by Alison McNeill of FutureWorks

Now with over 959 members, the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetups are bigger than ever. That’s great news for companies like the ones below who want to get noticed. This meetup tool place in Palo Alto, where roughly 100 gathered to hear about some of the hottest emerging companies on the Web 2.0 scene.

Drumroll please. First we have…

CoFounder: Kai Xu
inChorus is a platform for collaborating on projects with thousands of other people on the web. inChorus distributes your projects to thousands of people through our website and our network of hosts who put inChorus banners on their websites. Then we combine the results for you and the community to see. inChorus makes it easy for you to hear the wisdom of the crowd, and it’s free. You can get thousands of diverse and knowledgeable people to help with your projects. Anyone can be an inChorus contributor and devote bits of your spare time to collaborative projects that are fun, interesting, and useful.

Co-founders Greg Woock & Joe Sipher
Pinger is instant voice messaging for your cell phone. You send voice messages directly to someone instantly—no ringing, no greetings, no lengthy prompts. Pinger is fast and efficient like email, but with your voice. It’s mobile like text messaging, but with more personality. Example Situation: You’re mobile and you need to get a message to someone. Is she sleeping? Is he with the kids? You don’t want to interrupt—you just need to get the message out. With Pinger you can say it right now without ringing their phone, but with the speed, personality and emotion of your voice.

Co-founders Dave Snider & Ethan Lance
ComicVine is the social encyclopedia for comic book lovers that everyone can edit. You can even create your own superhero for everyone to view. There are forums to chat about superheroes, blogs to check out, statistics on fans using the site, and there’s even a section ranking the most powerful superheroes in order. It’s a really fun site, even if you’re not a big comic fan, but if you are you have died and gone to comic book heaven!

Co-founder Robert Chea
At its most basic level PowerReviews is spreading the power of Amazon’s Review system to the entire web. This review sharing solution delivers an enterprise-class review service as well as access to network-powered features. It set up reviews on your site for free, typically in less than a week for your online shoppers to view. It’s free, there are no long-term contracts. The site also has Web 2.0 features such as tagging and instant response to deliver features that take reviews to the next level and helps your customers make the right product and service decisions.

* Location provided by: DLA Piper
* Wine will be provided by: AndrewLane Wines

tags: vincent+lauria pr2.0 siliconvalley2.0 2.0 web2.0 web+2.0 siliconvalley silicon+valley
pinger comicvine comic+vine powerreviews power+reviews inchorus in+chorus