2002 - Borland Kylix 3
• 2003 - SGI Altix 3000
• 2004 - Mozilla Foundation for Mozilla Firefox
• 2005 - Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)
• 2006 - OpenSUSE
• 2007 - Unicon Systems’ System-on-Display (SoD)
• 2008 - ServePath’s GoGrid

Be sure to sign up for an Award-winning GoGrid account today! We offer Windows 2003/2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS Linux as well as free f5 load balancing, free static public IPs, private and public VLANs, Free Support and several pre-configured images to help you deploy a GoGrid Cloud Computing environment in minutes without any up-front costs to you.

The 100+ audience not only received invaluable information on how to “kick-start their startup,” they also received the Orrick Emerging Start-Up Kit CD-ROM (containing important legal tools and document templates to help any business) as well as a $100 coupon towards GoGrid.

Speaker & Demos

After about an hour of socializing, meets-and-greets and mini-demos (by Triggit, Askpedia and MotivePath…and GoGrid, of course), attendees listened to and participated in a through-provoking and information presentation by Jonathan Cobb (CTO and Founder of Kiptronic - a long-time ServePath customer). The presentation, “Genesis of a Startup…from concept to company,” covered a wide range of important topics that anyone thinking about starting a company should consider, including:

• Early Validation (pitch, customers, risks)
• The Basics (capital, agreements, timing, records)
• Validation (milestones, customers, research)
• Core Team (people, network, skillset, compensation)
• Fund Raising (tight ship & stay hungry)
• Term Sheet (valuation, plan B)

The full presentation is available for download here.

The Audience and Photos

We took a few photos last night. They are located on the ServePath Flickr photostream. A few highlights…

John Keagy (CEO/ServePath)

Michael Sheehan (Tech. Evangelist/ServePath) Pete Cashmore (CEO/Mashable)

View from the Orrick balcony

Daniel Lieberman (CEO/bitpusher) & Robert Ficcaglia (Founder/MotivePath)

Jonathan’s presentation

In the future, we also hope to begin doing live videocasts of the event as well as make these videos available for viewing later.

More information about StartUp SF

StartUp SF will continue every other month, with the next one planned for June. Speaking topics will be geared towards different tools, techniques, methodologies and strategies to help start-ups and emerging companies grow successfully. Companies or individuals who would like to speak, be media sponsors or host a demo table are encouraged to fill out the Contact form on the StartUp SF site.

We parked ourselves above the torch route in front of the Palomino (a local restaurant in our building) with a different message, not pro-China nor pro-Tibet, just simply pro-hosting (sorry, I know that was bad). Unfortunately, because of the huge amount of protestors and a few scuffles that took place, the torch run route changed and we were left without the action passing under our noses.

Earlier in the day, I snapped some other photos of various protestors around our area.

As I’m blogging this, the excitement continues elsewhere in the City. Isn’t San Francisco wonderful?!

Here are a few photos to get you going:

The rest can be viewed on our Flickr account. Be sure to give GoGrid a spin so that you know what all the hype is about!

About Under the Radar

Presenting companies had to be in an “early-stage” development cycle (launched within the year), an actual start-up (not affiliated with an older large company), have a beta (or beyond) product, monetization-ready and with a unique value proposition.

Instead of re-hashing all the companies and their offerings, I thought that I would take a different approach to this event summary and offer a bit of insight into what I learned as well as offer some tips and tricks on how to make good use of these types of events. Overall, the event was incredibly well organized and thought through. While it was interesting to learn about these companies, the side meetings and social aspects were and are, in my mind, much more important. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to do meet-and-greets and networking as I and my colleagues found ourselves “late” to many of the sessions because we were having engaging conversations with people next to the food and coffee.

The event was divided into two presentation tracks, each held in different auditoriums. Each track was broken up into 4 presenting companies under specific themes. The companies were given 6 minutes to present their company and offering and then were asked questions by both a panel of distinguished judges and audience members. At the end of each 1:15 minute session, the audience (and the judges) voted on the company that they liked the best (the audience voted via text messaging for real-time results). The results are now posted. The sessions were as follows:

• Business Calls
• Virtualization
• Get Aggregated
• Manage Up
• Happy Customers
• Virtual Worker
• Work Together
• Marketing and Measurement

The Sessions I Saw

Since I couldn’t be in two places at the same time, I can only comment on the sessions that I saw. But a general theme that seemed to link everything together was how business coupled social networking tools and other more traditional business practices into creating unique value propositions.

Virtualization - the common theme for this session was taking the complexity and lack-of-standards out of the equation. It’s pretty obvious that as technology advances, so does the complexity and perplexity that is tied to it. The companies at this session are making inroads on making the process easier and faster. DeviceVM makes the OS as an “instant on” option. Elastra simplifies elastic relational databases and server and software topologies through the use of markup languages. JumpBox takes the pain out of installing and configuring OpenSource applications. And Universant provides an application modeling studio. All under the umbrella of “virtualization,” these companies are aiming to create “containers” common business hurdles.

Bottom line - if you can componentize or compartmentalize a critical business issue, you are well on the way a potentially successful business.

Manage Up - while a bit of a cryptic title, I believe the gist of this session was finding a niche where your product solves a management dilemma. For Act-On Software, enabling on-demand communication and collaboration with your sales and marketing teams is critical. Magento presented a new OpenSource eCommerce platform for managing multiple eCommerce sites from a single administrative node. Mumboe showed how their product took the pain out of organizing and managing legal documents. And NetBooks brought financial and bookkeeping management to a more accessible level within the small business.

Bottom line - be sure you understand core management hurdles and bring a product that reduces the management risk as well as enables the core players to do their job better and more efficiently.

Happy Customers - this session strongly presented how critical customer service and support mechanisms are to the success of your business. Often overlooked or under valued, support can actually help you not only retain your customers, it can have an incredible impact in growing your business. The companies presenting offered innovative approaches to understanding your customers and the pain (or happiness) they are feeling. FeedbackFX provided a visual tool to enable conversation with every single customer. GetSatisfaction showed how a collaborative help network can help companies engage and get value. HiveLive showcased how their enterprise social networking platform allowed users to share anything with anyone in order to create business communities. And SupportSpace demonstrated a “new standard” of outsourced tech support.

Bottom line - to me it was pretty clear that helping the customer now goes well beyond just that. Assisting the customer actually helps your product and company. As the theme of “complexity” in business or technology grows, your customers are going to become more confused and need more help navigating the waters. If you want to start a company, keep that in mind; if you want to start a business around customer service, be sure that you focus beyond just customer service; the space is much more than just that.

Tips and Tricks and How to get the most out of these conferences and events

• At any conference, the best leads and conversations you can have are usually with the person sitting next to you are during the breaks when everyone is mingling. The “lobby” is really the best place!
• VC’s (of which there were many at this conference) are usually only interested in a few key things:
  • What place in the market do you fill?
  • How are you better than the people already out there doing the same thing?
  • How are you going to make money (and make them money)?
• Don’t be afraid to just talk to a stranger, and when you do, open by asking them questions about what they do. Many people just love hearing themselves talk (grin). You will find a time to talk about yourself, don’t worry.
• Cover the event “live.” I was using Twitter through most of the event and within an hour or so, had 6 new Twitter “friends.” I was even able to make contact with one face-to-face (the CEO of eyejot.com). Along those lines, be sure you add some of the judges or presenters to your Twitter account prior to the event, as many of them tweet out their opinions real-time and offer valuable, real-time insight (like Robert Scoble and Rafe Needleman, who I talked with at this conference).
• If you are a provider, attend conferences where your clients are presenting. One of the main reasons I went to Under the Radar was to meet Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare, a customer of ServePath’s.
• Follow up immediately with the people you meet. (I made many new connections on Twitter and subsequently got access to several private betas.)
• Figure out a unique way to make people remember you. Often people meet hundreds of people so make yourself stand out (I wore a red shirt and carried a camera, for example.)
• Attend more events similar to these. You will start to make friends and potentially find shared business practices and even business partnerships. SNAP Summit is a good example of an event coming up that has a similar audience to Under the Radar.

These types of events are very important to getting your company on the map, to find business partners or to simply expand your professional circle of contacts. Attend many and do so frequently.

A few photos from this event have been posted to the ServePath Flickr account.

At SF New Tech, companies sign up to give 5 minute demos of their product and service. The list of companies presenting were: GoGrid/ServePath, Surf Canyon, Buddy Fetch, Xeequa, and Askpedia.

GoGrid was the first demo to be seen with Paul Lappas (VP of Engineering) and Paul Lancaster (Business Development Manager) showing how a server could be created and a series of servers load balanced within the 5 minute demo window. To make matters even more interesting, “Murphy” was in the audience somewhere, causing the Internet connection to crawl, thus chopping a minute off of our demo time. That hiccup didn’t prevent the demo, and actually Lappas was able to not only initiate the creation of a server, but also clearly demonstrate how an F5 BigIP load balancer could be created and load balance 2 existing web servers in less than a minute!

I also spoke with a few people who have already signed up for GoGrid trial accounts, including one user who had successfully deployed 5 servers. The general consensus was that the service was “great” and the user interface and ease-of-use “fantastic!”

After the successful demonstration of GoGrid, Surf Canyon, a ServePath customer, showcased their powerful search-engine “enhancer.” Surf Canyon creates a “tiny browser extension that is installed in the user’s browser - either FireFox or Internet Explorer.” When a search is initiated on either Google, Yahoo! or MSN, much more targeted and relevant results are presented to the user, enabling them to truly see the results that they wanted, significantly accelerating the search process.

There were several photographers on hand for this event. My photos can be found on ServePath’s Flickr photostream.

As described from the event site:

“The annual technology exposition is a chance for students to discover the latest technologies, as companies unveil and showcase their latest innovations. Representing diverse industries and products ranging from databases to video games, the Technology Exposition provides an accurate cross-section of the computing industry and everyone is sure to find something of personal interest to them.”

The companies participating were: Apple Computer, Cnet Networks, Dell, Discovery Engine, FotoFlexer, Hooja, JAJAH, LinkedIn, Livescribe, Meebo, Merchanized Propulsion Systems, Perforce, ServePath, SongBird, Thompson, The Scholar’s Workstation, Vyew, WooMe and Xerox.

ServePath Table

JaJah Table

FotoFlexer Table

LinkedIn Table

Meebo Table

WooMe Table

More photos from the event have been posted to the ServePath Flickr account.