Washington DC

There were 999 RSVPs for DC TechMeetup: Social Media Edition this past Wednesday and probably 800 people showed up. Impressive!

The companies that got a chance to demo their startups were Spinnakr, Contactually, ShortMail, Sponto, Social Flow, Opower and here is a short summary for each of them.

Spinnakr allows you to create a targeted message for every visitor to your website. A simple code snippet is attached to your website and Spinnakr does all the magic for you. A great tool for a targeted marketing campaign.

Contactually synchronizes with your email account and collects rich data on you email relationships, reminds you to follow up with your contacts and suggests you to connect with new ones via twitter and other social networks. (You can also find my interview with Contactually here)

ShortMail limits your email message to 500 characters, aiming to provide a better and a more concise communication platform, eliminate spam and present emails in a conversational form. Imagine a 500 character text message or tweet but in you inbox.

Sponto is an app that shows you all the events in a 5mile radius around you, lets you connect with other people on the scene via chatting, photo sharing and displaying the profiles of your friends who you are with at the event. ( You can also find my interview with Sponto here)

Social Flow optimizes social media to help you understand the real-time value of the content posted on social networks and therefore publish your updates at a specific time to maximize clicks, retweets, mentions and followers.

Opower is “a new customer engagement platform for the utility industry.” The team was showing their new app that is integrated with Facebook where you can track you energy consumption and compare it with your friends, neighbors. They also added gamification aspect to the platform by giving you the opportunity to create and participate in competitions with the end goal to decrease energy consumption.

For all those folks who want to learn how to program, Hungry Academy presented their five-month program where participants get a chance to get a hands-on experience building products using software development tools, and join LivingSocial‘s engineering team after completion. The cool part of the program is that even if you are not the participant you can still follow along with the curriculum which will be posted online once the program begins in March.

The next DC Tech Meetup is going to be on March 30^th. Don’t miss it!

Written by Gulnara Mirzakarimova, an official Social Media Week DC blogger. Follow her at @GulnaraDC.