With over 700 members, the SF NewTech Meetup continues to gain in popularity as the Bay Area geekdom enjoys its forum for having new tech demoed directly to them each and every month.

SF Win, Silicon Valley Newtech, among others provide a venue for emerging companies to reach a sampling of their target demographic, without having to exhibit at an expensive Web 2.0-style conference.

Held at CNET on Second St. in San Francisco, SFNT hosted a crowd of about 100 guests, including fellow tech entrepreneurs, programmers, bloggers, as well as Cnet’s Rafe Needleman.

First up…

Dan Beltramo, co-founder, Vizu.
Vizu’s “Answers” service enables businesses to create a market research poll, which is distributed to various sites and blogs with a market-specific audience/demographic of visitors the researcher wants to poll at an affordable price.

Vizu also requests that the research be available for publishers as a way to monetize interesting content. Per their site, “Vizu Answers is an innovative, reader-friendly way to monetize your Web site traffic. It’s easy, pays well, and provides high quality content.”

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Travis Chow, founder, Neighboroo
Neighboroo has many potential partners in this space, with Zillow the most prominent.

Neighboroo is an easy way to learn about neighborhoods. That’s basically it. Enter a location, and you’ll receive information about stats and eventually city highlights. The potential is exceptional…and all based on UGC. Its primary market is best suited for folks shopping for real estate in new areas.

I ran a search on where I live, and here’s the result.
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Auren Hoffman, CEO of Rapleaf
Rapleaf is a personal reputation system for the Web – much like the industry-standard ebay rating, put portable. Sites including SwapThing and When2Date are integrating the Rapleaf system.

The site describes it perfectly, “Rapleaf is a portable ratings system for commerce. You can look people up before you buy or sell, and rate them afterwards.
Rate people and they will be encouraged to rate you back. Before long, your Rapleaf profile will reveal you for the honest person that you are. After all, it is more profitable to be ethical.”

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Jeff Kirschner, co-founder/Creative Director of Razz.
Razz enables consumers to mix sound content (voice, effects, beats) into their phone conversations and onto their personal web pages (read: social networks ala Myspace, etc.) There’s also a downloadable mobile-phone application that lets you include your creations into a live conversation — dubbed “in-call entertainment.”

They also announced the RAZZ Idol competition.

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SF NewTech is ripe for sponsors who wish to connect, on the ground, with the local tech-set. Smart marketers should take note of these types of opportunities that can get them *into* the conversation, versus being outside of it.

If you’re interested in presenting, contact Myles at info@sfnewtech.com.

Tasty beverages once again sponsored by the emerging tech law firm of Jacobs & Ferraro.

Yummy pizza thanks to the Forbin Group.

Fine wine courtesy of FutureWorks PR, a tech/web PR and social media agency.

sfnewtech meetup sf+newtech sfwin siliconvalley silicon+valley web2.0 web 2.0 web+2.0 cnet vizu neighboroo rapleaf swapthing ebay when2date razz jacobs ferraro futureworks futureworkspr forbin+group forbin group