Rhode Island Nexus

Very shortly, BatchBlue will be showing off their wares at the 800 pound gorillla of product launch conferences - DEMO.

As I type this, the entire BB team is in San Diego. Sometime in the next 48 hours, CEO Pamela O'Hara and UX Specialist Adam Darowski will take the stage in front of the discerning crowd of 700+. For those of us familiar with the their product, BatchBook, I am sure they will impress.

Related, but even bigger news than DEMO, is that BatchBook has entered its public beta. As any web entrepreneur can attest, the public beta is where the proverbial rubber meets the road.

I'm going to be monitoring all the news from BatchBlue's new Twitter and Flickr accounts.

And check out David Ortiz's PBN story on BatchBlue, complete with a fun photo of the team rehearsing for the spotlight.

UPDATE: This just in from Adam:

We're going up Wednesday shortly after 9:30am (PT). A video will be available, though I'm unsure of how quickly that'll be up. Here's an example of what those pages look like.

The cat is out of the bag.

Last night, Saul Kaplan and I had the pleasure of officially unveiling the RI Nexus initiative in general, and RINexus.com in particular. Fittingly, we did it in in front of a super, standing-room-only crowd at this month's Providence Geeks Dinner. And then this morning, the press gave us extensive coverage for which we're very appreciative:

• Benjamin Gedan at The Providence Journal
• David Ortiz at The Providence Business News
• UPDATE: Russ Conway at Rhode Island's Future
• UPDATE: Ian Donnis at the The Providence Phoenix
• UPDATE: Tibet Sprague at Providence Daily Dose

As you can imagine our traffic has grown a lot in the past day. Better still, the RINexus.com team's rate of learning has grown a lot too. A small army of super smart people are checking out the Beta site, finding bugs, and giving us brilliant feedback. Overwhemingly, the feedback has been very positive, and we really appreciate everyone's support and help.

Please bear with us as we continue ironing out the kinks. We're pysched to be on this trip with you all.

Photo credit: Mr. Jeremy Withers.

For 2007, Inc. Magazine expanded its venerable list of America's fastest growing private companies from 500 to 5,000. Of the 12 Rhode Island companies, 7 (almost 60%) are info-tech and digital media companies:

• #73 TCMPI of North Kingstown (broke the Inc. 100!)
• #1222 Carousel Industries of Peace Dale
• #3194 Advertising Ventures of Providence
• #3739 Lighthouse Computer Services of Lincoln
• #3986 Systems Engineering Associates (SEA CORP) of Middletown
• #3996 Atrion Networking of Warwick
• #4436 Bridge Technical Solutions of East Greenwich

It is interesting to note just how geographically spread out the companies are - they touch almost every major area of the state.

I'll be sharing this list with anyone who's unaware of the importance/potential of the info-tech & digital media sector to Rhode Island's economic future.

Congratulations Inc. 5,000 winners - you do us proud!

Last year at one of the first Providence Geek Dinners, fledging Providence-based startup Tizra made an impressive but super-early presentation (pre-pre-Alpha) of their Agile PDF product.

Well, the heads-down online publishing tool creator has come a long way, and in particular, has been on a true tear these past few months. Here are some highlights:

• In April, they were featured in an article on Forbes.com
• That same month, they were named a finalist in the 2007 RI Business Plan Competition
• May brought a $500k seed round with the Slater Technology Fund
• Then later that month, Tizra CEO David Durand presented at O'Reilly's prestigious Tools of Change Conference in San Jose
• Last, but certainly not least, just this week Tizra announced that they had landed a major charter customer - Duke University Press - one of the country's largest university presses

There's some real momentuum here, and we look forward to seeing what Tizra does next.

This is the first of many posts to come on the RI Nexus weblog. Every weekday, this spot will feature news and thoughts on Little Rhody's dynamic and strategically important info-tech & digital media sector. I'll be joined by an illustrious group of guest bloggers, and we hope you'll become an active participant in the community.

A quick tour of the site is a good way to get started. The links on the primary navigation bar will take you to the site's main offerings - a community calendar, news aggregator, organization directory, organization map, and discussion forums.

Then register and create a profile. For example, here's mine - and no, I don't always have a name tag on.

Please remember we're in Beta (I know - who isn't?). We have a lot more great functionality on the way including RSS feeds, iCal-support for the calendar, more tagging, user-submitted events & news etc. Maybe most importantly though, we'll soon be launching RI Nexus's "Marketplace" - a free, one-stop place to find and post local info-tech & digital media-related jobs, internships, gigs, and other stuff.

We're really excited to be starting this journey with you. Thanks for coming by - we hope to see a lot of you.