By Joey Ferguson
SANDY — More than 30 startups demoed products and services at Nerdapalooza v.1, an event organized by SLC Tech Startups and Salt Lake Community College Miller Business Incubator.
The Tuesday night event brought in about 250 attendees to check out products ranging from software as a service to vending machines for breathalyzer tests.
“I found that if you went to a business meetup, then there were only business people, and if you went to a developer meetup there’s only developers,” Erin Valenti, one of the event’s organizers from SLC Tech Startups, said in an interview. “You need both those people in the same room to be able to get anything done. My idea was to come up with a format where you could get lots of different personalities in the same room and get them interested in working with one another.”
Some startups were making their debut at Nerdapalooza.
Jordan Goulding, owner of game developer Rainblade Studios, LLC, developed a numbers game called “Equalize,” which was publicly introduced at the event.
“We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on our game,” Goulding said. “We’ve gotten a lot of great contacts of people who may be interested.”
Other, more veteran companies also found value in the event.
“This is our third show and this is probably the best one that we’ve attended,” Bill Burton, president of Red Cone Development, said after demonstrating his company’s iOS Passbook integration software. “We’ve had more people interested in technology and what we are doing than a lot of the other shows.”
