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Bold-faced names and pics from tonight's WebInnoRocket

Print | Comments () Posted by Scott Kirsner September 24, 2012 10:09 PM

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Instead of giving the stage to raw startups demonstrating their first product, tonight's WebInnoRocket event focused on bigger Boston-area tech companies that are already well into growth mode. The three "main stage" presenters -- Gemvara, DataXu, and HubSpot -- together have more than 500 employees and have raised more than $125 million in funding. Six earlier-stage companies, including Timbre, had demo tables in a separate room.

VCs Rob Go of NextView Ventures and Eric Hjerpe of Kepha Partners were there schmoozing... as were Sarah Hodges of Intelligent.ly, Blank Label's Ryan Dawidjan and Brent Grinna of EverTrue. I caught up with Ben Saren of Litle & Co., Keith Cline of Dissero and Tom Summit of Catalyst Recruiting. Northeastern student Drew d'Agostino told me about his bedbug-related startup Unbugged, spawned by a close encounter with the critters, and HubSpot's David Gallant shared the latest on his shadow career as a DJ. Matthew Albrecht filled me in on BrightDriver, a startup developing audio-based games for people to play to combat boredom in the car. Grasshopper's Taylor Aldredge was in line to talk with HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah, as was Satish Boppana of TouchVu, one of the participants in this fall's Betaspring accelerator program in Providence.

A few pics:

Jeremy Levine of Star Street Sports with Cheryl Morris of Nanigans.

Bobbie Carlton and Tim Stansky of Mass Innovation Nights, with Marsh Sutherland of ReferralBonus.

WebInno organizer David Beisel with Melki Ko of Block Avenue. (I covered Block Avenue earlier this month.)

Eylon Oheyva of Saverr with Andreas Randow of TourSphere and StudioShare. Saverr is part of the fall TechStars Boston class; the Android app lets you take a picture of a grocery receipt and then see whether you might save money next time if you shopped at a different store. (Oheyva says drugstores are coming next.)

Phyllis Speen of InfoNeeds with Jordan Fliegel and Arian Radmund of CoachUp. (I wrote about CoachUp around the time of its launch in May.)

Gemvara CEO Matt Lauzon.

HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah.

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About Scott Kirsner Scott Kirsner was part of the team that launched Boston.com in 1995, and has been writing a column for the Globe since 2000. His work has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Newsweek, and Variety. Scott is also the author of the books "Fans, Friends & Followers" and "Inventing the Movies," was the editor of "The Convergence Guide: Life Sciences in New England," and was a contributor to "The Good City: Writers Explore 21st Century Boston." Scott also helps organize several local events on entrepreneurship, including the Nantucket Conference and Future Forward. Here's some background on how Scott decides what to cover, and how to pitch him a story idea.

Events

May 16 & 17: Convergence Forum on Life Sciences
Speakers from Bristol-Myers, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and Biogen Idec talk about the next ten years of the biopharma business. Plus, journalist David Ewing Duncan on radical life extension. (I'm hosting.)

May 22: MIT Sloan CIO Symposium
Chief information officers from Guess, Haemonetics, Intel and other companies talk discuss "architecting the enterprise of the future."

June 25: TEDxBoston
The oldest and biggest of the locally-organized TED events is back, at the Seaport World Trade Center. Tickets are free, but tough to get. Also streams on the web and airs on WBUR.

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