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What: Schmoozd at the Xbar
When: Thursday, January 14, 2010, 06:00 PM – 9:30PM PST
Where: X-BAR | Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, 2025 Avenue of the Stars Los Angeles, CA
More Info: here
Tickets: here

The first-ever Schmoozd event, a new Social Media Mixer event in Los Angeles will be held at the Xbar in Century City, CA on January 14th. X bar’s environment is the perfect place to network – a lounge designed with spots for hanging out as well as socializing and action. Whether closing the deal or sharing ideas, X bar’s renowned design, cuisine and location means X marks the spot.Tweet

It was Lacy’s inclusion of web 2.0 in this predicament that got me thinking about where this whole AJAXy, social wave is headed and how we might look back on it in a few years. I could spend a few paragraphs on this so let me save time and cut right to the chase…. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs (depending on how they package their products) aren’t making a ton of money, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get rich.

If there’s one thing that Web 2.0 startups have done exceptionally well, its user experiences & design. Like master chefs in a kitchen, internet entrepreneurs of the last few years have combined the ingredients of Ruby on Rails, AJAX, and jQuery, Photoshop, etc. to create some amazing examples of clean usability, solid information architecture, and stunning design. Consumers have loved them for it, and the business results are clear in terms of user acquisition, retention & engagement. Its just a shame that so many of these companies don’t succeed. But that doesn’t mean their accomplishments are without purpose. It is time that Ruby developers and social-media entrepreneurs realize that the era of applied-experience is upon us. I’m talking about taking on the big enterprise-software players who are coasting along with billions in revenue from sectors such as healthcare, energy, education, government, etc. These industries spend millions of dollars every day on training, data quality, etc. and yet their consumers complain about how little the technology contributes to making their lives easier.

That’s nothing that a little jQuery can’t fix.

The well-honed skills of Web 2.0 can be applied to solve this problem. With a few usability brushstrokes, IA workflows, social-media integration and mobile apps these entrepreneurs can cut corporate IT costs, create a more functional work environment for employees around the world, and make a ton of cash in the process. Look at the companies who are already benefiting from this model… SalesForce and the entire SaaS model that they’ve left in their wake has made Marc Benioff a billionaire. ExpenseBay emerged as the winner at this year’s Twiistup by building a better product to help employees manage their expense reports. Who can forget the tremendous impact that social media & web design had on the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign. And we see how the iPhone is influencing the mobile market by using great design & usability as a barrier to entry.

Sure, you might hear about the social-media startup that has an eight-figure exit and the founders are driving around in Aston Martins. But the founders of enterprise-software companies fly their own jets and race king-sized sailboats across their Mediterranean. Let’s re-focus our priorities and take a piece of this pie.

Large corporations are spending millions of dollars on better, faster ways to increase productivity and cut costs. Web 2.0 designers and engineers have the talent to make immediate impact here and disrupt the dinosaur software players that have reigned for far too long. Let’s do it.

Photo courtesy of AdverBlogTweet

Forrester has predicted that the era of social commerce will heat up over the next five years, and NY-based Altrinsic has made a bet on this trend with their recent acquisition of ShopIt.com

Shopit.com is an e-commerce platform that lets buyers and sellers complete simple transactions on social networking sites. Atrinsic claims that the application has been downloaded 800,000 times, and that they will soon allow sellers to import existing listings from eBay & Yahoo stores to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Social commerce has come a long way over the last couple years. Facebook tried to push the movement forward with their Beacon product, but that ended poorly when users were automatically opted into what seemed like a violation of privacy. But the landscape is different today. The “walls” and “activity streams” of social networks are now a major major distribution channel for content & links, and younger users are connecting more and more to one another rather than to institutions. Social-commerce start ups can benefit in a big way from this. But they’ll also need to mitigate a major risk… With advertising revenues dipping, social networks are clamoring for ways to add transactional revenue to their books. The barriers to entry are quite low.

ShopIt.com is based in Los Angeles and received $2.5M in Series B funding from Emerson Ventures and Propulsion Ventures.

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